Back in July, (alleged) former Central Intelligence Agency officer and one-time Reform Party presidential nominee Robert David Steele appeared on Alex Jones’ InfoWars to voice a pet canard: he claims that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had a colony of child slaves on Mars.

The Daily Beast reached out to NASA to respond. The agency confirmed with barely concealed irritation that it does not, in fact, have a colony of child slaves on Mars.

In internal emails released to Nathanael King, any pretenses of containing irritation were dropped entirely.

While some expressed disbelief that defending themselves from interplanetary child slavery charges was a thing that they actually had to do …

and others suggested the literally anything else they’d prefer to talk to the press about …

one man, Chief Technologist John H. Scott, just wanted to correct the record.

Not only did Steele and InfoWars get the location of the colony wrong - it’s a moon of Jupiter, you moron - but also its denizens: NASA had in fact been capturing politicians to sate the surprisingly bipartisan appetites of a jellyfish monster.

While it’s not clear if Scott carried on with his threat to pass this info on to Jones the fact that it hasn’t come up at a White House Press briefing might be proof enough that it remains a closely-guarded secret.

Until now. Read the full exchange below, or on the request page.

Image via StarWars.com