Believing in Aliens Derailed This Internet Pioneer’s Career. Now He’s Facing Prison

One day in August 2021, Joseph Firmage walked into a video production studio in Salt Lake City and declared that he was going to change the world. Flanked by a bodyguard, he wanted to shoot a marketing reel for the major inventions he was building, according to the studio’s owner, Brandy Vega. These included limitless clean energy devices, self-powered homes and antigravity propulsion systems. “I hope that I am remembered for having made a difference, a structural difference,” he intoned in the reel the studio eventually produced. “I believe that the third millennia of our sacred world can be so much more than we think today.”