This is a huge step in the official recognition by the USA…”Īs to what this “huge step in the official recognition” of his claim of ownership of the Moon and other such celestial objects was, beyond we’re sure the IRS happy to collect taxes from him, the preceding paragraph on the website indicates that this acknowledgement came in the form of Hope being, to quote, “named co-chairman of the Republican Congressional Business Advisory Council.
Whatever the case, as for the United States, Hope states on his Lunar Embassy website that “We at the Lunar Embassy are pleased that our work since November of 1980, is finally starting to be recognized by the United States of America government as being valid. He also claims the Hilton and Marriott hotel chains have bought extensive properties from him, along with, to quote him, “1,800 major corporations”.īeyond selling property on the various celestial bodies, he also claims to be the defacto ruler of the “Galactic Government”, which he also states currently has “diplomacy with 30 governments on this planet.” We can only assume by “diplomacy”, he at some point sent an email off that some clerk actually replied to. Since then, Hope has claimed to have sold “611 million acres of land on the moon, 325 million acres on Mars and a combined 125 million acres on Venus, Io (one of Jupiter’s moons) and Mercury” to approximately 6 million property owners including, according to him, celebrities like Tom Hanks, George Lucas and even former Presidents Carter, Bush Jr and Reagan. (Incidentally, for more terrestrial rules on this, see: If You Own Land, How Far Above and Below Do You Own?) When they never responded, he began selling off plots of lunar real estate for about $20 an acre (he now charges $24.99), or slightly more if you also wished to purchase the mineral rights for your particular lunar plot. government and asking if they wished to challenge it. Supposedly after some pushing and prodding, a supervisor at the office signed off on his claim which made him the sole owner of the moon.Īs a courtesy, Hope then wrote a letter to the UN and the Russian Government telling them about the claim he was granted by the U.S.
Towards this end, he filed a claim for ownership of the moon with, to quote him, “his local US Governmental Office for claim registries”. Hope’s interpretation of this was that, while the Treaty forbade countries and governments from staking a claim to the Moon, it said nothing about an individual doing so. In that house of plant death, he discovered that, according to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty signed by all space faring nations at the time as well as over 100 others, no country can claim sovereignty over any such celestial body.
Hope ran to his local library (for those unfamiliar, a sort of place where they used to store the partial contents of the future internet on the bodies of deceased trees) to research who, if anyone, owned the Earth’s satellite. After learning that there was a great deal of money to be made buying and selling property, he states, “I looked out the window, saw the moon and thought, ‘Hey, there’s a load of property!'” So how did he pull this off? The story goes that, in 1980, Mr Hope was a down on his luck unemployed shoe salesmen, reeling from a divorce and looking for a way to make ends meet. While the media has mostly painted Hope as a harmless eccentric, if you study his story a little more closely, as we’re wont to do, you’ll see that Hope is actually a masterful entrepreneur and almost every aspect of his story is a carefully crafted falsehood or half truth that nonetheless has seen the man himself seemingly earn millions selling nothing more than pieces of paper. Since then, Hope has made a small fortune selling off pieces of the satellite’s surface. Back in the halcyon days of the 1980s, when all people of the world had to worry about was total annihilation via widespread nuclear war, an American called Dennis Hope made international news when he revealed that after exploiting a loophole in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, he had become the sole owner of our nearest celestial neighbour, the Moon.
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