This man makes up a lot of genuinely crazy stuff, but this may be his zenith. The Alex Jones Channel via YouTube

You’ve got to feel sorry for NASA.

The venerable space agency is trying its best to just get on with its missions. It just wants to fly its astronauts to Mars, keep an eye on our climate and environment from up above, and send its spacecraft to say hello to lonely old Pluto.

Instead, they are constantly being attacked by all manner of polemicists, morons, pseudoscientists, and conspiracy theorists.

Between pointing out that the Earth is most certainly not flat, that those $120-a-piece Paltrow patches do not use NASA technology to heal you, and that hacking group Anonymous has not uncovered a plot to hide the existence of extraterrestrials from us mere mortals, they also have to deny that they have child slaves on other planets.

That last one’s new, and it’s all thanks to a rather infamous right-wing provocateur named Alex Jones, whose name should induce a visceral reaction that’s somewhere on the spectrum between eye-rolling and uncontrollable vomiting.

Jones recently popped up on his InfoWars show and, with the help of Robert Steele – an ex-CIA officer and a peddler of some truly batshit crazy conspiracy theories – gave what is arguably his most bizarre segment to date.

Starting off talking about sexual deviants and the occult, the two of them suddenly segued into talking about child slaves on Mars, a transition about as unexpected as it is insane.

Yes, you read the title of that video correctly.

“This may strike your listeners as way out but we actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride,” Steele said, with no sense of irony whatsoever.

“So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.”

Jones, nodding along like this was a perfectly ordinary conversation to have, then utters some noises that involve the words “you have no idea,” and “they don’t want us looking into what is happening.”

The segment ends with Jones attempting to be skeptical. “Well I don’t know about Mars bases, but I know they’ve created massive, thousands of different types of chimeras that are alien lifeforms on this Earth now,” he blustered.

NASA, feeling like this was too ridiculous not to comment on, sent a spokesperson out to officially deny the claims in the most nonchalant way possible.

“There are no humans on Mars. There are active rovers on Mars. There was a rumor going around last week that there weren’t. There are,” Guy Webster, a spokesperson for Mars exploration at NASA, told The Daily Beast. “But there are no humans.”

The President listens to Alex Jones’ broadcasts from time to time, by the way. Let that thought sink in.