In 1980, Dennis Hope filed paperwork claiming ownership of the Moon and sent formal notice to the United Nations. Nobody objected. So he started selling. This episode of Sidequests traces how a struggling used-car salesman from San Francisco built a multimillion-dollar real estate business on a gap in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, generated roughly twelve million dollars in revenue, sold property to Ronald Reagan and Tom Cruise, created his own interplanetary government, and was never successfully stopped by any country on Earth. Whether it's legal is still, technically, unclear — which is exactly the point.
","author_name":"Keith Conrad"}