Columnist Susan Snyder: With Hope, you can land on the moon

Monday, Oct. 27, 2003 | 8:33 a.m.

Dennis Hope certainly has it.

Hope, I mean.

His dream? To build a utopian society with no lawyers and no taxes -- on the moon.

His scheme? Selling land on the moon. For 23 years the Gardnerville man has been raking it in as owner of Lunar Embassy, LLC. He not only claims ownership of our moon, but also of all the solar system's other planets and moons.

"I'm the first one to understand the incredulousness of what I am proposing to you. But I am a lucid individual," Hope said during a telephone conversation Friday morning.

He's crazy all the way to the bank. Hope figures he has brought in $6.5 million since laying claim to the moon under a loophole in the United Nations' 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Article 2 of the document prohibits nations from laying claim to the moon, he said, but doesn't exclude individuals.

"I have found property, and I have taken ownership of that property," Hope said.

Sorta like Lewis and Clark. On acid.

Earlier this month an Australian man who contracted with Hope opened Lunar Realty, which offers 1-acre moon plots or 10-acre "lifestyle blocks."

There's plenty to go around, Hope said. About 2.1 million people in 180 countries have laid claim to 408 million lunar acres, leaving about 9.52 billion acres up for grabs.

Hope, 55, moved to Gardnerville from California in 2001 because he thought then-Gov. Gray Davis "taxed everybody to death."

He came up with the idea of giving us the moon in 1980. He was recently divorced and is nearly out of money.

He sold cars and worked as a ventriloquist, mostly. He was between jobs and driving down the road one day when he started thinking about how he could make a lot of money if he owned a lot of property.

"I looked out the window, saw the moon, and I thought, 'Now, there's a lot of property,' " he said.

He then recalled a tidbit about the 1967 space treaty that he'd heard in a political science class back in college. He headed for the library and found the loophole to his financial success.

Not everyone is amused by Hope's enterprise. Two years ago a man in the United Kingdom filed ownership papers for the sun then sent Hope a $30 million bill for supplying power to Lunar Embassy's moons and planets.

"The guy was on a rampage," Hope said. "I waited two days then sent him an e-mail that said, 'We discussed it, and we have decided we don't want your energy. Please turn it off.' "

The guy hasn't written back.

Hope said Lunar Embassy's proposed galactic constitution goes online (www.lunarembassy.com) for moon owners' approval in November. Plans to create New Hope City in the Sea of Tranquility already exist, Hope said, as does a contract with an undisclosed U.S. company for developing transportation to the moon.

Hope also claims 1,300 corporations have forked over thousands to secure land for moon offices. He named a few, but those are follow-up calls I simply am not willing to make. However, he said Enron, Martha Stewart Living and Haliburton are not among them.

"They're hedging their bets," Hope said. "The whole thing with them is, 'What if this guy's right?' "