Morristown UFO hoax revealed…on April 1, 2009
In January, a friend of Earshot Presents named Andrew Rudy sent us a link to a vid of his brother Joe on the news. Joe and his friend Chris Russo were on television telling a New Jersey reporter about the UFO they saw over Morristown, around where they both live. The strange lights in the sky were seen not only by Rudy and Russo, but by a host of other people (including a seemingly reputable pilot). Media coverage was national, and even David Letterman joked that the extraterrestrials over North Jersey were probably just flying by to dump a body.
Earshot Presents hopes to talk to Joe and Christ as part of an upcoming episode of Within Earshot later this week or next. In the meantime, please enjoy a read of How We Staged the Morristown UFO Hoax, which was originally published in the eSkeptic, the email newsletter of the Skeptic’s Society. To see a number of media stories, along with the footage Joe and Chris shot of the hoax being prepared and under way, follow the links at the end of this article.
How We Staged the Morristown UFO Hoax
Chris Russo and Joe Rudy
Have you ever seen the face of the Virgin Mary on your grilled cheese? How about the image of Satan in a cloud of smoke? Or Sasquatch running through the woods? What about an alien spacecraft in the sky?
It is not difficult to find people who respond with an astounding “yes!” to one of these — or all four. Humans are, by nature, experts at finding patterns whether they are real or not, and UFOs are among the most common patterns people find in the skies. Now, you may be thinking that UFOs are only seen by a mullet sporting, tobacco chewing, dolt whose highest aspiration is to make an appearance on the Jerry Springer Show, but in fact doctors, lawyers and even pilots report seeing flying saucers, flying triangles, and aerial shapes of all manner of an unidentified nature. Even over the skies of an affluent suburban community in New Jersey. Enter Joe Rudy and Chris Russo and the great UFO hoax of 2009.
In November of 2008, we found ourselves sitting around one evening discussing pseudoscience and the large numbers of people that still believe in its various guises. We had always had a strong interest in why people were so easily fooled by such irrational superstitions as psychic ability, spiritual mediums, alien abductions, and the like. Despite the lack of evidence to support these notions, we were baffled. How could so many people in an age of science still buy into dogma that is no more or less ridiculous than the notion of an elderly obese man delivering presents to every child on Earth in one evening? And like most other people, we had always heard about the uneducated farmer spotting an alien spaceship hovering over his farm, but we wondered if that amount of gullibility could be found in our upper-middle class hometown of Hanover, NJ, and the surrounding cities.
The modern UFO phenomena began in 1947 when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted objects that he described as “crescent shaped,” adding that they “moved like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” He was subsequently misquoted by an Associated Press reporter as having seen “flying saucers,” which he later corrected, noting: “They said that I’d said they were saucer-like. I said they flew in saucer-like fashion.” Nevertheless, the flying saucer craze was born and 60 years later, despite the fact that there is still no evidence of their existence, the UFO myth is as strong today as ever, fed by cable channel shows that prop up UFO “experts” who claim to be authorities on a subject that’s on par with astrology and palm reading. These charlatans make a career by perpetuating the E.T. fairy tale and exploiting credulous people who want nothing more than a good conspiracy theory to believe in.
It is in this context that we set out on a mission to help people think rationally and question the credibility of so-called UFO “professionals.” We brainstormed the idea of producing a spaceship hoax to fool people, bring the charlatans out of the woodwork to drum up controversy, and then expose it as nothing more than a prank to show everyone how unreliable eyewitness accounts are, along with investigators of UFOs.
We hatched the idea of tying flares onto helium balloons and launching them in a nearby field — an open yet isolated area surrounded by woods. There we were sure that we would have the privacy to prep the balloons, and that we wouldn’t have our plot foiled. From the beginning we decided to document all aspects of the project, including setting up the flares and balloons, launching them into the sky, and recording any media coverage that the “UFOs” received. The documentation was especially important in order to prevent conspiracy theorists from claiming that we were part of a cover-up of the truth when we revealed the hoax.
On January 5, 2009, we set out into the woods on the border of Morris Plains and Hanover, NJ, carrying one helium tank, five balloons, five flares, fishing line, duct tape, and a video camera. After filling up one 3-foot balloon with helium, we tied about five feet of fishing line to the balloon, secured the line with tape, then tied and taped the flare to the other end of the line. Once all five balloons were ready for takeoff (with our fingers on the verge of frost bite), we struck the 15-minute flares and released them into the sky in increments of fifteen seconds apart from each other. We filmed the “UFOs” as they floated away, and then walked the half-mile stretch out of the woods to our car. The hoax was underway.
Fox News screenshot
The media coverage the incident received over the next few days was extensive. Both local and national news stations were covering the UFO over New Jersey. The local paper had a field day with it, quoting a doctor who said the mysterious lights traveled against the wind, and quoting another man who said the object “didn’t appear to be manmade.” The most sought after witnesses were the Hurley family. Paul Hurley, a pilot, along with his family, made appearances on just about every major news station, describing the strange lights that they saw in the sky. The “Morristown UFO” became the talk of the town.
We followed up our light show with four more performances, gaining media attention every time. Every conspiracy website and radio show was mentioning it. To add fuel to the fire, we made appearances ourselves on News 12 New Jersey, on the Jeff Rense Program (a radio show that promotes conspiracy theories), and at an Illinois UFO symposium hosted by MUFON. We even provided our own footage.
The icing on the cake came when the popular History Channel show UFO Hunters featured the Morristown UFO as their main story one week. Bill Birnes, the lead investigator of the show and the publisher of UFO Magazine, declared definitively that the Morristown UFO could not have been flares or Chinese lanterns. Surely Birnes, who has written and edited over 25 books and encyclopedias in the fields of human behavior, true crime, current affairs, history, psychology, business, computing, and the paranormal, and the co-author of The Day After Roswell (a New York Times bestseller in 1997 and subsequently a documentary on The History Channel), could not have let himself be fooled by a couple of twenty- somethings with no formal education in psychology. He could.
This begs an important question: are UFO investigators simply charlatans looking to make a quick buck off human gullibility, or are they alarmists using bad science to back up their biased opinions that extraterrestrial life is routinely visiting our planet? Either way, are these people deserving of their own shows on major cable networks? If a respected UFO investigator can be easily manipulated and dead wrong on one UFO case, is it possible he’s wrong on most (or all) of them? Do the networks buy into this nonsense, or are they in it for the ratings? How can a television network that has pretensions of providing honest and factual programming be taken seriously when the topic of one of their top rated shows deals with chasing flares and fishing line? In fact, we delivered what every perfect UFO case has: great video and pictures, “credible” eyewitnesses (doctors and pilots), and professional investigators convinced that something amazing was witnessed. Does this bring into question the validity of every other UFO case? We believe it does.
VIDEO LINKS:
The Setup
The Launches
The Reactions
Milton Glaser on Shepard Fairey’s use of Obama photo
From the NY Times, Monday February 9th, 2009: In a pre-emptive strike, the street artist Shepard Fairey filed a lawsuit on Monday against The Associated Press, asking a federal judge to declare that he is protected from copyright infringement claims in his use of a news photograph as the basis for a now ubiquitous campaign poster image of President Obama.
The great designer Milton Glaser (he created the iconic I ♥ NY logo and the famous Bob Dylan poster) is “discomforted” by Shepard Fairey’s use of an AP photo of Barack Obama as the reference for his now famous Hope poster.
From an interview in PRINT online:
Print: Fairey has referred to what he does as “referencing.” There’s certainly plenty of precedent for making reference to older artwork in new ones. How does one distinguish between plagiarism and reference?
Glaser: “The process of looking back at the past is very accepted in our business—the difference is when you take something without adding anything to the conversation. We celebrate influence in the arts, we think it’s important and essential. But imitation we have some ambivalence about, especially because it involves property rights. It probably has something to do with the nature of capitalism. We know that in other cultures, Chinese culture for instance, imitation is seen as a tribute, because you wouldn’t bother imitating trivial works. But in those cases the influence is acknowledged and the skill required is obvious.
“For myself—this is subjective—I find the relationship between Fairey’s work and his sources discomforting. Nothing substantial has been added. In my own case, when I did the Dylan poster, I acknowledged using Duchamp’s profile as an influence. I think unless you’re modifying it and making it your own, you’re on very tenuous ground. It’s a dangerous example for students, if they see that appropriating people’s work is the path to success. Simply reproducing the work of others robs you of your imagination and form-making abilities. You’re not developing the muscularity you need to invent your own ideas.”
Milton Glaser on Shepard Fairey and Plagiarism
* Earshot Presents has robbed itself of its imagination and form-making abilities by simply reproducing here the work of The New York Times, Boing Boing, Print Magazine, and Milton Glaser.
Bacon Explosion clogs arteries of blogosphere
Earshot Presents received an email this morning from Blogger telling us that even though EP was a WordPress blog having nothing to do with Blogger, we were required, as a blog, to post something about the Bacon Explosion recipe that is forecasted to be the #1 cause of death this SuperBowl Sunday. So, to fulfill our obligation, we’ve paste below some regurgitated content from the HuffPo:
Have you heard of the bacon explosion? The New York Times dining section reports on the recipe that is taking the Internet by storm:
This recipe is the Bacon Explosion, modestly called by its inventors “the BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes.” The instructions for constructing this massive torpedo-shaped amalgamation of two pounds of bacon woven through and around two pounds of sausage and slathered in barbecue sauce first appeared last month on the Web site of a team of Kansas City competition barbecuers. They say a diverse collection of well over 16,000 Web sites have linked to the recipe, celebrating, or sometimes scolding, its excessiveness. A fresh audience could be ready to discover it on Super Bowl Sunday.
Where once homegrown recipes were disseminated in Ann Landers columns or Junior League cookbooks, new media have changed — and greatly accelerated — the path to popularity. Few recipes have cruised down this path as fast or as far as the Bacon Explosion, and this turns out to be no accident. One of its inventors works as an Internet marketer, and had a sophisticated understanding of how the latest tools of promotion could be applied to a four-pound roll of pork.
Read more from the Times on the story of the recipe’s creation.
The ingredients, via BBQaddicts:
2 pounds thick cut bacon
2 pounds Italian sausage
1 jar of your favorite barbeque sauce
1 jar of your favorite barbeque rub
For photos and detailed cooking instruction, check out the BBQaddicts website.
The Bacon Explosion posting has been viewed nearly 400,000 times, the Times notes, and has ignited extensive Internet discussion about the dish. Over at Chowhound one conversation thread began with the question: “Bacon lovers–Is this Nirvana, or total excess?”
Vail skier hangs pantless from chairlift
from The Smoking Gun
January 6th, 2008—-In a bizarre incident that will surely lead to litigation (or an out-of-court settlement), a skier at Colorado’s ritzy Vail resort was left dangling upside down and pantsless from a chairlift last Thursday morning. The January 1 mishap apparently occurred after the male skier, 48, and a child boarded a high-speed lift in Vail’s Blue Sky Basin. It appears that the chairlift’s fold-down seat was somehow not in the lowered position, which caused the man to partially fall through the resulting gap. His right ski got jammed in the ascending chairlift, and that kept him upended since his boot never dislodged from its binding.
As seen in the photos (which were snapped by fellow skiers), the Skyline Express lift was stopped shortly after the pair’s botched boarding resulted in the man dangling from the lift. The exposed skier was stuck for about 15 minutes before Vail personnel backed the lift up and successfully dislodged the unidentified man from the four-seat chair. In a statement released this afternoon, Vail Resorts, which operates the ski area, reported that the skier was not injured after being “suspended for approximately seven minutes.” The press release did not explain how the mishap occurred, only that “the man was caught on the chair.”
Note: MP3s save lives.
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