In January 2017, 19-year-old Peter McIndoe was in Memphis, Tennessee, visiting some friends, when he found himself between a feminist demonstration against Donald Trump and another of supporters of the new US president. Without thinking too much, McIndoe wrote on a sign “Birds Aren't Real”, the birds are not real, and then wandered around improvising a fake conspiracy theory on the spot: the birds are not real, the government killed them all to replace them with state-of-the-art drones through which it controls the population. “It was a spontaneous thing,” McIndoe told the New York Times, “but also a consideration of the absurdity of what was happening”.
McIndoe found himself telling what went through his mind that day at the world's leading newspaper because since then his theory that “Birds Aren't Real” has gained many followers, the vast majority of whom are obviously well aware of the fact. the fact that it is a parody of a real conspiracy theory, such as QAnon, the movement now widespread in many countries of the world that believes that the planet is controlled by a circle of very rich and powerful Satanist pedophiles.
The pages of “Birds Arent't Real” have 400 thousand followers on Instagram, more than 70 thousand on Twitter, over 600 thousand on TikTok. Theory has a site that sells T-shirts, stickers and other products, and that tells their story in a highly detailed text of over five thousand words.
“Birds Aren't Real” pretends that between 1959 and 2001 the US government killed millions of birds, all that were there. What we have seen in the skies since then are drones that recharge through the power lines and that the government uses to spy on the population. Over the years the theory has expanded with fake documents, with fake vintage videos, with satirical protests (for example against the Twitter headquarters, whose symbol is not surprisingly a bird) and with arguments of various kinds. Like it's no coincidence that most of what we believe to be bird droppings fall on cars far more than on roads.
Over the years McIndoe has proposed himself as the leader of this conspiracy theory and before the recent interview with the New York Times he had never openly said that he didn't really believe it. To the point that someone had even taken him seriously or had at least brainwashed to understand if there was or did. More than for his admission – which only made explicit what was already very clear to many – Taylor Lorenz's article is interesting because it tells how and why McIndoe decided to follow up on that sign written in 2017, reflecting on the meaning of can draw or give, from here on, to “Birds Aren't Real”.
Before finding himself in Memphis writing that birds are a lie, McIndoe was born and raised in a very conservative and religious community in Arkansas. He said that he was raised in the house where he grew up with seven brothers and sisters and that he was taught that “Obama was the antichrist” and that he should not believe in the theory of evolution as part of a “massive plan for brainwashing done by the Democrats ”. He recalled that he happened to read a book according to which Hollywood advocated subliminal messages against Christianity.
McIndoe explained that thanks to the internet, however, he was able to get information and educate himself in another way, looking for information and points of view different from the one to which he had been exposed growing up: “my whole idea of the world was formed thanks to the internet”, he said. In 2016 he left home to attend university, also in Arkansas, and found that like him, many of his peers also found themselves having to mediate between the values and beliefs they had grown up with and what they had known and learned elsewhere.
Then came the Memphis sign, which he said was written in a flash and without thinking about it and then followed by some impromptu speech that someone took casually with the smartphone, and then shared it on Facebook. The speech had some success online, which prompted him to structure the “Birds Aren't Real” theory. In 2018 he dropped out of university, became more and more active online, and even began investing some money in his fake conspiracy theory, for example by paying an actor to play a former agent of the CIA, the main US intelligence agency, intent on confess the gigantic cover-up relating to birds.
Since the followers of “Birds Aren't Real” were mostly members of generation Z (that of those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s), McIndoe also hired some actors to impersonate slightly older protesters. “I started to get into character and build the world it could belong to,” McIndoe told the New York Times: “it was actually an experiment on disinformation, because we built an entirely fictional world that someone took for real.”
For example, the following questions are answered in the comprehensive FAQ section of the “Birds Aren't Real” website: what are eggs? how do you explain bird meat? and how do you explain the birds killed by hunting or driving? the real dead birds, where did they go?
The answer to the question “I have a canary, what should I do?” Is:
Stay calm, but know that you have a state-of-the-art government surveillance drone in your home, observing your every move, listening to your every word, and sending data directly to the Pentagon. Canaries didn't exist before 2001, when all birds became surveillance drones. It was then that the government began a propaganda campaign aimed at normalizing the “canaries” (if you think about it a canary in a cage does not make any sense, they are animals made to explore the skies). The advice is not to talk about things that you would prefer to remain private in front of your “canary”.
Together with his friend and collaborator Connor Gaydos, in recent years McIndoe has devoted himself full time to the theory of the conspiracy fruit of his admirable imagination. He said he made several thousand dollars a month from selling products, and reinvested a portion to grow “Birds Aren't Real”.
McIndoe – who already interviewed a few months ago by Newsweek had disseminated ambiguities and clues suggesting that he did not really believe the story of the drone-birds – believes that in addition to being an experiment, for him and for many followers (some of which organized in groups known as Bird Brigade) “Birds Aren't Real” is a way of thinking about conspiracy theories or about a certain type of information and dogmatic education, spread on the internet but not only. According to him it is “a way to laugh at certain delusions, without being overwhelmed”.
McIndoe then added that he has always been careful not to do or say something that could “have a negative impact on the world”, paying attention to “the thin line” on which he found himself acting. “” Birds Aren't Real “is not a flat critique of conspiracy theories made from outside”, he specified: “it is made from within”.
According to Lorenz, who specializes in the many variations of digital culture, “Birds Aren't Real” is “the cosplay of conspiracy theories”: that is, it is a theory that disguises itself and interprets a conspiracy. Like conspiracy theories, it manages to offer some of its members a sense of belonging, without however alienating anyone or fomenting anger and resentment. For 22-year-old Claire Chronis, “Birds Aren't Real” – of which he is a follower – “serves to fight madness with madness”.
Joshua Citarella, a researcher and scholar of internet culture and online radicalization of young people, told the New York Times that he mostly agrees with this view, because “the possible negative effects of it are very small”, and the positive effects they include instead “offering the possibility of collaborating in a therapeutic way in the construction of something” that is harmless.
As Gaydos, the friend who concocted everything with McIndoe, pointed out: “If you really believe in” Birds Aren't Real “,” Birds Aren't Real “is still the least of your problems, because it means that then you don't there is a conspiracy theory you will not believe “.
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As for the future plans, McIndoe – one whose words must obviously be taken with a grain of salt, given the previous ones – says he wants to use “Birds Aren't Real” to mislead other and far more dangerous conspiracy theories. On Instagram, in the post following the publication of the New York Times article, the profile of “Birds Aren't Real” wrote:
“We woke up to a NYT article about our amazing movement. Unfortunately we can't afford the subscription so we haven't read it, but if anyone does let us know how it is. 2021 has been the best year our movement has had so far, in 2022 we will bring everything to new goals and by 2023 we hope to achieve the deactivation of all bird of the sky drones. It was an honor to show the truth to America with you, patriots. “
– Read also: The first drones were pigeons
