Fool me once…

…then fool me again.

And it almost happened. At least for a few minutes, I took two recent bogus Internet stories seriously, probably because I wanted them to be true so I could write cool blog posts.

But the first thing in both cases that alerted me that these stories might be made up was a little question in the back of my head.  Why hadn’t I heard about this before now? Well, interesting things do happen that we miss, even if our antennas for news of the weird are usually extended. And these two bits of news definitely fit  in that category.

The first one comes from a little known news outlet called Rock City Times in Arkansas. I noticed the link to this story on a podcast website on Jan. 2. It was fresh news from New Year’s Eve. In fact, the event in question—a massive die-off of red-winged black birds that fell from the sky over a one-mile area– occurred close to the stroke of midnight. There have been other mass deaths of birds reported and it seemed that this one was the most recent. I was hooked…well, at least for a while.

To my astonishment, the story said that this was the fourth year in a row that red-winged black birds had fallen in mass on New Year’s eve on this town. I did not know that. But this event was far and above the worst case ever reported. Supposedly, 18 million black birds simultaneously plummeted to their deaths. How, I wondered, had they come up with the number so quickly?

The story quoted a local couple who had witnessed the plague of dead birds, and a meteorologist who said several clouds of birds had been spotted on radar before the big plunge. An ornithologist suggested the death-dive indicated that this species of black bird was going extinct, that a mere 500 red-winged black birds remained. How did he know that?  Somehow, the scientist even knew that the birds had come from distant places, turning the small town of Bebe, Arkansas into Jonestown of the bird world.

Amazing, I thought. Great story for the blog, and started putting together a quick post when suddenly my computer froze. My Mac Pro had never simply stopped functioning. I couldn’t type. I couldn’t escape the page. I couldn’t do anything but restart the computer. Fortunately, that worked and I was back in action. But before returning to the blog post, I was distracted by various household ditties and it was a few hours before I sat back down and I discovered my post had vanished. And I’d just told Trish I’d found a very interesting story earlier, but oddly, very oddly, I couldn’t remember a thing about it.

I clicked onto my Internet history for the day, and fortunately I wasn’t hallucinating. There it was—the Rock City Times story of massive death of blackbirds. This time I took a closer look and noticed that below the name of the publication was a curious line: Arkansas’ 2^nd Most Unreliable News Source.

I realized I’d been had by a satirical web site, a protégé of The Onion, which has produced fake news for years and fooled untold numbers of readers…at least for awhile.

Fortunately, synchronicity saved me.  My computer simply froze at the moment of truth. The post was never written. But, hey, at least I got something out of it—an alternative post about how stupid I almost was.

I’ve left out the other part of the story. Yes, another web site almost blind-sided me earlier that same day. It features a really interesting, well-written article that amazingly combined my interest in archaeology and the UFO/alien scenario. I’ll go into that one in the next day or two. Fool me twice…and my computer stops working.