Birds Aren't Real

The Story

In early 2017, Peter McIndoe was a psychology student at the University of Arkansas, visiting friends in Memphis. He told the Guardian that it was the weekend of the Women's Marches. He saw counterprotesters and thought, as he told 60 Minutes, that 'it would be very interesting if someone was in this situation with a sign that had nothing to do with anything that's going on here.' (NPR's TED Radio Hour gives the start date as 2016.)

The sign read 'Birds Aren't Real.' 'It was just the most absurd thing I could think of,' he told 60 Minutes. He improvised the backstory as he went: birds had been replaced with surveillance drones. Someone filmed him, and according to the New York Times the video went viral, especially among teenagers in the South.

'It was just the most absurd thing I could think of,' McIndoe told 60 Minutes.

McIndoe dropped out of college and leaned into the joke. He told the Guardian that he and his collaborators made up facts, faked 'secretly leaked CIA documents' and made videos: 'we created a world with laws and evidence.' Billboards went up in Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles. In November 2021, followers protested outside Twitter's San Francisco headquarters to demand that the company change its bird logo.

For years McIndoe stayed in character. In December 2021 he told the New York Times he was ready to reveal the parody, lest people think birds really are drones. He told 60 Minutes that the idea was 'building a little safe space to come together' within misinformation 'and laugh at it, rather than be scared by it.'

CBS calls the movement 'pure satire.' According to NPR, McIndoe now works to explore the 'us-versus-them' mentality in conspiracy theories.