The CIA assassinated John F. Kennedy after he refused to impale and replace billions of birds with drones. The U.Due south. regime is sequestering a team of Boeing engineers in Area 51 for a underground military mission. Our revenue enhancement dollars take been funneled into building the "Turkey X500," a robot used to hunt big birds.

Combine all these conspiracies and you get Birds Aren't Existent, a well-nigh two-twelvemonth-old movement that claims  the CIA took out 12 billion feathered fugitives because directors within the organization were "annoyed that birds had been dropping fecal affair on their car windows." The targets were eradicated between 1959 and 1971 with specially altered B-52 bombers stocked with poisonous substance. They were then supplanted with avian-like robots that could be used to surveil Americans.

Sounds farthermost simply as well somewhat fitting, given the landscape of today's social discourse. Past surfacing murky bits of history and the ubiquity of Aves , Birds Aren't Existent feeds into this era of post-truth politics. The campaign relies on cyberspace-fueled guerilla marketing to spread its bulletin, manifesting through existent-world posters and Photoshopped propaganda tagged with the "Birds Aren't Real" slogan.

For much of its devoted fanbase, Birds Aren't Real is a respite from America'southward political divide—a joke and so preposterous both conservatives and liberals can laugh at it. But for a few followers, this move is no more unbelievable than QAnon, a right-wing conspiracy theory turned marketing ploy that holds that someone with high-level government clearance is planting coded tips in the news. Therein lies the genius of Birds Aren't Existent: It's a digital breadcrumb trail that leads to a website that leads to a shop full of ready-to-buy merchandise.

The creative muscle behind the avian-inspired conspiracy (and thinly disguised marketing scheme) is twenty-year-old Peter McIndoe, an English and philosophy major at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. McIndoe first went live with Birds Aren't Real in January 2017 at his city'south Women's March. A video from the event shows McIndoe with a crudely drawn sign, heckling protesters with lines like, "Birds are a myth; they're an illusion; they're a prevarication. Wake upward America! Wake up!" The idea of selling Birds Aren't Real goods, he says, came after the stunt gained traction over Instagram.

McIndoe didn't break character once during a 30-infinitesimal-long phone interview with Audubon . He defended the movement'south legitimacy, mainly by proselytizing about what Birds Aren't Real isn't . "The thought that this could be used to make a satire of a nighttime and tense time in American civilization—I observe those things to be baloney," McIndoe says.

What isn't distortion is the attending Birds Aren't Real has fatigued on social media, thanks to an Instagram account with more than l,000 followers, a YouTube folio with more than than 45,000 views, and a Twitter profile with nearly 8,500 followers . McIndoe handles all these accounts and fulfills every order for the Birds Aren't Real goods he sells online. He declined to comment on how much money he's made off the T-shirts, hats, and stickers, many of which are out of stock.

Exploiting conspiracists for profit is nil new, says Mike Metzler, a social media influencer and viral-content creator on Instagram . Amazon sells dozens of styles of QAnon T-shirts that have become a fixture at Make America Great Again rallies effectually the land. What's different is that while many QAnon believers wear their shirts in earnest, most Birds Aren't Existent fans seem to vesture theirs to exist ironic and on trend .

"Birds Aren't Existent is taking reward of the meme-ification of previous conspiracy theories," Metzler says. "People really want to believe in conspiracies—merely more than that, people want to make fun of people who believe in conspiracies fifty-fifty more. Starting a conspiracy theory and selling Birds Aren't Real merchandise allows them to sell to both sides," Metzler says.

McIndoe'south movement got a gratis jolt of publicity on Oct 30 after Chicago-based announcer Robert Loerzel tweeted a photo of a Birds Aren't Real flier he found on the street. The same flier also popped up on Reddit numerous times over the past calendar month . The hectic and cryptic nature of the website makes information technology an incubator for conspiracy theories like QAnon. The Reddit forum r/conspiracy has 721,000 anonymous subscribers alone.

While some people will draw parallels between QAnon and Birds Aren't Real (they were both launched in 2017, after all), their popularity on Reddit is the only true similarity, says Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of the myth-busting website TruthOrFiction.com and the former managing editor of Snopes . "Birds Aren't Existent is a good one, but information technology in no way ranks up there with the incredible complexity of whatever QAnon is," she says over email. "QAnon has caught on because it'south interactive, information technology'southward always evolving, and information technology's completely vague—so vague that anything they say could be 'true' if you translate information technology the right way."

How could Birds Aren't Real gain more than dark-web cred then? "Conspiracy theories offer a fashion for the globe to make sense, and they offer a sense of purpose to the purposeless," Binkowski writes. "If Birds Aren't Real hinted at some larger, dark design, it would really accept flight."

For at present, though, this shallow conspiracy seems harmless and may even exist a net gain for birds. Hashemite kingdom of jordan Rutter, the managing director of public relations at the American Bird Conservancy , thinks the intricate history behind McIndoe'south movement is hilarious and thus, something positive. "Anything that gets people talking about birds is a good thing," she says. "It's definitely a style we tin kickoff a conversation."

The filmmaker Oliver Stone one time wrote that Kennedy'due south assassination is "a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma." Birds Aren't Real, on the other hand, is a chimera of conspiracies that wraps satire, modernistic insecurities, and internet culture into a successful marketing scheme.

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Birds are real! For proof, download our gratis Audubon Bird Guide app, which features more than than 800 actual Due north American species.