Perhaps you’ve seen the video of that supposed “dead alien” burning up the internet (5 million page views ain’t too shabby!). What’s most hilarious about this is that there are actually big media outlets out there — mainly of the British variety — reporting this with little to no skepticism whatsoever. Like, there’s no “supposed” or “alleged” or “possible” in their headlines. It’s just basically, “Dead alien found in Russia.”
The thing is so painfully a hoax, albeit a clever one, that my immediate thought upon first seeing was that it’s the work of a film student or independent filmmaker, or maybe a viral marketing campaign. Because that’s what these sorts of things always are.
Here’s the video in question in the event you haven’t seen it…
Luckily, ABC interviewed some “paranormal investigator” to confirm what any thinking person should have deduced when first viewing the video, which also happens to confirm my filmmaker theory.
Benjamin Radford, a paranormal investigator and managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, said the video is most certainly the work of pranksters.
“It’s clearly a hoax,” he said.
The first “big red flag” is the way the video was shot, he said. Instead of just stumbling upon the alien, the camera man gives the viewer a wide-angle so-called “establishing shot” of the landscape before zooming right onto the alien as he and his friend find it.
“This is film-making 101. We see this in sitcoms, we see this in virtually every film in order to establish a place and scene for the viewer,” he said. “It makes sense in the context of a fake film but it does not make sense in the context of someone suddenly finding this alien creature.”
Well you don’t say. As if an alien — that just so happens to resemble just about every depiction of aliens in pop culture from the past century — would just be lying there in the snow in Siberia for a couple of chuckling Ruskies to stumble upon, not buried in the snow or with any sort of alien transportation wreckage anywhere in sight.
Look, everyone knows that aliens only touch down in places like New Mexico, west Texas and California. People are so stupid.