It was all a hoax, as the perpetrators reveal in this month’s issue of eSkeptic.

 

Last
November, write Joe Rudy, who describes himself as “an avid reader of
Skeptic magazine” who teaches science and gives private music lessons,
and Chris Russo, who works in sales and says he “intends to continue
his quest to spread reason and truth, one pseudoscience at a time,” the
two 20-somethings were sitting around discussing pseudoscience and the
many people who believe one or another form of it. “We had always had a
strong interest in why people were so easily fooled by such irrational
superstitions as psychic ability, spiritual mediums, alien abductions,
and the like,” they write. So they “set out on a mission to help people
think rationally and question the credibility of so-called UFO
‘professionals.’”

 

They cooked
up a spaceship hoax “to show everyone how unreliable eyewitness
accounts are, along with investigators of UFOs.” They used 5 feet of
fishing line to tie flares to each of five 3-foot helium balloons and
launched them from a field on January 5, 2009. “Once all five balloons
were ready for takeoff (with our fingers on the verge of frost bite),”
they write, “we struck the 15-minute flares and released them into the
sky in increments of fifteen seconds,” filming the UFOs as they floated
away.

 

Media
coverage was extensive. A lot of it featured Paul Hurley, a pilot, and
his family, who appeared of several news broadcasts describing the
strange lights they saw in the sky. (For some reason, reporters find
pilots’ UFO sightings especially believable.) Rudy and Russo repeated
the performance four more time, gaining media coverage for each.
Conspiracy websites and radio shows covered the sightings, but “the
icing on the cake came when the popular History Channel show UFO
Hunters featured the Morristown UFO as their main story one week,” the
duo recall. “Bill Birnes, the lead investigator of the show and the
publisher of UFO Magazine, declared definitively that the Morristown
UFO could not have been flares or Chinese lanterns.”

 

This was the
pair’s main quarry, exposing the foolishness of UFO “investigators.”
They write, “are UFO investigators simply charlatans looking to make a
quick buck off human gullibility? . . . If a respected UFO investigator
can be easily manipulated and dead wrong on one UFO case, is it
possible he’s wrong on most (or all) of them? Do the networks buy into
this nonsense, or are they in it for the ratings?”