The Big UFO Project

Do you like UFOs? Do you like UFO sightings? Do you, like me, enjoy trying to find out what is really being seen (aside from alien space craft)? Mark your calendars, my friends, for April 5th of this year. Rumor has it that there will be a lot of potential sightings that day.

Update: Sharon Hill at Doubtful News reported on this as well, and did a better job than I did. Take a look here.

Word is making the rounds of the UFO community sites, and elsewhere, that a large UFO hoax is being planned for this coming April fifth. Called “The Big UFO Project”, the claimed goal of the organizers is to:

“pull off a worldwide prank that causes UFO sightings all over the world and causes an apocalypse-like idea in all the media.”[1]

I first saw the report on the Guardian Liberty Voice web site, in a posting written by Jonathan Holowka. According to that article, the hoaxsters plan to use remote control drone aircraft, outfitted with lights, to appear to be UFOs. This isn’t new, of course, what may be new is the scale. If reports are to be believed, of course. The sources are quite shaky, honestly.

I dug a bit more and found this warning posted to a UFO blog about the prank. From the posting:

“Big UFO Project Group Plans A Worldwide False Flag Mass UFO Sightings Event For April, 2014!”

The use of “false flag” is delightful.

From there, we can see that they pulled some of their material from a forum for a group known as FPVLab. FPV stands for “first person view” and it refers to operating remote controlled aircraft equipped with cameras so that the operators can see things from the point of view of the aircraft. They appear to be involved in a lot of interesting things, if you’re interested in RC aircraft and remote vision systems. The forum post of interest can be read via this Google cache link.

From the posting:

“We'll be flying on april fifth 2014, preferably 8pm. Blue lights will be the preferred choice, on either fixed wing or multi's.”

The author references another site which provided the inspiration for this event (or at least the invitation for the FPVLab folks). The site is a tumblr post which documents a drone flight which allegedly was seen as a UFO and captured in a number of papers and sites. There is, of course, no real way to verify that the tumblr post is legitimate, but it serves the role as potential inspiration for this event.

I have no idea of this event is even a thing, but there’s enough chatter on the net to lead me to believe that there might be some truth behind it. When it comes to a social event like this, even if it wasn't real to begin with, it will often become real due to word of mouth and ‘coolness’ factor.

Personally, I am amused by the event. It’ll be interesting to see if they do this and, if so, does it actually make a splash in the, usually, credulous media. It is clear that they have stirred up the UFO folks.

Be well.

[1]http://massufosightings.blogspot.com/2014/02/ufo-deception-precursor-to-project-blue.html