The Birds Aren’t Real Movement Is a Joke
The Claim
Every bird is actually a surveillance drone, thanks to a government scheme.
Emerging story
In late June and early July, a number of news outlets and viral publishers began claiming that the Birds Aren’t Real movement was a new conspiracy theory that was sweeping the U.S. While the group has been in existence since 2017, it has gained renewed interest thanks to the first of a number of rallies across the U.S., which took place in St. Louis in June.
On social media, posts that speculate that the movement represents a conspiracy theory in the same vein as QAnon have gained thousands of interactions.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar’s investigation concludes that the Birds Aren’t Real movement is satirical.
The founder of the movement, Peter McIndoe, spends significant amounts of time claiming that Bird Aren’t Real has been in existence for decades. However, the oldest video uploaded to the Birds Aren’t Real YouTube channel only dates to the year 2017, and the star of that video, McIndoe, references recent figures, such as President Obama and Hillary Clinton as being behind the “bird drones.” This suggests that at this point, McIndoe had not invented the long fictitious history of the movement. Another video on the YouTube channel claims to be a Birds Aren’t Real commercial from 1987. However, it clearly stars McIndoe, who looks like he is a similar age as he was in the 2017 video. If these two videos were genuine, then the star of the videos should look 30 years older in the 2017 video.
In recent interviews, McIndoe does not break character and claims that the Birds Aren’t Real movement is genuine. However, there are revealing inconsistencies between what he states and the information provided on the Birds Aren’t Real website. For example, he told Newsweek that the movement began in the 1950s, while the website claims that Birds Aren’t Real actually began in 1973. Additionally, in a 2019 interview on a local news channel in Memphis, one of the show’s presenters stated that before the start of the interview, McIndoe had admitted that Birds Aren’t Real was satire. McIndoe also stated in that interview that the Birds Aren’t Real Movement began in 1976, which contradicts the other two origin dates that he has provided.
The student magazine Hill, which represents the University of Arkansas, contains an account of how the Birds Aren’t Real campaign began. It states that it originated at the 2017 Women’s March in Memphis when McIndoe, who at the time was a student at the University of Arkansas, was visiting his friends in the city. Specifically, the magazine contains this quotation from McIndoe: “I’d always wanted to go to a rally and hold up a poster that had nothing to do with what the rally was about.” The poster that he held up stated, “Birds Aren’t Real.”
The magazine also states that McIndoe later dropped out of the University of Arkansas to focus on building the Birds Aren’t Real brand as an attempt to highlight how radical beliefs are currently pervading U.S. politics.
Therefore, McIndoe has revealed both directly and indirectly that Birds Aren’t Real is a parody of extremist conspiracy theories. Some individuals and news sources may believe that the movement is genuine, but this belief is not shared by the movement’s founder.
