In the age of fake news and the most intense government surveillance since 9/11, it is not totally unreasonable to simply turn your nose up at the idea that birds are fake, and anything that you think is a bird, is really just a government-issued drone, spying on you. Call it paranoia, call it a joke, but when you begin to think about it, the government has the money and the motives to spy on the people. What is the easiest way to do that? Birds.

  The conspiracy theory was started by Peter McIndoe, a twenty-year-old University of Memphis student. McIndoe attended Memphis’ women’s march in January 2017, where he held up a sign, insisting that birds are not real, and demanding that America wake up from its ignorant slumber.

  During the 1950’s, America was in the height of the Cold War with Russia, employing spies overseas to retrieve intel and trying to hunt down foreign spies within the US. Paranoia was high, and with the increasing amount of birds and the increasing amount of fecal matter that comes with them, the CIA had had enough. There was a mass killing of some 12 billion birds across the country between 1959 and 1971. The birds were replaced with look-alike surveillance drones used to help hunt down spies and to provide surveillance on the American people. Some people believe that former president John F. Kennedy was actually assassinated because he refused to continue with the mass murder of birds across America.

  Armed with $65 billion in public health funds, former director of the CIA, Allen Welsh Dulles, was on strict orders to construct 120 B-52 bombers, (a bomber plane first used in 1952 to carry nuclear weapons during the Cold War) to kill the birds. Because the American public was never supposed to know about this operation, the planes were built at Area 51, a highly classified US Air Force facility in a remote part of Nevada, to keep them out of eyesight and earshot of the people. The bombers were also painted black, and all lights were removed to make them invisible under the cover of night. They were equipped with a specific bird poison that would dissolve once sprayed. As soon as it came into contact with any bird, it immediately gave them a transmittable virus that would break down the bird from the inside out within twenty-four hours. Once everything was built and put into action, the government still had to deal with the engineers that had worked on this project for two years. In an effort to get rid of them, Dulles sent them to the front line in Vietnam, where they were captured by the Viet Cong within three weeks and never heard from again.

  Despite this incriminating evidence, the evidence that birds are real is infinite. Dead birds on the road bleed and are decomposed by other animals and bacteria. Drones cannot be decomposed because they were never alive to begin with. People have bird feeders that birds frequently visit to eat; drones do not eat. Junior Emily Midkiff said, “I have a bird feeder on my window that lots of birds come to. If they were robots, they would not eat the food.” Apart from evidence of birds being alive, the government did not spend millions of dollars in materials and labor to build the planes and to create this advanced bird poison. The founder of the “Birds Are Not Real” movement has even admitted to making everything up for publicity and profit. Alas, birds are real. That is the real deal.