What is behind the most ambitious ufological flash mob of our days.
Her name is Katya, she is 23 years old, she is from Saratov, and on September 20, in the morning according to the US West Coast time zone, she was going to get up very early. There will be a desert all around. Katya plans to put on a helmet in the shape of a unicorn, which she bought in a souvenir shop in Saratov, and go to storm the top-secret American military base 51. Aliens are being held captive there. Katya wants to save them.
Three million people on the Internet said they would participate in the assault. The Nevada State Police expects that approximately 40,000 people from all over the world will actually arrive. The authorities are warning that the military will open fire. Reinforced outfits were pulled to Base 51 in advance. Meanwhile, the organizers of the action had already made good money, and in fact on September 20 they were not very interested. "Komsomolskaya Pravda" decided to find those who are really behind this incredible adventure.
They were wildly bored
The slogan “We're going to storm Base 51, they can't stop us all” appeared on the Internet in late June. Katya joined the group of those wishing to go to the assault at the very beginning of July. Together with her, I found several dozen Russians in the group, but Katya was the only one who answered the letter. I have an American visa, I will definitely go, she wrote. What for? Well, that's cool! Katya dyes her hair incredible colors. Hangs out with her friends in clubs until the morning. In May I hitchhiked to Sochi. Katya lives a lot of fun, but she is incredibly bored. To give her life meaning, she decided to save the planet. Katya does not take plastic bags at the checkout in the supermarket, because plastic kills fish in the world's oceans. She collects batteries from all over the entrance and hands them over. Attends all environmental rallies. Does she believethat the US military is actually keeping aliens at Base 51? After I asked this question, Katya merged and destroyed the correspondence.
Of course, she does not believe, but if she admits that she is chasing a chimera, she will have to look for the meaning of life anew.
According to legend, in 1947 a flying saucer crashed near Base 51.
Promotional video:
21-year-old college student Matty Roberts from California was bored in June, too. He sat at an unloved job and frankly skimmed, watching another series about aliens on the Internet. It is now that Roberts is being interviewed by the world media, and then, three months ago, he stared at the screen and thought that his life was not working out. Roberts studied oil and gas business in college, and did not hide that this topic was disgusting to him. He loved online games and organized group game sessions, but they were watched by at most several hundred people. He also loved music and even collected rare guitars, but in his years, pop stars had already become famous, and he is just a guy from the hinterland. In general, all ashes and ashes.
Suddenly - he himself said in an interview with USA Today - the thought occurred to him, why not free the aliens who languish at Base 51, here, not far from California. The series inspired. He went to Facebook and created an event, that is, a call to action. The next day, a pitiful four people signed up for the event, and Roberts decided that this idea also burned out, like all the previous ones. But a few days later, the world's most popular social network, Reddit, wrote about the crazy idea. And by the evening several hundred thousand people expressed a desire to storm the base. And a week later, FBI agents came to Roberts. He became a world celebrity.
Roberts told the agents it was just a joke. Did they believe? Good question. Journalists who have met him describe him as a “nerd” (USA Today) or even a “21-year-old” (Washington Post). Perhaps everything is really obvious there, and the agents realized that this was an overage child, who was in the hands of the atomic bomb of the Internet. But what about his supporters?
I was accepted into a closed Facebook group in mid-July. The first thing I saw was that a man from Zimbabwe insisted that he had a Kalashnikov assault rifle, and the people were discussing how to bring it to the United States. Then there was a video: a grandmother of about 70 holds a bazooka in her hands of unimaginable size. She is wearing camouflage, she is wearing ankle boots, and behind her, on the wall, is a colossal arsenal of firearms. Spitting and swearing, the grandmother declares that she will "kick the government's ass." Now all these materials are not available, Facebook has deleted the group, which at that time had more than two million members. But new groups appeared. And the matter seems to be serious, I thought.
The creator of the flash mob, Matty Roberts, first said that he was just joking.
HYIP money
“They delete groups, and I subscribe to new ones. This is a freaky joke, but there are a lot of idiots in America, people will come to storm,”- Slava speaks to me from Washington on Skype while my parents are at work. He goes to school, and the school, according to him, is seething with the expectation of "movement." “All the young people are on edge here,” he conveys the mood in the American capital. The parents did not know anything, he told them, and now he regrets. “They want to either lock me up, or, even worse, we will go together to some rural museum, so that I, therefore, was under supervision. I'm not going to storm anything, but my parents are worried about me,”he says.
Semyon Kleiman works in Silicon Valley, where everyone began to follow the flash mob as soon as it appeared, Semyon says. No one had any illusions: this story is not about aliens, which are not on Base 51, it is about money, about colossal money.
- At first, the enthusiasts promoted the story, and in July people began to make money on merchandise (souvenirs - KP). T-shirts, mugs, but you never know what - like everything for little things and for a penny, but people raised a serious cash (money - KP), - says Semyon.
But the most important product is the audience itself, these two or three million people who entered the groups, and, therefore, got into the databases that can be studied in order to use for their own purposes, or sold to those who need such databases … The buyers are the largest corporations, - says Dmitry Sidorin, Internet analyst, head of Sidorin Lab.
- Often corporations themselves arrange a flash mob, and watch how people react to certain posts. The channels of information dissemination are analyzed: what people are ready to share, what are not ready. Is it better to like photos with a cat or a dog? What event are you ready to go to? All this is invaluable information, which is then used mainly in order to effectively promote advertising, says Sidorin.
It has been empirically proven that posts and flash mobs go well, which contain a specific call to action for a great goal, such as "save the planet from global warming." The assault on Base 51 is ideally designed in this sense - here you have both a goal and an idea, and the question arises, is the "nerd" from California so simple? Didn't Roberts think of the whole commercial scheme from the very beginning? I will collect, they say, personal data, and then sell.
Socks with aliens, T-shirts with a call to storm Base 51: souvenir manufacturers have made a good deal on the flash mob.
At our request, Sidorin made a study of Internet traffic associated with the "assault". While seasoned gamblers are adept at cleaning up traces of audience manipulation, such research can still help to understand how the boat of popular attention was rocked. The scale of the "movement" is, of course, amazing. On the Internet, the assault on Base 51 is mentioned 26 thousand times a day, or 800 thousand times a month. The peak of interest was at the beginning of August, then it began to decline, and suddenly flared up again with clearly pronounced bursts. Someone very closely follows the mood and throws new firewood into the furnace.
Maybe journalists are stirring up interest? They wrote - people rushed to look at the freaks storming the Base. But here's what's strange. When I went to the gathering point of the storming men on Facebook, I was surprised to see that two of my friends would go to the assault. Professor of Moscow State University and renowned specialist in Internet technologies. What got into them? I wrote to them, but they never even heard of any assault. It turns out that Facebook lied to me so that, seeing how interesting it is to my friends, I would also join? But everything turned out to be much worse.
Poster caption: Jesus was an alien!
Pages-clones of real people are being created, says Sidorin, and these are not necessarily clones of pop stars. They can clone your aunt, a car mechanic from Zhulebino, anyone. The clone reproduces on the page everything that a real person writes. You think that the social network keeps you in touch with your friends, but in reality you are surrounded by ghosts. And what these ghosts will throw out, why are they gathered here, only the owner of the clones knows. So someone used a very advanced technology to lure people, like me specifically, into an assault. It looks like the story did start out as a joke, by accident, the way Roberts puts it, says Kleiman. But then the "beast" got out of control, and who controls it now is a very good question.
Let's try to figure out who the puppeteer is?
Beer storm
At the beginning of August, Roberts, it seems, has not yet earned anything from his brainchild. He posted a hysterical post in the group: do not write to me! Leave me alone! I can't answer ten thousand emails a day! Then the group published his appeal: no need to storm anything, don't you understand that this is a joke? The members of the group immediately branded Roberts a traitor. I went to see who was running the group - Roberts was no longer among the moderators. He was gracefully thrown out somewhere along the road. The group was ruled by bots - people acting anonymously through fake accounts. And soon the group itself was shut down - not otherwise, Roberts complained to Facebook.
The military is ready to shoot to kill in the event of an assault.
Probably, Roberts worried for a couple of weeks that he was out of work, and then decided to catch up with the runaway train. And he succeeded. He announced that there would be no assault, of course, but he would organize a rock festival near Base 51 on September 20. Agreed with the Little A'Le'Inn hotel near the base. The hotel is strange: a few (until recently) ufologists stay in it, all the walls are covered with pictures depicting aliens. Roberts easily (note this) obtained permission from the authorities of the state of Nevada to hold a public event. But then he quarreled with the owners of the hotel. “The owners no longer have anything to do with me, they have no right to use my slogans,” he wrote sharply on his page. Formal reason: the hotel has only ten rooms, shared bathrooms,and even fresh water is not enough (desert after all). Where were his eyes before? This is a tiny hotel that can accommodate two or three families of UFO tourists, and he was going to shove thousands of rockers there?
And then a mysterious man named Brooke Daly appeared in Roberts' life. All that is known about Brook is that he is also only 21 years old, but he is supposedly an experienced organizer of mass events. And then, as if by magic, the festival is transferred from the backwater to the center of Las Vegas, where Roberts has recently arrived triumphantly. And right there, from the plane to the TV studio, he became the protagonist of the popular evening show. Do you understand how much it costs to rent a hall in the "city of sins"? Something is not clean here.
We go to the page with a call to storm Base 51, which suddenly revived a few weeks ago. And there are already almost three million people in it. The folk path to Base 51 is not overgrown. The page is currently being moderated by three hosts. This is Roberts himself, the unknown company The Hidden Sound and an equally fictitious "religious organization" with a difficult to translate name. But on the page of The Hidden Sound we - at the very top - unexpectedly find … oho-ho, a video of the largest US beer brand Bad Light. And Bud Light recently launched a series of packaged beers featuring aliens and mentioning Base 51. And now it's Bud Light who is organizing that very event in Las Vegas - the Bud Light Area 51 Celebration. And everything finally fell into place. 21-year-old producer Brooke Daly from somewhere in the American hinterland? A nerd and a gamer? Conquered Las Vegas? Ha ha,do not tell my processors.
Free the DPRK!
Naturally, we do not have concrete facts, but it seems that we know who got the most valuable asset in this story - a multimillion-dollar audience, which can now be turned around as you like.
We wrote to Roberts, they say, your creative plans? And suddenly they became exclusive owners. Roberts told "Komsomolskaya Pravda" that after the concert in Las Vegas he is going to arrange a concert tour in the USA. And in the future, perhaps, in the countries of the world. This is an unexpected, although to some extent expected outcome. A music lover becomes a music producer, and a joke helped him to realize his idea. And that's a good question for economists - hasn't a joke become the currency of the Internet age? Before, all "investments", "loans", and now, it turns out, a joke in the price. What an interesting and crazy new economy it turns out.
How romantic (albeit completely illegal) it all began. Let's break into the Base. And there are aliens in chains. We will give them some water, we will cut off the chains. There is also the press, television, the millennium event. And it all ended with a party in the casino and, of course, big money. Without which, apparently, nothing happens in the modern world.
And I'm wondering if freaks really go to storm Base 51 and get hit by bullets, how will a solid world company get out? How will the protest dissipate? Although I am sure that from a legal point of view all questions have already been answered. After all, the freaks were warned by the government. Military. They were clearly told - we will shoot. Although they probably won't shoot, they'll arrest him, that's all. Blood should not darken the holiday and interfere with business.
Well, what are you, Katya from Saratov, who needs so much, and I'm not being ironic here, needs pure ideals like air? You need to save someone, whales in the ocean, forest from buildings or aliens, it doesn't matter. Did you finally understand how they twist and twist you? And when will you understand what you will do? You will most likely become a boring office girl. The ideal consumer: you will follow the discounts and gossip with your friends at the sandbox that "you can't buy real milk." Sad, of course. And after all, aliens will not arrive in a blue helicopter, they will not save developed digital capitalism from the suffocating world.
FROM THE DOSSIER
What is Base 51?
US Air Force Base in the Desert in Nevada, established in 1955. One of the most heavily guarded facilities in the United States, it is used to test new military aircraft. According to legend, in 1947, a flying saucer crashed near the future base, the aliens were alive, they were taken prisoner. There are a huge number of fake videos with "alien interrogations" on the Web. Ufologists believe that aliens were interbred with humans and that these clones (reptilians) rule the planet. Previously, one could still suspect something like that, says Semyon Kleiman, but recently the military has legally declassified almost all of the old information about the base. It became clear that really cool planes were being tested there, including those in the shape of a saucer, people saw them, hence the legend arose. It also follows from the materials that specialists from Germany are working closely at Base 51, previously this was denied.
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Assault technology
According to the initial plan, the volunteers were to gather in a tent camp in the desert and go to the assault at dawn on September 20. People had to run without weapons, arms outstretched to create a psychological effect. The organizers warned that the military would try to prevent them from approaching the Base, and maps with checkpoints and bypass roads appeared on the Web. All this information has now been erased. They even analyzed how to overcome obstacle courses. They warned that this was a desert, there was no water or food, everything would have to be taken with you. The state authorities seriously fear a humanitarian disaster, including clashes with a few local residents and the death of storming people from heat, snakes and thirst.
EVGENY ARSYUKHIN
