In the middle of the New Year revelry, as many as 3,000 red-winged blackbirds, common grackles, and European starlings – which often flock together in winter – rained out of the skies, a seemingly Hitchcock-esque phenomenon that scared local residents and prompted concerns about a possible toxic event.
“This was very traumatic for a lot of people. It was very scary,” says Arkansas state ornithologist Karen Rowe, talking via cellphone while on her way to ship the birds’ bodies to an ornithology lab at the University of Wisconson-Madison. “There were a lot of people who … witnessed the birds falling from the sky, and since it was New Year’s Eve night, it lent some questions to whether there was foul play.”
Early tests on the birds showed no toxic gases trapped in their feathers, though biologists found some physical trauma indicative of being hit by hail or lightning. Still, a bird die-off of this magnitude is unusual. Among the possible explanations: People shooting off fireworks in the area flushed a large roost of birds out of treetops, causing them to fly into either a hail storm or a lightning strike.
Beebe’s blackbird population is large enough so that the US Department of Agriculture has in the past attempted large-scale scarecrow techniques to move large flocks out of the area. Outnumbered and outmaneuvered, the USDA gave up those efforts a few years ago.
John Fitzpatrick, the Director of Cornell University’s Ornithology Lab, said a “washing machine-type thunderstorm” suddenly appeared in Arkansas and sucked the red-winged blackbirds up into its midst and spat them back out onto the ground. Fitzpatrick says this is the most likely explanation for the strange phenomenon of the black birds falling from the sky.
A little research on the Internet reveals that thunderstorms do suddenly appear in time and space. Random, quantum thunderstorms. Magical realism come to life.
That theory works until one considers that there were no reports of a storm over Beebe, Arkansas, where the birds fell from the sky like the frogs in P.T. Anderson’s “Magnolia.”
The other theory so far is that a high degree of “stress” (brought on by New Year’s fireworks or Arkansasians firing shotguns into the air) caused the blackbirds to take flight from their roost. It follows that they either all simultaneously had heart attacks then fell, or became so disoriented from the effects of the booms and flashes that they nose-dived onto streets, cars, houses, etc. But even if these are the ultimate explanations, why is this the first we’ve heard of the theory? Someone needs to investigate who writes Fitzpatrick’s check.
haarp conspiracy around death bird in arkansas
And what of the conspiracy theories already bubbling up around the dead birds and fish?
The bodies of the Arkansas’ dead birds were hardly cold before Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists were blaming the government, the most likely explanation being HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program). HAARP is an experimental program conducting research into the ionospheric applications of high atmospheric technological applications, including missile detection, radio transmission, etc. (These are the admitted applications, remember.)
Much of the attention directed at HAARP has been drawn to the program’s IRI (ionospheric research instrument), which is capable of “exciting” certain areas of the atmosphere. The ionosphere, full of electrons, heavily influences the Earth’s electricity and radio transmission. And so HAARP’s research with the IRI has given rise to comparisons to Nikola Tesla’s Death Ray, causing many conspiracy theorists–including Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez—to believe that the IRI can cause earthquakes, storms, power outages, and on and on.
For many, it is not a stretch to assume the dead birds over Beebe, Arkansas were the victim’s of HAARP’s “Death Ray” and maybe even the fish, too.
Then again, maybe these creatures suffer from clinical depression, fried nerves or were sucked up into a washing machine thunderstorm as Fitzpatrick suggests.
“This was very traumatic for a lot of people. It was very scary,” says Arkansas state ornithologist Karen Rowe, talking via cellphone while on her way to ship the birds’ bodies to an ornithology lab at the University of Wisconson-Madison. “There were a lot of people who … witnessed the birds falling from the sky, and since it was New Year’s Eve night, it lent some questions to whether there was foul play.”
Early tests on the birds showed no toxic gases trapped in their feathers, though biologists found some physical trauma indicative of being hit by hail or lightning. Still, a bird die-off of this magnitude is unusual. Among the possible explanations: People shooting off fireworks in the area flushed a large roost of birds out of treetops, causing them to fly into either a hail storm or a lightning strike.
Beebe’s blackbird population is large enough so that the US Department of Agriculture has in the past attempted large-scale scarecrow techniques to move large flocks out of the area. Outnumbered and outmaneuvered, the USDA gave up those efforts a few years ago.
John Fitzpatrick, the Director of Cornell University’s Ornithology Lab, said a “washing machine-type thunderstorm” suddenly appeared in Arkansas and sucked the red-winged blackbirds up into its midst and spat them back out onto the ground. Fitzpatrick says this is the most likely explanation for the strange phenomenon of the black birds falling from the sky.
A little research on the Internet reveals that thunderstorms do suddenly appear in time and space. Random, quantum thunderstorms. Magical realism come to life.
That theory works until one considers that there were no reports of a storm over Beebe, Arkansas, where the birds fell from the sky like the frogs in P.T. Anderson’s “Magnolia.”
The other theory so far is that a high degree of “stress” (brought on by New Year’s fireworks or Arkansasians firing shotguns into the air) caused the blackbirds to take flight from their roost. It follows that they either all simultaneously had heart attacks then fell, or became so disoriented from the effects of the booms and flashes that they nose-dived onto streets, cars, houses, etc. But even if these are the ultimate explanations, why is this the first we’ve heard of the theory? Someone needs to investigate who writes Fitzpatrick’s check.
haarp conspiracy around death bird in arkansas
And what of the conspiracy theories already bubbling up around the dead birds and fish?
The bodies of the Arkansas’ dead birds were hardly cold before Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists were blaming the government, the most likely explanation being HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program). HAARP is an experimental program conducting research into the ionospheric applications of high atmospheric technological applications, including missile detection, radio transmission, etc. (These are the admitted applications, remember.)
Much of the attention directed at HAARP has been drawn to the program’s IRI (ionospheric research instrument), which is capable of “exciting” certain areas of the atmosphere. The ionosphere, full of electrons, heavily influences the Earth’s electricity and radio transmission. And so HAARP’s research with the IRI has given rise to comparisons to Nikola Tesla’s Death Ray, causing many conspiracy theorists–including Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez—to believe that the IRI can cause earthquakes, storms, power outages, and on and on.
For many, it is not a stretch to assume the dead birds over Beebe, Arkansas were the victim’s of HAARP’s “Death Ray” and maybe even the fish, too.
Then again, maybe these creatures suffer from clinical depression, fried nerves or were sucked up into a washing machine thunderstorm as Fitzpatrick suggests.
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