4chan Alien Sighting Hoax

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About

4chan Alien Sighting Hoax refers to a photoshopped image purportedly taken of an alien at the Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, Arizona, which was submitted to 4chan as a hoax in late February 2017. Due to a temporary server outage following the posting of the image, many speculated that it was being scrubbed off the internet due to a reptilian government conspiracy.

Origin

On February 22nd, 2017, an image purportedly showing an alien was posted to 4chan titled "24489 Taken Aprox 24 miles north west of Luke Air Force Base Phoenix Az. Lab H4C" (shown below). That morning, several Cloudflare servers went down, leading to 4chan going offline.

Spread And Confirmed Hoax

That day, a 4chan user submitted a thread to /pol/ saying they heard "something about an alien being posted before the site went down" (shown below).^[4]

Meanwhile, a Pastebin^[1] page was created with relevant links and information about the alien photograph post. Also on February 22nd, various 4chan posts were created claiming that the image was being covered up by the government.^[6]^[7]^[8] On February 23rd, Redditor Grizzlepash submitted a post to /r/conspiracy^[2] claiming that alien posts were being "aggresively censored" on 4chan boards. Meanwhile, a 4chan user submitted a post detailing how the image was a hoax orchestrated by a "shitposting Discord group" (shown below).

Also on February 23rd, an image outlining how the image was faked began circulating on both 4chan and Reddit, including a post on the /r/OutOfTheLoop^[5] subreddit (shown below). On February 24th, the internet news site Heavy^[3] published an article about the conspiracy theories surrounding the picture.