An oft-bemoaned reality of the world of skepticism is eloquently expressed in a popular quote attributed to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”
It is fitting that this quote both describes what this column is about—the viral nature of falsehood and the difficulty of rebuttals achieving the same visibility—and is also something of an example of such a viral falsehood.
Twain never said that—or at least there is no record of him saying it (O’Toole 2017). Sources that quote Twain claim he said it in 1919, which is rather unlikely because he died in 1910. Of course he might well have said it, as versions of the saying have been around since 200 years earlier, when Jonathan Swift wrote:
As the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.
This quote rings true today. Swift was talking about the political situation in eighteenth-century London, and yet it encapsulates a timeless problem that skeptics and debunkers are faced with at every turn. How are we to have an effect in spreading truth when falsehoods scorch the earth before we roll out of bed?
I have some ideas, best illustrated with two contrasting examples. First we will begin where the truth was late to the party.
The Beaver Bug UFO
In January 2019, a video suddenly went viral. It was actually recorded in 2016 when two documentary filmmakers (Sam Chortek and Jimmy Chappie) had been flying their DJI Phantom drone over the foothills of Beaver, Utah, recording some B-roll footage. When they reviewed the footage later that day, they noticed that in two seconds of the footage a white object appears to whizz out of the distance and fly past the camera.
They did some analysis and calculated that the video showed a substantial craft traveling at an impossibly fast speed. They showed it to friends but initially did nothing more with it. Chortek cited “a certain paranoia” about having captured something he was not supposed to see. Chappie felt they might have recorded a secret military drone and was concerned this might lead to trouble.
But 2018 saw the release of three “UFO” videos shot by the U.S. Navy, and the media attention prompted Chortek and Chappie to dig out their footage. Thinking it might be related to the sightings they’d seen several times on mainstream TV, they contacted Brian Hanley, a business analyst and political reporter with a small YouTube channel.
In early 2019, Hanley published the first of about twenty YouTube videos about the Beaver footage. The first was titled “Exclusive, Jaw Dropping UFO Sighting Caught on Camera, New Footage Reveals,” which got over a million views. The second was titled “RAW FOOTAGE Finally Released of Exclusive, Jaw Dropping UFO Sighting Near Area 51,” and it also racked up over a million views.
Hanley continued publishing videos for several months, many of them with carefully crafted clickbait headlines. There was an “EXCLUSIVE” interview with Chappie, then “Stunning New Analysis,” followed by “New Breakthrough Evidence,” then “Stunning NEW Enhanced Images.”
Interest in an individual case can be cultivated only so far though. While the first two videos had over a million views, the third had just 250,000, and the next few averaged around 100,000. Then it dropped precipitously, with the last few getting less than 5,000 views. But as Swift noted, the brief period of only dubious information had done its work.
The Truth Comes Limping
The astonishing claim that the video showed an incredible flying machine had not gone unanswered. In fact, just four days after the first video was posted there was extensive discussion on my Metabunk website (West et al. 2019). There it was quickly determined that the claims of high speed were dubious at best, and the motion of something much slower, smaller, and close to the camera was a much better fit. One poster, Ivan Horn, calculated a bug-sized object was the best fit and provided a 3D re-creation that matched very well. It seemed pretty much case closed.
The problem was that nobody was reading these explanations. The details were buried in the discussion thread, obscured by a chain of points followed by counterpoints. While quite solid conclusions were reached, they were not in a readily consumable form. They were not videos.
While Metabunk conducted analysis largely via discussion and diagrams, others created their own analysis and made long videos about it. One person in particular, Rob Woodus, created a video that seemed to show that the object must have been moving at 4,000 mph. This video had the rather staid title of “2016 Beaver, UT – UFO Video Analysis” but was reposted by Hanley as “Stunning New Analysis.”
The videos stuck. Over a million people saw the originals, and maybe half of them saw Woodus’s initial analysis. The status of the object as a large hypersonic craft (that somehow nobody noticed at the time) was cemented in UFO mythology. Possibly a few thousand people saw the thread on Metabunk. I made one video that addressed some of the general issues but gave it the rather boring title of “Drone Zip-by UFO Video Recreations” and got a paltry 1,700 views.
Woodus continued to examine the case and eventually realized that a small object was actually a quite viable fit. He went on to visit the location in Utah and saw the amount of stuff (insects and seeds) floating around in the air. In the comments section of his last video on the topic, I asked him what his current thinking was. He replied, “I think it’s poplar fluff”—a seed blowing in the wind.
But that video got only 1,600 views. Hundreds of thousands of people had watched Woodus’s original videos that “proved” it was a hypersonic craft. But by the time he’d realized it was something like a seed, it was too late; the (inadvertent) jest was over, and the tale had had its effect.
Fighting Flares
On December 4, 2021, a video was uploaded to the UFO reporting database MUFON. That same day someone downloaded it and reuploaded it to YouTube with the title “UFOs filmed from the flight deck over South China Sea?” This was shared on Reddit and quickly found its way to me and Metabunk.
The video is shot from the cockpit of a plane, looking shallowly down at a layer of clouds. The camera zooms in, and we see three diagonal rows of very bright lights that look like they are moving from left to right. The lights almost appear to be spiraling; as the bottom lights fade out, new ones pop into existence. It is, as the cameraman (possibly a pilot) says, “some weird shit!”
I didn’t need to solve it myself. It was quickly pointed out on the Reddit thread that the lights looked like flares. One Redditor even found a video that showed flares being deployed at exactly the same angle and rate. So it seemed all we were looking at was three planes, too far away to see in the low-resolution video and low light, that were dropping flares. The parallax from the recording plane’s motion gave the illusion of motion. Case closed?
I knew that if I left it at that or just wrote up a post on Metabunk, then it would not be case closed at all. The video was already starting to be reshared by individuals on social media and clickbait content aggregators. The people who would see it were not going to read some explanation buried in a Reddit thread or even in a neat post on Metabunk. I needed to make a video.
So I wrote a short script, just 220 words, that explained the key points. I got out my teleprompter and recorded myself reading it. I then added the relevant footage, including the compelling comparison with existing flares. I probably spent around three hours on it, and the result was a seventy-second video (West 2021).
I posted it on YouTube as quickly as possible, getting it up the same day the original video was published. Then I posted links to it wherever it was discussed. It quickly gained traction, and I soon saw it being shared by other people in response to social shares. When the inevitable tabloid stories arrived, they often included a link to my video. The viral spread of the video as showing weird alien stuff was, to a degree, tempered.
Practical Skeptical Strategy
Respond quickly. A viral bunk video is like a runaway nuclear reactor. You need to get the cooling rods in there as soon as possible. With the Beaver video, I made an elegant and persuasive little video explaining what was going on. But I made it two years after a million people had seen the first videos and been convinced by faulty analysis. Maybe 1 percent of those people will see my video.
With the flares video, I created the explanatory video just hours after the original had been posted. It now lived in the same media space, and the viral growth of the original carried along the explanation, which in turn acted like a cooling rod, slowing down any subsequent spread. Instead of 1 percent, my video got 50 percent of the original’s views in the first few days.
Fight fire with fire. Make a video. People who just watched an entertaining video on a topic of interest to them are unlikely to read an article explaining why that video was wrong. But they might watch an interesting looking video response.
Keep it short. It’s often harder to make a short video than a long one. I could have easily mumbled through a screen-captured analysis for twenty minutes and then dumped it online. Instead, I spent hours to craft just seventy seconds.
A short video has numerous benefits, including that people are more likely to click on it, then they are more likely to watch all of it. They have a far shorter attention span for information that disagrees with their beliefs than for that which agrees with them. Sixty-six percent of viewers watched over 80 percent of this short video. A ten-minute unscripted video on a similar topic fell to 66 percent in the first thirty seconds and had lost half of its viewers by the midpoint.
We cannot always stop a falsehood from going around the world. But if we get our boots on quickly enough, we can travel along and minimize its effect.
References
O’Toole, Garson. 2017. A lie can travel … Quote Investigator. Available online at https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/.
West, Mick. 2021. Three row UFO. YouTube. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9YK11YjQMc.
West, Mick, et al. 2019. Utah drone video of UFO. Metabunk. Available online at https://www.metabunk.org/threads/utah-drone.10370/.