A fake alien in the freezer has landed a Chinese farmer in jail. According to the bizarre report on Thursday, a man known only as Mr. Li supposedly uploaded a bunch of photographs and a wild story to Weibo, the Chinese government’s answer to Twitter.
The confabulating hoaxer said that he observed a UFO landing near one of his rabbit traps. Five aliens supposedly climbed out of the vehicle, only for one of them to stumble ignominiously into a rabbit net line and get electrocuted.
Yeah, OK. Who wouldn’t believe that story, especially if it came complete with tweeted — or would that be weibo’d — photos of the fake alien in Li’s freezer?
Well, the Chinese authorities are not happy with people who use social media to spread what they consider to be disruptive information. A few weeks ago, I posted a story on several people who were arrested for spreading false reports about bird flu infections .
Making up an extraterrestrial invasion hoax is apparently just as bad, even if the Space Brothers in question are so lame that they can’t escape a rabbit trap.
Li was arrested and detained for five days by authorities in Shandong Province, China until he confessed to the fakery. It was bad enough that he was already warned by police for illegally putting up the electric rabbit nets in the first place, I suppose.
After trying to claim that he’d bought the fake from someone else, he eventually admitted that he’d created the hoax because he loved UFOs and wanted more people to believe.
I can’t read Chinese and thus can’t read Weibo, folks, but I did find one of the alien photographs in question being distributed on Twitter:
@ ernestoriley A man found an Alien in his freezer ( China ) twitter.com/GwladysWestwic…
— ?.ErnestaRiley (@GwladysWestwick) June 12, 2013
What do you think? Would you have believed that the fake alien in the freezer was the real deal?
[fake alien top photo by Fer Gregory via Shutterstock ]
