Birds Aren’t Real: The True Story of Mass Avian Murder and the Largest Surveillance Campaign in U.S. History

In this sly debut political parody, McIndoe and Gaydos offer up a fictional backstory to their satirical conspiracy theory, widely popular online, that the U.S. bird population has been replaced by birdlike CIA drones. The joke, which pokes fun at several things at once—unhinged conspiracy theorists, actual government malfeasance, and how genuinely weird birds are—begins here as a tongue-in-check history of the U.S. surveillance state. Presented in the form of an exposé (narrated by a QAnonesque “Patriot”), the story starts with CIA chief Allen Dulles deciding to kill every bird in America after one shits on his car, and folding the project into a plan to surveil leftists. From there, military aviation contractor Boeing is enlisted to poison the birds, and hippies are tricked into constructing the replacement robot birds by CIA infiltrators who claim the drones will deliver food aid to Vietnam (this is meant as a sendup of real-life MKULTRA experiments: “If they told anyone... it would sound like the deranged ramblings of a braindead psychonaut”). Other chapters elaborate additional elements of the joke (in their “bird drone field guide,” the authors get back to making fun of birds; for example, seagulls are said to habitually steal half-eaten food because they are actually collecting DNA from saliva). It’s a silly and winning spoof. (June)