How Birds Aren't Real grew from one sign in Memphis

In January 2017, a college student wrote three words on a poster at a march in Memphis. Within five years the joke had billboards in three cities, and its founder told the New York Times it had been a parody all along.

October 31, 2026 · 4 min read · TruthRanking

The first source

The first source is a man holding a sign. In January 2017, Peter McIndoe was in Memphis, Tennessee, during a women's march that drew pro-Trump counterprotesters, according to a December 2021 New York Times profile. He tore a poster off a wall, flipped it over, wrote "Birds Aren't Real" on the back, and improvised a backstory among the counterprotesters. Wikipedia describes it as a spontaneous joke. He did not know he was being filmed, the Times reported.

That detail matters for anyone trying to pin down a first source. The earliest known record is a video someone else shot, and the claim inside it was made up on the spot. No document or witness stood behind it. The lore came later: the movement's website, as cited by Audacy, says the CIA killed birds and replaced them with surveillance drones. For the claim itself and how it rates, see our Birds Aren't Real guide.

How it spread

The video traveled on Facebook, especially among teenagers in the South, the Times reported. About three months after the march, McIndoe started social media accounts for the movement, according to Snopes. A 2017 Facebook post on one of them read "i made a satirical movement a few months ago," Snopes found. McIndoe later said a staffer wrote that post.

By November 2018, Audubon counted more than 50,000 Instagram followers and nearly 8,500 on Twitter. The same flier had appeared on Reddit many times, and on October 30, 2018, Chicago journalist Robert Loerzel tweeted a photo of one, which gave the movement free publicity, Audubon said. McIndoe, then 20, ran the accounts and filled merchandise orders himself. Merchandise sales began in 2018 and later brought in several thousand dollars a month, the Times reported. That year he left college to work on the movement full time, according to Snopes.

In August 2020, Vice counted 266,000 Instagram followers, 60,000 Twitter followers and more than 320,000 members of the movement's subreddit. By late 2021, the Times reported, the movement had put up billboards in Memphis, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. Wikipedia dates the Memphis billboard to 2019. A TikTok video of an actor playing a former CIA agent had more than 20 million views, the Times reported. In September 2021, members showed up at an anti-abortion protest at the University of Cincinnati and chanted until the activists left. In November 2021, they rallied outside Twitter's San Francisco headquarters to demand a new logo.

What it became

On December 9, 2021, the New York Times published Taylor Lorenz's profile of McIndoe, then 23, and he dropped the character in public. He acknowledged spreading misinformation on purpose for four years and described the aim as "holding up a mirror to America in the internet age." He said the team was revealing the parody so people would not think birds were really drones.

MSNBC described it in 2021 as having hundreds of thousands of members, according to Wikipedia. Snopes reported about 50 chapters in the United States and about 30 in-person gatherings averaging roughly 150 attendees. In January 2022, Vice ran McIndoe's first interview out of character. On May 1, 2022, 60 Minutes interviewed him with collaborators Connor Gaydos and Claire Chronis, and an Audacy report the next day, citing CBS News, put the following at more than a million. At TED2023 in April 2023, McIndoe spoke about conspiracy theories and the need for belonging. On June 4, 2024, St. Martin's published a satirical book by McIndoe and Gaydos.

By 2024, a sign at one march had become a touring parody with a published book. It is one of the clearest cases in our series on jokes, hoaxes and lies that became movements.

What the record shows

The satire was on the record early. The 2017 Facebook post described the project as satire. In 2018, still in character, McIndoe told Audubon that reading the movement as satire was "baloney." For four years, the same source made statements pointing in opposite directions. Neither statement was independent evidence of anything.

The numbers are easy to misread. Each figure counts something different: Instagram followers, Twitter followers, subreddit members, video views, or a total of followers across platforms that the 2022 report did not break down. None of them counts believers. In 2018, journalist Rachel Roberts described it as a joke that thousands of people were in on, according to Wikipedia. We found no source that measured how many people actually believed birds are drones. That number is unknown.

The lore itself moved. Audubon in 2018, and a 2022 report citing the movement's website, put the alleged bird-killing campaign at 1959 to 1971. Vice in 2020 described it as running from 1959 to 2001. McIndoe has also said the movement dates to 1976, which Snopes presented as his account. Even simple biography varies by outlet: Audubon in 2018 described him as an English and philosophy major at the University of Memphis, while the Times says he attended the University of Arkansas and Snopes says he majored in psychology there before leaving in 2018.

How to trace a claim like this

1. Separate the first author from the first upload. The earliest copy was a bystander's video, but the claim belonged to the man holding the sign. Attribute it to him. The uploader only published a copy.
2. Count reposts as reach, not proof. Billboards, fliers and a TikTok with 20 million views all repeated one source. None added evidence. Read more on republication vs corroboration.
3. Write down what each number counts. Followers, members and views measure attention. Record the unit, the platform and the date next to every figure before comparing them.
4. Check what the source said later. The December 2021 profile changed how every earlier post should be read. Search for interviews, reveals and corrections dated after the claim.
5. Log the version of the story you saw. The lore's dates changed between outlets. Recording the outlet and date for each version makes the drift visible.