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The Fourth Kind...They Faked It
Well, this didn’t come as too much of a surprise. It wouldn’t be the first time that a movie said to be “based on a true story” turned out to be complete hogwash.
So, here is the deal:
Universal Pictures is paying $20,000 to the Alaska Press Club to quell the many complaints they are receiving about the falsified news archives that were created to hype of the movie “The Fourth Kind”.
It was an Anchorage lawyer who negotiated the fee (I would have tried to go for more….haha). The name of the lawyer was John McKay, and part of his argument was that the fake news stories were undermining the credibility of news organizations.
In case you didn’t know, The Fourth Kind was supposed to be based on a true story about strange events that took place in Nome, Alaska. In this day and age of avid internet users, they knew that as soon as people heard that it was based on a true story that they would take to their keyboards to see just what happened (or if anything happened) in Nome. They knew that Google had better have some interesting stories to return to those “Googlers” looking for the scoop.
To make sure that people found something, they went and falsified online news articles that went on to describe a wave of alien abductions that took place in Nome, Alaska over ten years ago. The reason that they were sued isn’t JUST because the stories were completely fake…but also because of how they appeared on the web.
The stories they posted appeared to be from real and legitimate Alaska news sites…but they weren’t. The stories and the sites were all made just for the purpose of hyping up this movie.
They even went so far as to include a fake obituary and full news story about the death of the main character that appears in the movie “Dr. William Tyler”, and the articles appeared to be from the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, which is an Alaskan news publication.
I’ve got to say, this is pretty disappointing as I did want to believe that it was possible this movie was based on a true story. While it is disappointing, it certainly isn’t surprising. Movie companies nowadays will do pretty much anything to make their movies huge…regardless of the backlash that is inevitable, especially when using underhanded tactics such as this.
Read the full story about The Fourth Kind Fake.
