What the f**k?!
That’s got to be the weirdest s**t I’ve ever seen in my f***ing life.
I was always a bit of a showman, for lack of a better term.
This is so illegal.
-Is that them? -That’s them, man.
We’re going to call News 12.
We’re going to make a call to MUFON, Mutual UFO Network,
and we’re going to maybe call some of the New York stations,
ABC, you know, we’ll see.
Morristown police say they received
more than a dozen calls about the UFO.
This is what was seen last night between 8:30 and 9,
photographed by the Hurley family in Whippany.
I'd like to see someone,
you know, tell me what it was
because I cannot tell you what it was.
There was someone that said,
“Well, this could be the end of days.”
Someone even mentioned al-Qaida.
We’re not trying to prove or disprove anything.
But... it’s OK to be skeptical.
Let’s do it.
[We Faked a UFO Sighting]
It’s 6:35 pm. It’s January 5th.
Yep, Monday, 2009.
Chris and I had known each other 13 years at that point.
Chris and I were a little bit of class clowns.
We would talk about all sorts of pseudoscience.
And I was having thoughts in my head since 2004 about doing something.
He actually came up with the idea of perpetrating a hoax.
I saw, in the 1960s, someone put flares on large balloons
and let them go, and it created a stir.
And from there, the idea started to come together
about lights in the sky.
We knew the endgame of this social experiment
was us saying, “Ta-da, we did it.”
I'd be lying if I said it didn't have a fun element to it.
We were kind of excited about it,
but it did sort of stem from an idea of
maybe we could help raise the consciousness of some of these folks.
We were always baffled by how easy it was to fool credulous people.
As it went on and on and on,
we thought, do we keep this alive,
or do we just sort of leave it as it is?
And we ended up doing it a few more times
to keep the story going.
Just want to show you what we have over here—
helium tank.
We’re going to bring the fishing line,
the duct tape to tape the fishing line to the balloons,
two flashlights, see in the dark.
And finally, in the mystery box...
looks like dynamite, but I promise you,
it’s just five flares with the fishing line already attached.
And here are the balloons right here.
Red balloons this time.
That was pretty much it.
But it’s a lot when you’re carrying that into the woods
along with helium tanks that were literally four and a half feet,
five feet tall.
As we’re tying those flares to that fishing line,
your heart's racing.
We let the balloons go in 15-second increments.
And it was beautiful.
We started filming it right away to capture eyewitness footage,
but also just to see what it looked like.
We hadn’t done any tests,
so this was the first time we saw it.
We’re about to fill up the first balloon.
And here’s the balloon.
Fire in the sky, yeah?
And then followed them just to kind of track them,
see how long they lasted.
And as we were driving down the highway,
we could see cars pulling over to the side of the road,
filming this thing.
Here’s some video that was shot by Eric Hernandez from Bound Brook.
He says during a short break at work,
he and four of his co-workers saw these five tiny lights.
I think at that point, we knew it worked.
I got to admit I knew exactly what they were,
and I was impressed by what I was looking at.
I did call the local news station here in New Jersey
and said, “Hey, I’m seeing some crazy lights up there.”
There are some really strange lights in the sky right now over Morristown.
And it doesn’t look like a plane or anything.
It looks like five extremely bright lights.
I don’t even know if I should be calling you guys or not about this,
but it’s something pretty impressive,
and I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is.
And then it just blew up from there. It was a snowball effect.
You almost had this mass hysteria
where other people were injecting an opinion
and saying, “Yeah, they traveled against the wind.
They took off at incredible speeds.”
They were just kind of floating along.
We didn’t really know what they were.
Just that they looked, like, very, like, in a formation.
Sort of streaked down toward New York,
and the final one just kind of went “blip,” disappeared.
Really? Just “blip.”
Yeah, I’d say “blip.”
Some people thought there were five spaceships.
Some people thought it was one giant structure.
People were seeing what they wanted to see.
Whatever it was, it was real.
For me, at least.
What do you think those red lights were?
Aliens.
We were driving on Hanover,
and all of a sudden we see these lights literally zip over our car.
They pulled over, grabbed Joe’s camera,
and started shooting.
The lights seemed to ascend and descend
almost in a sequence.
You can say whatever you want to the media—it’s not a crime.
But I kind of regret doing that
because we were criticized a little bit
for injecting our own commentary into this hoax.
We didn't need to do that.
It was already-- There were so many other people
that were jumping on top of this.
I’m off Park Road.
I’m in my backyard, and they’re in the sky. What is it?
I walk out of my house, it’s like these parachutes
with these-- or balloons with these five lights
flying over right now.
The police say the unidentified flying object
was nothing more than flares,
a theory
and proven implausible.
“Police officer sees flares on balloons.”
That’s not exciting.
They wanted the people who are going to say,
“Didn’t appear to be man-made.
They appeared to be communicating with each other.”
And these experts, quote unquote, experts,
came out and said what we did could not be exactly what it was—
it could not be flares and balloons.
This could well be the first UFO sighting of 2009.
Up next, the team analyzes the footage,
and their finding is nothing short of amazing.
This thing’s just enormous.
Eventually, what happened was
the prosecutor in town had asked, publicly,
“Whoever is doing this, please stop.”
And when that happened...
we stopped.
And we kind of went into documentary mode
and figured out how we were going to explain what we did and why.
It definitely was flares... on balloons.
There was no extraterrestrial involvement at all with this prank.
It was all a hoax,
and News 12 New Jersey’s Derek Dennis
found out why two guys from Morris County did it.
That’s our top story this half hour.
Joe Rudy and Chris Russo used helium balloons and flares
to make a point about UFOs.
A judge in Morris Plains
brought them back to Earth on Tuesday.
The hoax sparked an FAA and Homeland Security investigation,
not to mention countless phone calls to area police agencies
reporting a UFO sighting.
The result: misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges
against culprits Chris Russo and Joe Rudy—
a slap on the wrist.
Chris and Joe’s social experiment got them $250 fines
and 50 hours of community service.
Even after we came out and said we did it,
there are still people that think we’re government agents,
we’re covering up the real truth.
So even when you place something right in front of somebody and say,
“Here is your proof,”
people will still say, “Nope, that’s not good enough.
We think you’re covering this up.”
Most of these things do have an explanation.
But again, I don’t think that sways people.
I think they want to believe, and they always will.
There’s nothing Chris and I could have done to...
disprove UFOs visiting Earth.
But hopefully we maybe changed a few people’s minds,
at least got them to rethink next time they see lights in the sky,
what could that be.
It an alien?
Or maybe is it two guys pulling off a prank in the woods?
So for now, better keep watching the sky,
you know, in case more aliens show up
to attack us with road flares.
Go, Jersey.