Apocalypse-gate Sparks Riots Worldwide

October 27, 2029—Law enforcement authorities and military troops are trying to quell rioting that has erupted in cities all over the world following news that Earth is in no danger of being destroyed by an asteroid after all.

Protests, street-fighting and looting have spread from Moscow to Los Angeles to Sydney as people demand that the United States account for what is now being called “Apocalypse-gate.”  Rioting also broke out on the Moon, where many people relocated to avoid annihilation by the asteroid.

“People are angry about being misled into thinking it was OK to make some reckless decisions,” said William Clubb, a London policeman.  “They drank and ate to excess, had unsafe sex and quit paying their bills because they figured they had nothing to lose.  Now that they know the world is safe, they have to actually account for those behaviors.”  

FU reported on Monday that top NASA, Pentagon and Homeland Security officials concocted the story about an asteroid heading on a collision course with Earth as part of a complex kickback scheme involving defense contractor LockMartin Corp.  Our investigation also revealed that the recent news about aliens entering our solar system was also false.

The asteroid scare has cost the world trillions of dollars, sent U.S. housing values tumbling below $0 and led to severe overcrowding in lunar refugee camps. About 65% of Earth’s inhabitants have left the planet.
 
The federal agencies late yesterday issued a joint statement denying the facts in the FU story, acknowledging that the planet is in no danger from asteroids or aliens, and that its earlier warnings were based on faulty—but not fraudulent—calculations.

“We simply mistook smudges on a telescope lense as being a plummeting space rock and an alien spaceship,” the agencies stated. “And we mistook some voice traffic between the Moon and Earth as a communique from approaching aliens.  It was all very innocent.”    

NASA officials had released what they said were images of the extra-terrestrials, who resembled the Geico insurance company’s gecko. But forensic analysis of those pictures have revealed them to be fake.

Meanwhile, Geico filed a trademark infringement lawsuit in federal against NASA, claiming the agency used its old spokeslizard without authorization.

Asteroid/Alien Crisis Was Part of NASA Fraud Scheme

SPECIAL FU INVESTIGATION

October 26, 2029—NASA concocted the story about an asteroid headed on a collision course with Earth as part of a complex conspiracy aimed at enriching its top officials,  FU has learned.

In addition, scientists and executives at the space agency concocted a story about aliens heading into our solar system, and possessing the capability to destroy the asteroid, as part of the scheme, according to terabytes of data leaked to this reporter by an anonymous source.

The records indicate that NASA made up the story about the asteroid in January, when it was a private corporation, in order to win lucrative government contracts that would help the company avoid bankruptcy.  The scheme appeared to be backfiring in late February when President Angelia Jolie ordered the government to take over the financially troubled company.

At that point, the conspiracy spiraled out of control.  When many NASA officials left the space agency to work for defense contractor LockMartin Corp., NASA Administrator (and former chief executive officer) Cy Phiphan steered lucrative space-barge construction contracts to the company, with the understanding that LockMartin would pay secret kickbacks to him and other top agency officials.  Under pressure from Congress, Phiphan subsequently cancelled those contracts because of cost overruns and mismanagement. 

At that point, NASA bribed top astrobiologists at the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute to claim that they had made interstellar contact with the aliens who were entering our solar system and had the technology to destroy the asteroid and save the Earth.   The space agency’s leaders then directed new no-bid contracts to LockMartin to develop special interspecies translators, claiming the devices were needed to help government officials communicate and negotiate with the aliens.

The data files indicate that the conspiracy trickles all the way down the lowest ranks of NASA, and also involves top officials at the Pentagon.  The documents do not provide evidence that President Angelina Jolie or Defense Secretary Maureen Corr knew about the conspiracy.

The asteroid scare has cost the world trillions of dollars, sent U.S. housing values tumbling below $0 and led to severe overcrowding on the Moon, where many people have fled to avoid the apocalypse.  It also has led to the cancellation of the Super Bowl, the 2030 Winter Olympics and the theatrical release of Seinfeld: The Movie.

Trillions of dollars have been spent on space barges designed to transport people off the planet, and the Jolie administration has been pressing Congress for more funds to accelerate terra-forming initiatives on Mars so that Earth refugees could live there.  And the news of the aliens has led to sweeping public concerns about a new wave of illegal immigration.

“Time-Traveling Boy” Incident Was a Hoax, Authorities Say

October 19, 2029—The story that a little boy had been hurled 140 million years into the past aboard a time machine was a hoax concocted to land a reality Web TV deal, authorities said this morning, and the boy’s father will likely face felony charges.

The stunt last week was a ploy by Conrad Mann, a self-proclaimed inventor who lives in Boise, Idaho, to convince the public that his four-year-old son, Ostrich, crawled into a first-of-its-kind time-traveling apparatus and accidentially activated it, according to the Ada County Sheriff Chase U. Downe.  Mann is suspected of concocting the entire incident to launch a self-produced reality series titled “Time Swap,” in which families from different centuries switch places and try to adapt to their new surroundings, Downe said.  

Downe said he expected to recommend that Mann be charged with making a false report to authorities and attempting to influence a public servant be brought against Mann. Federal charges are also possible.

The drama involving Ostrich played out over live streaming video over a 24-hour period on Oct. 14, after Mann made a desperate call to the sheriff’s office asking for help in rescuing his son.  Mann said  that recording data on the machine indicated Ostrich had been transported to the early Cretaceous period.  Mann’s statements had prompted the authorities to gather leading physicists and technologists from around the world to gather in Boise to rescue the boy.

The experts eventually programmed the device to return Ostrich to the present, but when they opened the machine to pull him out, all they found was a Protoceratops egg. Officials thought the boy had possibly been eaten or trampled by a dinosaur, but Ostrich was subsequently found in the family’s hologram room, playing with a 3D image of Elmo from Sesame Street. 

In fact, the machine — which was nothing more than a souped-up clothes dryer — would not have the power to launch the the 27-pound-boy back in time, Idaho State University physics professor Molly Cule said, adding that the scientists involved in the rescue should have realized the story was a hoax since Mann, who has a high-school education, was not likely to have invented time travel.

The Mann case bears a striking resemblance to the “balloon boy” case that gripped the nation 20 years ago. In that incident, a Colorado man named Patrick and Mayumi Heene were accused of fraudently convincing authorities that their six-year-old son Falcon was aboard a runaway balloon when the boy was in fact hiding in the attic of the family’s home.  Charges against Mayumi Heene were eventually dropped, and Patrick Heene was acquitted by reason of insanity in a 2010 jury trial.

Asked by FU to comment on the similarities between the balloon incident and the time-machine stunt, Falcon Heene, now 26 and living in Utah, promptly threw up.