Citizen Science by Jamie Zvirzdin

The Flamingo Conspiracy: They’re Out To Get You

Vanessa, you need to hear this,” Matt whispered, clutching his phone tightly. The last 10 minutes had been the strangest of his life, and he didn’t know who else to turn to.

Vanessa groaned. “Matt, it’s 3 a.m., and we have work tomorrow.”

“Listen,” he said, “I woke up worried I’d forgotten my phone at the office, and I went out and found the phone in my car, but on my way back inside, I swear, the pink plastic flamingo—you know, the one you made me buy because you thought it was funny?—I heard it chirp.”

“A chirp? Really? Go back to bed, Matt.”

“No, Vanessa, listen to me. It was a digital chirp. Like a transmission of some sort.”

The next day, Vanessa couldn’t shake Matt’s early-morning call from her mind. Despite her skepticism, she valued her privacy, so she decided to take a closer look at her own flamingo when she got home from work. What she found made her blood run cold. The flamingo’s plastic beak had a tiny seam, almost invisible to the naked eye.

Driven by curiosity, she started to pry the beak open. The cheap pink ornament burst apart unexpectedly, scattering several black pieces into the grass. Inside the flamingo’s head, she found a tiny compartment that appeared perfectly designed to hold a few microchips and a miniature microphone. She searched the grass for the scattered black shards, but she could not find them.

Vanessa and Matt both worked at a prominent tech firm, where for the last month the talk at the office had centered on their rival’s groundbreaking microchips—chips rumored to be capable of self-destructing without a trace. There on her lawn, as Vanessa gazed at her broken bird, it hit her. Matt wasn’t paranoid; he was right.

At the local library that evening, poring over old newspapers and obscure web forums, Vanessa and Matt saw a pattern emerge. The manufacturer of these plastic flamingos, “Bird’s-Eye Designs,” was a subsidiary of a tech conglomerate with close ties to global intelligence agencies. No one knew who officially owned the business; whoever it was, they knew how to fly under the radar. Moreover, there was an inexplicable surge in the number of birdwatchers who’d gone missing over the last few years.

Suddenly, Matt froze. One of the missing birdwatchers was Vanessa’s uncle, who had disappeared without a trace six months ago. A well-known environmentalist and president of the Flamingo Preservation Society, he had been campaigning against the very tech conglomerate they were now reading about.

The two 20-something sleuths kept digging deeper that weekend, hunched over Matt’s computer as sunlight faded into night. As they connected more with online communities, they realized that people from all walks of life were grappling with similar questions and uncertainties about pink flamingos. Vanessa gasped and wept as she and Matt watched a series of long, dramatic YouTube videos on Facebook. Their rock-solid, logical, sincere anecdotes seemed to prove that the plastic flamingos were not just ornaments: they were surveillance devices designed to keep tabs on environmental activists and anyone else deemed a threat to Bird’s-Eye Designs. Most terrifying of all was Operation Hitchcock, a sinister plan to roll out a new line of “smart” garden ornaments capable of more than just audio surveillance. These devices could interfere with home networks, manipulate data, and even control other smart home devices.

Realizing the depth of the conspiracy, Vanessa and Matt knew they had to join the fight to expose it.

“It’s time to ruffle a few feathers,” Matt said, his face now haggard and grim.

Vanessa nodded solemnly. She grabbed a butter knife from the kitchen drawer as Matt fetched a flashlight from the basement: they had to make sure.

From water-cooler talk they knew their boss, Sam, had an obsession with pink flamingos. He had 50 of them staked in his lawn, he claimed, and the proceeds from each had gone to the Flamingo Preservation Society.

“Mowing the lawn is hell,” he had said, “but I don’t care.”

Armed with this insight and the cover of night, Vanessa and Matt stepped onto Sam’s lawn. One by one, they’d crack open these plastic guardians of suburban bliss and find the clandestine technology they sheltered. Vanessa brandished her butter knife, dropped to her knees, and began prying open the beak of the nearest flamingo.

“Matt, there’s nothing here!” Vanessa whispered, holding up the empty pink innards.

The thought then occurred to her that the black shards she saw fly across the lawn might just have been mold.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.”

“Of course there’s nothing there! This one’s just a decoy. They just want us to think there’s nothing wrong here. Try the next one!”

Vanessa complied, but another nagging thought surfaced: Who exactly were “they”? But she had to remain strong. She’d committed too much time and energy to this conspiracy theory to back out now.

“There’s nothing in this one either,” Vanessa said.

Then, it clicked. “Hey, maybe Sam is the real decoy! Maybe he’s the one who murdered my uncle!”

At that moment, the porch light flashed on and Sam, dressed in a feathery pink bathrobe, appeared in the doorway.

“What’s the matter? Is something wrong out here? Hey! Lay off my flamingos!”

“We’re fighting a war, Sam,” Vanessa said slowly.

“A war against whom?”

“Against birds!” Matt said venomously.

Sam called the cops.

As for Vanessa and Matt, they knew their work was far from over. They had rattled a much larger cage, and there was no going back. After being released, they sat on a grassy hill and waited for the sun to rise over the lake. As a flock of real flamingos flew by, they felt a bittersweet triumph. The closer they got to the truth, the more dangerous their lives would become, but they were determined to fight against the hidden world of surveillance, corporate greed and probably murder.

One large flamingo landed right in front of them. Its beady eye was a startling red, and its hairy lamellae, normally used to filter food from water, looked more like rows of bristled traps ready to seize more than mere plankton.

“Matt, it’s 3 a.m., and we have work tomorrow,” it chirped. Then, it attacked.

The End

Moral of the Story

While murderous, tech-savvy flamingos are absurd, this story offers us a chance to see how conspiracy theories work and how we get caught up in them. Vanessa and Matt were just ordinary people who found themselves caught up in the search for truth. They weren’t paranoid or eccentric, and their concern was founded on legitimate core values, like privacy, injustice, and concern for missing relatives. Conspiracy theories are often emotionally appealing to us: They’re dramatic and they make us feel special, like we know an important secret, like we’re the heroes fighting the evil “them.” I especially find it fascinating that conspiracy theories hinge on a self-sealing logic, like self-destructing microchips and microphones that vanish without a trace. A lot of “evidence” for these theories is simply unverifiable, and thus the theory survives and grows on its own twisted logic. They also heavily depend on anecdotes, stories from people—even ordinary people—whose memories might not be as reliable as we’d like to believe.

But conspiracy theories have steep costs for Americans, both as individuals and as a society. They erode trust in institutions, from the government to the press, making it harder for these bodies to function effectively on our behalf. Personal relationships become strained as folks become deeply invested in views that set them at odds with friends and family. At the root level, these theories act like red herrings, drawing attention and resources away from real issues that require collective action, thereby weakening the fabric of society itself. Worst of all, when conspiracy theories make the leap from idle chatter to actual behavior, they can spark harmful, even violent, actions. As Vanessa and Matt found out, the price of tilting at windmills—in this case, plastic flamingos—was steeper than they thought.

Let us therefore lean on solid evidence and trustworthy sources to lay enduring but not endearing conspiracy theories to rest. Vaccines work, we moonwalked, 9/11 wasn’t inside baseball, and the Earth’s not a flat pancake. JFK’s death wasn’t an inside job, Princess Diana’s death wasn’t a royal plot. The climate’s really heating up, Sandy Hook and the Holocaust were tragically real, and Big Pharma isn’t hiding your cancer cure. No Freemasons or Illuminati are pulling the world’s strings. Contrails are all hot air, and Area 51 is neither a cosmic hotel nor a cosmic mortuary. Deep State really isn’t that deep, Pizzagate’s a slice of fiction, and QAnon’s out to lunch. For a full smorgasbord of debunked myths, feast your eyes on this Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories. If you want to be a true hero, serve your local community, keep the rule of law, and leave both real and plastic pink flamingos in peace.

For more related to this topic, I also enjoyed Christopher Hodapp and Alice Von Kannon’s book, “Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies For Dummies.”

Jamie Zvirzdin researches cosmic rays with the Telescope Array Project, teaches science writing at Johns Hopkins University and is the author of “Subatomic Writing.”