Koi UFO Video 077: Alien attacks police officer (4400)
[DEBUNKED] Koi UFO Video 077 appears to be footage from a dashboard camera (a "dashcam") showing a police officer approaching a car and then being incinerated.
This video appears online with titles such as "alien attacks police officer CNN BREAKING NEWS" and "Alien attacks police officer".
A copy of the video on Youtube uploaded by John Hutchison in July 2011 has over 3.8 million views as at October 2014.
In fact, as detailed below, the video was one of the "Promicin" series of online videos created to advertise a new season of the science-fiction series "The 4400".
Sections below:
2. Stories and claims relating to this video
3. The real background to this video
4. Relevant online discussions
1. The relevant video
This video appears to be footage from a dashboard camera (a "dashcam") showing a police officer approaching a car and then being incinerated.
Screen shots from the video are included below for ease of identification:
2. Stories and claims relating to this video
This video appears online with titles such as "alien attacks police officer CNN BREAKING NEWS" and "Alien attacks police officer".
3. The real background to this video
This video was in fact one of the "Promicin" series of online videos created to advertise a new season of the science-fiction series "The 4400".
"The 4400" was a rather good science-fiction series originally broadcast in 2004 to 2007. In the pilot episode, an enormous ball of light deposits a group of exactly 4400 people in the Cascade Range foothills near Mount Rainier, Washington. Each of the 4400 had disappeared at various times starting from 1946 in a beam of white light. None of the 4400 have aged from the time of their disappearance. A number of the returnees begin to manifest paranormal abilities, such as telekinesis, telepathy and precognition, as well as other "gifts".
By the second season of "The 4400", it was revealed that all 4400 returnees had a (fictional) neurotransmitter, promicin, in their brains, which gives them their powers.
According to an article on the Adweek website, to promote the fourth (and final) season of "The 4400" on USA Network, Campfire created a wide-ranging interactive world consisting of 80 videos that run from 30 seconds to five minutes and six Web sites. Chris McCumber, svp, marketing and brand strategy at USA Network in New York commented that "From the most ardent fan of 4400 there's as much or as little content as they want to sample". The campaign involved three different factions emerging around the drug Promicin (which gave the returnees their special powers): pro, anti- and neutral.
The video now circulating as allegedly showing an alien attacking a police officer was one uploaded to various websites in 2007 as part of that advertising campaign. For example, the video was uploaded to Youtube by "BanPromicin2477" on 11 June 2007 with the title "Promicin Freak Kills Cop" and a caption stating "A Promicin freak murdered this officer and left nothing but a smoking corpse behind. You won't find this sort of stuff on the Pro-Promicin websites, because it's more proof that Promicin KILLS".
The original version of the video began and ended with prominent references to "The 4400" and an associated website (see the screenshot below). Those indications that the video was advertising "The 4400" have been stripped out of the copies now posted on Youtube
The original video (including the reference to "The 4400" ) is embedded below:
I find it ironic that the copy of the original advertisement posted on Youtube only generated a few hundred views, whereas the versions of that video which have been edited to remove the references to "The 4400" at the beginning and end of the video now have several million views. It seems that being too obvious about the nature of the original video cost the advertisers a lot of potential viewers. A bit more mystery in the slightly edited subsequent versions of the video (and a reference to aliens in the title of the video) has caused the modified version of the video to go viral in the last few years - reaching number of viewers which I am sure would have caused the original advertisers considerable envy.
Quite a few other videos from the 2007 advertising campaign remain on Youtube, including the following:
4. Relevant online discussions
Relevant discussions on the AboveTopSecret.com forum include the following:
2009 (December) discussion entitled "[hoax] Cop gets busted by ALIEN? Zapped! [TV SHOW CLIP]"
A brief discussion of this video on The GodLike Productions forum ended after someone made the (incorrect) assertion that in the original video the police officer "gets shot with a gun". I have often found it amusing to see discussions come to an end when an apparently logical explanation (albeit unsupported by any evidence and in fact completely false...) is asserted in a confident manner.