Florida Alien Invasion Hoax Mastermind Reveals All

This year started on a weird note in Miami when clips went viral claiming that aliens had been spotted along Bayside Marketplace and that cops swarmed in to block off the area. The Miami Police Department explained ad nauseam that they were responding to "a large crowd of unruly juveniles" who were fighting and setting off fireworks. But that didn't stop rumors of an alien presence from spreading like wildfire.

Among the folks feeding into the conspiratorial frenzy was Anthony Po, a YouTube comedy writer and prankster with 1.7 million followers. While he had no hand in planning the Bayside hullaballoo, he flooded social media with comments after-the-fact, all from fake accounts, claiming to have witnessed the Magic City aliens.

"This is the most unemployed I've felt in my entire life," says Po, AKA Anthpo, in a YouTube video. "I left upwards of probably 300 comments."

Seeing an opportunity to capitalize on the Bayside saga, Po wondered whether he could successfully fake an alien invasion in Tampa. Operating for weeks out of an Airbnb, he devised an elaborate ruse that would push the limits of internet user gullibility. Along the way, he says, he enlisted the help of a few friends and overpaid for some alien-aircraft computer-generated effects. There was also a celebrity impersonator who might have been the most successful element of Po's operation, insofar as he managed to dupe a handful of people into believing he was actor Pedro Pascal of Mandalorian and Game of Thrones fame.
In a recent segment before a live audience of a few dozen, Po broke down the hoax step-by-step and explained how he blew thousands of dollars on his misinformation mission.

Sure, the props were hokey, the special effects budget low, but Po was determined to create a buzz, one way or another. It was one of Po's first projects since relaunching his YouTube channel. He revealed his return in May, changing course from a 2023 announcement in which he claimed his days as a YouTube content creator would be over once he graduated from Rutgers University.

To kick off the hoax in February, Po says, he recorded an extraterrestrial aircraft crash scene with a fake police presence, Hazmat-suit-wearing agents, alien costumes, and a popular prop alien widely available for purchase for around $250. He enlisted none other than Laura Banks, an actress from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, to be the "whistleblower" in the fake invasion, having her post the phony video, as well as other pieces of purported evidence. (Banks had some incentive to help out with the YouTube prank, as she was promoting her new book, Wrath of Blonde.)

Po's scheme did not stop there.

He regularly flew drones in the middle of the night around Tampa, hired a TikTok personality who went by "Travy Martin" to purvey the misinformation further on the platform, and spread posters all over Tampa, promoting a protest to demand answers about the alien creatures said to be creeping around Southwest Florida.
As a popular YouTube creator, Po (whose full name is Anthony Potero) was accustomed to investing in video production and setting up comedy bits, but the scheme gave him sticker shock, especially when he was hit with a $2,800 bill for a few seconds of digital effects for a video portraying a mysterious craft flying over a cityscape. Another short video he promoted showed a man in a field being beamed up into some unseen nether realm. In total, Po calculated he tore through more than $7,000 in an attempt to keep the Bayside alien hype alive.

While some of the bits seemed to be going smoothly, viewers of the supposed alien hot-zone footage spotted less-than-subtle signs it was staged. The dead alien prop was a dead giveaway, for one. Besides appearing like a stereotypical rubber Martian, Reddit users quickly discovered it was one of the first products to pop up when searching the internet for alien body props.

The operation was dealt another blow when Banks revealed she was acting in a YouTube series, "recreating ET abductions to an audience of 1.7 million viewers," on her official website, essentially outing the whole operation.

The crowd chanted, "The government is unfair! Aliens are somewhere!"

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Po and Travis still racked up tens of thousands of views on TikTok, and they tirelessly promoted the UFO-transparency protest at the University of South Florida's campus. Anthony donned his alien costume, now TikTok famous, and a lookalike of Pedro Pascal was also in attendance. Why? To draw in a crowd, of course.

Around 30 people showed up, and the event carried on for three hours. Led by Po in costume, the crowd chanted, "The government is unfair! Aliens are somewhere!"
"I was really worried the police were going to intervene, but literally the only reason they ended up staying is because they wanted to take pictures with Pedro Pascal," Po tells the audience. "The only real news that came out was everybody was talking about Pedro Pascal being in Tampa."

Po says if Floridians take away anything from this experience, it's that they should be wary of mass misinformation.

"This was stupid, I am an idiot, and I got nothing out of this."

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"Make sure you are a good amount skeptical about the information you receive on the internet," he warns his audience. "Most importantly, don't do this. This was stupid, I am an idiot, and I got nothing out of this."

While that is true, and the financial cost might have outweighed his payoff, his plan was not entirely without success. Deciding not to let his alien costume go to waste, Po posted more videos as the character under the TikTok account @Aliensinflorida69 and gained a broad following.

"I did not expect anything to come from this," Po admits. "But sure enough, I became a based alien celebrity."