Illinois football star and NFL prospect Tip Reiman ruffled some feathers and threw reporters a fowl ball during the NFL Combine’s press availability day on Thursday, warning them that birds aren’t real.
Reiman, who had 203 yards and three touchdowns last year for the Illini, apparently regaled reporters on the latest in bird talk by asking if anyone has ever seen a baby pigeon. And followed that up, asking, “How do we know that power lines aren’t pigeon recharging stations?”
More than likely, the young player was joking.
For those unaware, there is a popular faux conspiracy theory joke flying around the Internet that maintains that “Birds are Not Real” and posits that what we think are birds flying overhead are actually U.S. government drones spying on us from the skies.
The joke was started in 2018 by Internet jokester Peter McIndoe.
The satirical theory states that birds were exterminated by the U.S. government between 1959 and 1971 and replaced by lookalike spy drones. McIndoe played the joke straight for several years, but in 2021 finally admitted that it was just a big prank.
It is most likely that Reiman is in on the joke and doesn’t actually believe that birds are spy drones.
But football has featured odder characters with stranger claims.
As TMZ noted, another prospect also had some offbeat comments at the Combine.
Texas Tech standout Tyler Owens told reporters that he did not think other planets actually existed and that the flat earth theory was a strong argument.
In Owens’s case, he almost seems serious.
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