Home made UFO hoax

[azshooter]

I have not thought about this for a long time.  When I was in high school we came up with the idea of creating a UFO.  The solution was simple, get a plastic bat kite (red plastic) and tape a small pen light to the back of it.  We waited untill a breezy moonless night and using fishing line for kite string we sent it up.  We put it up high enough that you could not hear it nor see anything but the red light moving back and fourth.  At night you really can not tell how high up the light is and from our perspective it looked like it was thousands of feet in the air.  The next part was easy, after tying the kite to a bush, we stood at the side of the road in the neighborhood looking up and pointing.  After a few minutes a car slowed and seeing us looking up stopped looked up themselves.  Pretty soon we had probably a dozen people stopped and gawking at the UFO right over them.  After a while the battery died and all the commotion went away.  Great entertainment for a teenager!

How about it people - did you ever create a hoax?   BTW feel free to try this at home.

[Cowpox]

Hey azshooter, Thanks for bringing back some  happy memories.  At least you and your friends have the excuse of youth, but I and my friend were in our forties, and supposedly old enough to know better.  A local Variety store started stocking 5 pound disposable cylinders of helium, I think they were intended for blowing up party ballons. We decided that was a waste, when it was just the ticket for creating UFOs. We soldered two wires onto 9 volt flashlight bulbs and bared the ends, and dug through all of our kids old 9 volt powered toys to find those snap connectors that fit the batteries, and hooked them on the other end of the wires. They lit a 5 quart ice cream pail up real nice. We had to experiment to learn the best way to inflate big  trash bags, but by bunching the end of the bag around a ball point pen barrel, and fixing it with about three rubber bands and electrical tape we got a nice seal. The provided hose on the container was a tight fit in the pen. Once filled, a pencil eraser made a plug. We decided the pail might light up the bags, so we put 50 feet of mono fishing line between the bags and pail.  Like you, we waited for a moonless night, and about a 20 mph wind. We started with one bag, which wouldn't lift the pail, and blew up another. On the forth bag, it lifted off, and leveled out at what we thought was about 2 - 300 feet.  We followed it for about ten miles, and could not believe the attention it was getting. Soon, a State Trooper(on a county road) passed us, and when we realized he was following it too, we turned off, and went back to my friends house to listen to his police scanner. Lots of inter department chatter. The last we heard, it "disappeared" while a couple of Sheriff deputies  from about 60 miles away were watching it.  Over the next three months we sent about 5 more of them up, but no longer followed them, just went in and listened to the scanner , with the same results 4 of the 5 times. We gave it up, because it was costing a little over thirty dollars a pop. But it was kind of fun while it lasted.