Police Investigate a Cult Killing; It Turns Out to Be a Rock Video

Friday A/V Club: Hard Copy meets Nine Inch Nails.

Nine Inch Nails

"It all began one peaceful Michigan morning," narrator Rafael Abramovitz explains, "when a farmer named Robert Reed woke up to check on his corn field. Farmer Reed looked up towards the sun that morning and saw something strange floating across the sky. It wasn't the usual flock of Canadian Geese. It looked more like a UFO, if you ask him."

So begins the tale of the time the FBI investigated the death of a man who was in fact still alive, as told by the tabloid show Hard Copy. It was 1989. The UFO turned out to be some weather balloons with a Super 8 camera attached. After they landed on his farm, Reed turned his find over to the police, thinking it might be a surveillance camera searching for marijuana. When the cops developed the film, they discovered what they took to be a cult murder or some similarly grisly crime.

A yearlong investigation followed, and in the course of it the FBI was called in. Eventually, the police figured out the truth: The supposed snuff film was actually lost footage from a Nine Inch Nails video. The crew had attached the camera to the balloons to get some low-tech aerial shots, and their helium cinematographers then blew away. The "murder victim" was Trent Reznor, and he was very much alive. Indeed, he was somewhat famous.

In the Hard Copy report, Reznor is amused by the whole thing. The cop they spoke with also seems a little amused. The one person trying very hard not to seem amused by the mistake is Abramovitz, the reporter, who's intent on making Reznor the villain of the piece, blaming him for a "wasted year of police work that could have gone into solving some real crimes." And if Abramovitz had anything to do with the tongue-in-cheek "reenactments" that accompany his narration, I suspect that deep down he was chuckling about it too.

The report aired in 1991, complete with some closing comments about the alleged dangers of rock videos. It is a work of art:

(Via Dangerous Minds. For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

Comments

[XenoZooValentine]

"The supposed snuff film was actually lost footage from a Nine Inch Nails video."

A common mistake.

[Cynical Asshole]

I once walked in on someone I thought was watching what I thought was a snuff film. Turns out it was The Passion of the Christ.

[BYODB]

It took the police a year to figure it out since this was before YouTube and Google I imagine.

[$park? leftist poser]

Don't give up on the chance that they were incompetent.

[Longtobefree]

Of course, the true culprit is the devil weed - - - - - - -

[Chipper Mourning Somali Roadz]

Trent Reznor is still alive? Who knew.

[Brandybuck]

Rafael Abramovitz is such a slut!!!

[RockLibertyWarrior]

God, the media has always been stupid, they've just got more stupid over the years.

[Cloudbuster]

It's just that not their stupidity is revealed nearly instantaneously. In the past, someone in Memphis rarely read or watched incompetent reporting from someone in Seattle, and the three major national networks and newspapers with a national reputation (NYT, Wapo) were such a unified wall of uncheckable misinformation that they could blissfully lie to the public and memory-hole their own mistakes and biases with none being the wiser.

[Hank Phillips]

So the cops spent taxpayer money playing 3 Stooges. All this time they could have used that time and money killing kids over herbs, or for being brown, or gone on rampage confiscating innocent people's property. There ain't no justice!

[Cloudbuster]

So the cops spent taxpayer money playing 3 Stooges.

Business as usual at the police station.