Rural Alaska blog: The Village : Film company will pay $22K for using fake news stories to sell alien-abduction movie

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Kyle Hopkins

I was born in Sitka, have lived in Kake, Skagway and Fairbanks and joined the ADN in 2005 after writing for the Anchorage Press and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. I started blogging for the paper in 2006 with The Trail, our blog about the governor's race. Then came the Alaska Politics blog. Now I'm covering government and rural affairs and live in Anchorage with my wife, Rebecca. (Update: Our daughter Alice was born May 31. Thanks everyone for the suggestions.) E-mail me at khopkins@adn.com and find me on Twitter at twitter.com/ADNVillage.

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Rural blog: The Village

Film company will pay $22K for using fake news stories to sell alien-abduction movie

Posted by thevillage

Posted: November 11, 2009 - 7:11 pm

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Has this ever happened to you?: In this film publicity image released by Universal Pictures, Milla Jovovich is shown in a scene from "The Fourth Kind." Be sure to vote in the News-Miner poll on whether you've been abducted by space aliens. (AP Photo/Universal Pictures, Simon Vesrano)

“The Fourth Kind,” an alien abduction movie set in Nome, used a guerilla marketing campaign to try and fool audiences into thinking the main character was a real person studying real mysteries in Alaska.

If you Googled the movie when it first came out, you might stumble across stories that appeared to be written by real Alaska reporters. Except some of those stories – like the claim that the movie is based on real “archival footage” – are fake.

Now the film company distributing the film has agreed to give $22,250 to the Alaska Press Club and a Calista Scholarship Fund in a settlement with several state newspapers, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports.

News-Miner Columnist Dermot Cole, who has been following “The Fourth Kind” since August, explains:

The agreement is the first official admission by the company that its “viral internet marketing” included the fabrication of news stories and attributing them to the Nome Nugget, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the Anchorage Chronicle and other publications. In addition, the company included real news articles without permission.

I caught a matinee of the movie on my day off. The whole flick, from start to finish, bombards you with promises that much of what your seeing is real footage that happened to real Alaskans.

That includes -- spoiler alert -- a grainy scene that was supposedly taped by the Nome "Sheriff's" department depicting a Nome man killing his family.

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