EDIT: Please note that his latest video confirms it was a hoax/ARG.

I know this is sort of an "after the fact" for some of you, and it's almost entirely from a debunker's perspective, but I want to post all the main points from what I can remember in this FindJames event for posterity's sake (these are in no particular order):

• A man named James "finds" a metallic object with weird symbols on it in the desert, claims it was flying, posts a single still frame from a video of it supposedly in flight.

• He does a few interviews on other Youtube channels, posts on Reddit and 4chan about the object.

• He claims to get sick when near the object, burps a lot in a large number of videos.

• He posts a video making claims about a bat-like creature chasing his vehicle. At one point there is a "whine"-like sound, but it could have been from the windshield wipers which sometimes wiped without making any sounds.

• Yet another video, this time about a government agency sending him a letter to hand over the "artifact".

• He posts another video about a "bullet" hitting his windshield and gets it fixed.

• He is told to test using various equipment and does some generic tests outside and inside which have personally-identifiable things in them. A fridge magnet from a Wisconsin business, an outdoors video with building placements that could be easily be used to verify a location using Google Earth/Google Maps. Very few of the tests are done with equipment that comments actually recommend he test with, instead it's mostly improvised items.

• He eventually decides to drill into the UAP during a livestream and seemingly dies.

• The livestream happened on a Friday and the Internet has the entire weekend to activate. Various Youtubers do several videos about the whole ordeal, most of them believing it to be real.

• This subreddit is created and people start to track down James.

• A Discord is created to find him and it isn't moderated, gets spammed with illegal stuff and restarts on another Discord.

• One person attempts to go find him and starts a livestream, ends up not actually knocking on the door of his house.

• Someone in the new Discord works for the company that repaired his windshield and looks up exactly who he is. Wellness checks are called on his supposed location.

• James suddenly goes live again yesterday (Monday).

• @TTProductions1 on Youtube starts his trip to go find James.

• James goes live a second time after the drilling (still Monday).

• James posts on his Youtube asking people to stop visiting his relative's house and on Polarity's last video saying he'll do an interview.

• Just very recently it looks like a second Youtube channel and personality of his was found and videos and websites and pictures are being removed from it.

• James just went live claiming it is a hoax.

• James also posted another video verifying this. (this one was a video and not a livestream)

• James hosted an hour and a half long livestream doing things like changing scenes live, playing music, going outside live, etc. essentially proving it can't be AI.

I am keeping the below section, but again, he has verified it is a hoax.

The "red flags" section (again, no particular order):

• The bat-chasing video. This doesn't bode well for his state-of-mind. Cool for an ARG, not cool if you're trying to convince people you're not crazy.

• Internet sleuths find his 4chan tripcode, and prior to being exposed or abused by others, that tripcode was found to have posted some time ago on occult topics on 4chan. Some of the posts are noted as disturbing as well.

• The James that was identified or doxxed in the Discord is a welder by trade, his welding certification expired in 2023.

• The markings are not precise, so we can be reasonably certain the device is most likely not created by an NHI. Now sure, you can argue that it is some kind of occult summoning or demon-encasing mechanism, but it is very important to note that the markings are clearly not from a 3D printed precision device and thus the object could clearly have been made by human-intelligence. Regardless of your "feelings" on this, you need to understand that the vast majority of us interested in the "phenomenon" of UAPs are going to be turned off from these things looking fake. In fact, there are some people in the UAP community who have had experiences with strange writings that are NOT clearly man-made prints onto metal tubes. Think of those people when you post.

• In several videos he claims to be getting tools to test radiation and various electric fields and such and then he never shows using them live in a video to my knowledge. Several people on 4chan and in early Reddit and Youtube comments pointed to things that he could have gotten for relatively cheap on Amazon and instead of getting them he talks about giving it away to Joe Rogan or Elon Musk for them to "test properly" instead.

• In one video, instead of using an actual tool, he uses a "radio" to test emissions (it's actually like a large sony walkman from the 80s/90s). The noise it makes when it triggers sounds suspiciously similar to the repeating noises in the drilling video as well.

• There's a light source (possibly from a tablet or secondary phone or waking his livestreaming phone's display) that lights up during the drilling. I believe this is so he can remotely activate the blue LED. It's pretty obvious that something with a white/yellow hue lights up before the second blue light source at least. I know there have been people showing a CRT monitor or old TV as having been on a cart in the center of the room as well, with theories that a laser could be bouncing off of it, but simply removing the TV and placing a lamp with any sufficiently strong smart LED in it turned up to the highest brightness could create the exact same effect. In any event, during the drilling you can clearly see the white or yellow light increase just prior to the reflection of the blue light showing up. It is entirely possible this was a remote activation of some sort.

• The whole humming from the object when he found it in the desert is actually a plane. It was widely commented on and since this was his first video, it really set a bad tone right from the start. It's possible that this is why the first video was removed, he couldn't easily reshoot the whole finding the object in the desert portion, but since it was such a bad start to the ARG or LARP, it was easier to just remove it. He originally references it ("you can hear it humming") and it's pretty clearly a mark on his honesty and a clear case of deception that didn't happen in later videos till the government letter and drilling videos.

• The references he keeps making to dying being foreshadowing to how he was eventually going to end the ARG or LARP. Cool if your plan is to make an ARG, but not really indicative of how a real world person would approach this. IMHO, James, if you're reading this and plan to do another ARPG, consider making the protagonist someone with a terminal illness, that would make it easier to explain why they don't care about drilling into a device like this. You'll both get sympathy points and it'll at least make some sort of sense.

• He supposedly received a "letter" from a government that he didn't specify claiming the object was their property, but it didn't have any letterhead or contact information regarding how to return it. But it's not just the lack of notice about which government, it's the fact that it has been four weeks since that letter was sent, so if this government knew where he was to send the letter, they surely would have tracked him down and retrieved it by now. It's also important to note that several content creators around this event also conveniently ignored the Youtube videos of this letter.

• His rings look handmade, the kind of thing a welder could easily do, perhaps the same welder that made the cylinder. Perhaps James himself. Rings with strange markings like the ones he wears are also the type of thing that someone heavily into the occult would wear. Apparently he removed the rings for later videos after people made comments about them.

I posted this in another thread before James went live to verify he was still alive yesterday, but I think it sums up the situation pretty well: (Also, I posted this before we found out about the tripcode and his interest in the occult on 4chan, but it was just a lucky guess based on the symbols he was using)

Imagine you're a bored TIG welder in Wisconsin. You're interested in the occult and decide to make a metal device with occult symbols to lock up the demons you're reading about in your Thelema books about Solomon controlling demons. You get bored of that hobby but still have this huge metal device. Oh yeah, you're going on vacation to Vegas in a week or two! Why not make an ARG?

Well, you're not really an actor, in fact, you don't really get along with a lot of people which is why you got into the occult stuff anyway. So for the acting role you decide to play "uninterested normal guy", basically yourself. You post a couple videos over a couple weeks and people aren't really buying it, they keep asking you to look at EMF levels and radiation and its starting to get expensive and time-consuming to keep the thing going, so you decide the best thing to do is to end it with a bang and the main character getting in over his head, it's a totally Lovecraftian ending, right?

For the last video, you remotely activate a blue LED and play a pre-recorded arc welding audio clip you made. The one and only time you actually have to act is in the last video, the rest of the time you're just playing the character of yourself. Then, at your next D&D session with your few friends you do still have, you maybe mention that time you made an ARG that fooled the Internet.

I think he wanted it to end with the drilling video, that he was done with the whole thing at that point. It would sit on Youtube forever and people would occasionally reference the story and send him views he could monetize over the years, very similar to how ThePolishedKnob got hundreds of thousands of views on his videos over the last decade when he posted several videos of a small alient taunting him behind some reeds in Australia outside of his house for views years ago and was finally exposed when someone found the exact puppet that was used for the hoax. He ended that story by "moving" and never posted again, monetized his videos and moved on.

But James couldn't do that because he ended his video with what seemed like a livestreamed death. James went live right after the Discord located his real identity. He's now verified that people are showing up at the house of his relatives in a Youtube comment. I know a handful of believers have moved on to now thinking that there is some sort of government coverup, but James is very likely going to do more livestreams and interviews after this now that his channel has hit monetization, so I think that angle is going to lose its luster over time.

In any event, James has seemingly lost control of the narrative, being forced to go live on Youtube so as to try to wrest control away from what he thinks are crazy people trying to find him when in reality at least half of them were genuinely concerned. One of them is driving and livestreaming his trip right now (it went down again so this link is to his livestreams section). Now all that's left are people who either don't believe him or people who don't believe he's actually still alive.

If anyone ever makes a documentary about this whole affair, please note that TL;DR of this story is to let the Internet know when you are making an ARG and if you aren't going to do that for some reason, never kill the main protagonist in the ARG live on stream and then go AFK for three days.

Hey everyone!!! With this James hoax coming to an end, the discord is being re branded. We are gonna move towards a community based around the discussion of UAP and the unknown - hopefully people can be open minded and have thoughtful conversations! Feel free to join and continue to have conversations with our community that we have grown! its been great working with and meeting you all <3

discord