Man Saves Adorable, Tiny Puppy With Drone... OR DOES HE?!?!
1906: Author Upton Sinclair exposes terrifying conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants in his book, The Jungle
1972: The Washington Post’s Bob Woodard and Carl Bernstein expose the Watergate Break-In
2018: Kate, from Barstool Sports, exposes damning evidence that footage of a man saving a puppy with a drone is staged, leaving the world forever changed
I want to believe this story with every fiber of my being… A man, Milind Raj, hears an adorable puppy crying in a drain and dedicates his time and technology to selflessly rescue it.
But right away the part of me that doesn’t want myself or anyone else to feel joy, alerted me that something was off. Here’s the video with 16 points of cold, hard, possibly incorrect proofs that I’ll feel bad about later if I’m wrong:
1) You only see the puppy once it’s in the air. I couldn’t find any evidence of it actually in the drain. When the footage begins he’s only hovering right above the water.
2) Raj says the puppy had been in the drain for days. You’re telling me nobody took pity on the little dude & figured out a way to pull him out? Seems like a net could have reached him.
3) That pup seems pretty clean & dry after supposedly being drenched in murky filth.
4) If you look closely, the puppy’s neck is fully supported. So… despite exhaustion & terror he knew to slip his ‘lil neck through that small hole somehow?
5) OH SHIT – And then the video goes to a different view, and when it comes back to the puppy THE NECK SUPPORT IS GONE!
6) He shows where the puppy initially fell through to land in the ditch. How the heck would he know if he just happened to walk by & hear it days later?
7) Raj makes it a point in the video to show that this puppy was saved because of his innovative technology. Doesn’t that make you want to…. invest in him somehow?! $$$$
8) The whole video was literally made by the guy himself.
9) And at the end he’s giving out all of his contact information & asks people to pledge to make a better India, and there’s a number you can call ‘for details’.
10) I might have used my old email and reached out to him because I’m waiting for traffic to die down before I drive home from Barstool HQ and this is what I’m doing with that time.
11) I’m in too deep. Maybe it’s actually pretty weird that I did that. And I signed with a fake name forgetting my photo and real name will pop up when he receives it. ::collar pull::
12) Oh, you thought I was done? Nope, my obsession only gets way more pathetic from here.
13) I looked this guy up and he seems to be a busy gent. He’s the director of business development for Crest Admissions; consultants who you can pay to write your papers. They also claim to help kids get into good universities etc. for $250 – $300 USD per hour, or for a package deal:
14) His other job? Inverotech. Which seems like a real website at first until you start tooling around on it and realize it’s all stock photos & pics of him squatting under fancy machines that who knows if they’re really his, and also you can’t really click anything.
15) He & his film crew are the only witnesses to this event. So nobody else in town thought it was interesting that there was A PUPPY DANGLING FROM A FUCKING DRONE? I would risk crashing my car into a bus full of children to snap a photo of that.
16) As of March 2018, South Korea had developed a drone that could pick things up, but it didn’t look nearly as advanced as this one, and yet I couldn’t find anything on this one.
My theory: His drone really can pick things up with those gloves. But he needs investors to keep the idea going, so he staged a puppy rescue for publicity. And I bet the name he gave this puppy, Lifted, will wind up being the name of the project investment money brings in.
Interested to see if anyone else comes to the same conclusion while they also spent their evening deeply researching a small, obscure story from the other side of the globe.