Last Friday, a British Airways pilot spotted something strange through her cockpit window.
She was flying from Montreal to London, and as her plane neared the coast of Ireland, she saw a bright light approach her plane — before seeing it veer off at great speed to the north.
“Astronomical, it was like Mach 2,” said a second pilot about how fast this mysterious light was.
To this day, nobody knows what this strange thing was.
Maybe, just maybe, it was a UFO. After all,
“UFOs spotted off Irish coast under investigation”
was the headline this story ran with, and it’s the headline that caught my attention this morning, so I can report on it to you now.
But here’s the thing.
I’ve written before how I like to haunt tabloid websites and sex forums and conspiracy theory Facebook groups.
That’s not how I found this particular story, however.
I actually came across it on Hacker News.
This is a news website where serious and professional nerds go to do intellectual battle with each other, submitting serious and professional stories (mainly about programming and business), and showing off their intelligence by writing comments that illustrate how nobody can make a fool of them.
And yet, the above story, flimsy UFOs and all, made the front page of Hacker News, alongside articles about new programming languages and $8 billion company exits.
What explains the success of this clickbaity story?
Well, I believe it was a combination of two things.
The first clearly being the curiosity-evoking power of UFOs.
But you have to remember that this story bubbled up among an audience of very left-brained, logical, skeptical engineers and computer programmers.
So there’s a second, more subtle, but equally crucial element that allowed this story to go viral.
And it’s something that can be used to sell as well as to simply draw clicks.
In fact, if you’re in a crowded, jaded marketplace such as weight-loss supplements, this second element is absolutely crucial.
I’ll discuss this second element in full detail in my upcoming book on email marketing for health products.
This book is not out yet, but if you want to get a free copy when I do finish it, you can sing up here: