He is used to attention. To crowds. To causing a stir.
The hoax master has fooled thousands. But now, it appears, the jig is up. Three golf carts of security guards and uniformed men converge on Linn Murphy in a dark park behind the Orange County Fair.
They’ve got him – and the so-called UFO he’s been hovering tonight over the fair’s packed concert.
“Are you flying something?” one of the men shouts.
“Why?” asks Murphy, 51, of Irvine.
Around here, he is equal parts rebel, nerd and celebrity – a man who has spiked Orange County’s unidentified flying object sightings for the past three years with a foam toy 3 feet in diameter. A man who has emptied bars, distracted football games and brought cars to a halt. A man who has generated hundreds, if not thousands, of calls to police and dozens of videos on UFO Web sites.
“All the police know me,” he likes to say of his nightly obsession – flying radio-control planes shaped like saucers with lights. “It’s never boring. Every night is different.”
He’s been kicked out of parks by police. Questioned by security. Confronted by businesses. But generally, everyone ends up asking the same thing: Can you show us how the darn thing works? And Linn Murphy – the Southern gentleman with ever-present radio controls dangling around his neck – is happy to oblige.
Tonight is different.
“Come with us,” he is told.
Murphy is escorted into a cart by men wearing full body armor and helmets. Men who look like … soldiers.
STRINGFLY
We’re standing on historically significant ground: Where the most infamous sightings of what the local police chief calls a “super-double-secret gyroscoptic UFO” occurred.“I just made that word up,” says the chief, chuckling at all the UFO stories that have landed on his desk in Aliso Viejo. Like the time a “UFO” crashed on a bookstore roof and deputies had to help get it down.
Yikes!
Read more with pictures at http://www.ocregister.com/news/ufo-orange-county-1886384-unidentified-flying
