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A tale about bemused penguins and the pilots who toy with them has been part of Internet lore since 1994, but a 1985 sighting of the legend long predates that. The attribution of the piece to the Audubon Society's magazine is understandable — one figures anything to do with wild birds would be found there, as did whoever formed this story into a bit of lore. People find the story plausible because it's easy to anthropomorphize penguins: They stand upright, they walk rather than fly, and some of their actions seem distinctly human-like. Therefore it doesn't seem a stretch to imagine penguins, like people, calmly craning their necks to watch airplanes fly overhead. As charming as the story is, there's not much reason to believe it. Penguins hate the sound made by airplanes and are known to scatter whenever one approaches. This phenomenon was supposedly first reported by Royal Air Force pilots who flew over the Falklands during the 1982 war with Argentina, and it was popularized in a 1986 Bloom County cartoon in which Portnoy announces his desire to get his hair cut like Billy Idol because everybody is doing it. Opus counters with the tale about penguins looking up at airplanes and falling over to make the point that whether one person or ten thousand performs a silly action, it's still a silly thing to do. Embellishments of the original are part of the world of contemporary lore: In November 2000, British Antarctic Survey researchers announced plans to spend one month aboard HMS Endurance studying the falling penguin phenomenon, even though one of their members, Dr. Richard Stone, proclaimed: I'm afraid it's an urban myth. Aircraft do have an effect on penguins, but not to the extent of birds falling over. This announcement prompted dozens of readers to forward us messages proclaiming You're wrong; this is true! as if the mere effort to investigate a phenomenon were sufficient proof of its existence. (Surely scientists wouldn't study something that isn't true, apparently.) In January 2001, the Associated Press reported Dr. Stone's findings: A viral August 2018 tweet referenced a wag who supposedly worked as a penguin erector at the Edinburgh Zoo to reset penguins fallen over from watching airplanes pass overhead: The zoo confirmed that no such position existed:
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