News of the Department of Transportation chasing a giant 28-foot inflatable pumpkin more than 60 miles across the windswept landscape of southeastern Wyoming is being reported by news outlets across the country as “breaking news.”
The story, along with an image of the huge, orange fruit rolling across Interstate 25 with a Wyoming Highway Patrol cruiser keeping other drivers away, has exploded online.
A Denver-area weather outlet called out the runaway pumpkin on Facebook as “the Wyomingest story in all of Wyoming.” As did the Oklahoma City Pow Wow Club.
Just down I-25 in Longmont, Colorado, a tire outlet used the story to draw in potential customers to promote a sales pitch.
Saying he’s sorry to smash all those who’ve delighted in the story of the rampaging Wyoming pumpkin, Casper oil field worker Justin Hathaway said he has to squash it.
That’s because Hathaway — the slightly warped and admittedly possibly deranged mind behind the popular satire outlet Casper Planet — made it up.
“Yeah, total fiction,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “I make all this stuff up. I don’t know how, but stuff just pops into my brain.”
The monstrous squash rambling across Wyoming toward Colorado was just the latest of those brainstorms, which he posted Sunday evening.
The Wyoming Highway Patrol confirms it's had no reports of a giant pumpkin rolling anywhere.
"To clairfy, we have not had any calls about the inflatble pumpkin — thank gourd," WHP spokesman Aaron Brown told Cowboy State Daily in a text message.
By Monday morning, the news had exploded, Hathaway said.
“I can’t even tell how many have picked this story up,” Hathaway said. “I’ve been getting tagged in a lot of them and they’re popping up like crazy in my news feed.
“This thing has gone way beyond what I thought.”
Made Believers Out Of Them
Hathaway also finds it amusing that so many people believe his fake news is real. His outlet is clearly marked as satire, and many of those who comment on the shared story are quick to point that out.
But there are still a lot of people who believe it, Hathaway said.
“I do get a lot of people who reach out, and they’ll share it and think it’s real,” he said.
Perhaps what made people more prone to believe the Casper Planet story was a real story about a week earlier out of North Carolina of an inflatable pumpkin getting loose.
In a video posted from a dash camera, a giant pumpkin broke loose from its tether and rolled down a residential street.
“It’s going to hit us,” says someone in the car as the big, orange ball slowly rolls toward them. “That pumpkin’s going to hit my car and damage my car.”
Then, Anger
When people realize they’ve been fooled, some also lash out at Hathaway in anger, embarrassed they got taken by what — with 20/20 hindsight — was clearly made up, he said.
“They get very angry, and sometimes I appreciate that,” he said, adding that some of that vitriol is backlash over the use of artificial intelligence to create the fake “news” photos that go with his fake stories.
“Yeah, isn’t that wild? I get a lot of those (responses), actually,” Hathaway said. “I find that kind of funny — they get all upset about how dare I use AI to make photos for made-up stories.
“I think a lot of people get misconstrued about what I do,” he continued. “They think I hate the ‘real’ news and do this because of that. But you have to respect (legitimate news outlets). Their job is way harder than what I do.”
In fact, Hathaway said he studies how journalists write their stories and headlines to make his bogus stories seem authentic.
“I’ve been studying the headline format from AP (The Associated Press), with the titles and stuff, and they are really good at grabbing attention,” he said. “Why not adopt that into satire?”
The Story That Fooled Them
It worked with Sunday’s story.
“28-Foot Inflatable Pumpkin Blown Across Wyoming, WYDOT Tracks It For 63 Miles,” the headline reads.
Then the story begins with a traditional AP-style dateline of “DOUGLAS, Wyo. —” indicating the location of the runaway pumpkin can be associated with the small eastern Wyoming city.
Hathaway then plays it straight, which he said is probably why so many established outlets tend to believe the report.
That, and when they go to verify the report and see it came from “Casper Planet,” they think that’s a regular newspaper based in Casper.
“Wyoming transportation officials spent several hours Thursday tracking a 28-foot inflatable Halloween pumpkin after strong winds ripped it from a commercial display and carried it across more than 60 miles of eastern Wyoming,” the story begins.
The gargantuan squash then rumbles across the landscape, crosses I-25 twice and was last seen rolling toward Colorado, the story concludes.
Yup, They Believed These, Too
The pumpkin isn’t the first time Hathaway’s Casper Planet stories have gone viral with people thinking they’re real.
In fact, it’s happening again now with another fake story he posted Monday about the government finding an old Civil War cache of military supplies on a Wyoming ranch. The rancher was rewarded with a $100 gift card to Red Lobster for the find.
What Hathaway finds funny about that one is that the Civil War didn’t happen anywhere close to Wyoming, so “nobody should believe it.”
He made international headlines with a story about a semitruck crashing on I-25 and setting loose hundreds of king cobras.
Then there was the one about the giant tree roots found under Devils Tower, playing into the long-running myth that the nation’s first national monument is the stump of an ancient tree.
When the Black Diamond Pool in Yellowstone National Park exploded in 2024, he reported a woolly mammoth calf was unearthed, also generating headlines around the globe.
"There are a lot of people arguing about how real my stories are, and I'm not sure where that comes from," Hathaway told Cowboy State Daily in a previous interview. "They don't believe it's fake, but it's right there at the top of the page: it's satire. All names and locations are made up."
As for the 28-foot inflatable pumpkin, that was just another weird thought to pop into his head, Hathaway said.
“I think that day or the day before it was windy,” he said. “I was working, and the wind was just howling, so I was thinking about stuff that could go flying in the wind.
“I’d already done port-a-potties, garbage cans and trampolines. So, the pumpkin was just next, I guess.”
He joked that if the stories he does about stuff blowing away in Wyoming’s infamous wind were legitimate, “there’d probably be some town in Kansas” buried under it all.
Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com.
