A decade of news: The extraterrestrial Easter egg of EastIdahoNews.com

It’s a good time of year to confess to an Easter egg I made on EastIdahoNews.com. It has been a running gag for years.

If you’ve ever seen an alien head instead of a play button in our logo above one of our stories (this one doesn’t count), you caught it! This is only on our website, not the app.

The editors tend to put the alien head on a story if it meets one of the following criteria:

• Is about space, especially exoplanets or the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
• Deals with cryptids (think Bigfoot and friends) or ghosts.
• Is lighthearted and mysterious.
• Is just plain weird. But if we applied this to politics, it would be too common to be an Easter egg, wouldn’t it?

These aren’t hard-and-fast rules. Summoning our interstellar buddy depends on the editors’ moods.

The Easter egg began in 2019 with a story titled “Thousands of people have taken a Facebook pledge to storm Area 51 to ‘see them aliens’.” And I liked the alien head so much that I made it a permanent (but rare) feature.

At this point, I should tell you that my full title is web manager, which is an ambiguous way of saying I am an editor and a web developer. Rather than have a wall separate web development and the newsroom, I am part of both departments. This helps us be flexible and sometimes fancy in how we bring you the news.

On July 12, 2019, I decided the web manager arrangement could help us be a little silly too. Maybe it’s not as amusing as I thought it would be then, but I left a comment in the code implementing the alien head: “We have a fun alien logo for alien stories because that’s what Giorgio A. Tsoukalos said to do.” (For the uninitiated, Tsoukalos is the “Ancient Aliens” guy of meme fame.)

But there’s more to this Easter egg than just the logo.

The alien appears only if a story falls into the aliens category on the backend of our site. It’s not in the menu like other categories (think local, national, Biz Buzz, politics, 7 Questions, etc.). But it’s there. Stories rarely announce that they are in the aliens category and often have a heading from another, “normal” category instead.

Click here to browse the category, which contains some of the best weirdness this website has to offer.

As we celebrate 10 years of EastIdahoNews.com, consider this our gift to make your day more surreal.

The truth is out there.

A decade of news series:

The time a prostitute brought a sandwich to our newsroom

Our attempt at ‘Finding Faith’ through the eyes of a local Muslim congregation

The time Segway training went hilariously wrong at the Rexburg Police Department

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