The blog-o-sphere was abuzz for a while with news of the strange adorable broadcast from space. Unbeknownst to the masses, the militaries of the world had indeed found strange unmarked craft on their radar screens, and the signal really did seem to come from a network of unidentified craft hovering over different areas of our planet. The top brass weren't so gullible as to believe teddy bears were taking over the planet, of course. But they did tighten up their airspace and try to figure out which of the major superpowers was responsible for this surprise demonstration of technical prowess.
In the civilian world, accusations bounced around the news channels and social media feeds as everybody pinned the supposed hoax on everybody else. The Chinese and the Cubans and the North Koreans were told it was a propaganda stunt from the decadent capitalists in South Korea and Japan, who must have pooled their technological and aerospace resources with the other decadent capitalists in the Americas and Europe. Russian media labeled it the boldest NATO plot in decades. Most of the Middle East was told that it was a psychological warfare attempt by the Great Satan and its kawaii allies from the Far East. Much of the developed world chalked it up to hackers in the developing world. The American far left media claimed it was Russian meddling in favor of Republicans, while the far right media claimed that it was Chinese meddling in favor of the Democrats. And of course, there were nutjobs and tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists all around the world who believed it was an authentic announcement for an actual alien invasion, or even a fake alien invasion staged by the New World Order to disguise their depopulation agenda. But by far the most popular explanation, and arguably the mainstream consensus, was that it was an advertising stunt on behalf of some lame movie or half-baked marketing campaign.
Overall, though, the fact is that most people just never even gave a shit in the first place. Everyone was already used to publicity stunts, high-profile hackings, exaggerated foreign propaganda, tin-foil hat conspiracy theories, and half-baked marketing campaigns. Most people forgot about it within 15 minutes after it aired, if they ever even saw it in the first place. If it showed up in social media shares from their friends, they left some snarky comment and scrolled down to something else. Of course, when UFO sightings and abduction reports started to increase, they posted smartphone videos and made cheesy documentaries for cable TV, but everyone knows you can't believe much of what you see on YouTube or the History channel. When people started disappearing on a larger scale, the suburbanites chalked it up to a rise in mass abductions and serial killings and started locking their doors at night, but the single moms in the inner cities were used to doing that already. There were always a few nutjobs who made the connection to the plushies and claimed to have seen them, but there are always nutjobs. The religious nuts were saying it was a sign of the end times, but religious nuts are always saying that.
Almost everyone since that broadcast has just kept on going about their normal day, just like they always had, and trying to get through it all with as little work and thought as they could get by with. You are one of these people. And as you lean back on the couch this evening, turning off your brain and turning on the TV, the self-proclaimed plushie invaders from space are out of sight and out of mind ... until you hear a knock at your and see a living stuffed fox with a plate of cookies and what looks like a little toy ray-gun aiming up at your face.