Cameras on Amazon’s Ring doorbell will now not only keep you safe, they will also attempt to capture evidence of extraterrestrial life. The company announced that it is ready to pay people who manage to record an image of an alien with their Ring cameras.
This plan is called Ring’s Million Dollar Alien Search. Attendees are encouraged to keep their eyes peeled for any signs of alien life recorded by Ring doorbell cameras. If a small green entity enters the camera’s field of view, the winner of the best “scientific evidence” will win $1 million in the contest, with meteorologist and astrobiologist Jacob Haqq Misrad serving as judge. Those who are unlikely to encounter a real alien can win a $500 Amazon gift card by capturing their own alien Ring footage using makeup, props and costumes. Applications are accepted until November 3.
“Sensors detect spurious signals from the Neighborhood Nebula,” Amazon said on the contest website. It may be nothing. Something could happen. “This is where you come in,” he says. Participants must download the images from the Ring app to be eligible to receive the prize money.
With the recent increase in news involving aliens, Ring may be looking to capitalize on UFO hysteria to convince customers that it’s not a privacy nightmare. Politico reported in a story this March that the company turned over entire daily Ring footage to law enforcement without a customer’s consent. The client had previously complied with law enforcement’s request for doorbell footage during his neighbor’s investigation, but those same law enforcement agencies had filed a lawsuit to obtain more footage. In other words, in many major cities, law enforcement has access to a special portal through which they can request Ring images from the device’s massive network of devices.