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On April Fool’s Day, 2025, Minnesota bluegrass band The Gillyweeds released their latest album, 

In the year that followed, the band played no local venues and gave no interviews. No videos or photos of the band members — Taylor Farris-Smith, Elizabeth Gregor, Noah Keller, Ryan Keller, Samantha Miller, Georgiana May Norton — appeared online, or anywhere.

Then, on March 15, 2026, on the band’s Facebook page, which had about 60,000 followers, an announcement was made: “We are devastated to confirm that today, just before noon, all six members of The Gillyweeds were killed in a plane crash.”

Music fan Kyle Matteson, who’s been immersed in the local music scene for a quarter century, was distraught.

“Well, that’s terrible,” he remembers thinking. But the sorrow soon turned to puzzlement, as he realized he’d never actually heard of The Gillyweeds. He started searching online for plane crashes.

“I didn't see anything, so it was already not passing a smell test,” Matteson says.

Matteson did not find anything because there was no plane crash, and the Gillyweeds never existed.

“The Gillyweeds are a fictional, satirical band that was created for the narrative purposes of a story I've written called ‘Viridian Skies,’” Todd Pitman tells MPR News. “At no point in time was it intended for anyone to take that fiction or that satire as fact or reality.”

By “story,” Pitman is referring to an ARG, or an alternate reality game. For Pitman, it’s part treasure hunt, part geocaching, and part multimedia storytelling that blends fiction and reality.

Pitman has a creative background — he’s done graphic design for bands including Trampled by Turtles and Hippo Campus, and 

his redesign for the Minnesota flag was a finalist

. He’s designed more than 100 ARGs for his company, TC Treasures.

With “Viridian Skies,” Pitman created narrative clues for a small, committed group of players that led to treasures — fake green gemstones he hid around the Midwest. 

Pitman wrote lyrics for several albums and set them to AI-generated music and vocals. He also embedded in the band’s lore inspiration from musicians who died in plane crashes, like Buddy Holly and Otis Redding. He posted the music to Bandcamp and YouTube.

The post about The Gillyweeds’ plane crash was the final clue.

“That fiction did, in fact, end up bleeding into reality, and I've done what I can to sort of stop the misinformation that occurred as a result of that mistake,” Pitman says.

After the social media post about the death of The Gillyweeds, confusion and backlash ensued. On a 

, a panel including Matteson discussed it.

“I’m legitimately mad,” host Sean McPherson said. “Generally, I'm looking at a person who maybe had a good history, but at this point has fictionalized a tragedy, pulled on my heartstrings and many, many other people’s, for a treasure hunt.”  

People who had not signed up to play the game saw the post in their social media feeds without context. The Gillyweeds Facebook page had originally been a page titled “Minnesota,” which Pitman started over a decade ago. It had built up about 60,000 followers.

“I changed the title of that to The Gillyweeds,” Pitman says. “That was probably ill-advised.”

 about The Gillyweeds, says that his main grievance is that Pitman had not clearly identified that this was all part of a game, causing distress for folks who had not consented to play.

Matteson says that whatever Pitman was trying to accomplish “was very poorly executed.”

Pitman had included a disclaimer about the fake band, but it was hard to find.

“I did a poor job of delineating fiction from fact,” Pitman says. “There was a disclaimer on their Facebook page, but it was probably optimistic of me to assume people would click through to find that if they weren't invested in the story.”

Colin Agur, an associate professor of emerging media studies at the University of Minnesota, says ARGs create “tight-knit, highly engaged communities.”

“There's a shared sense of what's fiction, what's reality, and what they have to figure out, but outside the community, those signals are often invisible,” Agur says. “They usually depend on players opting in and understanding the rules. What happened here is that one piece of the game escaped into social media, where people who weren't playing encountered it as real.”

Agur expects to see more scenarios like The Gillyweeds as AI-generated “cultural artifacts” become easier and cheaper to create.

“The challenge is not just identifying truth, it's understanding what context we're in, and that becomes really time-consuming and complex sometimes,” Agur says. “In the future, being in the know, it won't just mean knowing facts, it will mean knowing which system or community a piece of information comes from.”

Melanie Hendrickson, a 3rd-grade teacher in Bloomington, was in the know from the beginning as an ardent ARG player who participated in “Viridian Skies,” even traveling to the crash site of Buddy Holly in Iowa to search for a gemstone. Hendrickson had been knowingly listening to the fake band for over a year when the Facebook plane crash post went up.

“I'm sorry that they misread it,” Hendrikson says of onlookers. ”I felt bad for Todd. I'm like, ‘Oh, gosh. People are reading this the wrong way,’ and I get it. If I didn't know about Todd and his hunt, and I saw this post, I'd be like, ‘Oh my goodness.’”

Hendrickson found solace and community in ARGs after the death of her son a few years ago. She hopes the intentions and creativity behind “Viridian Skies” don’t get lost.

“In a world where people are often disconnected, he's creating to get people outside, to get people thinking, to get people working together,” Hendrickson says. “That kind of impact is valuable.” 

“Viridian Skies” came to a close when the last green gemstone was found in Camden, Tenn., on Sunday. 

Pitman first fell in love with treasure hunting as a kid doing the Pioneer Press medallion treasure hunt, and he’ll keep making new stories, he says. But, he will label content more distinctly as fiction, he says, though he hasn’t figured out quite what that looks like yet. 

“I'm not going to stop probing this kind of interesting space between narrative and real life,” Pitman says. “It's about giving people these experiences that, if executed properly, can be remembered for a lifetime.”

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An alternate reality game about a fictional Minnesota band spilled into real life when a staged plane crash announcement reached tens of thousands of unsuspecting social media followers, prompting genuine confusion and grief.

The Gillyweeds saga: A fake band, a fake plane crash and a real game blur reality

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