Is Cumtown, Alaska a real place?

President Joe Biden ordered the U.S. Air Force to shoot down an “unidentified high-altitude object” on Friday after it strayed into American airspace. The now-obliterated object was the size of a small car and may well have been another Chinese “spy” balloon. The Pentagon said that it was traveling at speed and posing a serious threat to civilian air traffic.

Rumors quickly began circulating that the balloon was downed over Cumtown, Alaska, and Twitter users even displayed maps showing the location of the place.

Unfortunately for the more juvenile amongst us, Cumtown, Alaska appears not to be a real place.

The pilot of the ultra-modern F-22 stealth fighter scrambled to intercept engaged the unwelcome visitor at 40,000 feet over Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, blowing it to pieces with a single sidewinder missile. This shootdown did not even take place over land, instead happening 31 miles off Alaska’s north coast near a settlement called Deadhorse. Several larger planes and Black Hawk helicopters were later spotted extracting debris from out of the ocean.

But that hasn’t stopped Twitter from going wild over Cumtown. Deadhorse wasn’t an interesting enough name for some, and Twitter users are even producing questionable pictures of the citizens of Cumtown, including the mayor and chief of police. Dubious maps of Cumtown also appear to place the settlement far inland, which is at odds with the Pentagon’s admission that the F-22 was scrambled to the coast. A trending tweet also appears to have renamed the town of Chase, just north of Anchorage, to Cumtown.

Unless the good people of Chase have renamed their town overnight, you can take it that the Cumtown angle is a load of trash.