SEATTLE, WA– The Museum of Flight issued a press release stating that the Space Shuttle delivered to the Emerald City by NASA is actually a fake wooden mockup version.

“It was the biggest shock of my career” said Brian Jorgenson, the first member of the Museum’s staff to notice that none of the parts in the shipping containers from NASA were metallic. “I was expecting titanium parts with lots of wires and switches, but instead all we got was a mangled heap of plywood, cardboard and duct tape.”

NASA Freight Trucks Arrive at the Museum of Flight

The Museum spent $12 million building a 15,500 square foot Space Gallery facility in anticipation of receiving a real Space Shuttle, but it has already decided it cannot try to pass off the wooden model as the real thing. “Even the least-informed kindergartner with zero knowledge of the American Space Program would immediately recognize this as a fake” said Jorgenson. Photos from NASA indicate the fully-assembled mockup looks more like a Third-World shanty than the Space Shuttle, which is one of the most expensive and sophisticated machines ever built by man. In place of the Space Shuttle, the Museum is now considering either buying a junkyard school bus and painting it in NASA’s signature white and black colors or, in light of budget concerns, assembling an under-scale version out of packing tape and refrigerator boxes and drawing in windows with a Sharpie.

Experts say the Museum of Flight was had by a fairly common technique used by scam artists. “They fell for the old plywood Space Shuttle trick” said Dan Fredricks, an FBI investigator assigned to the Seattle office Fraud Division. “This is probably the tenth or eleventh museum that’s fallen for this in April alone.”

Parts For the Wooden Shuttle After Being Unloaded

NASA, meanwhile, disagrees with the Museum of Flight’s assertion that the wood mockup is actually a phony Space Shuttle. “The agreement that the Museum signed doesn’t specifically say they were to receive the metal one that goes into Space” said a source inside NASA who was familiar with the wooden Shuttle transfer and who spoke to the Pacific Intelligencer on condition of anonymity. “It is, in fact, a 100% real wooden Space Shuttle.”

This isn’t the first time the museum has been sold a fake bill of goods. Two years ago  the Museum purchased a World War I-era blimp for $1.2 million that turned out to be 1/500th scale.

SEATTLE, WA–Until recently, hipster Skip Nelson could frequently be found at an urban coffee joint sharing his digital photography with friends via the online program Instagram.  Then he learned that Facebook purchased Instagram, a disturbing fact which threw Skip’s otherwise comfortably ironic universe into chaos.  Now Skip can’t be certain that his photos of vacant city lots are really as ironically cool as they once were.

“Balancing the absurd with the unique and the skinny jean has always been something I’ve excelled at, but now that uncool Facebook owns Instagram, I just don’t know what is and what isn’t cool anymore” he said.

Instagram, which allows users to modify and share images, became wildly popular among hipsters since its founding less than two years ago. A popular feature is its ability to turn any dull image into a hipster masterpiece with just a few clicks. Users can add key elements of the modern hipster identity to digital photos by manipulating retro, grit and fish-eye effects to create a uniquely absurd image that is cool only because it defies lameness gravity.

Meanwhile, the last several years has seen Facebook’s level of coolness quickly implode. Facebook’s status as a growing corporate juggernaut turned it into a swirling gaseous super-giant of anti-cool. The introduction of parents and then grandparents to Facebook caused the super-giant to collapse in on itself, creating an unimaginably massive black hole of lameness from which nothing cool within a radius of hundreds of light years could escape.  Planet Instagram has now likely entered a terminal orbit around the Facebook death star, and, like Alderaan before it, Instagram may shortly be pulverized into a billion pieces of lame.

Not since ultra-lame retailer Target introduced pre-worn, undersized versions of 1960′s foreign soccer shirts has there been such an unraveling of the hipster universe. Based on that distressing episode, it could be months before Instagram’s level of coolness is finally sorted out.  Until then, many hipsters across the country are in an awkward lame-cool limbo.

“I’m at a loss, for sure” said Skip. “With Facebook’s purchase of Instagram, finding the cool spot at the intersection of bizarre and absurd is now a bigger challenge than ever.”