Alien-Obsessed Idaho Couple Builds UFO-Shaped Chicken Coop

Brett Wilson and Ellen DeAngelis are self-described “UFO nerds.” The couple also happens to raise chickens in the backyard of their Boise, Idaho home, where they’ve built a small house for their growing flock of fowl.

It’s not your garden-variety chicken coop, no pun intended. This baby’s constructed with two repurposed ten-foot satellite dishes from Craigslist, made to look like a UFO.

It was the couple’s summer project, Wilson and DeAngelis explained in a post early last month on BackYard Chickens, an online hub for people who grow and raise their own chickens. They outfitted the dishes with 1-inch styrofoam insulation to create a “climate-controlled environment,” allowing the chickens to brave Idaho’s unfathomably harsh winters. They coated it in aluminum paint (a “classic UFO color,” they say) and sat the structure atop an eight-foot trampoline base, attaching blinking LED lights to it as a finishing touch.

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Just take a look at that stationary saucer—you might even say it’s “out of this world!” (I’ll, uh, see myself out.)

Though the couple posted photographs and a video of the coop to Facebook last month, it’s only gone viral in the past week. It’s certainly quite a video, featuring each chicken marching into that mothership in single file as if in a trance.

“The video going viral has been a huge surprise to us,” Wilson wrote to MUNCHIES over email on Friday. “We had no idea it would spread that fast. It’s pretty fantastic to see all of the positive feedback we are getting from around the world.”

As for next steps, Wilson told MUNCHIES that he and DeAngelis are hoping to add an automatic door to the coop and interior lights to encourage egg laying during winter months. Exciting. Beam us up, baby.