Foreword: I wrote this chapter because I thought it would be interesting to see how real-life conspiracy theories would interact with the Statute of Secrecy. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is completely intentional.
It was the Reptilians!
During your time in an alternate universe, you may be caught in a way that alerts people to the possibility that you aren't exactly from around there. Sometimes, that's relatively harmless, so you can just explain what's going on and be on your merry way. Other times, you need to remain completely undetected, or throw people off the trail. That's what I'm here to talk about today. You probably know how to obliviate people, give them false memories, mess with the evidence in a police locker, or even hack into a CCTV system to edit footage. I won't go over any of that, but I will give you a good example of the more complicated ways I've obfuscated my trail. I was formally adopted by Alastor Moody and served with him as a hitwizard before I found my way to Potterwatch.
Once, I had to gaslight Adam James with a weather balloon, an iguana, a modified polyjuice potion, and a toy ray gun. Don't laugh, I know he's an insane conspiracy theorist, but I wouldn't mess with anyone's head unless it was a matter of magical security. Moody and I were in the States on special assignment- we were investigating rumors of a coup by religious extremists on the Muggle side, which normally wouldn't affect us.
The thing is, we thought they had help from inside MACUSA- Don's speeches were just a little too effective for an inexperienced demagogue. We checked for compulsion charms, but nothing meaningful showed up. You'd need a very powerful compulsion to affect people over the telly, and it just wasn't there.
I was desperately trying to figure out how to keep the new president from doing something drastic once he found out about magic, when I happened to come across this forum of extremists who thought the president was some kind of holy warrior destined to defeat a hidden organization of devil worshippers.
That immediately set off some alarm bells, since muggle wingnuts of the religious variety tend to think that magic is automatically evil. If they looked too closely, they might uncover and declare war against our world. Nobody wants that to escalate- It's easy enough to hide underground or in expanded spaces, but drones and CCTV will completely ignore notice-me-not charms and it's almost impossible to defend Hogwarts or Ilvermorny from the Bomb. Needless to say, we brought in a divination consultant in a hurry.
We traced the origin of the conspiracy theory to several people, but Adam James was the main one. We obviously couldn't just obliviate him, since his Datafight talk show has a large following and it would be incredibly suspicious for him to suddenly forget about his newest conspiracy. Instead, what we decided to do was mess with his head until he came up with a newer conspiracy theory that didn't threaten our safety. It took a while, but I eventually got ahold of the right supplies for the job.
The idea was to make it look like the conspiracy was on to him and threatening him to keep him quiet. He obviously wouldn't listen, which is what I was counting on. The reverse psychology would make him give a false description to his cult followers, directing them safely away from us and preserving the Statute of Secrecy. The best way to do this was to make myself look like a space alien, so I found a recipe for a special kind of polyjuice designed for use with animal hair. Don't ask how- Let's just say I found out more about certain subcultures than some people would be comfortable with knowing.
This is where the lizard came in- he was shedding his skin. Most of the time, the potion's intended users put cat, dog, or fox hair into it, but scales are made of keratin just like hair or nails. I drank the potion and changed into a giant, talking iguana, which was quite an experience. I still have the occasional craving for alfalfa and cicadas, but I digress. A little creative transfiguration made the toy ray gun look more realistic and my robes look like a space suit, and then I apparated in.
After I stunned everyone in the house, I took Adam for a little ride. Told him some nonsense about me not appreciating the way he was trying to move in on our brain-harvesting business, and if he didn't shut up I'd smoke his pineal gland like a joint. Then, I keyed him into the notice-me-not charm I'd cast on the enlarged, magically altered weather balloon and pulled him up with me -the charm was to keep anyone else from seeing something that looked a lot like a flying saucer since I didn't want to make his conspiracy theory credible to skeptics. I just wanted to divert the True Believers' attentions away from the magical world. I got into his head and made him think he was inside a spaceship, surrounded by blinking lights. I stunned him again, used a temporary memory charm layered on top of the first to make him forget what he saw for about a week, and put him back where he came from.
It worked, if you'll excuse the pun, like a charm. The very next week, Adam James was on Datafight ranting about a cabal of reptilian spacemen who controlled the world and wanted to harvest the adrenochrome in people's brains, instead of a bunch of devil worshippers making human sacrifices.
We never figured out why Don was so good at stirring up angry mobs, but at least I kept that conspiracy theory from revealing our existence. We kept Don from doing anything drastic by just having MACUSA keep up their liaison with the previous president- he was smart enough not to break the Statute on a whim. Anyhow, that's how I dealt with a serious threat to the Statute of Secrecy, and tactics like that will probably come in handy if you need to disguise your presence in a universe bundle.