Chaos Pigeon Boards A Bus, Does A Crash

Nothing to see here.

A scheming pigeon injected a little mayhem into Tuesday morning's commute, sneakily slipping onto an MTA bus and creating such a flap that the driver careened into a sidewalk shed. Or so the reports say—Chaos Pigeon immediately fled the scene on wing, so we can only tell you one side of this story. The unreliable, envious flightless side.

According to CBS 2 New York, the pigeon boarded an MTA bus around 7:30 a.m. yesterday, its presence inside a small space where birds are not supposed to taking the driver totally by surprise. The shock—perhaps combined with the slippery conditions created by wet snow—allegedly robbed the driver of their focus just long enough for them to roll off the street and into a construction site at West 14th Street and 8th Avenue. No serious injuries have been reported, although the bus did not escape unscathed: Its windshield cracked upon contact with the scaffolding.

If perhaps that sounds a little too convenient to you, a rogue pigeon conjured as a scapegoat to explain away human error, know that witnesses have corroborated Chaos Pigeon's flight path. "It's really hard to believe a bird come flying out, but all of a sudden we hear this big boom," construction worker Freddy Villcres told CBS 2. "So we turn around, we see the bus hitting the sidewalk bridge. We were worried about pedestrians walking in heavy weather." And indeed, security camera footage obtained by the news channel does show one person start to walk under the scaffolding, when the bus comes crashing into their path.

Although Chaos Pigeon has since been skewered on the sword of public opinion, some have risen to its defense.

"He was probably cold and said, 'Let me go inside. It's raining,'" one person (who presumably watched the accident unfold) told CBS. And maybe so! But the simplest explanation is often the correct one: The sky rats that lord over this city just want to watch the world burn.