A green-screened 3D alien dancing, cut to Lil Uzi Vert's Money Longer. Uploaded as a stock-looking animation in December 2017, then reposted on iFunny with a caption about sleep paralysis, which is the version everyone actually remembers. The record's entry for a rendered asset that got a personality.
Seen looping on a phone in a queue at a chip shop, no sound, two people watching it anyway. Neither of them could name the song. Both of them knew the alien.
Howard is not a character. He is a piece of royalty-free 3D animation that acquired a name, a soundtrack and a backstory entirely from captions written by strangers.
The animation came first and the song came second. The original upload had no Lil Uzi Vert on it; the pairing was an iFunny edit, and the caption did more work than either.
You were there. What happened?
