This is a thing that actually happened. When I first saw it popping up on my feeds I thought it was some kind of photo shop jobbie, but no. Shia LaBeouf, the embattled plagiarist/actor, hired a plane to skywrite “I am sorry Daniel Clowes” over the pellucid skies of Los Angeles.

CLOUD: - vapor floating in the atmosphere - remote servers used to SHARE DATA - to make LESS CLEAR or TRANSPARENT pic.twitter.com/jw9JlEi791

— Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) January 1, 2014

And here’s the skywriting companies official confirmation.

An apology from Shia Labeouf to Daniel Clowes. 5 miles long message from our team The Skywriters pic.twitter.com/zqfWgkMIUZ

— Skywriting Aerial Ad (@Worldwideskyads) January 1, 2014

You’ll recall that LaBeouf’s short film Howard Cantour was directlt based on the Daniel Clowes short comics Justin M Damiano. Since then, many of LaBeouf’s other statements and writing—and even the “About” page on his website—have been found to be lifted wholesale from others work.

Over the last few days, LaBeouf has continued to tweet apologies cribbed from others, even as it becomes more and more apparent that his idea of an idea is stealing someone else’s.

Some have suggested this is all an elaborate art project — certainly the sky writing incident has taken this all to a bizarre parallel dimension — but I’m not so sure. I think it’s—actually, I don’t know what to think. This is all crazy.

LaBeouf’s next film, Nymphmaniac, opens in March in the US. Assuming he does some press for it, we may finally have some direct answers then. Or maybe not. Or maybe next we’ll see a giant blimp in the shape of Dan Pussey floating around the Super Bowl. Your guess is as good as mine