It should have been the first day of the rest of their lives...

...but it turned out to be the last.

As millions of colleges and universities across the United States prepared for their springtime commencement ceremonies, the grizzly-bear-sized snowy owl that has been terrorizing the country was preparing for a feast of unparalleled magnitude. The owl seemed to know that tens of millions of graduate students were preparing to take their degrees around the middle of May, and as if guided by some hellish internal radar, he preyed upon scores of students.

One of the owl's first stops was the University of California, Berkeley. Family and friends of new graduates snapped several photos of the owl about to strike. He flew to various graduation ceremonies, where he quickly devoured over 92% of attendees. He also was observed to eat several faculty members.

Their big day is about to take a deadly turn

They didn't realize he wasn't just there for the photo op

One unidentified survivor who observed the owl as he devoured the bioengineering department said, "First I thought this couldn't be real. I thought it was either someone's experiment, or maybe just somebody in a big owl suit. But when it started to eat people then I realized it was actually a giant man-eating owl. It was the first time I saw anything like it."

A Berkeley resident, who refused to give his name, stated, "This is definitely the work of Dick Cheney. He probably engineered this thing to torture innocent civilians. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have a whole fleet of these things somewhere in New Mexico."

A quick flyby before raining doom from above

Eyewitnesses reported mass chaos as the owl began his attack. One anonynous commentator said, "It is disheartening that these folks are supposed to be some of the top engineering students in the country, and nobody could throw together a bomb, or hell, even a sling shot to get this overgrown bag of feathers."

That's not confetti, it is blood.

The owl attacked approximately 780,000 other colleges and universities on the west coast, before flying east to Colorado. Witnesses reported sightings of the grizzly-bear-sized owl appearing over the Rocky Mountains before he flew to the University of Colorado at Boulder. "It was a strangely majestic sight," reported one survivor, "before the owl went straight for the Geology grads and started ripping them apart."

The owl proceeded to attack several hundred thousand more graduation ceremonies. Friends of a student at Ohio State University captured the following image of the owl's attack there.

Maybe they should have been trying to spell 'S.O.S.'

One survivor of the attack took the following photo of the owl about to devour members of the graduation procession en masse.

'It was like a diabolical buffet line'

Tragically, the owl's attacks, which killed between 3,186 and 237 million people nationwide, have decimated the graduate student population in the United States. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, "This probably means trouble for most key economic sectors in the future, because we've lost a lot of potentially productive researchers and workers. This also probably won't help the ratio of US to international grad students in our schools."

Not everyone was so pessimistic, however. Surviving student C. Sleigh said, "This probably will make it easy for me to win some of those competitive fellowships I keep losing out on. With only, what, a couple dozen grad students left, I'm pretty sure they'll have to fund me now." Unidentified individuals involved with one program Mr. Sleigh had previously applied to responded, "We consider it unlikely that we'll ever fund people who are such cowards that they hid under piles of their fellow students' corpses in order to avoid being killed by a big owl."