UFO turns out to be, er, something commonplace
Police in South Wales, UK, were dispatched to respond to a 999 emergency call to investigate a "bright stationary object" in the sky above a concerned citizen's home. The BBC News posted a recording and transcript of the conversation between the control room, the caller, and the police:
Control: "Alpha Zulu 20, this object in the sky, did anyone have a look at it?"Link
Officer: "Yes, it's the moon. Over."
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Was it a street light? (Farker joke).
/dnrtfa
This needs to go down into the annals of historic bloopers.
Wow. How baked WAS this person?
Is it really so cloudy all the time in South Wales that they've forgotten what the moon looks like?
Um, not too far off ... one night Venus freaked me.
This is obviously a coverup.
Once the UFO sighting was reported, the government relocated the Moon over the concerned citizen's home.
Sorry to burst the "I want to believe!" bubble, but you don't have to be baked to mistake the moon for something "unknown"--happens all the time!
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=328
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/07/05/thats-no-moon-oh-wait-yes-it-is/
This is a total aside, but does the 999 emergency number in the UK strike anybody else as totally asinine?
Remember the story of Steve Wozniak's cell phone with the number 888-8888?
I wonder how many babies the emergency dispatchers have to deal with in the UK.
/rant.
This citizen was simply exercising appropriate caution and diligence in notifying the police. Often as not, what at first appears to be a small moon is in fact a space station, and some of those can be quite dangerous indeed.
@freshyill
People can correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the origin of 999 comes from the old rotary-dial days when it was easy to dial by feel even if you couldn't see the phone properly in a dark or smoke-filled room or something.
Obi-Wan: That's no moon. It's a space station.
If they faked the moon landing, perhaps they've been faking the moon too!
@Pablissimo
Wouldn't 111 be a wiser choice seeing as 9 is second only to 0 in how long the dial takes to spin around?
Actually I just looked it up and it has something to do with being able to call the number for free.
SemioTix (#9) Yep. Just ask any Alderaanian. Oh yea - too late. They're all dead!
P.S. The control panel used to fire the death star is a completely unmodified Grass Valley Group (RIP) production switcher (or vision mixer for you BBC people). I cracked up when I saw this back in '77. I hope no one thought I was laughing at the mass genocide that followed - 'cause that was not supposed to be funny..
I wasn't at all surprised by this article, only the popularity of it, because in Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World he mentions the moon being mistaken for a UFO is a quite common phenomenon.
JJasper: If they faked the moon landing, perhaps they've been faking the moon too!
Yep, ever since the Nazi's stole the moon back in '40... The USA just threw a plywood cutout up there.
The real moon has been in an underground storage facility underneath the American southwest since '44... which is why the Moon Landing footage convinces so many people. Because it was faked on a soundstage ...on the moon!!!
Speaking of Nazis and the moon:
Nazis on the moooooooooooooon!
http://www.ironsky.net/site/
@webcester
The reason they opted not to use "111" as the emergency number was because it was introduced when the phone system used pulse dialling (as opposed to the tone dialling used now).
Dialling any number on a rotary phone would send that number of pulses down the line. Dialling "1" would send a single pulse. Dialling 3 would send 3 pulses. Dialling "111" really quickly would also send 3 pulses down the line, so the switchboard would get confused as to the intended number. "0" would get you the operator. So "999" was used instead as a shortcut directly to the emergency services operator.
As someone who works "behind the scenes" on the 999 system here in the UK, I can confirm that the most frequently occurring problem with this number is the number of times it is dialled accidentally on someone's mobile phone as it gets knocked about inside the owner's pocket. Nokia's are the worst because locking their exposed keyboard locks all keys except "9"! They account for around 50% of ALL calls. This becomes even more of a problem when you consider that you can't ignore such calls either. Someone may be dialling "999" from a mobile who is unable to answer - like a kidnap victim. Eek!
You guys should come to OREGON. This one thing has, like, been freaking me out the past few days. Everyday...at about the same time in the morning, I see a bright and shining light that usually wakes me with it's creepy, probing beams pouring through my window.
Outside, hanging like a specter, is always a huge, unbearably bright - well, I have to say it... - DISC that peers down onto my house...looming. This mysterious disc, with the brightness of 1,000 jet airplanes, stays looming in the sky until about 9:00 at night, when it slowly creeps over the horizon...always to the west. I can't see how something so bright, and hot (the heat it gives off is sometimes remarkable) can possibly be man-made.
Local and federal authorities have denied any explanation of the phenomenon.
@12
http://www.revisionism.nl/Moon/The-Mad-Revisionist.htm
Further proof that the human race has reached it's intellectual peak and is now descending
Axx, does it change color as it dips below the horizon? If so, I've seen that same thing right here in New Jersey!
And it's not like it's harmless, either. I've gotten first-degree radiation burns (they didn't show up until several hours after) when I haven't protected myself from it adequately. That's why I prefer to remain indoors until it's gone.
I was tricked by a the unblinking red eye of a radio tower once. But I was 8, and had been watching "Unsolved Mysteries" all evening.
Feel free to report the moon.
However, if you attempt to photograph it, there will be trouble.
'112' can be used in any EU country or on any GSM network.
In other words, in the UK, 112 and 999 will both direct to emergency services from any phone.
In the US, 112 redirects to 911 on GSM mobiles.
The "lock" feature of mobiles will also typically let you dial any of the widely-used emergency numbers while the pad is locked. US phones typically will let you dial a nine, followed by two ones, but not anything else without unlocking.
They didn't say WHICH Moon, did they?
There has been an increase in supposed UFO 'sightings' in Wales. A lot of people think it may have to do with lights, night filming and other effects to do with the BBC TV series Dr Who and Torchwood being filmed there.
There's a moon in the sky
It's called the Moon.
Today's moon is not yesterday's moon nor is it tomorrow's, but they are all the same moon...
PS Love the B-52s...
nice quote!
that was a perfect summary of that article.
#16, good trippy gag.
Nazis on the Moon?
Now , whalers on the moon, I've heard of...
Another possibility is that the cop only saw the moon, but whoever reported it saw something else that had since left. The cop's explanation makes sense if he had the guy next to him and they both were looking at the same thing and getting different results.
I was always willing to give the UFO nuts the benefit of the doubt - certainly there were lots of strange accounts from apparently reliable sources.
But now the entire surface of the planet is saturated with phone cameras. Result: no decent UFO images, and not even an increase in the rate of fuzzy crappy ones.
@NANITE2000 Hooray! My long-standing suspicion has been confirmed! 999 is a stupid emergency number (even if it made sense when it was created).
When I was in sixth grade, early one morning we had some really neat stacked cloud formations with some standing lenticular activity. All the kids on the playground were pointing at the sky all excited over a bright object that seemed to be moving at great speed. Well, I took one look, was impressed by how the clouds were moving, declared that they were looking at Venus, "the Morning Star" and that the cloud movement without any terrestrial visual reference made it look like Venus was moving. We checked it with a fencepost on the baseball diamond, stepped back and marvelled at the awesome coloration of a sunrise with Venus flying.
"Holy living fuck, it's the fucking moon. Over."