Man Thinks Moon Is UFO, Calls Police

Nov. 2, 2011 — -- Somewhere in here, there has to be a good joke. Police in Hertfordshire, England, report they received an emergency call after 8 o'clock one night last week from a man who insisted he'd seen a UFO.

"It's not an emergency per se," he said, "but there's something flying over our house. It's coming towards me now, there's all this light blazing. I don't know what the hell it is."

Two minutes later he called back and reached the same dispatcher. "You're not going to believe this," he said. "It's the moon."

The dispatcher seemed flummoxed. "Right, okay, I'll look at that but we're really busy so I'm going to have to go now. Right. Okay, thanks. Goodbye."

To the discerning ear, the man may sound groggy, or drunk, or a little as if he's taken too much of something -- but whatever the case, the Hertfordshire police didn't think it was funny.

They have posted the two calls on YouTube as an example of when not to call 999 (the U.K.'s equivalent of 911).

"'While the caller here may not have been phoning out of malice, his call still tied up valuable police resources and time for something which was not an emergency," said Jason Baxter, the assistant manager at the force communications room, in a statement to British media.

Was the call a hoax, or was the man genuinely confused? Did he have his head firmly attached or not?