The police department of a California town had to tell residents to please stop calling 9-1-1 to report two suspiciously bright dots in the sky after it turned out the terrifying UFOs were actually planets.
Jupiter and Venus, to be exact.
Here’s the backstory: on March 1, the pair of planets, which are already two of the brightest objects one cane see in the night sky, were the closest together they’ll be until 2032. The spectacular lineup caused the celestial objects to appear like two unusually bright, unmoving dots - and that’s all it took to scare the wits out of the fine folks over in Stanislaus County, just east of San Francisco. Residents were so concerned, in fact, that droves of them started calling the police to report two mysterious objects hovering over their heads.
Local police got so many emergency alerts that they had to post a PSA to their social media pages explaining that the scary lights were actually planets and asking worried residents to please stop clogging up the emergency line.
"If you are seeing these lights in the sky, dispatch has received multiple calls regarding this. Do not be alarmed as NASA said that Jupiter and Venus would appear in the western sky on March 1st. There is no reason to report this,” the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department posted on Twitter.
While it's a bit laughable to think the local police would be able to do anything about UFOs, it's understandable that Americans would be a bit on edge about unidentified things floating about in the sky. After all, it was only a few weeks ago that President Joe Biden let a Chinese spy balloon take an unauthorized nine-day jaunt all the way across the continental U.S., triggering a temporary wave of paranoia about what else this administration might be ignoring up there in the clouds.
And before you come down too hard on Californians - let’s be honest, it’s easy to do - apparently, people also tried to turn our planetary neighbors in to the cops in southeast Wisconsin. And generally speaking, Venus continues to be one of the most oft-reported UFOs thanks to its particular brightness in the sky.
But since we're on the subject, if you take a gander upwards tonight and happen to see a giant ball that kinda looks like a spotlight made of cheese? It's not the Death Star.
It's just the moon, y'all. Juuuust the moon.