By David Altaner Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. media, including Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun, are speculating whether a Lincolnshire wind turbine was wrecked by a UFO with tentacles like an octopus.
On Jan. 4, a 90-meter tall wind generator near Conisholme, England was damaged, with one of its 20-meter blades torn off. Yesterday, The Sun’s front-page story blamed an “octopus UFO,” citing residents who’d seen “mysterious flashing orangey-yellow spheres.” Today’s story, “Close Encounters of the Turbine,” suggested a secret “robot stealth bomber” led to the UFO sightings. The same ideas were also published in the Daily Mail newspaper.
Ecotricity, the Stroud, England-based power provider that owns the 800-kilowatt generator, lists more than a dozen stories behind a cartoon on its Web site featuring a turbine next to a cow being beamed up by an alien spacecraft. Managing Director Dale Vince, who was interviewed over the mystery on BBC Radio 4, said the company is still investigating.
“We have been crawling all over it and have sent bits off for analysis to see if we can work out what caused it,” Vince said on the company’s Web site. “To make one of these blades fall off, or to bend it, takes a lot.”
The story was first reported on Jan. 6 in the local Lincolnshire paper, the Louth Leader, which quoted a resident saying he saw a “massive ball of light” with “tentacles going right down to the ground” the night before the incident.
“UFOs sell newspapers, especially on slow news days such as post-Christmas and summer silly season,” said David Clarke, a journalism lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University who writes about UFOs and other supernatural beliefs. “Never was the phrase, ‘Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?’ more appropriate.”
The Guardian and the Financial Times newspapers claim to have solved at least part of the mystery. The Guardian’s director of digital content, Emily Bell, cited a fireworks display she helped arrange for her father’s birthday celebration Jan. 3, less than two miles from the turbine. Her husband, Ed Crooks, writing in the Financial Times, said some of the pyrotechnics “looked rather like octopus tentacles.”
The turbine manufacturer, Germany’s Enercon, is examining some of the broken parts.
“It was not a flying object, ice or extreme wind gusts,” said Henri Joppien, a salesman for Enercon, by phone today. “There is no general defect or manufacturer’s problem. All the rest is speculation.”
To contact the reporter on this story: David Altaner in London at daltaner@bloomberg.net
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