A woman panicked her village near Doncaster was under attack when she spotted a number of paragliders flying over her home and thought they were from Hamas
To be fair, after the attacks on 9/11 I heard a fair number of comments from people who were convinced their local high school football stadium would be a prime target for international terror rings.
"Think about it, Becky. It's Friday night and the whole town of Left Nube, Indiana will be packed in there. We're sitting ducks."
It's silly, but people project their fear locally.
At least the city I lived in was close enough to "primary nuclear strike" targets to be demolished by shockwave.
Never mind the fact that that's nuclear strike targets, not "Terrorist-hijacked-jets" target. Clearly people tend not to think rationally about these things.
We live a few stone throws away from the biggest military base in this part of the country. I usually joke that we'll either be the first or the last to go if there's a war.
However, terrorists attacking that would be "putting your dick in a fire ants nest" level of stupid.
My dad pointed out to me as a kid that the city next to us would be a nuke target because it held the US strategic reserve of silicon carbide, a substance critical to grinding parts (e.g. making weapons).
After 911 a woman in my city (Portland Oregon) called the police because she saw powder on the hood of her parked car - parked under trees that were shedding pollen. She though fer sher that evildoers were targeting her with anthrax spores or something. The police are required to respond to those calls with full bio-emergency gear, so it was a huge scene, road blocked off, police vans everywhere, people in full body protective gear taking samples of the "anthrax" from her car. The end result was a public announcement from the police asking the public to please use common sense before calling. The drama going on in people's heads sometimes ... yikes.
People need to remember that chances are they are far too unimportant to use expensive stuff like anthrax on them. And if they are important enough for it, then they would already know and take precautions.
“The lab results from the brain dissection were inconclusive, but the available data has lead us to formulate a new hypothesis. This sort of anomalously delusional thinking pattern may have been effected by excessive exposure to news and social media, but further research would be required.”
You jest. But I’ve had an 8” flying saucer shot out by an idiot when I was doing some park flying. (The saucer body was a 3d printed replica of the OG Day The Earth Stood Still film,)
it was 8” on diameter. 2) it was in a park loaded with kids
Fortunately it was bird shot and no one was harmed. But still.
I just like the idea that Hamas got all the way through a plan to invade britain that required them to train for aerial operations, arrange for a plane, convincingly penetrate british airspace from another EU country and yet they couldn't figure out how to buy paragliders that weren't hot pink.