Man Loses Cat, Finds ‘UFO’
Murlimann the cat had gone missing. So Austrian farmer Franz Knoglinger went looking for her. She was nowhere to be seen, but the farmer did discover a deep hole in the ground.
“I didn’t know how deep it was,” he said. “So I dropped a stone down there and heard a metallic clunk. From the time it took for the stone to reach the bottom, I realized it was very deep.”
The farmer then tied a magnet to a rope and lowered it down the hole to see if whatever was down there was definitely metal. Yes, it was.
Knoglinger said he’d never seen the hole before and it must have appeared overnight.
Soon, people of all kinds, from geologists to UFO hunters, were on the scene. Before long, the object had attracted international speculation.
A UFO was the favorite explanation.
But still no sign of Murlimann the cat. Was she now aboard the mother ship?
As people flocked to the farm to see the hole for themselves, a buried UFO became a favorite explanation … until a local historian decided to dig a little further – this time into local land-use archives. It turned out the hole had been there for decades.
Fifty years ago, an oil company had drilled there looking for oil. A large metal drill bit had become stuck and broke, and the workers simply left it there and never bothered to fill in the hole.
The somewhat disappointed UFO hunters went home. Farmer Knoglinger went home, too, and found Murlimann snoozing in a cupboard.