Lighthouse and naval vessel urban legend

The modern legend of the lighthouse and a warship goes back to the early 1930s appeared jokes and cartoon collections and circulating since the 1990s on the Internet.

The content and distribution

The legend describes the communication between a warship and a lighthouse. The crew of the warship demanded a change of course of the lighthouse, which she considers to be a ship on a collision course. The lighthouse keeper rejects this, the conversation escalated. The warship, occasionally depicted as a flagship aircraft carrier or an entire fleet, is increasingly demanding threatening a change of course. In the end, the commander of the warship threatens with all his military power and gets reported back We are a lighthouse. Please come! and is so embarrassed to the bone.

Formally, the associated joke has been known since the 1930s. The first mentions were drawings, a conversation was thereby mapped a megaphone between an arrogant officer and a lighthouse keeper with subclass accent, both stand at the railing, the difference of the lighthouse and ship due to fog or image section is not initially visible. Since about 1995, is the urban legend spread on the Internet and is often used as actual transcript, which was approximately released by the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations.

Example

A classic version looks like this:

" Below is the transcript of a radio communication on the coast of Newfoundland between a U.S. warship and Canadian authorities in October 1995. The release of the data by the Chief of Naval Operations was released 10-10-95, level of secrecy.

Some aircraft carriers such as the Enterprise, Coral Sea and the Nimitz and the battleship Missouri, the anecdote was attributed. There are also Scottish or Irish variants, the ships are then occasionally also associated with the British navy.

Reception

The U.S. Navy has a website that explains the topic as a joke. This prevented Mike McConnell as Director of National Intelligence not think to use it in a speech in 2008. Likewise, Isaac Asimov and Steven Covey took it on in books. The story is often used as a metaphor for inefficient superiority and lack of flexibility and excessive imagination. 2004 used the Swedish navy company Silva the flow for an award-winning television commercials.

For various reasons, it is very unlikely that the story actually happened, what has their popularity yet done any harm. Actual accidents of ships with lighthouses or lightships are rare, so it was even rammed several times by ships the Elbow of Cross Ledge Light in New Jersey once and the Moreton Bay Pile Light in Australia. The U.S. Coast Guard provides the anecdote as a popular joke about the Navy. Technically, such conversations are now unrealistic due to the automation of lighthouses and their known positions.