Conisholme UFO Wind Turbine Mystery Solved!

Thanks to Limey, the mystery is now solved!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/11/wind-turbine-mystery

So it wasn’t a bird; it wasn’t a plane; it wasn’t a piece of ice “about the size and weight of a cow”. Nor, disappointingly for conspiracy theorists, was it an alien spacecraft.

It is five weeks since a wind turbine in Lincolnshire mysteriously shattered, amid reports of strange flashing lights and dazzling “tentacles, like an octopus” in the night sky. Deprived of other obvious explanations, the Sun concluded in a front page story that the turbine’s 65ft blade had been struck by a UFO.

The Guardian later seemed to have solved part of the mystery, revealing that the “strange lights” had almost certainly been caused by a firework display hosted by the parents of Emily Bell, the paper’s director of digital content, but the cause of the broken turbine remained unexplained.

Yesterday, however, the turbine’s manufacturer published the preliminary results of an investigation into its failure, revealing a rather more prosaic culprit: a broken bolt.

The mystery began early in the morning of 4 January, when the 300ft turbine, one of 20 at a site run by Ecotricity off the Lincolnshire coast at Conisholme, near Grimsby, was found to have shattered the previous evening.

A number of neighbours contacted local newspapers to report seeing strange lights. Dale Vince, Ecotricity’s managing director, told the BBC that the UFO theory was “the best … that we have currently got”, though he added that a cow-sized piece of ice, perhaps falling from a passing plane, would also do it.

In fact, discovered Enercon, the firm which made the generator, the bolts securing the blade to the turbine’s hub “exhibited classic signs of fatigue failure”. Though the bolts themselves had shown no flaws, it seemed a component part on either side had “induced stress in the bolts beyond their design limits”.

The humdrum truth, Vince admitted yesterday, was “a bit disappointing”, though he defended his decision to entertain the possibility of alien involvement. “Personally I believe in life from other galaxies, and a lot of people do. I can say, however, at this stage we have eliminated collision and therefore aliens.”

He is not quite ready to declare the mystery definitively solved, however. “I still don’t think the firework display explains the flashing lights … they don’t tend to hang around in the way these lights are said to have done. There was no scorching, nothing burned or melted, so the lights, whatever they were, were certainly not associated with the turbine failure.”