Given the season, this is an appropriate title for this column, even though the well known anglicised version of the international distress call is a tad misleading. A century old, it was created because S.O.S. (“Save Our Souls”) was hard to transmit correctly due to poor sound definition of the letter S. So “May Day” has nothing to do with the month of May and is in fact taken from the original French cry of “M’Aidez” – “Help me”.
I was reminded of this by a recent case from Scotland, where, on the morning of 22 November 2021, a joiner working on a wastewater plant in Dalmarnock, East Glasgow, saw what looked like a ‘May Day’ incident unfolding in the sky: a bright white object and a dark object appeared to be present, because he took clear video footage of it, showing both the two small objects and the hovering aircraft. We may not get much further with resolving this incident, but a clue is the small size of the two UFOs, which are also moving slightly up and down. The witness says that after he stopped filming they climbed vertically upward and disappeared into the sky. Viewing the footage, I feel the most likely explanation is that these were small drones being controlled from the ground. Police do use them in searches, and perhaps they were doing so here, but did not want to state why – UFOs, then, in name only.
