Remember how everyone got so worked up about aliens using Apple OS in Independence Day? Turns out they're also on the metric system.

Remember the story of the Trinity Incident where a couple of old guys came up with an unbelievable and completely unsubstantiated story that fooled the world's leading ufologist, the New York Times, and the US government?  Douglas Dean Johnson wrote the definitive debunking of the hoax. Loads of amusing details, but this might be my favorite.

From: Crash Story File: The “Alien” Artifact with Metric Dimensions

Beginning with early versions of the Reme Baca-Jose Padilla story, Padilla, while inside the crashed alien craft, uses “a pipe," or in later renditions a “cheat bar” (crowbar), to pry a metal device off the inner wall of the craft. As he described it to radio host Richard Syrett in December 2010:

There was a piece of material there, you could turn it around in circles...I got a cheater bar, and I went back in there and pried it off, I ripped it right off...to me it looked like a boomerang.

“I had to put all my one hundred pounds that I weighed to get it off,” Padilla said in 2010 (Veritas interview at 30:10). Striving to explain the workings of his ostensibly eight-year-old mind, Padilla added, “I had to get something out of evidence, that will some day, you know, we’ll come up with something, you know.” (Veritas at 30:30)

 This is a part from a pump. You can buy something almost exactly like it online or from a well stocked hardware store. If someone showed you something like this and said it came from a crashed alien spaceship, I;ll bet I can guess your reaction, and furthermore, I'll bet it would be this: the guy grabbed the part from a pile of old parts and made the story up.

 I'll also bet your reaction wouldn't be this:

 

 

Struggling a bit with the details, here. They had the generator and the cord but they didn't have a spool (or needed another one) so they got their hands on a Mexican pump part and bolted it to the inside of the spaceship.

 Vallée (the basis for the François Truffaut character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind) had more to say on the subject.

 I had become convinced it was likely a common industrial object, but Paola disagreed, and indeed some mystery remained. Actually, it had only become more puzzling: How did that piece of rough aluminum alloy end up pinned to the interior wall of the extraordinary vehicle the military had been so eager to remove and hide away in an undisclosed laboratory, where it presumably rests today?” (Trinity, page 125)

I have a theory.

That convoluted instrument may appear standard but it is not “unremarkable." We have yet to ask what an ordinary, human fragment of some low-tech aluminum gadget was doing aboard a fantastic craft dropping from the sky in the middle of a storm, shattering the Marconi Tower of the White Sands Missile Range as its crew of diminutive insectoids skidded weirdly through the cabin. (Trinity, page 140)

Still have a theory.

What kind of interplanetary spacecraft would contain a device made of a common, human industrial alloy, without brand identification, manufactured to precise metric dimensions (30 cm long by 9 centimeters high) and metric diameters for all the holes? (Trinity, page 306)

 Pretty sure I have an answer for this one.