Audio By Carbonatix

Imagine you’re sitting outside your house when something falls out of the sky and lands in your backyard. A comet? A bird having a heart attack? Nope, it’s a Marine Corps fighter pilot who ejected from their plane. And he needs your help.

This bizarre story is 100% true. The pilot took off from the Charleston, South Carolina airport. His F-35B fighter jet had climbed to about 1,000 feet when it suffered a mechanical issue that forced him to eject. And he landed in a suburban backyard a mile from the airport.

For his part, the homeowner rolled with the punches. The pilot said he needed medical attention, so the homeowner picked up the phone and dialed 911. He said, “We got a pilot in the house, and I guess he landed in my backyard, and we’re trying to see if we could get an ambulance to the house, please.”

The 911 operator was so confused by the situation she asked for clarification. So the pilot grabbed the phone. “Ma’am, a military jet crashed. I’m the pilot. We need to get rescue rolling.”

She was still confused. He had to explain,  “I’m not sure where the airplane is. It would have crash landed somewhere. I ejected.”

At this point, she began to ask him what symptoms the person who fell was having. He ignored the formulaic question: “Ma’am, I’m a pilot in a military aircraft, and I ejected. So I just rode a parachute down to the ground. Can you please send an ambulance?”

The back-and-forth would have been comical, if it hadn’t been in the midst of a rather serious emergency. Hopefully the dispatcher actually scrambled the ambulance as soon as it was requested, before reading through the boilerplate questionnaire.

In an ironic twist of events, the F-35B turned out to be operable enough to fly north for another 20 minutes before finally crashing. You can listen to the 911 call yourself in the video embedded below: