Ever heard the one about the burger that fell from space and landed at the training ground of League Two outfit Colchester United?
Incredibly, it’s not a joke, as that’s exactly what happened earlier in the week.
There is some context to proceedings, however, with ‘YouTuber’ Tom Stanniland, aka ‘Kill’em’, the responsible party for the unidentified flying object that found its way to Essex.
He carried out an experiment, for want of a better word, that sent a burger into space attached to a weather balloon.
However, the prank went awry when the balloon popped, sending the burger back down to earth.
Big Mac and Flies
The burger landed in a heap – presumably now back in its original minced form – at the training ground of Colchester United, where the head groundsman made the gruesome discovery.
A timeline of the day’s incidents was published on the Colchester United Twitter feed, which at least gave their social media team something more interesting to write about than injury news and the usual player and manager soundbites.
“There was no card inside, so we didn’t really know what to do. Honestly, what DO you do with a frozen burger? Then the phone rang!” was their opening missive, written underneath a picture of the burger in its polystyrene home.
“Then, at just before 4pm, our burger launcher arrived through the gates at Florence Park!”
Interviewed for the Colchester social media pages, Stanniland said:
“I sent a burger into space using a weather balloon.
“It’s gone about 24 miles up, weather balloon popped, it’s come back down, over 100 miles, and it’s landed right here.”
Handily, the 29-year-old – who has 2.7 million subscribers on the video sharing platform – had rigged the beefy delivery with a GoPro camera and a GPS tracker, and so he was able to keep tabs on his cargo.
“We lost connection with it when it got so high,” he said. “It’s crash-landed here but in the morning the groundskeeper found the box, turned it upside down, the tracker got connection again, we’ve found it and just followed it.”
He travelled from his Sheffield home all the way down to Essex to collect the burger, and in typical YouTube fashion decided to try to eat a piece of the meat because….well, just because, really.
“That’s not nice,” was his brief reply, before presumably disappearing off to the nearest hedgerow to deposit the contents of his stomach.