NASA confirms touchdown in space
TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA – A routine college football kickoff took an impossible turn Saturday when the pigskin was launched with such tremendous force that it broke free of Earth’s gravitational pull and entered low orbit, according to multiple witnesses and confirmed radar tracking data from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
The unprecedented incident occurred during the opening kickoff of the Alabama Crimson Tide’s homecoming game against Auburn, when kicker Jake “Rocket” Morrison connected with the ball in what spectators described as a “superhuman” display of power that defied all known laws of physics.
“I’ve been watching football for forty-seven years, and I ain’t never seen nothing like it,” said Cletus Bramblewood, a season ticket holder who witnessed the extraordinary event from the fifty-yard line. “That ball just kept going up and up until it disappeared into a tiny speck, and then WHAM – it was gone completely. My neck still hurts from craning it back so far.”
Video footage captured by dozens of smartphones shows Morrison’s foot making contact with the football at exactly 3:47 PM Central Time. What should have been a standard kickoff instead became a launch sequence that propelled the regulation Wilson football to an estimated altitude of 120 miles above Earth’s surface, placing it firmly in the thermosphere.
Dr. Wilhelmina Stratosphere, a senior atmospheric physicist at the Huntsville-based NASA facility, reluctantly confirmed the tracking data after initially dismissing reports as “physically impossible nonsense.” However, ground-based radar installations detected an object matching the football’s dimensions traveling at approximately 17,500 miles per hour – the exact velocity needed to achieve stable orbit.
“Look, I’ve got three degrees from MIT and I’ve worked in aerospace for twenty-two years,” Dr. Stratosphere admitted during a hastily arranged press conference. “But our instruments don’t lie. There’s definitely a football-shaped object circling our planet every ninety-three minutes. It’s completing one full orbit and appears to be maintaining a stable trajectory.”
The bizarre incident has sparked wild speculation about the true nature of Morrison’s kicking abilities. Teammates report that the 19-year-old walk-on freshman from Dothan has displayed “unnatural” leg strength since joining the team in August, routinely sending practice kicks completely over the stadium and into nearby residential neighborhoods.
Sources close to the athletic department, speaking on condition of anonymity, reveal that Morrison was recruited after a mysterious scout approached him following a high school game where he allegedly kicked a 78-yard field goal that “kept rising until it was out of sight.” The scout’s identity remains unknown, and university officials have sealed Morrison’s recruitment files.
Even more disturbing are reports that Morrison exhibits other superhuman characteristics. Cafeteria workers claim he consumes nearly 8,000 calories per day without gaining weight, while dormitory residents describe hearing “strange humming sounds” emanating from his room during late-night hours.
The orbiting football has already been designated as space debris by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which is now tracking the object under the catalog number 2023-BALL-001. International Space Station astronauts report spotting the football during their own orbital passes, describing it as “spinning end-over-end in a perfect spiral.”
Government officials have remained suspiciously tight-lipped about the incident, leading conspiracy theorists to suggest Morrison may be part of a classified military experiment involving enhanced human capabilities. The Pentagon has refused to comment, citing “national security concerns.”
Meanwhile, Morrison himself has mysteriously vanished from campus. University officials claim he’s been granted a “leave of absence for personal reasons,” but his teammates haven’t seen him since the extraordinary kickoff. His dormitory room was reportedly cleaned out by unidentified individuals wearing black suits who refused to show identification to campus security.
The characters and events depicted in this story are entirely fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, or to actual events is unintentional and purely coincidental.
