BARSOOM INVADED!!

Navy claims it's a weather balloon

A spokesthing for the Royal Navy, however, denounced the reports.

"The object was, in fact, a harmless high-altitude weather balloon, not an alien spacecraft," said General Rangrod Mortus The Lesser, appearing at a press conference today.

Allowing no questions from reporters, Rangrod Mortus immediately left the room and took command of a thousand-ship armada headed in the direction of the swampy area the device reportedly landed.

The story broke late Friday night when a dwar stationed at nearby Kordangu Air Force Base contacted The Barsoomian Blade with a story about a strange, balloon-shaped object which allegedly came down in the nearby desert, sakking several times before coming to a stop and "deflating in a sudden explosion of alien gases."

It crushed a farmer near the Kordangu Waterway, a witness told The Blade.

"I saw old Jeb Burndo out watering his thoats on the back forty," said the witness, who refused to give his name. "Next thing I knows, this big 'ole honking spaceship comes boncing along and Jeb's layin' out there, flatter 'en a pancake."

Minutes after the Kordangu dwar's initial call to The Blade, Mortus The Lesser reached the newspaper telepathically to contradict the earlier report.

Mortus The Lesser stated that hysterical stories of a detachable vehicle roaming across the Barsoomian desert were blatant fiction, provoked by incidences involving swamp gas.

But the general public has been slow to accept the Air Force's explanation of recent events, preferring to speculate on the "other-worldly" nature of the crash debris.

Conspiracy theorists have condemned the Navy's statements as evidence of "an obvious government cover-up", pointing out that Barsoom has no swamps.