47 News Helicopters Collide Filming News Helicopter Collisions

Singleberry, West Virginia, August 22, 2013 -- An estimated 47 news helicopters collided and crashed this morning over a West Virginia highway interchange in what has been described by a zealous news anchor as "an unprecedented aerial pileup caused, no doubt, by over-zealous news anchors". While it remains unknown how many news personnel were killed or wounded in the collisions, due to the fact that those involved depleted virtually the entire local inventory of journalists, eyewitness reports suggest dozens or more may have been hurt.

"It was just like one of those serial highway collisions you sometimes get during foggy or rainy weather conditions," Pembroke Fuller, a local arms dealer who happened to be bicycling through a highway overpass with a consignment of cross-border semi-automatic weapons when the helicopters began to collide, said. "First I looked up and there was one news chopper there – I think it might have been the local ABC affiliate. Then, maybe five seconds later, another one from a different network showed up and seemed to be sort of trying to push the first one out of the way. I think they wanted to film something on the highway, which I couldn't see from where I was riding my bike."

A few moments later, Mr. Fuller said, he heard "a big thud, then a couple of grinding smashes, like old refrigerators falling out the back of a pickup truck. Then I saw what I'm pretty sure were helicopter parts whizzing by. I took cover under the overpass in case there'd be any explosions. Damn good thing I did, too, since what I seen was just the beginning."

The first helicopter collision quickly brought a flurry of new news helicopters "like big, fat swarms of killer bees shooting up from the south", according to another eye-witness, Lucille Shepherd, a waitress at a nearby IHOP. Ms. Shepherd said she believes the newly arrived news helicopters were there to film the remains of the first two.

"Problem was, there was just too many of them trying to be in the same piece of sky at the same exact time," she said. "Before you know it, they was bumping into each other and falling down out of the sky all over again. I saw maybe six drop. They looked like those big slow skeeters right after you mace them."

Other witnesses described additional, increasingly large and hysterical waves of news helicopters arriving steadily from multiple directions over the next thirty to forty minutes while piles of smoking wreckage grew on the ground and the highway. The new airborne arrivals collided with each other in the air, sometimes three and four at a time until, apparently, all local helicopter supplies were exhausted.

Dr. Waterbury Triffle, an adjunct professor of media hysteria at Virginia State University, described the incident as a "cascading implosive media event".

"We've often seen self-destructive media catastrophes of this kind," Dr. Triffle said, "but generally without the physical carnage. Normally, a media organization will pull out all the stops to get an exclusive on what they think will be a highly marketable story. Reflexive stories, such as those involving the errors or failures of a rival media institution, are often viewed as the top prize in the news gathering business, so it's easy to understand why the later helicopters were there. What's difficult to really fathom is the total lack of restraint exhibited in this case. These particular news organizations – and as far as I can tell from photos of the wreckage, all major U.S. news and infotainment networks are represented – are perhaps more reminiscent of moths around a bug zapper, rather than the proud upholders of America's vital democratic traditions of transparency and freedom of the press."

It is currently unknown precisely what the initial helicopter may have been filming. According to Jules Niles, a spokesman for the local Fox News affiliate, "it was probably just some human-interest schmaltz."

By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor