Intellpuke writes "Sunday, March 7, 2004

Even in a town where the lovestruck can select from a roster of Elvis lookalikes to marry them at 4 a.m., what happened three weeks ago in Las Vegas was pretty strange, even by the locals' standards.

Late on the morning of February 21 - nobody is too precise about the exact time, initial location, or actual identity of the first caller - someone rang a locksmith and complained the remote-control locking system on the caller's late-model car was refusing to respond. The old-fashioned key, linked to the same circuitry, wouldn't work either, so could the locksmith send over a technician to fix whatever had gone wrong?

A couple of minutes later, another locksmith's phone rang. Different caller. Same problem.

By the end of the day, the best estimate is that police, fire brigade, locksmiths, car dealerships and tow-truck services had received at least 200 calls from motorists, and many who are still puzzling over the February 21 incident put the figure as high as five times that. Read more.

"Maybe it's those little green men," joked Mike Estrada, a spokesman for the U.S. Air Force's Nellis Air Base, about 80 milies north (160 kilometers) of Las Vegas, according to The Age news website.

The Story
http://freeinternetpress.com/article.pl?sid=04/03/08/0044227&mode=thread

More Background and details
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/06/1078464695634.html