A lost tribe of savages has been discovered in a remote part of Suffolk, after a light aircraft accidentally strayed over their hidden village.
Amateur pilot Graham Ruddle (77) from Little Blakenham, mid-Suffolk, took his husband, Paul out for a pleasure flight in his Piper PA-28 Cherokee aeroplane to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary. If that wasn’t surprise enough, what they discovered on their short cruise around the surrounding area was absolutely astonishing!
Mile high club
Graham takes up the story; “Well, we’d only been up for about 15 minutes and, well, don’t tell the CAA but we’d had a couple of flutes of champers to celebrate our anniversary, and well… I had my hand wrapped tight around the joystick, snigger. I was pulling on it this way and that and all of a sudden we went into a sharp, unscheduled dive. More like a plummet really.”
Paul cut in “Didn’t we just! Snigger. Anyway, I grabbed Gray’s joystick and gave it a good, hard yank and some extra thrust until we levelled off a bit. I remember I was just wiping some froth off of my moustache when out of the window, I noticed, in a clearing in the woods, some people waving their arms up at us. I told Gray to circle around again.”
Graham: “So I did. As I began the roll, a fusillade of arrows came whooshing up past the windows. The thud, thud, thud coming from the undercarriage told us that we’d been hit, multiple times. The ‘arrow hit’ alert button started to flash red and the plane lost power.”
Paul: “I screamed at Gray… ‘Aaaaaah, Gray! We’re going to DIE! Gray! Gray! Do Something!’ So Gray handed me the champagne bottle and I took a massive swig. The yaw and roll of the plane made it spew out of my mouth and all over my face, but I’m used to that. Snigger.”
So what happened next?
Graham: “I eventually got control of the plane and we decided to circle around again to see what the hell was going on. As we approached the clearing, we could see some straw-covered mud huts with smoke billowing out, probably from the primitive clay ovens inside. There were a few goats and wild boar roaming around…”
Paul: “And some canoes, and a large fire in the centre of the clearing. All around were these primitive savages jumping up and down, pointing at us, and waving spears. It was like something out of Last of the Mohicans.”
Graham: “More arrows flew up at us, and we thought ‘f*ck this, let’s get out of here’, so I did a rather impressive outside loop, accelerated at speed and headed for home.”
Paul: “And what happened when we got home, Gray? Go on… tell him!”
Graham: “What, you mean?…”
Paul: “No, not that! That was later! Snigger. With Google Earth.”
Graham: “Oh, of course. So as soon as we’d gathered ourselves, we looked on Google Earth to see if we could figure out WTF was going on. I’d downloaded the telemetry from the plane’s black box so we could trace the precise location of the primitive village (tribe of savages).”
And where Tribe of savages was?
Graham: (Wait for it…) “Ipswich.”
