Patrick Moore's Jovian-Plutonian gravity effect

APR 01 1976

On BBC Radio 2, the astronomer Patrick Moore announced that at 9:47 that morning Jupiter would pass behind Pluto, briefly weakening Earth's gravity, and that anyone who jumped at the exact moment would feel themselves float. Hundreds rang in immediately afterwards to report the sensation; one caller said she and eleven friends had been wafted from their chairs and orbited gently around the room. The joke's buried punchline was that Pluto is far too small for any such alignment to matter.