Human-Octopus Hybrid From the Future Speaks During Accidental Alert at Elementary School, Prompts Lo

A Washington elementary school went into lockdown after a dark voice speaking over the intercom claimed to be a human-octopus hybrid from the future.

The message was a previously recorded test for the alert system and was accidentally broadcasted, Woodland Public Schools said about the Tuesday incident. But the broadcast was a mystery to school officials in the first moments after it aired, so staffers put Woodland Primary School into lockdown until it was sorted out.

School district spokesperson Eric Jacobson described the message to Newsweek as an audio clip that was between five and 10 seconds long, "intended to be a joke told from the first-person by a fictional character with a gruff voice who called himself 'the Humoctopus' and claimed to be from the future."

He said the test message was created by the company that developed its public announcement system, called InformaCast.

At the time of the accidental release, the district had been testing a connection linked to the PA system.

"The audio file test message was simply called 'test' in the software and the IT department hadn't heard the message before its broadcast," Jacobson said. He pointed to a misconfiguration in the system as the cause of the broadcast.

About five minutes later, after the school was in lockdown and staffers had notified the police, school officials solved the mystery and ended the lockdown.

According to Jacobson, school officials sent information to parents via letters and a robocall and talked to students about the experience.

"Picked my daughter up from school and she comes running up to me from the bus. 'Dad, dad, dad, there's an octopus that's gonna smash my eyes with a hammer,'" Scott Summers, a father of a 6-year-old at Woodland Primary, told KGW.

It appears that the Humoctopus is a gag for test alerts that has roots going back some years. People on online forums have in the past discussed hearing the alert and joked about a potential Humoctopus invasion.

A representative for Singlewire Software, InformaCast's creator, did not immediately return Newsweek's request for comment.

According to the school district, the canned test messages that came with the PA system were all deleted and replaced with the message "This is a test of the public announcement system." It also said Singlewire was working on its end to remove the Humoctopus from its system.

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