police found watermelons on Mars

But of course: the point is that on the planet Mars there is no watermelons, and neither do the police. It then became evident that the post had been made in error.

The concrete thing is that until a few hours ago you can still read part of the text in archive.is:

“Authorities say increase in extraterrestrial fruit is due to excess watermelons in the space.

The FBI declined to comment on reports of watermelons raining, but confirmed that kiwis were intercepted. This story is terribly boring.

The watermelon tastes good, police say. “

After this story had been online for a while, a New York Times spokesperson said it was a fictitious article intended for a testing system and was published in error.

As explained on the Whatsnew.com site, this was just an accidentally released test, a “random” text that is written to see how a new version of a digital content manager (Content Management System or CMS).

What happened in this case is that it was tested in the production system and released by mistake, something hard to imagine in environments where there is development, testing, quality and production. And above all a lot of control.