The report of a possible plane crash on Horsefly Lake Monday, July 21 turned out to be false but was not a prank call.
Williams Lake RCMP Staff Sgt. Brad McKinnon said a call came in at around 4 p.m. and they were later able to determine no plane crash took place.
"It appears to have been a malfunctioning cellular device sending random messages from a man fishing on Horsefly Lake in choppy conditions."
The man had put his cell phone on the dashboard of his vessel, hit some rough water and the phone was bouncing around.
"You can imagine if you were to hit rough seas and your phone is bouncing around it could be consistent with turbulence in an aircraft," McKinnon said.
He had no idea that his brother who was receiving messages was concerned for his safety.
"When he got back into cell phone service range, saw something had happened, cancelled whatever SOS had gone out from his phone, called his brother and met up with us - saying 'woah, woah, this didn't happen.'"
McKinnon said the RCMP are grateful for the multi-agency response.
"Thanks to CFB Comox, who deployed resources from the SAR tech group, Central Cariboo Search and Rescue, local fire departments for their willingness to respond," he said. "By all accounts it was quickly determined to be false."
McKinnon said RCMP are seeing more and more of these types of incidents.
There was one in Quesnel last week that turned out to be false, he said.
In his weekly report, Clearwater, RCMP Sgt. Grant McKinnon related an incident from July 17, 2025 where a phone fell off the roof of a vehicle on the Clearwater River Road and an S.O.S. was sent out.
On Tuesday, McKinnon plans to reach out to the phone company to let them know it's becoming a problem.
"The technology is maybe too advanced? We cannot have precious first responder resources out chasing something of this significance," he said. "We were dealing with NAV Canada, the joint rescue coordination centre. There were a lot of resources employed in this."
