Lighthouse and naval vessel urban legend
Maritime urban legend related to the dangers of hubris and inflexibility
The lighthouse and naval vessel urban legend describes an encounter between a large naval ship and what at first appears to be another vessel, with which the ship is on a collision course. The naval vessel, usually identified as of the United States Navy or the United Kingdom's Royal Navy and generally described as a battleship or aircraft carrier, requests that the other ship change course. The other party, generally identified as Canadian or often Irish and occasionally Spanish, responds that the naval vessel should change course, whereupon the captain of the naval vessel reiterates the demand, identifying himself and the ship he commands and sometimes making threats. This elicits the response "I'm a lighthouse. Your call." or something similar, a punchline which has become shorthand for the entire anecdote.
It has circulated on the Internet and elsewhere in particular since a 1995 version that was claimed to be a transcript of such a communication released by the office of the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations. There is no evidence that the event actually took place, and the account is implausible. It is thus considered an urban legend, a variation on a joke that dates to at least the 1930s, sometimes referred to as "the lighthouse vs. the carrier" or "the lighthouse vs. the battleship".
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Lighthouse and naval vessel urban legend” as maritime urban legend related to the dangers of hubris and inflexibility. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as maritime urban legend related to the dangers of hubris and inflexibility. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2752632. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lighthouse and naval vessel urban legend” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.