On Wednesday evening, a father and his 22-year-old son found themselves looking down the barrels of submachine guns when they unwittingly became part of a military exercise in a residential area of Skive in central Jutland, BT reports.

Niels Ole Nielsen and his son Daniel went out into the street after hearing a helicopter repeatedly circling their neighbourhood at low altitude.

Here they were met by two men dressed in black, pointing submachine guns at them, and an aggressive German shepherd dog. The men shouted at them in broken English to get on the ground.

On the ground for a "long time"
“Daniel tried to communicate with them in English, but I thought it was best to keep my mouth shut. And then there was that awful dog standing there with its nose right in our faces.”

Minutes elapsed with the father and son on the ground with their hands behind their heads before the penny dropped with the soldiers that the duo were not 'escaped prisoners' in their war game.

“It felt like a long time,” Nielsen said. The armed men promptly disappeared.

Austrian special forces
Night Hawk, the military exercise the Nielsens had inadvertently become a part of, will involve 1,300 soldiers in the coming weeks and is the biggest of its kind in Denmark.

The two armed men in black turned out to be Austrian special forces soldiers who had wandered beyond the perimeter of the exercise.

The head of the operation contacted the Nielsens shortly afterwards to apologise for the mishap. They are satisfied with the apology and will not be taking the matter further.

”Sorry! It was a mistake. We regret it,” the press spokesman for the exercise told BT. ”This episode also came as a surprise to us,” he continued, adding that there will be an investigation into how the soldiers ended up in a residential area.