I don’t see why fundamentalist would have to put it in the metaphor category. Even when the moon is visible during the day, the sun clearly rules.
I think that maybe the callers were thinking of something along the lines of “well, hey, there’s a lot more lights up there than usual… is it one of those ‘meteor showers’ or something?”
I’d be hard-pressed to identify more than a handful of individual lights as being planets or stars. Venus, those stars which form the few constellations I can identify… anything else, if you point at it and tell me it’s Jupiter I’ll believe it.
But there were no callers. The story is false. As several of us who were there have now pointed out, the lights did not go out.
I think it’s fair to say that the Moon rules the night. It’s the brightest thing you’ll ever find in the night sky. And besides, Earthly rulers often find themselves outside of the realms they rule, too-- Richard the Lionhearted didn’t cease to rule England when he was off on crusades (which was most of his reign).
Speaking of how the stars are so much more spectacular from rural areas than the suburbs where I live, when I go to the Rocky Mountains and look at the stars, I have a hard time finding the constellations that are so familiar back home. From the suburbs, features like Orion, the Big Dipper, and the Pleiades really stand out. But from the mountains, there are a jillion other stars all around them, and you have to do a lot more searching and staring to find them.
I’d also be sceptical of the suggestion that these people didn’t know what stars were but were somehow familiar enough with the idea of an observatory to ring them and ask. 