Oops: Would-be hero runs naked through his neighborhood after a car he thought abducted his niece. Turns out she was just around the corner

Give Nathan Murphy credit. When he believed the moment called for a hero, he was ready and willing to act the part.

So ready and willing, in fact, that he ran outside buck naked and corralled an innocent driver who he thought was trying to kidnap his niece.

Unfortunately for Murphy, what might have been a heroic moment instead turned out to be one of the most embarrassing moments of his life, when the supposedly absconded niece showed up moments later, safe and sound.

The scene unfolded in Ormesby in the United Kingdom, according to UNILAD.

According to Murphy, he was asleep in bed when his sister Natalie began screaming "That's our Lucy!" believing that her daughter had been abducted by a gray van that had pulled up front. So Nathan did what any adoring uncle would do and bolted out of bed in his birthday suit to stop his niece from being kidnapped.

"I jumped up out the bed, tried to find my clothes and I ended up just grabbing a T-shirt thinking it was my bottoms and I flew downstairs. When I was on the front I heard 'kidnap' and thought 'wow, this is serious'. I'm a big lad, I'm 18 stone, but I can move when I need to and because the adrenaline was rushing through me I went weak in the legs and I just fell over," Murphy said.

That, however, is when horror turned to embarrassment, because right then, the niece he was supposed to be saving strolled around the corner, completely safe and unharmed.

Apart from gratitude that his niece had not, in fact, been abducted, Nathan's first thought was, "I hope one of the mothers don't report me because all their kids had seen my downstairs and I didn't want to be put on some register."

There's no evidence that any of his neighbors intends to report him as a sex offender, yet, but the news is still pretty bad for Nathan: His 64-year-old father obtained CCTV footage of the whole incident and posted it to Facebook where it quickly went viral, racking up tens of thousands of shares and hundreds of thousands of likes.

According to the New York Post, Nathan's sister explained some of the confusion: "There must have been someone going past, having an argument, booting the van, then I heard, 'Mam!' and I thought someone grabbed her into the back of the van."

When she realized that her daughter had just walked around the corner, "Obviously that was a huge relief, then I was walking back to the house and the next thing I know Nathan's outside buck naked. I couldn't stop laughing, but at least I know he's got my back and I know he's going to be there for me."