Seriously, tell the truth: Does this photo make my butt look big? Whoops, wrong half, wait a minute …

Take two: Greater minds than mine have suggested De Void could elevate its pathetic numbers by posting a personal photo as a permanent logo. And I thought, well, sure, this one here’s entirely appropriate. Except that it was shot on celluloid as a straight-up vertical, not horizontal. And that means, in order to squeeze a Peak Manhood Moment into the “featured image” format, I had to literally cut myself in half. More than half, actually. Cue the inevitable: “Hey, aren’t you that dandruff shampoo guy?” “‘Scuse me, what?” “Head ‘n shoulders?”

I mean, come on. You can’t even see the fish I caught. This feels kinda stupid.

Then it occurred to me: This is what UFOs do. They make you look stupid. Intentionally. Which made me think about these two guys I interviewed in 2002. They were Air Force pilots who’d served together with the 9th Fighter Squadron of the 49th Fighter-Bomber Wing in Misawa, Japan. Decades later, they reunited when they realized their Florida homes were just a few miles apart. They told me about the time they watched a UFO humiliate their entire airbase.

In 1950, Misawa was on the Cold War frontier, located just across the water from a landmass of monolithic Asian communism. As USAF warplanes were transitioning from prop jobs to jet fighters, tensions on the Korean peninsula were revving up and rehearsals were underway. Back then, aerial gunnery practice involved fitting old P-51 Mustangs with 800-foot cables that towed banners marked with bullseyes. The targets stretched 30 feet horizontally with an eight-foot vertical spread.

In April 1950, just two months before Korea exploded in insane violence, something weird went down. During routine training exercises, a pair 49th Wing pilots en route to what they thought was their assignment rendezvous radioed home: “We’ve got a target, but no tow ship.”

The mystery pinged on ground radar, and flight commander Bud Evans got scrambled upstairs to check it out. By time he reached the target area, the thing was gone. During debriefings, his fellow airmen insisted they had encountered a broad, flat, airborne something-or-other, measuring maybe three times the size of a regulation target, but no more than three inches wide. It looked like a flying window pane – they could see the silhouettes of each other’s planes as they flanked the object. Before either could get a shot off, bingo, “it went straight up and out of sight,” Evans says.

Sometimes it’s best not to see it coming … /CREDIT: carolinajournal.com

Apparently, that was just a sneak preview. Shortly thereafter, Evans, fellow pilot Clyde Good, and the rest of base personnel – the band, the honor guard, the whole shebang – were on the runway awaiting the arrival of Fifth Air Force bigwigs when the brass got beat to their own party. Minutes before the VIPs landed, The Great Taboo made a pass over the field in broad daylight.

“I knew as soon as I saw it that this is what the guys had seen before,” Evans said. “… It was quite large.”

Good saw it, too.

“It was coming in pretty slow, and at first, we all thought it was a tow target, but we couldn’t see what was holding it up,” he said. “So I’m looking for its power source, and there were no props, no jet engines, no visible means of propulsion, and it doesn’t make a sound. But it was definitely under the control of somebody or something, because then it pulled straight up, like a bat out of hell, and took off. Just disappeared.”

Good and Evans were ordered to shut up about it. Which they did. At least until after the Cold War ended, when it didn’t matter anymore.

Which brings me back to the photo. Some of you guys know the story, but for the uninitiated, here goes:

20 May 1989, Ten Thousand Islands, Gulf of Mexico, offshore between Everglades City and Marco Island: This is the final shot in a four-photo sequence. Too bad you can’t make out what I caught. There’s actually a decent-sized yellow-tailed jack beneath that fishhead. What’s over my head, I have no idea. Neither I nor photographer David Dickerson saw or heard anything.

Some argue it’s a near-foreground object (NFO) close to the camera lens, a bug or airborne debris. A Northrop-Grumman engineer who took a look at all four pix years ago discounted the NFO theory by arguing the same object in the immediately preceding third photo is actually moving behind the fishing line. He also directed my attention to the fact that a little cotton-puff of a cumulus cloud, visible in the first and second frames, is missing from shots three and four. In the first photo, he pointed out that a tiny blip, photographed in roughly the same attitude as the blur in shots three and four, is sitting at about 2 o’clock off the cloud’s shoulder. Because the blip isn’t visible in shot two, he said it had most likely ducked into the cloud, which in this fourth photo has dissolved off my left wrist.

Given how the sequence starts with a blip located in the upper far right side of the first photo, only to reemerge in the lower left, shot three, then surges to the upper center of shot four, he theorized the object approached from behind on a parabolic trajectory. But trying to figure out what happened 30 years ago in the Gulf of Mexico, especially regarding something you never even saw — that’s an ego trap. Ego has limitations as a reliable fuel source.

Your mind can wander into one funhouse after another if it dwells too long on an imponderable. Lately I’ve been thinking about that old sight gag about one fish preparing to devour another fish without realizing it’s about to be swallowed by an even bigger fish. When you can’t tell the subject from the object, sometimes it’s best to cut your losses.

Fifty years after Misawa, Clyde Good and Bud Evans still couldn’t get over it. Advanced technology that outperforms our front-line defenses – OK, that’s one thing. But when that (apparent) technology choreographs its advantage into a theater of the absurd? That’s downright gratuitous, man. That’s rubbing it in.

It’s been two years now since The New York Times gave us permission to talk openly and seriously about a mystery that’s been ripening since forever as low-hanging fruit in the punchline department. With our multidisciplinary approach to The Great Taboo at a stalemate, maybe it’s time to ratchet it up a notch. Maybe, in the campaign for hearts and minds, it’s time to drag comedy writers onto the team and have them come up with a different set of targets.

But in the meantime, yeah, the photo/logo — I think it’s too big, and the format won’t let me scale down. It’s ostentatious, right? I mean, I’m guessing you don’t want to be confronted by this billboard every time you click on De Void.