The Grassy Knoll

Okay, something fun and frivolous for a change.

Let's start by saying that I am not a believer in conspiracy theories. I believe that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, the Virgin Mary has never appeared in a piece of french toast, and aliens probably have better things to do than abduct people from trailer parks.

With that in mind, I came across the following image the other day. For some strange reason I decided to go through some of the countless boxes that litter our basement, each one containing film envelopes from my days as a wire service photographer.

This particular envelope said "Blue Angels, Andrews AFB." I shot for UPI in Washington from 1988 through 1990, before moving to the Los Angeles bureau, so I'm pretty certain this was taken in 1989. Since I was looking for any potential images for our new web site (yes, it's coming, I swear) I took out the negative page and glanced briefly at it. And this one frame just popped out.

My first thought was that this was a huge piece of debris on the negative, but inspection shows that this monolith (it does look pretty "2001"-ish, no?) is embedded into the film, not on it. Meaning that it does not appear to be a sticker that stuck itself to the film and went through the developing process. (Back in the film era, we used things called twin-checks, little numbered stickers, to identify film. One twin check would go on the film, the other on the caption envelope.)

Anyway, I am not going to play forensic sleuth, since I really have no idea what this is. But it's fun and it made me smile. Look for me someday on a future episode of TV's "Unsolved Mysteries."

Matt