Sports writer Mic Huber and I worked together for 10 years at the Herald-Tribune here in Sarasota. Different shifts, different departments, which meant we didn’t see each other all that much. Small talk, mostly, much of it focused on the whereabouts of an elusive relentlessly self-deprecating mutual friend. We got a lot of mileage out of you, David, so thanks for that, wherever you are.
At his voluntary-buyout farewell office party early this year, Mic retraced the steps that led him to his long run in Sarasota. What made him appreciate Florida was his Air Force hitch in North Dakota. The winters were so grim he applied for a transfer to Vietnam during the height of the war. Uncle Sam sent him to Germany instead.
Anyhow, during his sayonara to the newsroom, Mic mentioned something about how he’d been on duty when he got sucked into a UFO incident, an experience that impressed him so deeply he saw fit to bring it up during impromptu remarks to colleagues nearly half a century later. But it was a small fleeting recollection and he didn’t linger there.
Mic still freelances, and a few months later I pulled him aside one afternoon and asked for more details. I couldn’t help but smile as he rattled off words like Minot Air Force Base, 1968, B-52, radar, radio interference, security breach, etc., etc. Mic isn’t a UFO geek, he doesn’t follow this stuff, so he was unaware of just how significant this incident was, in terms of evidence. At the end of his recollection, Mic repeated another phrase that actually made me laugh out loud because I’d heard it so many times before. He said he’d been debriefed by an Air Force colonel, his testimony had been tape-recorded, and that the officer left him on this note: “This didn’t happen.”
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