Boiled down: Mikeⁿ had something for Mike¹. Mike² was after it.

The earthshaking case can be shared with the public now that it has been declassified. Redacted too, which authenticates it as an official government document. It played out on St. Patrick’s Day 2024 at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort on the coastline of the Pacific in the State of Oregon in the United States of America, where Mike¹, a court reporter from San Diego, California, was on a break from transcribing hard-luck stories. A salt-of-the-earth guy, he did not want nor expect to become the focus of the planet. By the final report, he had acquired the codename «The Reporter». That’s him in the green shirt on Bandon’s Sheep Ranch course. You could call him lucky to be alive. He felt lucky before St. Paddy’s.

An anonymous, handwritten riddle had been delivered to the Pentagon.

Were not our hearts burning within us at B while [ illegible ] talked with us and opened the [ illegible ] to us?

The paper on which it was written was harmless, but the letters paraphrasing Luke 24:32 were radioactive, so the Department of Defense circulated copies of the enigma to law enforcement in every town and city whose name began with the letter B. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s cryptanalysts, who were sure the illegible bits were «Jesus» and «Scriptures», threw a net of suspicion over the country’s religious zealots, who consumed no small percentage of the bureau’s budget. Meanwhile, its Financial Crimes Unit figured a trade secret had been, or would be, exchanged at B, wherever B was. Mike², chief of police in Bandon, Oregon, pop. 3,323, was in charge of search operations there. Bandon Dunes south of town increased the number of people to account for; its guests could be anywhere on six courses. Fortunately for Mike², the resort’s webcams, popular with those who had played there and those who dreamed about playing there, saved time and money.

What kind of person was Mike²? People said she killed a man who questioned why no American flagpin «flapped its gums» (her mixed metaphor) over her heart. Record-keeping was not her gift; she would sign paperwork willy-nilly as «Joseph Stalin», «Mae West» or fill-in-the-blank. Mike²’s codename was «Luke».

What kind of person was Mike¹? The world changed on March 17, 2024, with him at its epicenter, but fame did not change him. Sure, he retired on the largess of grateful admirers, but his routines remained the same. Take the importance to the case of photographic evidence as an example. Our hero was not one for chronicling his life, or those of his loved ones, with a camera (don’t ask his spouse about this predilection, she has invoked her right to remain silent). Therefore it was ironic that his star turn with an Unexplained Anomalous Phenomenon, aka UAP (aka Mikeⁿ), entered the annals of history thanks to photographic devices hidden in nature; and fate made him the prey of the paparazzi. As he explained patiently to their lenses in rare interviews, the scene seen round the globe (and beyond) was not even framed on the living-room wall; and, no, he was not aware of the astronomical prices paid for reproductions of his time-tested putting drills on the practice green in the morning ocean mist.

Initially, Mike¹’s «mist putts» did not «putt» him in the cross hairs. Everybody was a suspect. The images monitored by Mike² on Bandon’s 2,525 acres, 1,500 and 250 of which were unmanaged and conservation land, respectively, have been edited for brevity.
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sources
Luke 24:13-35
Tom Doak, The Making of Pacific Dunes (2021)

dedication
for Mike Gallivan