Like most of these sorts of events with me, it started rather serendipitously.

Surfing the web can kill more time than I ever did previously in libraries. And this is a big deal, especially if you know me and know how long I have spent in the world of physical books. But the seemingly random waves of the web can, sometimes, slide themselves into little patterns.

Set the wayback machine to 2000. I had a reunion coming up. I went to school in a town known as Las Vegas. Not the one in Nevada, the one in New Mexico.

Believe me, this is relevant. Hang in there.

I'm reading on the web about the SR-71. I won't go into detail about why exactly this remains the coolest aircraft ever made, as there are plenty of other people who could make that argument better than me (see the Links page). I'll just point out that it was a remarkable aircraft of which, as it turns out, some fifty were built, and a few of them crashed.

One morning I'm looking at an exceptional site called Habu.org, which among other things houses a collection of photographs of every airframe in the Blackbird line, a photo of every serial number.

Except one, where instead of a photo, it simply says "No Photo".

Cue the music to "one of these things is not like the other," and I click on that one. Because it's different.

Its serial number was 61-7966, it had never (apparently) been photographed, and it crashed near Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Now, this particular Las Vegas is fairly obscure. Outside of the state, practically no one knows it exists. Heck, even inside the Land of Enchantment, it's pretty unknown, except as a trivia question. To see it mentioned on a website so completely unrelated to my old school seemed, well, it seemed like it had to be a typo.

So I visited another few sites devoted to the remarkable Blackbird. I found "966" again, this time with a listing saying it crashed near Las Vegas, Nevada.

Ha! I thought to myself. Just a typo. Makes more sense for it to be in Nevada, because that's where that super-secret base is, where the A-12 (the first and spookiest of the Blackbirds) was based. Just some internet weirdness.

But it never hurts to check.

About half the sites I visited said NM, the other half said NV. This was feeling odd, and odd has always attracted me.

That first website I visited had seemed, well, you know how you get warm fuzzies about one search engine and not another? And you can't put your finger on it, but you like one best? That's how it was with me and this first site. So I emailed the webmaster, who, as it turns out, was Dave Allison, founder of the site. And I asked him why he thought it was New Mexico and not Nevada.

To his eternal credit, this completely random question didn't faze him in the least, and he responded eagerly, beginning a correspondence I have valued ever since. Put simply, he said, it had to be New Mexico because he had a clipping from a reporter who, as Dave put it, "probably knew which state he was in."