Another Slow News Day

Last Wednesday, Aug. 7, a drop of water appeared on the lens of a security camera at the Venetian Village waterfront complex in Naples, just south of here. For whatever reason, somebody thought it might be a UFO. We know it ain't so because the investigation is now logged as Case #49676 in the "solved" files of the Mutual UFO Network. And it didn't take long for researchers Marc D'Antonio and Cinde Costello to figure it out: "The most telling piece of evidence is... that you actually see how the refracted image of the droplet seen on the housing has brought small particles of dirt on the housing into focus."

But here's the takeaway for TV viewers in southwest Florida. The standup even said "Officials at MUFON tell me this is the most fascinating video they've seen in awhile":

Dude -- really? Have you ever seen such a sorry-looking UFO in your life? De Void's favorite shape comes near the end where it looks like a Venus flytrap leaf. Feed me!" Audrey II? Seriously?

Anyhow - as with last autumn's brief national flurry over Google Earth's lens-flare "UFOs" - this piece went nuts on the Internet and generated nearly 70,000 hits in a few days. Every local station piled on and even CNN posted the thing.

De Void is still trying to find the first followup to MUFON's resolution of this dingbat trifling. After all, in an article titled "MOUFON to investigate possibility of UFO sighting in Naples," WPTV's "Action News" website stated last Friday "The video was sent to 'MOUFON', a UFO organization, in Ohio, where it's being analyzed." Alerted to ongoing research, one might naturally expect "Action News" to update the story.

But the episode begs a larger question: Why does this sort of flaccid dreck go coast-to-coast, when a legitimate curiosity - like the fact that the military destroyed its radar records from the 2008 Stephenville UFO incident while the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Weather Service complied with the law and surrendered their own radar logs to a FOIA request - doesn't rate a shred of media coverage anywhere?

Ideas, anyone? Me first: "Because there aren't any really good pitchers..."