Interesting thread - including the 'thread within the thread' that Justa Picker linked to. That one I don't think I had seen before.

About my Earl 'vision' and the suggestion that a skywriter had written the name in the sky which I and my friend had just happened to be in the right place to see, I'm not sure that I ever explained before that these are Juneau skies- we don't have much air traffic of any kind. Any plane one sees is either approaching our airport or is leaving our airport. Our sky does not have planes way high going to points unknown. Besides which, if we had a skywriter in town we would know about it. This is not a big town.

That said, the only thing that irks me about Wolfgang's implication that my accounts had any conflicting points. I should think that if I had told the story with exactly the same amount of detail both times that that would show artifice.