I'd found some version of this story online, thought it was pretty weird and naturally wanted to post and ping, but something came up (minor family crisis, all better now) and I wondered if Blam would post it. Alas, he was on the road and way out of town (although I wonder how he got the FReepmail... funny, that didn't occur to me before), so I wrote back that it would wait until tomorrow, because, hey, no one is going to A) see it or B) post it on FR...
It really is an interesting discovery...