It all started with a misremembered line from an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.
A few years back my band at the time, Mannequin Men, was on a monthlong tour with Cheap Time from Memphis, Tennessee, and during a post-show late night drive probably a week or so into it our guitarist Ethan and guitarist/vocalist Kevin started talking about an episode of Unsolved Mysteries during Dennis Farina’s stint as host concerning a UFO sighting at a British military base. Ethan recalled a part of the episode where Farina, narrating a reenactment of the events, says the phrase, “The two men stared at the craft,” rendering it in a fairly accurate imitation of Farina’s heavily Northern Cities Vowel Shift-inflected accent. The two of them began repeating the phrase back and forth to each other and to escalatingly hysterical laughter. Both of them had made good use of our allotment of drink tickets at the show we were driving away from.
Later on in the tour I managed to track down a YouTube clip of the episode, which I haven’t been able to do since, and it turns out that Farina never actually says, “The two men stared at the craft.” But by that point it didn’t matter—all of us were doing Farina impressions pretty much around the clock by then, and the illegitimate quote was a crucial part of the ongoing joke. Even a couple of the guys from Cheap Time were doing it.
