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A tale of the self-important aircraft carrier captain getting his well-earned comeuppance at the hands of a plain-speaking lighthouse has been making the rounds on the Internet since early 1996. Most write-ups purport to be transcripts of a 1995 conversation between a ship and a lighthouse as documented by Chief of Naval Operations: It's not true. Not only does the Navy disclaim it, but the anecdote appears in a 1992 collection of jokes and tall tales. Worse, it appears in Stephen Covey's 1989 The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and he got it from a 1987 issue of Proceedings, a publication of the U.S. Naval Institute. It's far older than that, as this excerpt from a 1939 book shows: Even older, a one-panel 1931 cartoon that appeared in the Canadian newspaper The Drumheller Review (but listing The Humorist of London, England, as its source) displayed two men arguing through megaphones, one standing on the bridge of a ship, the other on the exterior walkway of a lighthouse, above this bit of dialogue: Slightly different versions of the e-mailed account name different ships as the one which unwillingly gained a lesson in the unimportance of self importance. Having debunked this tale a few times themselves, the U.S. Navy has a web page about this legend, one that answers what three of the commonly cited ships were doing at the time this supposedly occurred. The U.S. Navy's take on this crazy bit of faxlore is contained in the following 1996 newspaper article: In March 2008, Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence in the U.S., opened his remarks to The Johns Hopkins University's Foreign Affairs Symposium with the lighthouse story, claiming, Now this is ... true. I was in the signals intelligence business where you listen to the people talk and so on. This is true. It's an actual recording.
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