"The story goes that during exercises with the Royal Navy, a US Navy fighter pilot, vectored to investigate an unidentified contact at 3000 feet, found himself flying alongside one of the Fleet Air Arm's Fairey Gannet AEW3s.

"What have you found up there?" his controller asked him. The American aviator paused to consider his answer, staring at the odd-looking machine as it ambled around the sky with one engined turned off. With a jet pipe sticking out of the side like the siphon of an octopus, bent wings, contra-rotating propellers and psychedelic swirling yellow and black spinner, and the swollen afterthrough of a radome, attached underneath like the cap of a giant mushroom, there was no doubting its strangeness. But it was the pilot who most caught his eye. In the cockpit, high on top of the the Gannet's tall fuselage, was a man who looked like Brian Blessed, wearing an old leather flying helmet, who, apparently engrossed in a book, didn't even look up. ' I, er, I think I've found God...' concluded the fighter pilot."

From Phoenix Squadron by Rowland White

u/Vladimir_Chrootin