veryone's used to stories about flying saucers kidnapping people.
But the question for a lot of soapbox derby fans at McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen is: What person abducted the flying saucer?
The saucer in question is the firm's annual entry in the Sand Hill Challenge, the Menlo Park charity event where Jamba Juice-swilling tech execs, VCs and lawyers race in a soap box derby.
The McCutchen team wants to know who stole their entry, vandalized it with law firm-related graffiti, and dumped it on the roadside early Sunday just as the event got under way.
Obviously, the saucer-nappers went to a lot of trouble -- it's pretty heavy and hard to hide.
In fact, a couple of Menlo Park's finest were directing traffic at the scene when a shiny maroon pick-up truck pulled up and a pair of twentysomething perpetrators hastily unloaded the stolen saucer.
Officer Lloyd Asato said the two men were Caucasian, of medium build, wearing shorts and T-shirts. Their truck was a late model GMC or Chevrolet.
He said he would have stopped them - if he'd known the saucer was hot.
"We had no idea what they were doing until we got a closer look at it and thought 'man, no way is this thing going in the race,' " Asato said.
The "crime" looks like the Silicon Valley version of fraternities raiding rival colleges to steal their mascots. But since law firms don't have mascots, soapbox derby entries in the Sand Hill Challenge are apparently the next best thing.
Actually, the thieves probably didn't know the saucer was headed out to pasture and wasn't even in the firm's possession anymore. The saucer was starting to get worn after three years of use, so McCutchen decided to retire it.
The firm passed it on to Woodside restaurateur and Sand Hill Challenge co-founder Jamis MacNiven. He thought the saucer was a nifty bit of memorabilia for his Buck's Restaurant.
Alas, at seven feet in diameter, mounting the wheeled car on the restaurant ceiling or wall would have been too great an engineering challenge, said MacNiven.
"I thought I'd hang onto it, and left the saucer overnight behind the Woodside Elementary School, never anticipating someone would purloin same saucer," MacNiven said.
Now MacNiven's no stranger to such pranks, having once stolen a soapbox entry himself. So thinking he knew who took the saucer, MacNiven bravely started making accusations. But he came up empty on confessions, and even believed the denials. Mystified, MacNiven didn't even mention to McCutchen it was stolen.
But as this year's event approached, Elizabeth Pounders, McCutchen's marketing coordinator, asked MacNiven what he did with the saucer. That's when she learned its fate.
She tried to rally McCutchen's troops for the event by posting fliers around the office sporting a photo of the missing saucer under the caption "Have You Seen This Saucer?"
Then lo and behold, on Sunday Pounders found the saucer.
It was cruelly defaced and harshly misshapen, its sleek curved body split wide open. Someone had dumped it in front of 2800 Sand Hill Road, which is where the race starts.
The saucer sported misspelling-laden graffiti that said "Brobick Phlager was here," "Sonsini," "Cooley Rules" and "Ware Freidenrich is the best." Bumper stickers stuck to it said "Jupiter is Intense," "Pluto -- Not," "Venus is Sexy" and "We brake for nobody."
"It was pretty depressing," said Mario Fausto, a McCutchen second-year who started on the team last year as an alternate driver. (That meant he had to push.)
MacNiven is pretty sure the thieves were lawyers from a competing law firm. "We need the disreputable lawyers to step forward and admit the breach and be widely chastised."
