The Great Pentagon ‘Blow-Dry’ Portrait Prank

How the Wall Street Journal broke the story of a suspiciously coiffed young midshipman, dubiously 'lost at sea' in 1908.

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Department of Defense

For nearly half a year the portrait hung on the walls of the Pentagon, commemorating ensign Chuck Hord, a Navy man lost at sea in 1908. The image depicted a handsome young man in a midshipman’s uniform — his buttons shining, his eyes twinkling, his hair impeccably, and somewhat suspiciously, blow-dried.

There’s just a slight problem: Hord — actually, Captain Eldridge “Tuck” Hord III — is very much alive. In fact, he’s happily retired from the Navy and living in Virginia — and he’s only 53 years old.

It turns out the portrait isn’t an oil painting at all but a stylized photo, made to look like a painting, of Hord taken upon his graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy back in 1982. As part of a clandestine Anglo-Canadian-American operation that ranks among the better pranks in military history, a Canadian officer named Brook Bangsboll hung the picture, complete with engraved plaque, on one of the Pentagon’s less-trafficked halls of power early one morning last July. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Lt. Col. Bangsboll scouted the halls for the right spot. He planned to put the portrait in a foyer dedicated to logistics—the office’s specialty—but feared those responsible for displays in the area would catch on.

He settled on a previously unadorned hallway which gets less foot traffic. At 6:15 a.m. on July 29, 2011, Lt. Col. Bangsboll spirited the portrait to the hallway and drove a large screw into the wall.

“The place was quiet,” he recalls. “No one noticed.”

For the next seven months, the portrait attracted little attention. One Pentagon official, as he walked by the photo, said it had never crossed his mind to look twice.

The whole sordid story of the photo’s origins, early escapades and how it eventually caught the sharp eye of a Wall Street Journal reporter went up on the paper’s site last week and is well worth a read. The painting itself, sadly, was removed from its place of honor after military officials were informed of it. As  for Capt. Hord, he remains proudly defiant. “A little bit of alcohol and a whole big dose of irreverence plays into it,” he admitted to the Journal, adding wistfully, “this was going to put me in perpetuity in the Pentagon.”

Erica Ho is a contributor at TIME and the editor of Map Happy. Find her on Twitter at @ericamho and Google+. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.