t was like a scene from the movie Dead Calm. Here in the ocean, on a millpond-smooth day, was a Maine lobster boat off Tenants Harbor, pretty as a postcard. But where were the lobstermen? Did they evaporate? It was May 1, 1975, and because Judd Miller and his business partner Michael Percy were never found, their vanishing continues to haunt authorities, friends, and relatives.

Of course the water is very deep in Tenants Harbor. And where it isn't deep, it's deeper. But this disappearance has been complicated in recent decades by rumors of sightings of Judd Miller all over the world. In one of these urban legends, Miller pauses to look at a former high-school classmate on the Rocky Mountain ski slopes before schussing out of view. Then there's a ghostly Miller appearing to an acquaintance on a bridge over the Sheepscot River. Sound like a Warren Zevon song? Miller was a walking Warren Zevon song.

"Judd could anger people," says a fellow Kennebunk High School graduate (Judd Miller was Class of 1971) and close friend who asked not to be identified. "When he wasn't drinking, he was one of the nicest guys in the world, co-captain of the football team, lots of friends. But when was drinking, it got to be a Jeckyll/Hyde-type thing. You know the little green bridge separating Kennebunk from Kennebunkport, where all the tourists hang out? Judd was walking across it with a buddy and impulsively punched out all the glass windows of the little shack that operates the bridge. Boom. He could get scary like that.

"But he was a hard worker. He loved being alive. When he played football, he hit with passion. He owned his own lobster boat and worked it through high school."

As far as his disappearing off a lobster boat on a calm day is concerned, "If Judd was a newcomer up there in Tenants Harbor, well, I know how territorial lobstermen might have reacted to him if he showed his arrogant side." There is a pause. "But he was well liked here in Kennebunk and Kennebunkport."

Could he have somehow drowned, despite the good weather?

"He was an excellent swimmer. We used to jump in and swim across the Kennebunk River, where there's a strong current, to the beach from Government Wharf."

Judd Miller's parents, Anne and Red Miller of Tenants Harbor, say they are all but certain their son perished along with his friend, Michael Percy, that day on upper Penobscot Bay. But the young men's bodies were never found, and as Anne Miller says, "there's always a possibility" Judd is still alive somewhere.

In any case, the young men's spirits were high and aiming for a prosperous future. Miller, 21 at the time, and Percy, 22, were on their way back from Stockton Springs in a lobster boat Miller had just bought. Their parents suspect the boat overheated—its hatch cover was off when it was found the next day, anchored in the bay—but what happened next is unclear. One man may have fallen in the water, and the other may have boarded a plywood skiff to retrieve him; or perhaps both boarded the skiff in an attempt to make their way back to shore. The skiff was found upside down the next day in Belfast, Red Miller said. The bodies, however, were never found. NEXT PAGE >>