I first noticed it early last fall. Scrolling through the comments on a story online, I encountered this:

“Can’t think of anything to comment so I’m just going to post a pancake recipe.” And it was followed by, yes, a pancake recipe.

That first time, I laughed. Well, isn’t that clever, I thought.

A week or two later I saw it again. And then again.

Who is this guy, I wondered, thinking it must surely be one person.

Soon I started seeing it everywhere, and you know what came next. Try Googling it yourself — type in the exact phrase, in quotes. When I did this last fall, I got more than 100,000 results.

Each time, it was the identical comment and recipe, word for word, punctuation mark for punctuation mark. And it showed up on a random collection of stories, most having nothing whatsoever to do with food.

On a story about the Palin family’s involvement in a brawl at a party in Alaska. With the recap of a soccer game on an Irish sports news website. On a forum where someone asked for advice on what to tell his little sister, who thought she was in love. (Somehow, I don’t think pancakes will help.) On Kelly Osbourne’s Facebook tribute to the late Joan Rivers.

Screen names accompanying the post varied widely, too: Jonathan Stapleton, Bryan Hernandez, Sweetflame, Chewbaca, thatafricanchic, to name just a few.

The recipe, it turns out, is from an Australian food magazine, taste.com.au. “Basic Pancakes” is attributed to food editor Kim Coverdale, who first posted it in March 2010.

About the time I was making my discovery, so was news.com.au. For a story about the mysterious case of the pancake recipe gone viral, the Australian news service contacted Coverdale, who said she had no idea what was going on.

I sent my own email to the food magazine a month or two ago but never heard back. I also contacted the Australian flour company, White Wings, whose self-rising flour is called for in the recipe. Nothing. I found the Facebook page for one of the commenters and sent him a Facebook message. Again, no response.

Who started this? And why? Why pancakes? Why this recipe in particular?

When my investigative attempts to get answers to these questions fell flat, I had my own “I give up” moment:

Can’t think of what else to do, so I’m just going to make a pancake recipe. And so I gave this one a try.

Meanwhile, enthusiasm for the post seems to have fizzled. Last week when I Googled the phrase, I got 3,150 results. Either the phantom pancake recipe posters have grown bored, concluding that the novelty has worn off, or site managers have been deleting the comments. Or both.

“Make your own stuff up, stop stealing,” wrote one commenter after seeing the post perhaps one too many times.

Maybe, if you can’t think of anything to comment, it’s best to just not comment at all.