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It seems that Us Weekly has abandoned any hope of landing the first, heavily discounted pictures of Suri Cruise, settling instead on moving glossy product by spotlighting Tom Cruise's profoundly strange delay of the initial public appearance of his possibly nonexistent daughter as the BABY MYSTERY, even going so far as to run a Where's Suri? clock counting the days since the Miracle Baby's alleged birth. But after three months of waiting for proof that Cruise can at least be bothered to pull a stand-in baby off the toddler rack for a photo shoot to ease the public's suspicions, we're ready to upgrade the situation from "mystery" to "riddle that would make the Sphinx incontinent." To add to the weirdness, Us reports that even Cruise's BFFs, both of the regular and Scientological flavors, have yet to gain an audience with the world's most elusive rugrat:

Three months after her birth, Baby Suri, is still unseen, even by the family's closest friends. A source says Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes have yet to show her off to fellow Scientologists John Travolta, Kelly Preston and Lisa Marie Presley. Even good pals Will and Jada Pinkett Smith supposedly have not met her, despite repeated calls to Cruise. "Every time, it's a different excuse: He's busy or Kate's not feeling well," says a source. '[The Smiths] think it's so weird."

After such an interminable build-up, Cruise, always the master of self-promoting spectacle, will certainly pull off an impressive stunt when he finally decides it's time to show off his daughter in public. Tens of thousands of stunned baseball fans will surely gape in disbelief as he and young Suri tandem-skydive onto the infield at Dodger Stadium as Katie Holmes sweetly waves from a circling Goodyear Blimp, then will be delighted to discover that the incredibly generous megastar has cloned enough babies for each fan to take home his or her own perfect genetic replica of his beloved offspring from the ballpark.