MG Siegler of TechCrunch is reporting that he just received a mysterious invitation for an event taking place in New York City on January 11th by Verizon. He states:

And now something curious has just appeared in my inbox. An invite to a Verizon event, taking place in New York City on this coming Tuesday, January 11. Could it be? Well, for one thing, I don’t typically get invites directly from Verizon to anything. At least not that I can recall. They usually send those directly to the MobileCrunch and CrunchGear guys. But this invite appears to very specifically be for me — it’s non-transferable. Would Verizon send me such an invite unless it was specially about Apple?

Let's add everything up from recently. Businessweek reported right before the new year that Verizon would have the iPhone by Valentine's Day. Just yesterday I wrote about an interview on CNBC of Verizon COO where he spoke in a way that caught my attention, and I declared that Verizon is definitely getting the iPhone. Now just this morning BGR reports Apple blocked out vacations for February 3rd to 6th, and expects a release on February 3rd. And here we are. A mysterious event is being held by Verizon on January 11th. Usually Apple holds these types of events, but since Verizon just made all their LTE announcements at CES, this one is most likely not going to be about that. What else could it possibly be?

Verizon. iPhone.

Update #1 (3:37p ET): Obviously others are now reporting the same invitation. Wall Street Journal says sources close to Verizon is confirming that an iPhone announcement is in fact imminent.

Update #2 (3:53p ET): Ha. Looks like the event will be hosted by Lowell McAdam, the same guy in the interview yesterday that caught my attention with his wording.

Update #3 (4:14p ET): Gizmodo has a few choice words.

But here's what's key: We're great friends with Verizon. (Hi guys!) We've worked with them for years, and We've been to like every event they've had over the last three years. And we haven't gotten an invite. We've reached out to Verizon to see why, exactly, but we've gotten no comment yet. (And they're on their game, so they're usually pretty quick to reply.) The obvious answer is that it's an Apple event, and Steve doesn't want us there. You know the story.