"I live in Anchorage, Alaska," reports Zachariah. "Roughly one year ago, I had gotten home from school, done my homework, and started to unload and load our dishwasher. Bearing in mind I'd yet to have eaten lunch, I put a fork aside to use for some chicken ramen. Now, there was nothing unusual about our table. It had no open drawers, no parts removed, and no holes. I turned back for a moment to put some forks away, and when I turned back, the fork was just gone. It hadn't fallen; we'd have heard it. It didn't get put away and I didn't misplace it, as I had searched everywhere for it. This wasn't some unholy haunting or some trippy time paradox or anything, but it was definitely weird enough to make me stop and think for a while. How could the fork have disappeared? Where had it gone to? What forces could've acted upon it to make it move so suddenly? I think of these questions daily, but no solution comes to mind."
Thanks, Zachariah. I had a similar experience a few years back. I opened a can of Pringles and dropped the yellow lid on the tile floor of my apartment kitchen. I heard it hit the floor at my feet. I stooped to pick it up... and it was gone. I looked everywhere for it, assuming it had bounced or rolled away. I searched every inch of that small kitchen, including under the stove, under and beside the refrigerator, in all the cabinets (which were closed) -- even the upper cabinets. I even thought of that lid when I moved out of that apartment and cleaned everything out. The yellow lid was never found. It simply seemed to vanish into thin air.
There is a mystery known as the "borrower" phenomenon or "disappearing object phenomenon" in which an object vanishes from where it was recently placed -- usually a "normal" place -- with no explanation. Extensive searches turn up nothing. Then sometimes the object mysteriously returns -- in that normal place. It's weird. Read more about this phenomenon.
