Many years ago a mystical story happened in our house: my mother accidentally dropped a teaspoon, it rattled on the floor and … disappeared! She was never found. It would seem, what's so special? Are a few things lost? But later, I was amazed to learn that the loss of teaspoons had long ago acquired a global scale - such that scientists became interested in this phenomenon.
Stolen billions
The authoritative scientific edition of the British Medical Journal published the results of research by employees of the Center for Epidemiology of the Burnet Institute (Melbourne, Australia). A group of researchers led by Margaret Herald placed 70 specially marked spoons in the institute's cafe. Then the experimenters counted their number weekly. Five months later, only 14 pieces remained … According to one of the participants in the experiment, Campbell Aitken, for every inhabitant of the Earth, there are 7.2 missing teaspoons annually. Let's multiply this number by the number of people inhabiting the planet (today it is 6 billion). We'll get over 42 billion missing spoons!
Of course, everything can be explained by banal theft. But after all, spoons do not disappear from canteens for homeless people, but from quite decent establishments visited by an exceptionally respectable public. And in most cases, the loss does not represent a serious value. In addition, not only the staff of cafes and restaurants, but also individuals complain about the disappearance of cutlery. Spoons disappear from the hosts even in the absence of guests. You can, of course, sin on third-party robbers, but what house thief would be content with one or two teaspoons?
So the researchers can only try to unravel this mystery. The most diverse versions are put forward. According to one of them, spoons, due to some incomprehensible properties associated with their shape and metal composition, are sucked through "black holes" into another dimension.
However, other objects "evaporate" too: forks, knives, nuts, nails … Where? As you know, there is a mass conservation law. That is, if a thing disappears in one place, then it must certainly appear in another. And there is indirect evidence of this.
Psychology is sometimes referred to as "the science of sophomore students and white rats" because
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Prehistoric nuts
Objects of artificial origin, undoubtedly the product of a developed civilization, have been found more than once in the most ancient rock. So, in 1844 in the Kinguda quarry (Milfield, Britain), a rusted steel nail was found completely ingrown into hard sandstone. In 1851 in California, prospector Hiram Witt discovered a nail, slightly touched by rust, in a piece of gold-bearing quartz. In June of the same year, in Dorchester County (USA), among the debris of stones chipped from a rock by an explosion, halves of a metal vessel made of an unknown alloy were found. In early December 1952, a tool of unknown purpose was removed from a coal seam near Glasgow. In 1891, a resident of the town of Morisonville (Illinois), splitting a piece of coal prepared for kindling, saw a gold chain about 25 centimeters long. And on the Cheleken Peninsula in Turkmenistan, a petrified thermometer was found …
Such mysterious finds occupy an entire stand in the Mineralogical Museum. A. E. Fersman RAS. Among them are stone balls with regular through holes, screws, bolts, nuts and other objects made of metal and wood, extracted from an ancient rock that hardened in time immemorial.
Several years ago, members of the MAI-Cosmopoisk Center expedition, looking for meteorite fragments in the Kaluga region, came across a suspicious stone fragment. A bolt about a centimeter long with a nut at the end was visible on the chip. Obviously, he got inside the rock when it was still a soft clay. Meanwhile, geologists said that the stone is at least 300 million years old … And quite recently, Vasily Filatov, a resident of Orenburg, bought a block of marble in order to lay out a fireplace in his country house. After the marble was cut into square tiles in the workshop, in one of them Filatov found slices of a nut and a bolt. How did these details get into the marble?
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Some "anomalies" refer to the theory of the so-called resistiveism - they believe that inanimate objects have consciousness and do not want people to use them. So these objects disappear, disintegrating into molecules and teleporting.
However, things can be much simpler. After all, the disappearance of objects is nothing more than one of the varieties of poltergeist, which many parapsychologists associate with the tricks of brownies and other inhabitants of the other world. Thus, these beings prove their existence to us. Or perhaps they are using the missing items for their own purposes. For example, as a tool to get the energy they need.
Sometimes you can try to teleport a disappeared object back by tying a ribbon around the leg of a stool and reading the spell: "Brownie, play and give it back!" If the loss did not appear, it means that the "owner" of your house really liked it.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №15. Author: Dina Kuntseva