Garfield Phone Mystery at the Beach (@drmysterion)
Remember Garfield?
Almost everyone who grew up in the 80s knows the chubby, lazy orange cat who likes lasagna and pizza.
It turns out that in France, a more than 30-year-old mystery was finally solved when an epidemic of hundreds of landline phones in the image of Garfield washed up on the shores of Brittany.
Tyco's cat landline has since become a collector's item and was an homage to the cartoon character's sleepy nature, as his eyes remained closed until someone picked up the phone.
Definitely a premium item for Garfield fans, but not exactly something you'd expect to find on the beach.
Yet that's exactly the sight the people of Brittany have been exposed to for three decades starting in the 1980s, when the first swallows of orange plastic Garfield phones began appearing scattered across the French coastline.
There were years when hundreds of these phones were seen on the beach, but where did they come from?
No one had a clue.
The iflscience website reported last week that the great Garfield mystery was solved with the help of a farmer whose memory is refreshed by a renewed campaign about the phone waste of beach cleaning crews in France.
When the local press reported the story, he contacted reporters to say he remembered seeing Garfield's phone after a storm in the early 1980s, and what's more, he knew exactly where they were coming from.
As often happens when a huge number of strange items start drifting into a certain area, these phones also "escaped" from a container that fell from a cargo ship at sea.
A similar incident happened in 1992 when a shipment of 28,000 rubber ducks were released into the ocean after a container broke loose from a cargo ship during transit from China to America.
The bath toys first came ashore in Alaska, but thousands of them continued to the Bering Strait where they froze in the Arctic ice, only to thaw a few years later and drift towards Britain.
Being bath toys, they were well prepared for Messi on the surface of the sea, but Garfield's phone was not so suitable for sea water.
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The shipping container from which they came was stuck inside a hidden sea cave, the location of which was known only to the farmer who decided to help finally crack the mystery of Garfield's phones.
Decades have passed since it crashed there, but when crews went to investigate the cave they found the destroyed container, as well as some phones still inside.
The shipping container (container) from which they came was stuck inside a hidden sea cave, the location of which was known only to the farmer who decided to help finally crack the mystery of Garfield's phones.
Decades have passed since it crashed there, but when crews went to investigate the cave they found the destroyed container, as well as some phones still inside.
"I saw Garfields and pieces of the container all over the cave," the president of the local beach cleaning association, Claire Simonin-Le More, told Ouest-France.
"But most of the phones are already gone, the sea has done its job for 30 years. We arrived after the battle."
Although the mystery is solved, Garfield's control of the French coastline continues = because although the container was located, it was in a place too difficult to reach and could not be removed from there.
With an unknown amount of cargo still hidden inside, it is not known how long sleepy orange cats will occasionally appear on British shores.
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