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Garfield Phones Beach Mystery Finally Solved After 35 Years (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A French coastal community has finally cracked the mystery behind the Garfield telephones that have plagued its picturesque beaches for decades. Since the 1980s, the Iroise coast in Brittany has received a supply of bright orange landline novelty phones shaped like the famous cartoon cat. Anti-litter campaigners have been collecting fragments of the feline for years as they clean the beaches.
But now, the source of the problem has been found -- a lost shipping container. Last year, campaigners from the Ar Vilantsou anti-litter group made the novelty phone a symbol of the plastic pollution on the beaches of the Finistere region -- part of which is a designated marine park. Once a common household item, its eyes open when the landline receiver is picked up, and thousands were made and sold during the 1980s. Collectors still buy and sell the vintage Garfield phone online today. The beach-cleaning teams had long suspected that a lost shipping container -- perhaps blown overboard -- had regurgitated its precious orange cargo. But they had never been able to find it.
But now, the source of the problem has been found -- a lost shipping container. Last year, campaigners from the Ar Vilantsou anti-litter group made the novelty phone a symbol of the plastic pollution on the beaches of the Finistere region -- part of which is a designated marine park. Once a common household item, its eyes open when the landline receiver is picked up, and thousands were made and sold during the 1980s. Collectors still buy and sell the vintage Garfield phone online today. The beach-cleaning teams had long suspected that a lost shipping container -- perhaps blown overboard -- had regurgitated its precious orange cargo. But they had never been able to find it.
First they made a list of all the plausible explanations:
1. A shipping container lost its contents
After 3 decades of work, they narrowed this list down to:
1. A shipping container lost its contents
This is absolutely brilliant investigative work.
Actually, (from TFA) they actually found the shipping container.
The media attention on the new campaign, however, drew the eye of a local farmer who remembered the first téléphone Garfield appearing after a storm in the early 1980s, when he was a young man.
He also knew the location of the container - in a secluded sea cave accessible only at low tide.
Members of the Ar Viltansou group, accompanied by Franceinfo journalists, set out to find it.
Climbing down the slippery rocks to the cave, the team spotted remnants of a destroyed shipping container - and soon, between the rocks, Garfield phones - in a more complete condition than any found before them.
Don't know why this guy didn't tell someone sooner ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .