For 35 years, parts of Garfield novelty telephones have been washing up on the shores of the Brittany region of France, and no one knew why.
Now the mystery has been solved: The cat-shaped phones are coming from a long-lost shipping container, reports the BBC.
Renewed attention to the weird phenomenon prompted a local farmer to come forward to say that decades ago, he had seen the shipping container lodged in a cave by the sea. He led a group of environmentalists to the site at low tide, and voila—there was the container, along with telltale orange plastic phones and parts.
“We found this incredible fissure that is (100 feet) deep and at the very bottom, there were the remains of a container,” says the leader of a local beach-cleaning group, per AFP.
“Under the boulders in front of the entrance, we found 23 complete handsets with electronics and wires. They were everywhere.”
The phones were hot items back in the 1980s, notes Gizmodo, and they remain collectors’ items to this day. (Read more Garfield stories.)
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