The Watch From the Unknown

Strange things happen every day, whether its running into an old friend to seeing something weird like a monkey running down the street. This story launches our “just weird” section and hopefully establishes the tone of this column.

This watch appeared from out of thin air on the hood of my car and we have no idea how it got there.

It all begins with a routine trip to Toys ‘R’ Us. Erin and I were in the store for about ten minutes and when we returned to the car, we did not see the watch on the hood. I’d go as far as to say that we were 100% sure that the watch was not on the hood of the car before we went into the store, nor was it there when we returned. I started driving home and we talked as usual until a strange thing started wiggling around behind the windshield wipers. The car went through some pretty sharp bends in the road and the wiggly thing moved closer into view: it was a watch band. There were no sudden noises so the watch couldn’t have falled or been thown at the car. We continued driving for several miles at 40 mph approx. and the watch didn’t seem to move at all.

We eventually pulled off into a neighborhood and Erin removed the watch from the hood of the car so that we wouldn’t lose it. It was then that we gathered some details from the watch: it was a woman’s watch with a thin leather wristband. The clasp of the watch had worn the closest hole to the watch so it had been worn by someone with a skinny wrist. The watch was also still ticking.

Upon our return home, we noticed that there was a circular mark of broken glass on the hood that was neither from impact nor caused any actual damage to the car. It was, simply put, some crud in a circular shape and broken glass. There were no marks that would have indicated that the watch landed in one location and moved to another. Not even the drive home moved the watch from its initial position.

We began theorizing about how the watch got onto the hood of the car. Several fantastical possibilities came to mind:

Scenario 1: Someone threw the watch from a bridge and it landed on the car as we drove under. Perhaps it was a jilted woman that threw a watch that her mischievous lover had given her for a special occasion such as a birthday or anniversary. We didn’t drive under any bridges or overpasses on the trip home so it couldnt have been this scenario.

Scenario 2: As a practical joke on a co-worker, someone had hung the watch from the light in the parking lot that we had parked under. While this could have been a reason the watch would have appeared on the hood while we were in the store, it surely would have caused some form of impact on the hood and sent the glass flying. Our analysis showed that the glass on the hood of the car would have filled in all of the broken glass of the watch face, not to mention that it would have likely broken the mechanisms inside the watch itself.

Scenario 3: The watch simply fell out of the sky. Maybe a woman inside of a plane was opening a window and her watch somehow came off and flew out the window, only to land on our car while we were taking those curves. There were no planes in the area so it would have had to have been some kind of top-secret military stealth plane with total sound silencing and a cloaking device that rendered it totally invisible to the human eye. Sounds perfectly reasonable, right? Except the pesky problem that there was no sound of impact, plus the velocity of any fall greater than a few feet would have scattered the glass from the watch’s face all over the hood and/or parking lot, but all of the broken glass from the watch face was indeed under the watch on the hood. This glass didn’t even scatter from its original position after we removed the watch from the car’s hood.

Scenario 4: Someone placed the watch on the car while we were in the store. While this seems the most logical of the scenarios, it leaves us with a few unanswered questions. Why did this person place the watch face-down on the car’s hood? One would assume that if someone had picked up a watch off the ground and placed it on the closest car, it was an act of helping someone out. After all, if you find something on the ground that appeared to belong to someone nearby, you would assumedly try and return it to them. Unless, of course, if you were a dirty thief. If this was the case, why would this samaratain place the watch face-down on the hood and ultimately break the watch face? Wouldn’t they place it face-up so that it wouldn’t get broken? Also, if this samaratain had the goal of returning the watch, why didn’t he or she take it inside the Toys ‘R’ Us and leave it with the customer service desk in case the person that lost the watch came looking for it inside of the store rather than on the hood of a car? The other issue with this scenario is that neither Erin nor I saw the watch near us in the parking lot as we drove into our spot, nor did we see it as we got out of the car and walked up to the store. There is also the possibility that the watch had been in the parking lot for a day or more, but we find this not to be a possibility since just the day before we’d had half a foot of snow. A watch with a leather band would have surely taken some damage from a burial in snow for 24+ hours, plus it would have had some water damage or rust, but it showed signs of neither.

Scenario 5: A woman used a prototype teleportation device in a building that we were driving by and her destination was a building across the street. As she was broken down into her basic molecular structure and sent to her destination through a wi-fi device, our car intercepted the signal, causing the molecules that made up her watch spontaneously re-form back into the watch on the hood of the car.

Originally posted 11 April 2009.