we have scissors to find them… open a pair of scissors, hang them on a nail open… they will find the object for you. 
It’s a glitch in the matrix
It’s the uncertaintly principle. You know how fast they’re moving, because you left them right there. You have to forget where they are, because otherwise all of causality is disrupted. It’s a blessing, really. They can only reappear when you forget all about them.
I’ve had things seem to disappear, in that I’m confident there are only a small number of places I could have put something and it’s not in any of them. Often I can’t find it because of an assumption I’ve made. But I’ve never, as far as I remember, found it in a place I’m sure it wasn’t before.
I do sometimes, for example, open the fridge to look for mayonnaise and can’t see it anywhere, then look again (or someone else looks) and it’s so obviously right there. Again, I put that down to assumptions (perhaps that finding the mayonnaise will require some looking so it can’t be right in front of me).
I suggest you run another experiment. When this happens, mark the spot you’re certain that the object should be in. Put a post-it there for instance with “My keys should be right here.” I expect when you discover them later, you’ll find they were somewhere else close by and your memory has been flawed when you’ve previously been sure they returned to the exact spot.
This assumes your statement of “exactly where you know you left them” means “this two inch square piece of desk real-estate” and not “somewhere on my desk”. If you actually meant “somewhere on my desk” you should remove every item on the desk until you either find the item you’re looking for or the desk is completely clear. If you completely clear it you should sprinkle flour all over it so the gnomes make footprints when they return the item.
I’ve overlooked items in plain sight as well. I put it down to “My ability to pick out a searched for item in a quick scan of an area is not as good as I think it is when I select scanning speeds.”
Can’t remember where, but years ago I read a theory that crosstime travel (travel between parallel worlds/alternate timelines) is not at all difficult - in fact, it’s so easy that people do it all the time without noticing.
There’s your answer…
Perception is a funny thing - we think we’re seeing the real world as it exists, but actually, it’s more like we’re seeing a picture of it, painted by a team of impressionists, who all speak different languages, and communicate via semaphore.
What we perceive as a continuous, seamless world is in fact cobbled together from fragmentary snapshots and fumbly inferences - thus it’s easy for us to see things that are not there (patterns in shadows or clouds, etc. Ghosts, UFOs…), or to entirely fail to see things that are right there in front of us.
It’s also possible, in a limited sense, to train your perception to do the opposite of not noticing something - to attune your senses so that you notice things others commonly do not - I often put this to practical use when searching for things like fossils, wild strawberries, seaglass, or lost coins.
Clearly, someone is gaslighting you.
I told this story on the lost diamond thread.
I used to stay at my exBF’s house a lot. I had a fabric bag/knapsack that I took back and forth to my house. A bunch of my earrings started to pile up on the dresser right next to where the bag always sat on the floor. One day just a couple of months into the relationship, I went to put on my favorite pair, and one was missing. At this point, I was still going back and forth to my house and carried this bag back and forth, too. Eventually I just left it there, because I had enough clothes, etc., at his house that I didn’t need extra stuff.
I went through the bag looking for the earring, emptied it out, turned it inside out, felt for torn seams inside where the earring might have gone. I looked all over the floor, in every one of the dresser drawers, under the bed. I did this repeatedly, many times, over the course of our 5.5 year relationship, but I never found the missing earring. I kept the other earring.
Years went by and we broke up due to various things. I took all my stuff home, including the bag, all the stuff from the dresser top, and the other stuff that piles up around the house in those situations. I put the bag in my closet at my house.
A year after we broke up, I signed up for a p.e. class at the community college I attend and thought that bag would be good to carry my gym stuff in. I pulled it out of the closet without opening it and set it on my bed. I looked down on the floor and there was the missing earring.
All I can think is that it was caught on the outside of the bag… but I had carried the bag back and forth numerous times after the earring disappeared and it never fell off. It remains a mystery. The end.
In my workshop, I have workshop gnomes. At least, I think they are gnomes. I have never seen one, but I have no doubt of their existance.
Many, many times this has happened to me and others who have worked with me in my shop ----
You drop something on the floor, or more likely, something rolls off the workbench onto the floor. Could be a screw, a small part, might be something that could roll, but is usually something that won’t travel far.
You immediately look for the errant object, but you don’t see it on the floor. You look repeatedly, over and over, getting down on the ground and looking for anything that stands out from the floor, go all around with a flashlight to see if the extra light helps or reflects back at you — nothing. You check the entire area where it logically should have fallen or rolled, but it’s not there. You check a larger radius from this area, and still nothing.
The part has vanished.
This happens often enough that I keep plenty of spare parts around, so I just replace the missing part with another and go on about my business. Working and walking back and forth in the same area for hours never produces the part or a clue where it went.
The next morning, I come into my shop, turn on the lights, and walk over to my work area. Before I even get there, I spy the missing part there on the floor. In the middle of the floor. Where I looked a dozen times. Where I would have had to walk on it many times the day before had it been there. It could not possibly have been there all this time.
My explanation - workshop gnomes. They live under my workbench and collect all the tiny stray parts that make their way to the floor and gather them like so much mechanical booty under the bench, rich in their hoard of assorted screws, nuts and metal scraps, a silent group of greedy creatures, still trying to figure out how to get to the 4)Profit! part of their dedicated employment.
Sometimes I drop a part that they already have an overstock on, or they don’t really need. These parts they throw back out onto the floor in front of my workbench every night for me to find them in the morning and wonder what inter-dimensional packrat left it there.
This often happens to me because the mental image of what I am looking for is wrong. An example: I know I bought ice tea mix and put it on my counter. I go to look for it and cannot see it.
I think back and remember I usually buy the square box, but today, because it was on sale, I bought the round canister. And there it is.
Another example: I am downloading the Green Lantern movie to a friend’s computer. The damn instructions fall on the floor and we cannot find them. Fifteen minutes later, I start looking at every single paper on the floor.
We were looking for something Green. The damn paper had flipped over the the other side, which was black.
http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html
Great stuff. You don’t know what you don’t see until you see it.
I am with you all on this, i have had a few (only a few) that fall into the never explained group, one so scary and far fetched I dare not tell the story!
using Occams razor I go with the inter-dementinal transport theory , so many of us just can not be that thick!
Please update this thread when the pencil saturation point is reached. I go through a box of pencils a month at work and have been doing it for almost 7 years. I’m pretty sure that most of them are on the 3rd level of boxes (because I’m so lazy), but when I scan the tops of the boxes, I can never find one and have to go back to my office to grab some more.
This actually worked for me with my car key once. I took my car key off the key chain, and for two bliss full years I could find my key in what ever pocket, shelf, or bag I left it in. I was crushed when I realized I was using three different keys.
(I never misplace the key to my current car. I think it’s because the car, and the key, used to belong to my spouse, for whom small metal objects do not time-travel.)
Yes. It is called a search image. Animal predators that hunt visually are thought to have specific search images, which sometimes lead them to miss prey they could eat, because it does not look like what they have got used to looking for. Archeologists and paleontologists also talk about having search images for the sorts or artifacts or fossils they are after.
So, that is … what? the obverse … of noticing something when it doesn’t comply with your expectations?
Isn’t this known as the Pencil Event Horizon?
I’m delighted to read this - because it concurs so well with my experience. I’ve developed a search image for dropped coins that’s so ingrained, It almost feels like a palpable ‘tug’ when one enters my field of view.
The vanishing objects thing happened to me this morning. I carry a small LED torch in my coat pocket - I took it out this morning while I was still in the front hall, so I could look at something in the dim light. After I put on my shoes to leave, I reached for the torch and it wasn’t there.
I looked all around, checked in my bag, searched my coat and trouser pockets by touch, then my emptying out. Couldn’t find it, so I set off thinking it must have rolled under a chair or something.
Got on the train and noticed a cylindrical bulge in my right trouser pocket, and there it was. One of only three items in that pocket, a pocket I had searched, emptied and searched again.
I just thought my house was haunted & had a sick sense of humor. Whatever I’m looking for (that can’t be found) will invariably show up days later in exactly the spot I was searching. I can hear the basement giggle.