I’m pretty sure some of my friends had this phone growing up. It’s fun, but not all that practical. — Dan

If you grew up in the 1980s, there's a decent chance you had a novelty telephone in your home — one shaped like a football, a hamburger, or perhaps a cartoon character. Among the more popular options was a phone shaped like Garfield, the lasagna-loving, Monday-hating orange tabby from the Jim Davis comic strip, as seen above. The phone's eyes would open when you picked up the receiver, adding a touch of whimsy to your otherwise mundane landline experience. Thousands of these phones were manufactured and sold during the decade, and today, collectors still buy and sell the vintage items online.

But for residents of a French coastal town, these Garfield phones weren't a nostalgic curiosity. They were an inescapable nuisance.

Starting in the mid-1980s, pieces of orange plastic began washing up on a beach on the northwest tip of France. (Here’s a map.) At first, the debris was probably just confusing. But as the years went on, a pattern emerged: the plastic wasn't random garbage. It was Garfield. Specifically, it was parts of Garfield phones — sometimes intact, sometimes badly coated in grime, but always unmistakably the cartoon cat. According to the BBC, this had been happening, more or less continuously, for more than three decades.

Local anti-litter campaigners from a group called Ar Vilantsou had long suspected the source: a shipping container, likely blown overboard during a storm, regurgitating its cargo into the sea. But they couldn't prove it. The container, if it existed, had never been found.

In 2018, Ar Vilantsou decided to make the Garfield phone a symbol of plastic pollution in the region, launching a media campaign that drew national attention. And that attention caught the eye of someone who knew more than he'd ever let on: a local farmer named René Morvan.

Morvan remembered the phones appearing after a storm in the early 1980s, when he was a young man. More importantly, he remembered where they came from. "You had to really know the area well," he told Franceinfo. Decades earlier, he and his brother had explored a secluded sea cave accessible only at low tide. Inside, they found a shipping container lodged in a rock fissure, its contents spilling out. "We found a container aground in a fissure," he recalled. "It was open. A lot of things had spilled out, but there was a stash of cell phones"

After the anti-Garfield campaign took off, Morvan led members of Ar Vilantsou and a French news crew back to the cave. Climbing down the slippery rocks, they found exactly what he'd described: the rusted remnants of a shipping container, and scattered among the rocks, Garfield phones in better condition than any they'd ever pulled from the beach. (But alas, no well-preserved lasagna.) The mystery, at least, was solved.

But the problem wasn't. The container remains wedged in an inaccessible spot, and no one knows how much of its cargo is still sealed inside. The phones that escaped won't decompose in a human lifetime. For now, all locals can do is keep collecting Garfield, one orange piece at a time, as he continues his endless return to shore.

Want an A+ when it comes to AI? Subscribe to The Current written by Kim Komando and get a free AI Prompt Hack Pack filled with powerful prompts you can enter into ChatGPT to save you hours (and money) every week.

Get The Free AI Guide Here

Today’s Bonus fact: Garfield made headlines in 2018 for another weird reason. That summer, Clara Edwards, a mom in Oklahoma posted a wanted ad on her company’s employee billboard, asking “to BORROW an orange cat for 24-48 hours,” and yes, “borrow” was in all caps (as seen here). Her kids — age two and four — wanted to eat a lasagna dinner with Garfield, and this was her way of getting that done. The photo of the wanted ad went viral and, according to USA Today, a neighborly person with a fat orange tabby cat offered to come by one Sunday, helping Edwards and her kids make the dream come true.

From the Archives: Starving Garfield: A very morbid series of Garfield comic strips.

Now I Know is supported by readers like you. Yes, you! Many of my readers donate a few dollars a month to help Now I Know grow and thrive. And in exchange, they get an ad-free version!

Interested in supporting Now I Know? Click here!

And thanks! — Dan