You know why the internet is awesome? Because you can share the experience of someone discovering a mysterious treasure. Reddit user TramStopDan documented and shared his recent experience of unlocking and discovering the contents of a box which his friend found discarded on the street next to the trash. When he managed to open it, Dan found a mind-boggling collection of posters, illustrations, text, maps, technical drawings and personal belongings.
Speculating on the original owner of the case, Dan writes: “Clearly something happened to this guy that was very memorable. It measures roughly 29″ by 38″ and almost all the drawings are very large… It appears that he was making a diorama/tabletop display. (Why? I have no idea). There are numbered parts and instructions/explanations.”
So let’s take a peek at what he found…
Pretty normal so far…
Text on a poster with corrections and a few eyebrow-raisers to quote, such as, “…but after 12 years it developed that this picture of an obvious other-world invasion…”
‘Fairly small maps, hand-drawn on a clear-ish plastic-like material.’
They all have a hole in the middle, to be overlaid on something else.
Hmmm…
Getting weirder… (or cooler) …
And as Dan puts it, “begin the crazy”…
“Now things start to get a little odd. It seems that the artist saw something in Tampa, FL in 1977 that changed him … This appears to be an early sketch of the event”.
“An obvious blending of the religious and the extraterrestrial…”
One Reddit commenter had this theory to add:
Apparently the guy went slightly insane over finding extraterrestrials in the bible. He was obsessed with “living creatures” described in Ezekiel 10 that are described as having four faces: “the first face was the face of a cherub, and the second face was the face of a man, and the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.” I guess he really wanted for that to be an alien encounter.
Also found in the briefcase was this technical drawing that looks like a patent application, quite large and very detailed. Dan looked but could not find any registered patent of this design.
So there’s your daily dose of “what the heck am I looking at?!”
It’s amazing, as well as pretty sad however, to see what people will just throw away. Maybe the author of the box’s contents isn’t around anymore, but his secret world is now forever preserved. And that’s why the internet is so great.
You can see the entire contents of the case here and an entire sub-reddit dedicated to figuring out the material here.
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PS. Discover my own visual cabinet of curiosities for the undiscovered and forgotten on my Instagram
