Unsolvable Mysteries: The case of the missing DVDs

If only these DVDs could talk...what a story they would have to tell.  Let me set the scene for you.

It was a dark and stormy night...

Wait that's not right.  Let me try again.

Once upon a time...

That doesn't sound right either.  I guess I'll just cut to the chase, then.

In my library, we have been having a rash of missing and mixed-up DVDs for about a month and a half now, as if some elf is going through the section when nobody's looking, rearranging which DVDs go in which cases, and removing some of them all together.  We never saw anyone over there looking suspicious, and while some of the mix-ups were clearly the same patron, there were far too many of them not connected to the same patron's record for it to be solely them.

Then one day, we get the following stack of disks in the book drop, in a ziplock bag - no note, no cases, nothing.

There were thirty DVDs there, all children's movies, and most of them were ours.  There were three oddballs, though.  Movies without cases from other libraries, but not just any libraries -- libraries from another state.  We're not even particularly close to the state border, either.  Also, some of the movies we got back were missing for so long that we deleted or reordered them.  Whatever has been going on, it has a history longer than our knowledge of it.  It's all very strange.

Popular theories include:  a child stealing DVDs for kicks and a parent discovering the stash while cleaning their room and being too embarrassed to return the DVDs in person and force the child to apologize, someone who doesn't understand how borrowing works at the library, and aliens trying to learn more about Earth's history before they decide if we're a good candidate for contact.  None of these really explain the out-of-state ones, though.  We'll never know what really happened, but if you've got some interesting ideas on the subject, we'd love to hear them in the comments.

Anyway, it's now a side-project to make new cases and/or catalog records for the prodigal DVDs, re-unite known empties with returns, and hunt down empty cases we didn't even know were missing their movies.  The out-of-state libraries in question will also be receiving a mysterious package soon with their wayward movies nestled inside, and a note explaining their bizarre circumstances of return, causing more librarians to puzzle over this unsolvable mystery.