There is a phenomenon I have noticed all my life and wonder about its origin.

Perhaps they are objects from one of the multiverses suspected by proponents of string theory searching for quantum gravity unifying theory of everything.

It is characterized by shoes.

Well, actually the random appearance, typically alone but sometimes in pairs, of these in places one wouldn’t expect.

There is the random single shoe along the side of the road.

Conjoined pairs dangling from telephone wires. These tend to be of the urban species, but some have ventured into the suburbs.

Where do they come from?

In my fifty-seven years on this particular planet, twenty of those spent as a police officer wandering streets looking for suspicious activities, I have never come upon a shoe appearance in progress.

Never received a call from a parent complaining that some bully tossed their child’s shoes high up into the wires.

Never came upon a person, making their way suspiciously, wearing only a single shoe, merely feet (pardon the pun) away from an abandoned twin shoe.

I’ve seen shoes in the roadway, having been deposited by the wearer being knocked from them as a result of being hit by a car.

I often wondered if the shoes possessed a stronger attraction to gravity and that’s why they were left behind.

And there is no obvious limitation of the type of shoe, although sneakers are more common, I think that is just a matter of numbers.

Yet they show up, frequently.

Next to the wheel, the invention of shoes certainly propelled man more effectively in exploring and dominating his world.

Who had the first idea?

Divine inspiration has always been non-sensical to me. According to the “pictures”, Jesus wore sandals. Ineffective footwear for most of the planet.

Alien intervention seems unlikely given our current understanding of the universal speed limit,
the speed of light. Effectively crippling the efficacy of interstellar travel.

But maybe, instead of listening for intentionally directed narrow beams of radio waves, of obvious intelligence in origin, as the SETI project does, we should look for the source of these shoes.

They could be messages from another dimension.

A symbolic communication we need to decipher.

Like Paul not wearing shoes on the cover of Abbey Road, I suspect it is a message,

Perhaps they are telling us, look you are not going to find a way to beam yourself up, you aren’t going to be in command of an inter-stellar star ship anytime soon, you aren’t going to find a way to go faster than light.

So start walking, as the ancient Chinese saying goes, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Were they really that smart, or did they have help?