Oops is an exclamation we often sound after bumping our elbows or making some other mistake accidentally. But the term has a double meaning. Out of place objects (OOPS) or out of place artifacts (OOParts) are a phenomena by which objects or animals appear under mysterious circumstances or appear to have always been in a location despite the fact that there is no reason for their presence. OOPs (pronounced by spelling the name out or simply saying Oop) are located all over the world with the only common factor being that they appear very far from home. And it categorizes everything that simply should not or could not be where it was found without quite a bit of explaining.
Examples of Oops have been observed throughout history, but there are specific examples that have been recorded as recently as this year with black cats and even tigers being found in unexplainable habitats all around the world. Sharks have been discovered swimming in lakes where they could not survive for long or along stretches of ocean where they simply never go. And Kangaroos have been discovered hopping along through the American Midwest an entire half globe away from their natural habitat in Australia.
But it’s not simply left to the unexplained discovery of animals in locations they should not be. OOPs can be categorized as inanimate objects as well. OOParts have been found ranging from an automobile spark plug discovered in a strata of rock dated millions of years old to Viking helmets and ships discovered inland in Canada. The phenomenon is troubling to say the least, and require several different explanations to make any sense of it.
The first possibility is that there is a very real possibility of objects suddenly spontaneously teleporting to another location on the Earth. A sufficient pool of personal or environmental energy is utilized to open a rift in the space-time continuum and objects are suddenly transported to locations that are alien to them. Of course this explanation requires that for every survivable environment an object or entity is transported to there must be several others who find themselves in the vacuum of space or embedded in the Earth’s crust. While this isn’t necessarily beyond the realm of possibility, the lack of an explainable “force” acting to move objects renders this theory beyond the realm of understandable science.
Another explanation is a series of incredibly unlikely events that allow objects to, through no more force than the natural universe, find themselves in locations they should not be in. These would include a combination of migratory deviation, perseverance and survival, a mountain of luck ensuring they are not detected, and then natural forces such as high winds to transport them safely. While this seems a very specific explanation, and it doesn’t explain OOparts for the most part, it has been proposed as a potential explanation for animals in unknown environments. And while this explanation may be more mundane, it does not seem incredibly likely. And that’s exactly what makes OOPs so interesting.