It Must Have Been the Pizza

Aha! Now I get it.

Back in the early 1990s, I was editing two fanzines: The Observer for Project Quantum Leap, and TARDIS Time Lore for United Whovians of Tucson. Most of subscribers to the Doctor Who zine were local, but when The Observer came out, Teresa and I used to have to mail hundreds of copies, some of them internationally, usually in two or three batches as we got them addressed. After a couple of issues we went to first class mail for greater reliability. I remember standing for an hour in a post office, putting $1.21 in stamps on each of about a hundred envelopes. On at least two occasions, an entire batch of envelopes failed to arrive anywhere, ever, costing the club hundreds of dollars in replacement and additional mailing costs.

Now today I've heard a report that the local postal service leads the country in finding and confiscating marijuana and other drugs from "suspicious" mail. They even bring in drug-sniffing dogs, borrowed from the Border Patrol.

Okay, how's this theory? Stacks of science fiction fanzines were deemed "suspicious" by drug-sniffing dogs, on the basis of pizza and Dr. Pepper smells, essential staples of the envelope-stuffing process.

Either that, or large numbers of postal employees were closet Scott Bakula fans.

Karen

Update: Becky comments,

LOL you can't come up with a better explanation that THAT? What about worm holes? Sucked into parallel dimensions? Evil alien plot?

I suppose we could go a couple of ways with this.
1. Stolen by Al Qaeda operatives to gain intelligence on U.S. time travel experiments in the NM desert.
2. The zines arrived in the original history, but then an Evil Leaper put wrong what once went right.
3. Eaten by sandworms.
4. Confiscated as a risk to national security. (See #1)

Any other guesses?