Damning Deflategate Documents Also Mysteriously Vanish

There's always a lot going on that we don't have time to get to on the blog, but there's something specific going on behind the scenes right now that we did feel we should tell you about. On Monday of this week we received - from a source - a collection of confidential documents related to Deflategate. We believe those documents are authentic, they're real and they are super damning, you guys.

When we received these documents, that both exist and are 100 percent real, myself and my editors were all in our various homes across the country preparing to write about various people in sports and pop culture that we consider "a snack." So we made the obvious decision to send the actual, original, physical documents around the country Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants-style so that everyone could get a good look at these documents which are - and I can't stress this enough - super duper real.

On Monday afternoon of this week, we shipped those documents overnight with a large independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal service in the United States, that we and probably you have even used multiple times without a single problem. Yeah, it's probably the one you're thinking of right now. That's the one we used. Whatever one you are most familiar with and thus easiest to imagine shipping documents with. That one.

But then something very crazy and unforeseen happened - the Deflategate documents never arrived.

Tuesday morning we received word from the unnamed government agency that mails things, that our package had been opened and the contents were missing. The documents, which really truly existed, had disappeared!

Now, to its credit, this service which I am not going to name but you know the one, took this very seriously and immediately launched a search. They traced the envelope from the moment it was dropped off, in a city you've heard of on Monday, all the way to 3:44 a.m, yesterday morning which is when employees are their sharpest and make sure to check every parcel. That's when an employee at a sorting facility in another state noticed that our package was open and empty.

Apparently, it had been opened. It was closed, but when they checked it, it was not closed. It was open. And empty, which was the most surprising part because there had been stuff - specifically documents - inside it when we had dropped it off. Curious, right?

So the security team did some contact tracing and interviewed every one of the agency's employees who had touched the envelope we sent. They searched the trucks the documents had ridden in. They went through the office where we had dropped them off. They searched the plane where the documents had flown economy and watched half of Uncut Gems and 10 minutes of Cats before shutting off the in-flight entertainment. They even did a hard target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, hen house, outhouse and doghouse in that area and set up checkpoints at 15 miles.

They searched the cavernous sorting facility where every employee had individually handled these very real documents at least once because they had all been so fascinated by how real and full of documents this envelope had been.

We gave them pictures which we had taken of these documents which we had taken because in today's society you take pictures of everything because we all have a camera in our pocket, you know? Especially, if you documents proving that Tom Brady deflated footballs to cheat in the NFL playoffs - like we totally did - you would take pictures. You wouldn't scan them or make copies, but you would take pictures.

Which we did! And the people in the sorting facility looked at the pictures and were very impressed that these real documents were the exact ones they had all handled earlier.

So, yeah, it was a very thorough search, which is what makes it so crazy that they found nothing. Those documents have vanished. As of tonight the office where we posted these documents has no idea - and no working theory even! - about what happened to this trove (yes, it's a whole-ass trove now) of materials. Documents that are directly relevant to the 2015 AFC Championship Game which happened just six years ago.

We spoke to executives at the post offi... er, this agency a few hours ago and they seemed baffled and deeply bothered by this. And so are we. Hopefully, this is just a one-time thing.