Don Stauffer
After reading this thread, I now realize where those little pieces I drop on the floor go. I used to blame it on the plastic bugs, that eat plastic parts. Now that I know they enter the twilight zone, or else that storm featured in the Final Countdown. Those are the parts that disappear, and weeks later re-appear in some spot I thoroughly investigated at the time I dropped the part!
I've joked (and sometimes fumed) for years about precisely the same phenomenon! I call them 'random singularities': mini black holes that open up just to catch a falling (or flying) part...transport it somewhere to the other side of the universe for an unspecified time...and then return it---long after the project in question is completed---back to exactly the place it was searched for, multiple times, when it disappeared!
I have this image in my mind of bits of plastic and the occasional modeling tool all floating together in some galactic void, or in orbit around some distant planet of Tenax-breathing amphibian hobbyists.