Brian Rogers Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

Those who know the Bureta area have for years been puzzled by the many unexplained disappearances.
From the little things, such as golf balls that vanish from the course, to the larger items – such as the missing Trust Hotel – every year the mystery deepens.

One theory on the golf balls is that they roll into the ditch and sink into the mud. Of course this is far too simple and logical. Alien abduction is the only plausible explanation.
The missing Trust Hotel is a bit more difficult to explain. Some people (obviously hallucinating) say the Trust is no longer visible because the hotel changed its name to something like ‘Bureta Park Motor Inn'. However, our exhaustive research suggests it's more likely, and makes a much better story, that the hotel has fallen into a giant black hole or been sucked into an invisible time warp – typical of The Bureta Triangle.
Certainly, many of the people who used to frequent the Trust Hotel, looked like they had come from an invisible time warp.
Some say the disappearances can all be explained away by natural phenomenon. Others have trouble saying ‘phenomenon,' so they find it more convenient to blame weather balloons. We are not sure why weather balloons always get the finger pointed for causing strange phenomena, perhaps it is a convenient explanation for anything we don't understand.
(You may well remember the song popularised by the muppets: ‘Phenomena, do doo be doo be'.)
I feel for the people who run the Weather Balloon factory. They must be really frustrated with people constantly blaming their products for weird happenings in the sky.
Doris: 'Albie, you won't believe this. They're saying that our weather balloons are causing people to see things, and for global climate change. Last week it was UFO sightings, then we took the rap for Susan Boyle coughing during a live performance. What next?”
Albert doesn't answer Doris; he's too busy wrapping himself in tinfoil under his magnetic pyramid to ward off the ‘evil in the sky'.
Anyway back to the Bureta Triangle. There have been other odd disappearances too.
Flight 19 is one of the strangest. So strange, that is all we can tell you about it.
Another weird disappearance is the mysterious loss of Bigfoot. Not a trace. Not even an oversized mammalian footprint in the rose garden outside the Bureta vicarage. The large, hairy mountain man has never been seen in Bureta. No-one knows what happened to him. Now isn't that spooky?
Then there's this mystery: Bureta has the top shops and the lower shops, but to this day, no-one can explain what happened to the middle shops.
I personally discovered the eerie mystery of Bureta when, at the tender age of four, went missing myself from the St John's church fair.
One reported sighting of young Brian came from Pine Ave, where a man doing his gardening heard a youngster crying, 'I wanna go home” and 'why hasn't Mr Garmin invented the GPS yet?”
Fortunately, I was later rediscovered quite by chance, ambling along Ngatai Road. A popular theory is that I wandered away from my best friend Peter Sargent while perusing the used book stall.
(Historians have discounted rumours that he may have traded me in for a dog-eared copy of ‘Biggles Flies Again'.)
We all know that in the paranormal environment of the top shops, telepathic levitation was a possible cause; or more sinister, extraterrestrial abduction.
If I'd had a compass, (probably in my shoe, like Maxwell Smart) the needle would be spinning wildly and there would have been strange lights in the sky.
My distraught parents have dedicated most of the decades since then trying to find an explanation and to contact the extraterrestrials… to tell them: ‘Please pick him up again'.