Socks are some of the most elusive and mysterious objects known to exist. A sock is a tubular article of clothing which is closed at one end and open at the other. Socks are intended to be worn on the feet, but fashion designers are finding increasingly interesting areas of the body to wear them. Most socks are made out of some sort of fiber, including, but not limited to: cotton, wool, nylon, polyester, and yak hair.

Socks do not obey the regular laws of physics, and are thus incredibly good at disappearing into thin air. A person will repeatedly put what he knows to be EIGHT socks into his dryer, and, mysteriously, will end up with seven at the end of the dryer cycle. Some quantum physicists theorize that dryers generate a sort of "anti-sock field." This is similar to an anti-matter field in that when an anti-sock field and a sock meet, they instantly destroy each other, releasing energy. Some think that this is actually how dryers generate heat.

Other researchers have focused upon the sock itself, citing multiple incidents of sock disappearance in places nowhere near a dryer. They hypothesize that the fairly foreign design of socks hints at an extraterrestrial influence. Who, they ask, would ever think to design a piece of footwear shaped like a tube instead of a foot? Obviously human beings wouldn't. Supporters of this theory believe that the desire to make socks was planted in the human brain in prehistoric times. Socks, they conjecture, are in fact an alien storage device or, more likely, a form of currency. Wanting to free up labor for more important purposes, extraterrestrials left humans the job of minting their money. Thus, say these theorists, disappearing socks are more of a cash withdrawal than an unexplainable phenomenon.

Despite these explainations, socks remain one of the more mysterious forms of attire in many people's minds. Even if a person carefully keeps his socks in order, pairing them together in his drawer, one morning he will open his dresser to discover one half of a pair missing. Curiously, almost 99 percent of all lost clothing consists of sockwear. The least commonly missing articles of clothing are polyester disco suits, which cannot be destroyed. While some pay no mind to socks, calmly wearing them every day, others view them as a sort of cruel joke, a taunting feeling hanging about in the back of the mind. These people have a heightened sense of clothing, describing socks as a dark sort of shadowy tingling in the gut. These so-called "clothes psychics" have closely analyzed socks for years and discovered relatively little that was not already known. What is known, however, is that socks most often disappear at the moment when the person sorting, counting, or washing them forgets that he is handling them. Socks can vanish in the instant that it takes to look at one's watch or turn one's back to answer the phone. This phenomenon is similar to that of disappearing remote controls, spoons, and newspapers. Scientists are still working to find a possible link between the three.

The scariest theory for sock disappearance dates back to before the Cold War. Soviet spies looking for weaknesses in the U.S.'s economic discovered a devious loophole in consumer spending. This was, of course, socks. The Russian military estimated that billions of dollars were spent on socks every year. By buying large sock conglomerates and fixing prices, they hoped to ruin the country's economy by forcing consumers desperate for socks to pay outrageous sums, then funneling the money back into the Russian economy. Unfortunately, this theory is at the present time unconfirmed and thought by many conspiracy theorists to be a frighteningly real possibility. Fear of communist influence has forced many "sock barons" to become reclusive individuals, overseeing operations from remote bases of command.