I stand before you, accused of a crime: Blanket Stealing.

This morning I was accused of a terrible and heinous crime, that of blanket-stealing. But I maintain my innocence based on a little-known scientific principle called blanket-drift. I have attempted to find some supporting documentation on the Internet, however it seems that the scientific research up to this point has been a little lacking. Wake up, white-coated individuals, this is important!

Here are the circumstances of the charges, brought against me by my beautiful wife. We go to sleep with approximately the same amount of blanket on both sides of the bed, covering us pretty much evenly. When the fog of sleep rolls back at seven o'clock in the morning, most of the blankets (one velvety-type, one electric blanket, and the top comforter) have slid about a foot toward the floor on my side of the bed, leaving Michelle huddled under a ponderously small amount of blanket. But here is my proof that is isn't me, the sheet travels in the opposite direction. If I were truly the culprit of these acts, I would take the sheet too, but that travels the other direction! My other meaningful piece of data is that it is not just the top (closest to our heads) of the blanket that travels. The half of the blankets that are covering our leg, feet and tucked in at the foot of the bed ALSO move toward my side of the bed. Now there only a small number of circumstances that I can think of which fit the facts: 1) Maybe instead of sleep-walking, I get up and pull the blanket, nice and uniformly so it is touching the floor over my side of the bed. 2) More likely: Blanket Drift.

Blanket Drift has it's foundation in physics. Everyone remembers from High School that light sometimes acts like a wave, and sometimes acts like a particle (Why can't light be a third category all by itself? Photons....Hello?). For the purpose of measuring drift, it acts like a wave. Light, acting like a wave, traveling to us from distant stars and galaxies gets acted upon in one of two ways: Elongated, if the light emitting source is moving away from us the wave forms get stretched out as they travel from there to here. This is called Red-Shift. The opposite effect is called Blue-shift, when the light wave forms get compressed towards each other shortening the frequency. I am still analyzing how this exactly translates to blanket theory, but I am confident, especially with any grant money anyone wants to allow me, I will crack the mystery soon enough.