Imagine this: one day, for no apparent reason, phones start washing up on a remote shore. Weirder still — they are all Garfield phones and they keep coming.

Key points: A media campaign was launched to locate the source of the Garfields

A media campaign was launched to locate the source of the Garfields One local remembered a crucial clue from a storm almost 40 years earlier

One local remembered a crucial clue from a storm almost 40 years earlier Garfield was a popular cartoon and comic in the 80s

This is the strange scenario that for almost 40 years has played out along the coast of Brittany in France.

Garfield was a big deal in the 1980s and a number of phones and other products were produced until the 1990s.

But no-one had any idea as to why the phones were appearing along this part of the French coast.

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A media campaign to locate the source of the phones has finally solved the mystery.

Local man Rene Morvan said they first started appearing in the early 1980s. He also knew that a lost shipping container was in a remote sea cave nearby, but only accessible in low tide.

"At the time, I was between 19 and 20 years old. There was a big storm. With my brother, we saw phones everywhere on the beach," he told news site Franceinfo.

His information proved crucial in locating the shipping container.

"You had to really know the area well," he said.

"We found a container aground in a fissure. It was open. Many of the things were gone, but there was a stock of phones."

A group of French environmentalists located the container with Mr Morvan's help.

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The group's leader, Claire Simonin-Le Meur, said the fact the phones were still intact shows how much damage plastic pollution can cause.

"There is a feeling of desolation and sadness too", she told Franceinfo.

"Because we can see the pollution that this represents for the fauna and flora of the environment."