Sooner or later, everything winds up at the Baxter Building

Welcome to the Fantastic Four's storage closet! Right next to the Negative Zone portal entrance, down the hall from Johnny's video game room, just across from The Museum of Doom Artifacts (open Monday-Friday, 10-6; please do not bring any metal into the Museum). It's here where the FF keep their large collection of DVDs (including all those copies of Fantastic Four (1994) that Corman unloaded on Reed), Sue's wedding china (she doesn't dare bring it out when Johnny and Ben are at dinner), stuff for the garage sale (the skis that Ben only used once, Johnny's asbestos sweaters, Norrin Radd's extra surfboard), and hey, what's this?



Huh. Wonder what that is? Well, it says DO NOT OPEN so in the absence of it being locked in a room with Johnny Storm and telling him it's full of Maxim magazines, the world will never know.

Apropos of absolutely nothing at all, I'm betting one of those DVDs is Raiders of the Lost Ark. After all, we do know that Ben Grimm absolutely loves that film!



You remember Raiders, doncha? The movie that ended with the Ark of the Covenant, holy relic of the ancient world-slash-Nazi face-melter, is discovered by the hero played by Harrison Ford? (No, no, not Rick Deckard or Preisdent James Marshall.)



...which gets put in a box and sealed up snugger than Ben Grimm in a SmartCar...



...locked up with a bolt that would keep even the Hulk out (admittedly, he always has trouble remembering combinations)...



And then, it gets labelled with spray paint, just like they always did in those days prior to the Brother P-Touch Labeller (or even one of those label makers where you spin the wheel and push the button and the tape comes out and it never looks as good as it does in the commercial and you can't get the back off and then it gets sticky and gets all over your fur...look, it's just difficult with hooves, that's all!



And then, it's loaded up onto a cart and pushed into a storage facility...what do you think, is this guy going "wheeeeeee" all the way down the aisle? I bet he is.



...and it disappears into a vast warehouse where, using principles Edgar Allan Poe used to keep his letters safe from the prying eyes of Mrs. Poe...



...ever, ever again.



Now wait one cotton-pickin' minute! How the Sam Scratch did Reed get his rubbery little paws on it after that???

For the answer to that, we must flash forward from 1936 to 1957, where hooligans in their hot rods disturb ant hills, refrigerators are built atomic-tough to survive the nuclear holocaust, and Doctor Henry Jones and his Russian pals arrive at Area 51, a rent-a-storage garage outside Roswell, New Mexico, where the government keeps its stuff. You have to remember to pay the bill on that every month or they sell your stuff off at auction, y'know! I've lost more action figure collections that way.



Remember this when you put your stuff into storage: always label the boxes. It's helpful to remember which box belongs in the living room and which one is for the kitchen. They'll never find that can opener in this place!



Say, some of those boxes look kinda familiar, don't they?



Yep, somewhere in there has got to be that crate they packed up two decades ago and left to be lost forever, but what are the chances anybody's gonna find it? It's buried deep inside the warehouse, and no simple chance exploration is going to reveal it. That's just beyond the realms of probability! And pretty unlikely, too.



D'oh!



So, there you go. Reed Richards probably picked up the Ark of the Covenant on one of his exploratory missions to Area 51, or possibly got give it by Nick Fury so he could test its mystic and other-worldly possibilities. Or maybe Ben accidentally bought it on eBay. All we need to do is prove conclusively that Reed Richards met Indiana Jones at one point, right?



There ya go! Easy peasy; Q.E.D.

Speaking of God-given mystical objects...



...you know which one I mean...the collector's cup where you pay for the drink but you get to keep the glass? Yeah, this thing:



Now, seeing as that archeological tomb-raider tumbler wound up in the hands of Doctor Jones, wouldn't it make sense that eventually Doctor Richards might get his hands on it?



Say. Do you think...



...could it be...???



...Nawwwwwww.