It’s a stupid question, but what’s that thing along U.S. Highway 550/160 by Basin Co-op? It looks like a metal box on top of a pole. It’s between the frontage road and the highway. I’ve been driving past it for years and wondered what the heck it is. – Curious Commuter

A mysterious object in plain view? Action Line lives for this kind of investigation!

A reconnoiter of Basin Co-op’s perimeter revealed an unmarked metal box on a pipe cemented in the ground.

What’s more, there was a lock on the box. It’s time to start asking some tough questions.

Action Line burst into Basin Co-op to grill the clerks: “Do you guys know what that box-on-a-pole is?”

“What box?” the clerk replied with puzzled look on her face.

“The one out there by the highway.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She had a co-worker cover the register and went outside to inspect.

Basin Co-op knows all about horse troughs, salt licks and fence panels but not so much about strange roadside objects.

“I have no idea what that is. Weird,” the clerk said.

Undaunted, Action Line rounded up the usual suspect: none other than our good friend Nancy Shank of the Colorado Department of Transportation.

If anyone would know about strange roadside objects, it would be Nancy.

The CDOT spokeswoman made the rounds, asking engineers, planners, managers – everyone. Nancy came up empty-handed.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

Sherlock Holmes had an explanation for this kind of situation: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

One local wag suggested it was “Al Gore’s Lock Box.”

Remember the “lock box” trope? During a presidential candidates debate in 2000, the then-vice president suggested sequestering Social Security and Medicare funds in a “lock box.”

You can look that up on the Internet.

Coincidently, Al Gore invented the Internet.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Action Line chimed in.

“It’s a giant smart meter,” she deadpanned.

Mrs. Action Line, as we all know, is the voice of reason in an increasingly irrational world, and her hypothesis leads to an even more logical explanation.

The strange roadside object is a “dead drop.”

Dead drops are secret locations spies use to pass items or documents. One spook drops the item. The other spook comes along later and picks it up. Thus the spooks don’t speak.

That’s gotta be it. Why else would there be a lock on the box?

The U.S. 550/160 dead drop is where United Nations undercover operatives place classified directives for deeply embedded activists to implement Agenda 21 locally.

Agenda 21 calls for cooperation, environmental responsibility and sustainable growth.

In other words: annexing rural La Plata County, confiscating guns, stepping up chemtrail sprays, enforcing population controls, monitoring private conversations and establishing a New World Order with mandatory vaccination, fluoridated water and global warming re-education camps.

Can you identify the roadside thingy? Send along your wild speculation, half-baked ideas and ridiculous conspiracy theories.

Of course, this will require thinking outside the box.

Email questions to actionline@durangoherald.com or mail them to Action Line, The Durango Herald, 1275 Main Ave., Durango, CO 81301. You can request anonymity if you’ve seen the invisible black helicopters.