enigmatic puzzle - The Science Department

Today I decided to take another tour of the local university. We went into the science department first.

Suddenly, I found myself harassed by a woman in a lab coat. She exclaimed in an urgent voice, 'My experiment's gone!'

'Gone where?' you ask.

'I don't know, just gone!'

Last time you were pulled out of the tour in the mathematics department, it looks like it's going to happen again. She drags you towards a nearby laboratory.

As you go, you realise she's holding a stack of papers about birds. 'What's those?' you ask.

'I'm a birdwatcher in my spare time. I was collating my club's observations from this morning.' Opening the door, she gestures to a box in a lab. 'Look! Nothing!' You realise that's not the whole truth, as you pick up a scrap of paper she's dropped on the floor. You drop it again just as she spins to usher you out again.

What you can see of the papers she is holding (___ indicates a gap of arbitrary length):

Not___

• Bir___rved to be fly___ocks with usu___ormat___n.


• Leng___ails:___ound 45 me___


• Ta___gle fr___avel direc___bout 25___rees


• Spee___tra___: aro___ 20 m___s pe___ute, in ___aight lin___


• Floc___lew at di___ent heig___

The scrap on the floor:

Sighted flocks on metre grid centred at Point Zero:

   FRONT     DIR   TIME
( 200, 680)   S    0926
( 330,-420)   N    0937
( 110,-180)   N    0949
(  70, 120)   S    0954
( 290,  80)   N    1002

(- 10,  20)   W    1007
( 250,-300)   S    1015
(   0, 440)   N    1020

---

Press Release!

_(hint)

Massive congregations of birds have been seen flying past the city centre recently! Watch out for airborne droppings!

Another hint:

Obviously the birds need to make a message somehow. Where?

---

^{This story is based on a fictional event and taken from there...}

Part of an upcoming metapuzzle.

Answer

The box contains ...

... a vacuum.

Or, in the language of the birds:

This is the pattern the formations have at 10:00 hours.

Nautilus and tmpierce have already worked out what the gaps in the notes mean. With the help of these notes we know the uniform speed of the formations. The formations have the typical V pattern. The 45m length and the angle of 25° corresond roughly to distances of 40m in flight direction and 20m perpendicular to that.

The note that says that the formations have different altitudes is just to rule out that they collide. (The hint about droppings first made me think that the message were written on the ground, in which case the exact altitudes would have mattered. The birds here are well behaved and continent, though. Phew!)

Note that the above image is the view from the ground. The top view is mirrored.