The trend of students enrolled in 8:00 a.m. classes having deaths in the family has long been observed, but only recently formally studied. A comprehensive study of the phenomenon was just published, and the results are bizarre and disturbing.

Not only are students in 8:00 a.m. classes more likely to have a grandmother die during the semester, they appear to have more grandmothers than their peers in later classes, a trend that experts are finding difficult to explain.

“Not only did he have five grandmothers,” a professor quoted in the study said of one of his students, “but they all died within four months! I’ve never seen anything like it.”

There were also other common patterns noticed by the study. Students with 8:00 a.m. classes were almost twice as likely as their peers to get sick, have a wedding to attend, observe religious holidays, get abducted by aliens or witness a hit-and-run on their way to class and be asked by police to stay and give testimony. While some researchers have stated that they plan to study these effects further, the main focus of the study remains family deaths.

For a while, many speculated that this correlation was merely a coincidence. However, the recently published data makes that hard to dismiss. Several theories have been floated, from an ancient curse to a link between the ill-health of grandparents somehow causing young adults to register for earlier classes, but on the whole researchers remain stumped.