A friend of mine had an aunt who passed away, and so he ended up inheriting her car. The car came with a petrified apple pie in the back. He was insistent that the car would not start without the pie in the back window.
Several of his friends who he played in a punk band with confirmed this, that they had tested it. Take the pie out, car won't start. Put the pie back in, the car starts.
I don't think anyone ever figured out what was going on, I graduated a couple of months after hearing the story, and fell out of touch. But - timing and vapor lock makes sense, if they were always testing it by first starting the car, removing the pie, and then putting the pie back in.
As an aside, the aunt who had passed away was one Aunt Martha (after which the car was also named), which in honor of the strange car and its strange pie was what their garage punk band was named after. There's some totally unrelated band now called Aunt Martha - any evidence of their band is not on the internet.
Not to be blunt, but you might get a closer shave with Occam's Razor.
If my wife said "I'm going to the shops" I wouldn't assume she was lying until proven otherwise.
> If my wife said "I'm going to the shops" I wouldn't assume she was lying until proven otherwise.
I certainly hope you wouldn't! But the null hypothesis would indeed be that the words she speaks have no bearing on whether she is going shopping. I don't know your wife, but I find it easy to believe that your prior probability of that hypothesis is quite low.
(At least, until it becomes a pattern where she's regularly staying out all night with more and more flimsy excuses....)