NAKED MAN HIJACKS BUS
A naked man was arrested in 2008 after hijacking a Las Vegas bus. Police said he punched in a back window of the bus, climbed aboard, forced the driver off, and then drove the bus for about 200 yards before jumping off again while it was still moving. The arrested man was given a mental evaluation.
PASSENGER EATS WINNING SCRATCH CARD
An airline passenger ate his $18,000 winning scratch card in protest at not being able to claim the money immediately. The man was flying with Ryanair from Krakow in Poland to England’s East Midlands Airport in 2010 when he won 10,000 euros with the scratch card. The flight crew confirmed that he had won the prize but told him that because it was such a large sum, he would have to collect the jackpot directly from the company that ran the competition. Ryanair said the man then became frustrated and started to eat his winning ticket, thus making it impossible for him to claim the prize money. A Ryanair spokesman said: “He clearly felt that we should have his 10,000 euro prize kicking around on the aircraft.”
SHEIKH FLIES CAR TO LONDON FOR OIL CHANGE
A wealthy Arab sheikh spent $50,000 flying his luxury Lamborghini car from Qatar to London – for nothing more than an oil change.
DRIVER DOES 60 MILES PER HOUR ON HARD SHOULDER
Speeding along the breakdown lane on a highway in Ontario, a driver touched speeds of 62 miles per hour and passed more than 300 vehicles before he was eventually pulled over by police. By way of explanation, he told them that there was a chance his car was going to break down between Toronto and North Bay, and he wanted to be already on the shoulder when it did.
MOBILITY SCOOTER IN CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY
Arnold Saunders was stunned to receive a parking fine for his mobility scooter in Birmingham – particularly as he had not left the Isle of Wight, 170 miles away, since moving there two years earlier. The 89-year-old said the journey to the Midlands would have taken nearly 30 hours if he had travelled at the scooter’s top speed of 6 miles per hour. However he would have had to persuade eight people to let him recharge its battery en route, as it has a range of just 20 miles. A spokesman for Birmingham City Council speculated that a car was driving around the city with the same licence plate as Mr Saunders’ electric buggy.
WOMAN FLASHES DRIVERS TO STAY OUT OF DEBT
A Pennsylvania woman was arrested in 2001 for standing by the side of the road and exposing her butt to drivers. She had apparently been told by her grandmother that doing so would keep her out of debt.
FLIGHT ATTENDANT RUNS SEMI-NAKED AROUND PLANE
After British Airways flight attendant Andrea O’Neill lost a bet with colleagues on whether her plane would land on time in Genoa, Italy, she fulfilled her side of the wager by stripping down to her panties, shoes, safety waistcoat and pilot’s hat and ran a lap around the plane. There were no passengers in the vicinity at the time but fellow cabin crew, baggage handlers and cleaning staff all caught a glimpse of the semi-streak. British Airways said it was impressed by her dedication to punctuality. A spokesman said: “I guess we ought to take our hats off to her – but nothing else.”
BANNED AFTER TAKING 11 YEARS TO PASS TEST
A 73-year-old man who took 11 years and eight attempts to pass his driving test was banned five weeks later for drink driving.
PEDESTRIAN HIT BY MICHAEL SCHUMACHER IN VAN
A pedestrian in Kent, England, who was hit by a van during an overtaking manoeuvre could hardly believe his ears when the police told him the van driver was none other than German Formula 1 ace Michael Schumacher. The seven-time world champion, who was on his way to a private airfield, dealt car salesman Martin Kingham only a glancing blow, but it was enough to throw him onto the hood of a parked vehicle. “I thought I recognized the driver,” said Mr Kingham afterwards, “but my head was spinning. Then the penny suddenly dropped. When I phoned my business partner later and told him that ‘you’ll never guess who I’ve been run over by’, he wouldn’t believe me.”
DRUNK DRIVES HOME IN GOLF CART
Stranded at a golf club in Richfield, Wisconsin, after drinking several beers, a 47-year-old man decided to “borrow” a golf cart and drive it home – for 40 miles. He was stopped by police driving the cart on Highway 175. Before hitting the road in the commandeered cart, he had not even taken the time to throw out the empty beer cans.
DRUNK DRIVER REPORTS HERSELF
A 17-year-old girl in Bismarck, North Dakota, called 911 on New Year’s Eve 2008 to report that she was driving while drunk. She gave her location, and officers found her downtown in a parked car. Police Lt. Randy Ziegler said: “I’ve never heard of such a thing happening, and neither has anyone here.”
FLIGHT IS GROUNDED BY MUSHROOM SOUP
A flight from Budapest to Dublin was forced to make an unscheduled landing in Germany in 2008 after a jar of mushroom soup in an overhead locker started leaking. With desperate misfortune, it dripped on to a passenger who happened to be severely allergic to mushroom soup. As the passenger’s neck swelled up and he struggled for breath, the Ryanair flight was diverted to Frankfurt Hahn airport so that he could receive emergency medical aid.
MAN DRIVES TANK TO BUY ICE CREAM
A man drove a 12-ton tank through the centre of a historic Czech town in 2006 . . . just to buy his kids an ice cream. Miroslav Tucek told police he had to use the armoured personnel carrier through the narrow streets of Hradec Kralove because he had promised his children an ice cream and his car had broken down.
WOMAN WRECKS SIX CARS WHILE TRYING TO PARK
A 49-year-old woman driver on a 2001 shopping trip in Hamburg, Germany, wrecked six cars (plus her own) and caused an estimated $15,000 worth of damage – simply while trying to park. Her foot slipped as she tried to reverse into a parking space, and this sent her speeding back into two cars. The impact was so great that they in turn knocked into two others, one of which rolled into a main road where it collided with two cars heading down the street. To add to her woes, her insurance company refused her claim.
HIJACK ALERT TURNS OUT TO BE FRIENDLY GREETING
The FBI, a county SWAT team, and a squad of police officers were urgently summoned in 2000 after flight controllers at Oakland International Airport, Michigan, speaking with an incoming jet over the radio, heard the word “hijack”. However when the plane landed, they realized there was no terrorist on board. Instead someone had simply stepped into the cockpit to say “hi” to the co-pilot, whose name was Jack.
AIRLINE LAUNCHES NAKED FLIGHTS
A German airline announced in 2008 that it was introducing special flights for naturists in a bid to recapture the spirit of old Communist East Germany. Enrico Hess, founder of the company OssiUrlaub.de, explained: “In the former East Germany, naturist holidays were a much-loved way of spending the best weeks of the year. All the passengers will fly naked, but they are only allowed to undress once they are in the plane. The pilots and cabin crew, however, will remain clothed.”
“PEACE LOVING DRIVER LASHED OUT”
Frustrated that a truck ahead of her was moving too slowly along a two-lane road in Tustin, California, police said Lisa Lind pulled up alongside it in her car and aimed a series of blows at the vehicle with a baseball bat before throwing a can of air freshener at it. Her car had the personalized number plate PEACE 95. A Highway Patrol officer attending the incident said: “She told me she got it because there was so much violence going on in today’s society.”
PILOT LANDS AT WRONG AIRPORT
After completing a textbook landing, a Ryanair pilot announced to passengers: “This is your captain speaking. I may have landed at the wrong airport. Er, sorry.” The 39 passengers on the March 2006 flight from Liverpool were supposed to be travelling to Ireland’s City of Derry airport but the pilot mistakenly landed at Ballykelly military airbase five miles away. He said he only realized his error when dozens of surprised soldiers came running towards the plane.
STUTTER PREVENTS MAN BECOMING DRIVING EXAMINER
A
man was barred from becoming a driving examiner in Southampton because his stutter meant that he could not say “Stop” in an emergency.
WOMAN KEEPS HAIR APPOINTMENT AFTER CRASH
Arriving for a 2007 hair appointment in Soldotna, Alaska, 73-year-old Della Miller saw her car skid on snow and crash through the front window of the salon, causing $15,000 damage and knocking a customer six feet across the room. Although shaken by the incident, Miller proceeded with her hair appointment.
AIRPLANE TAKES OFF WITHOUT PILOT
A pilot could only look on in horror as his plane took off without him. The 70-year-old pilot was taxiing the single-seater plane at Barton Aerodome, near Manchester, England, in 2006 when the engine cut out. He climbed from the cockpit to restart the motor manually but accidentally nudged the throttle lever open with the result that as soon as he spun the propeller, the plane surged down the runway. He desperately clung to the wing in the hope of preventing it taking off but he lost his grip and saw the plane soar into the sky where it performed an involuntary loop before crashing. The pilot said he hadn’t realized he had knocked the throttle because he was wearing padded clothing.
BOY’S BICYCLE SOLD BY MISTAKE
Thirteen-year-old Cody Young made the mistake of parking his expensive BMX bicycle just inside the front door of a charity store in Salem, Oregon, in 2008. And while Cody was browsing around the store, an employee, thinking the bike was for sale, sold it to a customer for $6.99.
LOVELORN VIOLINIST CAUSES PLANE BOMB ALERT
At the end of a 1995 tour of the United States with a travelling theatre group, violinist Nuala Ni Chanainn was sitting on a plane at San Francisco Airport about to head home to Ireland. However just before the plane was due to take off, she suddenly jumped up, disembarked and ran to the terminal buildings. TWA officials thought she must have planted a bomb, and a sniffer dog was brought in to search the plane and her luggage, causing a delay of four hours. Finally she managed to convince them that there was no bomb – the reason she had left the plane in such a hurry was that she just couldn’t bear to leave her new boyfriend.
MR BEAN GETS LOST
On his second day as a Glasgow bus driver, Barry Bean became hopelessly lost and ended up wedging his bus under a low bridge. Not content with one mishap, his attempts to release the vehicle saw him crash into a parked car, hit a lamppost, and demolish several garden fences. A passer-by commented: “It was chaos, but we couldn’t keep a straight face when the driver said his name was Mr Bean.”
FRIENDS SEND SLEEPING MAN ON RAIL JOURNEY
When Gerle Kittler nodded off on the couch during a party, his friends decided to play a joke on him. So they wheeled the still-sleeping Kittler more than a mile to the local railway station and put him on a train after buying a single ticket for him and a bike ticket for the couch. He woke up on a platform four miles down the line in Warngau, Germany, still stretched out on the sofa and being quizzed by police. He said afterwards: “I always sleep like a baby, so I didn’t notice anything until the cops shook me awake and demanded my ID. I thought I was in the middle of a bad movie.”
BOY TAKES AIRPLANE FOR JOY RIDE
A 14-year-old boy stole a Cessna light airplane in 2005 and went on a late-night joy ride. Finding the key in the unlocked plane at an airfield in Fort Payne, Alabama, the teenager removed the tie-downs, started the engine, and began driving around. “The next thing he knew he was in the air,” said the local police chief. Despite never having piloted a plane before, he stayed airborne for nearly 30 minutes, taking off and landing twice without suffering anything worse than minor cuts and bruises.
DRIVER HAS THREE CAR CRASHES IN AN HOUR
In the space of less than an hour in April 2009, a German woman was involved in three separate road accidents. The 69-year-old from Berlin began by crashing into three vehicles as she tried to leave a supermarket car park in Usedom. Next she accidentally stepped on the accelerator and sped across a lawn before crashing into a nearby house. As a result of her injuries, she was taken to hospital in an ambulance . . . only for the ambulance to be hit by a truck.
ANGRY PASSENGERS SET TRAIN ON FIRE
After spending hours stuck in a crowded commuter train that steadfastly remained stationary, frustrated passengers in Sao Paulo, Brazil, abandoned the train and set it on fire, completely destroying every carriage.
PLANE DROPS CEMENT ON HOUSE
Russian air force planes accidentally dropped a 25-kilogram sack of cement on a suburban Moscow home in June 2008, blasting a three-foot hole in the roof. The planes were seeding clouds above the city to empty the skies of moisture and prevent rain from spoiling a forthcoming national holiday but one of the packs of cement used in the process failed to pulverize completely at high altitude and fell onto the house.
ABSENT-MINDED DRIVER LOSES CAR FOR SEVEN MONTHS
On a sightseeing trip to Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in 2006, Eric King parked his black Ford Focus in a residential road and walked into the town centre. But when he went to return to the vehicle later that day, he realized that he had forgotten the name of the road and had no idea where it was. After four hours of fruitless searching, he had no option but to catch a coach back to his home in Milton Keynes, more than 60 miles away. Over the next seven months, he returned to Bury St Edmunds ten times to search for his lost motor, losing two stone pounding the streets in his quest. He finally got it back when two neighbours, who had both assumed that the car left outside their homes belonged to the other, finally realized that neither of them was the owner and contacted the local council.
FLAT CHAMPAGNE SPARKS TERRORIST ALERT
A Northwest Airlines flight attendant forced a 2003 flight from St Paul, Minneapolis, to make an emergency landing in Denver, Colorado, because she feared terrorist activity. Having opened a bottle of champagne and found it had gone flat, she apparently thought terrorists had sucked out all the bubbles.
PRONUNCIATION ERROR COSTS TOURIST COUPLE $5,000
A Spanish couple finished up with a taxi fare bill of over $5,000 because of their inability to pronounce the name of a Norwegian town. The elderly couple, who were touring Norway’s fjords, wanted to travel from Stavanger to Olden on the country’s west coast to rejoin their cruise ship but their poor command of Norwegian meant that the taxi driver took them instead to Halden, some 350 miles to the east, a trip that cost them $2,793. Oblivious to the mistake, the couple even gave the driver a $180 tip. It was only the next morning, after spending the night in a hotel, that they realized they were in the wrong destination and had to spend another $2,980 on a cab to take them to Olden.
PROFESSOR DRIVES WHEELCHAIR ON AUTOBAHN
Police in Germany stopped a retired astronomy professor as he tried to drive along a high-speed motorway in his electric wheelchair. While cars flashed past him at over 100 miles per hour, 67-year-old Wolfgang Hain plodded along the autobahn in North Rhine Westphalia at a steady 6 miles per hour. He told police that when he passed his driving test almost 50 years earlier any vehicle could travel on the motorway and he had not realized this had changed. He added that he was going home to Vechta, more than 110 miles way, after visiting family, and said he had already driven five miles. After Hain was escorted to the nearest B road, one of the officers attending the incident said: “He was fully aware of who he was and where he was going, but I’m not sure if he realized that it would take him 20 hours to get home.”
CRASHED CAR GETS PARKING TICKET
A motorist in Oldham, Lancashire, was given a ticket for bad parking – even though her car had been shunted into a tree by another driver. Joanne Billington was fined by an overzealous traffic warden after her Ford Ka, which she had left parked, was hit from behind. Despite the fact that the front end of her car was in bushes, the traffic warden claimed he thought it had been parked that way.
DRUNK DRIVER RUNS HIMSELF OVER
A 21-year-old man was charged with driving while intoxicated in 2008 after leading police on a wild chase that ended with him co
ntriving to run himself over. The man was spotted by police driving a pickup truck erratically on a highway near Sante Fe, New Mexico. As officers gave chase, the suspect narrowly missed other vehicles and drove through a ditch and a barbed-wire fence before finally stopping. He tried to park the truck but instead put the vehicle into reverse and as he fell from the open door on the driver’s side, his legs were run over by the front wheel.
GOOD SAMARITAN LOSES ROOF OF CAR
A motorist who allowed a driver hurt in an accident to take refuge in his car after a crash could only watch in horror as firefighters cut off the roof of his vehicle to remove the injured man. Sean Carter was driving through Nottinghamshire in 2009 when he witnessed a crash in which a car overturned. He stopped, helped the driver out of the wreckage and then invited him to sit in his passenger seat to shelter from the cold. However, when paramedics arrived they said the injured man might have spinal injuries and that therefore they needed to take the roof off Mr Carter’s Ford Focus in order to lift him into an ambulance. Mr Carter estimated that his Good Samaritan act left him £1,000 ($2,000) out of pocket. Meanwhile the other driver turned out to have no spinal injuries and was well enough to leave hospital the next day.
The Mammoth Book of Weird News (Mammoth Books) Page 48
