In 2009, police in Ireland went on a massive manhunt for Prawo Jazdy because he had numerous driving infractions and apparently every time he was caught he had given police a different address. Eventually someone realized that “prawo jazdy” means driver’s license in Polish.

In 1975, when Pink Floyd was recording a song about their former bandmate’s psychological decline, Syd Barrett, their former bandmate, walked into the studio after a 7 year absence.

A man in China sued his wife for giving birth to ugly children. It was soon discovered that she had over 100,000 USD worth of plastic surgery prior to getting married

In 1981 President Reagan accused the Russians of using chemical warfare against farmers in Laos. Apparently yellow drops were falling from the sky and killing crops. The US ramped up production of chemical weapons in reply but the drops eventually turned out to be something very natural…bee poop.

In 1969 an Italian man was arrested on account of the cheese he was selling. Having been reported by customers, analysis of his “cheese” revealed that it contained grated umbrella handles.

SRA stands for satanic ritual abuse, and this was a very big deal during the 1980s. After the publication of Michelle Remembers, a memoir detailing child abuse by members of a satanic cult, people everywhere started remembering similar details. It wasn’t until the 2000s that SRA was discredited as false memories due to coerced interrogation techniques.

In 2010, scientists looked over 43 research papers analyzing smoking and its effects. They found that 11 of them significantly downplayed the risk smoking poses. Not surprisingly, the researchers in those 11 papers turned out to have connections with the tobacco industry.

In 2012, some Bulgarian farmers captured some thieves they found in their field. The thieves turned out to be French commandos doing some training.

In 1961, three people died in a British retirement home when they saw the grim reaper at the window. It turned out to be another retiree wearing a mask.

When Los Angeles suffered a series of arson attacks in the 80s, an intense investigation didn’t turn up any leads. Eventually, however, it became clear as to why. The arsonist turned out to be the lead investigator, the fire captain, John Leonard Orr.

When officials in Tokyo wanted to congratulate the oldest man in the city for his 111th birthday (Sogen Kato), they instead found his 30 year old skeleton. Apparently his family was still getting money from his pension.

When a film crew went to a Los Angeles haunted house in 1976, they filmed a hanging mannequin…except it wasn’t a mannequin. It turned out to be a dead body that had been circulated among haunted houses for the past 60 years. Actually, it was the body of Elmer McCurdy, a train robber who was killed in a police shootout in 1911.

In 1983, a man confessed to killing his wife when a body was discovered outside his house. It eventually turned out to be an ancient mummified body (the Lindow woman) but Peter Reyn-Bardt was convicted on account of his testimony.

When dozens of Palestinian girls started fainting all of a sudden in 1983, accusations of chemical warfare were all over the headlines. It eventually turned out that the faintings were the result of mass hysteria. Today it is known as the 1983 West Bank fainting epidemic.

During World War I, Henry Tandey, a British soldier stumbled across a wounded German soldier and chose not to kill him. That wounded soldier turned out to be Adolf Hitler.

When Cheryl Bradshaw appeared on the Dating Game, she chose to go on a date with Rodney Alcala. Afterwards she changed her mind when she said he started to “act creepy”. Years later it turned out that Rodney was a serial killer who was in the middle of a vicious killing spree.

After Fiji water ran an ad in 2006 that said “it’s called Fiji because it’s not bottled in Cleveland”, the city of Cleveland took offense and ran some test. It turns out that Cleveland’s tap water is cleaner than Fiji’s bottled water.

Alicia Esteve Head is a Spanish woman who claimed to have been on the 78th floor of the South Tower when it was hit. She even became the president of the World Trade Centers Survivor Network. It was eventually revealed that she was studying in Barcelona when the attacks happened.

In 1964, Donald Rusk Currey a graduate student at UNC cut down a tree in the mountains of Nevada to study it. It was only revealed later that he had accidentally cut down the oldest living organism on Earth, a tree known as Prometheus that was more than 5,000 years old.

In 1900, a bear was donated to the city of Toledo, Ohio. The city decided to start a zoo. It was only later that the bear was determined to in fact be a woodchuck

In 1980 the Swedish Navy detected underwater sounds off its coast that it thought were coming from the Russian Navy. Tensions escalated between the two countries until a researcher discovered that the sounds were actually fish farts.

People in the Chinese city of Yiwu were astounded by a local couple that managed to run a diner for nearly 24 hours a day all by themselves. Eventually it turned out that the diner was run by two pairs of twins that had married each other.

The moon rock that was given to the Prime Minister of the Netherlands in 1969 turned out to be nothing more than petrified wood. It is still on display as a curiosity.

In 1897, when Frank Hann was looking for a fresh water lake in Australia, he followed several freshwater rivers to their end where he found…a saltwater lake. Perhaps not surprisingly he named it Lake Disappointment.