From bags of filth and blades to hidden living bodies, we count 9 craziest things found by airport security.
9 – Knifey Dirt
- In 2012, a passenger travelling by from Pasco to Salt Lake City baffled airport security with what he was trying to take on board.
- Instead of a backpack or a nice little suitcase, this guy was carrying a massive garbage bag. The image on the x-ray scanners revealed that the man’s sack was completely full of dirt, and also contained two rusty looking knives, which security immediately confiscated.
- I mean really, what is the world coming to when a man can’t even bring a weird sack of dirt and knives on a plane anymore.
8 – Bat’leth
- Trekkies might recognise the dangerous weapon a passenger tried to carry onto a plane in New York.
- Resembling a Klingon Bat’Leth, this knife was found in the carry-on luggage of a passenger at LaGuardia airport in 2012. It’s a smaller version of the famous Star Trek sword often used to disembowel enemies of the Klingon Empire. Unsurprisingly, travel authorities confiscated the unfriendly blade before it made its way onto the aircraft.
- Until we are able to travel at warp speed, Klingons are advised to check in their heavy-duty swords of doom.
7 – Snakes
- When travelling overseas, always be sure to pack the essentials: toothbrush, underpants, oh and a jar of dead snakes.
- During a routine scan of checked baggage at Newark airport, an explosive detection alarm went off, alerting officers to some suspicious jars. Inside the jars were several dead venomous snakes. Astonishingly, it’s totally legal to travel with dead snakes in your luggage, and once the liquid in the jars was verified to be safe, they were sent on their way.
- Travelling with your dead serpentine companions has never been so easy; just make sure you store them in non-explosive liquids.
6 – 18 Severed heads
- Don’t you just hate it when the 18 frozen human heads in your luggage go missing?
- Due to a mix-up with paperwork, a shipment of human medical specimens went missing in transit in 2013. The severed heads were being returned to America after being used for medical research and training in Italy. Eventually they made their way to their final destination in Illinois, where they were cremated.
- Apparently thousands of cadavers are sent back and forth around the world on airlines every year.