Top 10 Craziest Things Found by Airport Security

In 2013, two American tourists were traveling home from Cuba by way of Fort Lauderdale, Florida with sealed clay pots they’d bought as mementos. When airport security opened the pots, they found something they weren’t expecting: fragments of human bone. The women claimed they’d purchased the pots at a religious shop, where they’d been told the items would “ward off evil spirits.” Fortunately for the ladies, the investigators decided they couldn’t have known what was in the pots and let them board their flight to Baltimore. The next step? Figuring out whose skulls they were…

Pro tip to all you lumberjacks and lumberjills out there: traveling with a chainsaw as checked luggage is apparently perfectly fine… just make sure it’s not gassed up. In 2012, a man tried to board a flight at New York’s Elmira Corning Regional Airport with a chainsaw in his carry-on, when he was stopped by airport security… Duh. But did they confiscate his tool, worried that he’d do something like this? No! All he needed to do was empty out the reservoir and send it to checked baggage, and he was allowed to get on with his trip.

Let’s say a weapon hasn’t been popular in, like, 700 years: can we bring on a plane then? No? One traveler learned this the hard way in 2013, by trying to bring a flail – or what’s sometimes wrongly called a mace – onto a flight at Chicago Midway Airport. A flail is basically a spiky ball attached to a stick handle by a chain. While a weapon like that may be appropriate at a Renaissance Faire or your latest LARP adventure, it is not suitable airplane cargo. Can you imagine if this fell on you during some rough turbulence?

In case you don’t know, a chastity belt is a tool once used to thwart unwanted – or wanted – sexual intercourse or masturbation. It was used mostly during the Renaissance period, but even today it’s not an unheard-of accessory, especially in the BDSM community. So what happens if you’re wearing one of these metal devices while going through airport security? Well, as the TSA explained on their blog in 2012: not much. While it definitely caused officials to have a chat with this passenger, ultimately the person was allowed to board the plane.

You know things are about to get weird when an exotic bird flies outta your suitcase… In 2002, a California man was returning from Thailand, when customs officials decided to check his luggage. Sure enough, there were a total of four birds in there, accompanied by 50 orchids of an endangered species. But wait! There’s more: when the man was pressed to reveal what else he was hiding, he said: “I’ve got monkeys in my pants.” So, to sum up: that’s two pygmy monkeys, four exotic birds, 50 rare orchids… and a partridge in a pear tree.

It’s completely legal to bring your baby onto an airplane – no matter how much their crying bugs other passengers. However, hiding that baby in your luggage is not. One Egyptian couple travelling to the United Arab Emirates was not allowed into the country because they didn’t have a Visa for their five-month-old. Well, instead of waiting two days at the airport like a couple of suckers to get the proper papers, they crammed the boy into their carry-on and hoped for the best. Well, that pesky airport x-ray machine revealed their hidden cargo, and the parents were detained.

You thought “Snakes on a Plane” was pure fiction? We wish… Five years after Samuel L. Jackson’s high-flying adventure, a man was arrested at Miami International Airport with no less than seven exotic snakes on his person… Or in his pants, to be more specific. What’s more, he also had three tortoises hidden in there. As you can imagine, the man was arrested for illegally trying to import exotic animals, and faced up to five years behind bars. Gives new meaning to the term “trouser snake,” doesn’t it?

In 2013, a shipment of 18 heads – covered in skin, btw – landed at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Thing is, they’d been sent by researchers in Rome to a crematorium in the area, and were preserved and tagged as a medical shipment, so the whole thing was actually legit; it’s just that some piece of paperwork had not been properly filed. Officials were pretty blasé about the whole thing, saying that human body parts are shipped to schools and hospitals on the regular. Well, it’s good that cooler heads prevailed.

In order to camouflage the baby tiger she was trying to smuggle into Iran by way of Thailand, one woman had the brilliant idea of drugging it and hiding it in a suitcase filled with stuffed tigers. The plan almost worked too, but the Bangkok airport’s trusty x-ray scanner revealed the truth. Y’see, unlike stuffed animals, real animals have bones… Anyway, thankfully, the three-month-old tiger was rescued, nursed back to health and sent to a wildlife preserve. And luckily for the other passengers, they didn’t have to travel with one of the world’s most dangerous animals.

Before we unveil our number one pick, here are some honorable mentions:
- 240 Live Fish in Water
- A Knife Hidden in a Walker

We’ve seen skull fragments and severed heads, but nothing’s quite as gutsy as trying to sneak an entire human corpse onto an airplane. The cost to transport a dead body via airplane can be steep, often surpassing the cost of a coach airfare ticket. That’s probably why one family came up with a plan straight outta “Weekend at Bernie’s:” placing their dead relative in a wheelchair, they rolled the man through the Liverpool airport wearing sunglasses, thinking no one would catch on as they boarded their flight to Germany. They were arrested.