Strange but true

Some people lose the most bizarre of things, from their arm to a hole in the ground and even a president’s brain

DID you hear about the man who mislaid his right arm? Or the guy who lost a hole in the ground? And then there’s the true story of the missing brain ….
A flurry of bizarre tales about people losing things came from readers after I wrote a report about a tycoon who twice mislaid ultra-expensive sports cars.

One of the oddest conversations in history took place in Papua New Guinea when a man walked into a police station and said: “Someone’s stolen my arm.” Officers saw that it had been neatly sliced off between shoulder and elbow.
The man, a long-distance truck driver, told them he’d been alone in his cabin when a thief had nicked one of his favourite limbs. Cheeky!
The mystery deepened when the arm was found 400km away. Police eventually worked out what happened.
The driver had been motoring down the highway with his arm hanging out of the cabin. He sideswiped another truck and severed his arm, but there was so much alcohol in his system that it acted like a general anaesthetic. He didn’t feel a thing. Only after he arrived at his destination did he realise it had gone. How inconvenient.

Then, there was the man who wanted compensation because he had lost a hole in the ground, I heard from reader K. Sriram. One day the hole was there, he said, the next it wasn’t. Showing people his hole-free land, he displayed two lots of paperwork from the authorities: one certified that Sriram told me the real story.
The man had paid a bribe to get a grant to dig a well, but spent the cash on other things. So he had paid another bribe to get a police letter of confirmation that he had dug a well. Finding himself with two pieces of proof in his hands, he’d decided to argue that his hole in the ground had been mysteriously stolen.