Metro News reported on Feb. 20 that travelers "remained silent" for 20 minutes while a fellow passenger on a Ural Airlines flight from Antalya, Turkey, to Moscow used the air vent above her seat to dry a pair of underwear. Witnesses reported that the woman showed no shame and that "everybody was looking with interest and confusion." Debate raged later, however, after video of the woman was posted online, with one commenter speculating that "maybe the takeoff was sort of extreme, so now she has to dry those."

Tangled up in booze

Police in Mainz, Germany, responded to an apartment building after cries were heard from within one unit early on Feb. 17, the Associated Press reported. When they arrived, officers found two men, the 58-year-old tenant and a 61-year-old visitor, "hopelessly locked up" with a mannequin dressed as a knight and a large remote-controlled car. The men were too drunk to explain how they had become entangled, and one officer remarked that "the whole thing would have remained a funny episode" if the younger man had not become "more than impolite."

Least competent criminals

• Shanghai police posted a video on social media of two men trying to break into a business on Feb. 14 by using bricks to shatter the glass storefront. But as United Press International reported, when Suspect A's brick bounced off the glass, he bent to retrieve it and ended up squarely in the path of Suspect B's brick, which struck him in the head and apparently knocked him out. In the video, Suspect B can be seen dragging Suspect A away from the store. Police remarked: "If all burglars were like this, we wouldn't need to work overtime."

• A drug smuggler from Brazil apparently didn't know he was under investigation by the National Anti-Narcotics Trafficking Unit in Portugal when he arrived on a flight Feb. 12 wearing a set of false butt cheeks, filled with 2.2 pounds of cocaine, UPI reported. The 32-year-old unidentified man was detained and searched, where his unusual derrière aroused suspicion. An accomplice, waiting for him at a Lisbon train station, was also arrested and charged with drug trafficking.

Inexplicable

Firefighter Constantinos "Danny" Filippidis, 49, from Toronto, was the subject of a weeklong search by more than 250 people using drones, dogs and helicopters starting Feb. 7, when he disappeared from Whiteface Mountain ski resort in New York's Adirondacks. When he finally turned up in California at the Sacramento International Airport on Feb. 13, he was still dressed in his ski pants and ski boots, and he still had his helmet, along with a new iPhone and a recent haircut. But, according to the Syracuse Post-Standard, Filippidis couldn't tell officers anything about how he had traveled across the country, other than he rode in a "big-rig-style truck" and "slept a lot."

Compelling explanation

A woman claiming to be on a mission from God led a Kentucky State Police trooper on a chase at speeds up to 120 mph on Feb. 10, stopping only when another trooper pulled in front of her car. According to the Elizabethtown (Ky.) News-Enterprise, Connie Lynn Allen, 52, of Goodlettsville, Tenn., told officers that she was Mother Mary, en route to pick up Baby Jesus, and that God had given her permission to speed. She was charged with several offenses.

News of the Weird is compiled by the editors at Andrews McMeel Syndication. Send your weird news items to WeirdNewsTips@amuniversal.com.