Meat Mystery

Some friends of mine traveled to San Diego over the holidays, and a most mysterious thing happened on the flight back. When they got home, they found that two of their suitcases had been tampered with. While the fact of tampering isn’t too surprising (especially for anyone who has flown through Atlanta via AirTran), the method of tampering was baffling. Instead of things being taken out of their suitcases, they opened them to discover: big slabs of once-frozen meat, now oozing blood all over their socks.

Nothing else seemed to be taken, and other than having to wash socks again very carefully, no harm seems to have been done. It is as if Johnny Apple-Meat-Slab has taken a job as a baggage handler, so he can share his love of meat with the world.

My friends wondered whether it was some kind of drug-smuggling tactic, perhaps to confuse drug-sniffing dogs. However, this doesn’t make a lot of sense, since dogs finding meat would likely just make authorities suspicious, and presumably more searching would ensue.

So, I’m hoping someone out there has enough diverse knowledge of airport baggage handling, security, drug smuggling tactics, and methods for random acts of meat-kindness to shed some light on this mystery.

Also, I now have a little more sympathy for people using strange search terms. Someone will soon be posting that I found their blog based on the string “found meat in luggage.”