20 Cases of Bizarre Misunderstandings That Actually Happened

Halle Berry attended a Star Trek screening and mistook an audience member for Trek's Klingon attorney Michael Dorn. When the man refused to say he was Dorn, Berry became angry, stood up during the movie, screamed and stomped out.

To promote his newest single, Paul McCartney painted "Hey Jude" on the window of a closed boutique store. A Jewish passerby mistook this as anti-Semitic graffiti ("Jude" meaning "Jew" in German) and smashed the window.

When Canada minted coins with poppies for Remembrance Day, visiting US contractors mistook them for suspicious nanotechnology and filed espionage reports about them.

When Adolf Hitler shot himself, Helmut Christian Goebbels (son of Joseph Goebbels, a German Nazi politician), mistook the sound of the shot for that of a mortar landing nearby, and screamed: "That was a bullseye!"

Green Day joined the lineups of both the Lollapalooza festival and Woodstock '94, where the group started an infamous mud fight. During the concert, a security guard mistook bassist Mike Dirnt for a stage-invading fan and punched out some of his teeth.

While the Breaking Bad episode "Half Measures" was being shot, filming was interrupted when a man mistook the character Wendy for a real prostitute and attempted to pick her up.

In 1987, a British tourist named Kris Tait in Tibet nearly had her shirt ripped off by a Chinese policeman because the cop mistook her Phil Silvers 'Sergeant Bilko' t-shirt for an image of the Dalai Lama.

In 2012, police tasered a blind man named Colin Farmer because they mistook his guide stick for a samurai sword.

In 1902 the congregation at the Shiloh Baptist Church in Alabama mistook a cry of "FIGHT!" for "FIRE!" and stampeded to the exits. 115 people died.

When the president of Botswana (Quett Masire) was traveling to Angola for a meeting of African heads of state, the Angolan Air Force mistook his plane for an enemy aircraft and shot it down.