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The 10 Strangest Items TSA Kept Off Planes This Year

A grenade-shaped trailer hitch, a replica exploding vest, dead seahorses in a bottle and a golden hand grenade — these are a few of the strangest items that Transportation Security Administration officers confiscated at airport checkpoints this year.

"So, what sport do you play with this bat?" blogger Bob Burns asks about a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. Here he gives us the top 10:

Also not cleared for travel — a terrifying movie prop of a corpse.

In slightly sadder airport security news, TSA posted this photo of a giant bear that it said was not acceptable hand luggage.

"Why does this gigantic teddy bear look so sad," TSA wrote on Instagram. "He was abandoned by his owners at LAX after the airline and TSA determined that he was just too big to be screened as a carry-on and taken on the plane."

The reality is a bit more complicated: TSA later updated the post to say that this was actually a stunt from a "popular YouTuber to see if he could get the giant bear in the plane."

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Merrit Kennedy is a reporter for NPR's News Desk. She covers a broad range of issues, from the latest developments out of the Middle East to science research news.