Weird BUT true

Police helicopters usually keep an eye out for traffic messes — not cause them.

But mechanical problems shook up pilots aboard a Kansas City, Mo., Police Department helicopter on Wednesday night, and they were forced to land at the intersection of Independence and Elmwood avenues.

No one was injured. The copter sat in the middle of the road until it was hauled away Thursday morning.

This “gunman” was soon terminated.

Cops in Toronto responded to reports of a man walking around town with a gun — but there was no real threat, just someone mistaking a cardboard cutout of an armed Arnold Schwarzenegger from the “Terminator” movies.

A garden gnome in Victoria, British Columbia, was stolen and then returned eight months ago — along with vacation photos.

Bev York’s stolen garden figurine, which she named Leopold, mysteriously returned recently, along with an album chronicling its trips to the Grand Canyon and Mexico’s Baja Peninsula.

No hard feelings: “Whoever did it, I think, has a great sense of whimsy,” Bev said.

Here’s one way to travel cheap: Pack your kids.

Passengers about to board a flight in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, thought they saw a hand poking out of one woman’s luggage.

When police were called, they found an 11-year-old stuffed inside. The woman claimed she found the boy on the streets and was going to adopt him. The kid was placed in foster care instead. Talk about call roaming. Stacey Sarre, 47, was strolling along a British beach when she tripped over her puppy and dropped her iPhone into the water off Jersey.

The phone floated into the English Channel and had been lost for a month when it washed up on another beach. And after a few days of drying out, remarkably it still worked.