Drunk Dude Missing in Woods Mistakenly Joins His Own Search Party

In the dusky hours between the darkest night, and early morning, as Beyhan Mutlu, 51, was combing through the woods of Inegöl, in Turkey’s Bursa province, searching for a lost hiker, he heard a fellow rescuer call out to the missing man: “Mutlu! Mutlu!”

Wait, thought Mutlu, that’s me. We’re searching for me?

He’d been out drinking the evening before. When he didn’t come home, his wife heard from others that Mutlu drunkenly walked away from his friends toward the forest. She called the police who organized a rescue party. As the rescuers were dispatched, Mutlu slept off a bit of the drinking in an isolated forest cabin.

He awoke to the sounds of searchers traipsing through the underbrush looking for a lost man.

Being a concerned citizen, Mutlu joined the efforts, and for, reports say, an hour or perhaps several hours, picked through trees and bushes looking for a lost dude. He wasn’t sure who he was looking for, just that someone was out there, alone.

Then his name being shouted by the SAR team, in that kind of call that immediately brings to mind a missing person search.

“I broke into a cold sweat when I heard my name,” he said.

The rescuers took some convincing that Mutlu was indeed the missing person, understandably. Then a friend who was part of the search team wandered over and said, yeah, that’s Mutlu, alright.

Sometimes it takes getting truly lost to find yourself, is the clear takeaway of this charming episode.