A night out with friends turned into one of the internet’s most bizarre real-life stories back in 2021 after a Turkish man accidentally joined a search party looking for… himself.

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Beyhan Mutlu, 50, sparked concern after wandering away from his friends while drinking near a forested area in Turkey’s Bursa province, Sky News reports.

When hours passed without anybody hearing from him, his worried wife and friends contacted local authorities and reported him missing.

What followed quickly escalated into a full community search effort around the wooded area in Cayyaka, with neighbours, volunteers and rescue teams all joining the hunt to find the missing man.

The only problem was that Mutlu himself had absolutely no idea he was the person everybody was searching for.

According to local reports at the time, the 50-year-old eventually came across the search group in the forest and casually decided to help out, per BBC News.

Believing the rescue effort was for somebody else entirely, Mutlu reportedly spent hours walking alongside volunteers looking for the missing person — without realising it was him.

The bizarre misunderstanding only came to an end when members of the search team began shouting out his name into the darkness.

That was the moment everything clicked.

“I am here,” Mutlu replied.

The search reportedly stopped almost immediately after stunned volunteers realised the man they had spent hours trying to locate had been standing beside them the entire time.

After the confusion was cleared up, Mutlu was taken aside by rescue workers to give a statement about the incident.

But even then, he appeared more worried about what was waiting for him at home than the search operation itself.

“Don’t punish me too harshly, officer,” he reportedly said, per Turkish news outlet NTV. “My father will kill me.”

Authorities later drove him home safely, although reports at the time stated it was unclear whether he received any formal penalty over the incident.

And strangely enough, it wasn’t even the first time something similar had happened.

Back in 2012, a tourist in Iceland was accidentally reported missing by members of her own tour group after she changed clothes and returned looking different enough that nobody recognised her.

Without realising the missing person description actually matched herself, she ended up joining the search effort looking for the “missing” woman.

The hunt was eventually called off once authorities realised the person they had been searching for had been with the group all along.

But even with that bizarre case on record, Mutlu’s accidental self-search still remains one of the strangest missing person stories to emerge in recent years.

Featured image credit: GoogleMaps