A headless mascot, a drug drop at Crime Watch and other strange Miami stories

The University of Oregon Ducks mascot lost its head while running onto the field before a football game on opening weekend. The mascot tripped, the head dropped, and the revealed human ran back into the tunnel.

That’s not the first time a team mascot has been decapitated.

In April 1997, a U.S. Navy SEAL parachutist dressed as the Marlins’ popular mascot. He was to parachute into the Miami Gardens stadium to open the baseball season and wow fans.

Except on the way down, a wind gust caught hold of his pointy-billed head and it spiraled earthbound, where it landed somewhere in Northwest Miami-Dade and wasn’t found for weeks.

But the shocked SEAL, figuring he would terrify the youngest Marlins fans if he floated into the stadium as a beheaded Billy, thought fast and steered his flight away from the park.

MORE: A new version of UM’s mascot has just been unveiled. Take a look

While no other heads or decapitated mascots have been reported falling from the South Florida sky, plenty of other stuff has dropped.

Raft through the roof

In 2018, an 80-pound inflatable raft crashed through a woman’s roof in Northeast Miami-Dade. She was in her bed chatting with a friend on her cellphone when she was suddenly covered in wood and dust from her roof.

The yellow raft fell from a visiting Royal Canadian Air Force search-and-rescue helicopter that was on its way back to Miami-Opa locka Executive Airport. The chopper’s crew had been conducting an off-shore training exercise. Somehow the raft “separated from the helicopter,” a police spokesman said.

Cocaine dropped into Crime Watch meeting

Homestead’s former police chief and the department’s Crime Prevention officer were addressing a group of residents on a quiet evening in July 1992 from a pool patio at a home. This was the first meeting of a neighborhood Crime Watch group and the setting seemed idyllic.

Until then-chief Curt Ivy looked up.

A plane soared overhead, too low, he thought. That’s because it was making a special delivery.

“I see a package come sailing down,” the chief told the Miami Herald at the time.

The package that fell from the sky was a 75-pound bale of cocaine. Conveniently delivered to a Crime Watch meeting.

Marijuana bale into the bathroom

In 1981, a man was asleep on his sofa in a trailer in South Broward. Nature called early that morning. While relieving himself in the bathroom, a 100-pound bale of marijuana came crashing through the roof into the room the man had just left. “If I had stayed where I was I would have been wiped out,” he told the Herald at the time.

Fifteen pounds worth of bagged frozen Italian sausage fell on a Deerfield Beach home inJune 2017.

“It was like thunder, and it awakened me out of a sleep,” the homeowner said of the fearsome crash the pork bags made as they fell from the sky. The family found two bundles next to the side of the house and three more on the roof.