My Dad, who is known for spinning tales, once told me a story about a bomb wiping out the Chinese officers on a boat as they posed with it for a photograph. It had been left there by nationalists. This was the 60s, so the communists had only been in power a fairly short while. Also, just for context, this is in the days before super tankers when there were a <i>lot</i> more ships at sea and they were a <i>lot</i> smaller.<p>Because they had no-one to pilot the vessel they&#x27;d sent out distress calls and my Dad&#x27;s ship went to aid. Now, technically, this counts as [some nautical term for salvageable rescue] and the crew of the rescuing ship is allowed a proportion of the cargo, so they&#x27;d have made quite a lot of money. So they&#x27;re trying to get an officer swung over there in a swing to board the vessel, but can&#x27;t because the seas are too choppy, so they end up telling the ship to follow theirs and they get them back to port (but forfeit the rescue money as they didn&#x27;t actually provide anyone to pilot the vessel).<p>It gets in to harbour and a pilot goes out to take the vessel in (this is standard practice, local pilots always take a ship into port). He sits down in the chair, feels under the chair, thinks, hmm, that&#x27;s odd and looks underneath only to discover another bomb!<p>Luckily that one was disposed of safely.<p>I thought this was a load of bollocks so I went home and researched it. Wikipedia confidently told me there had been no such bombings or conflict between nationalist Chinese and the Communists in the 60s. It even had a list of all the incidents, and no ship bomb is on there. I subsequently told my Dad it was a load of bollocks, and he got quite upset and ended up emailing me a photo of his log book to show he was on the boat in question, the only evidence he had.<p>Once I had the name of the boat, the Loch Gowan, suddenly I could google more confidently and lo and behold:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.google.com&#x2F;newspapers?nid=1310&amp;dat=19661114&amp;id=XatVAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=COEDAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=6810,3012869&amp;hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.google.com&#x2F;newspapers?nid=1310&amp;dat=19661114&amp;id=...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.google.com&#x2F;newspapers?nid=1314&amp;dat=19661113&amp;id=lg0zAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=rugDAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=6815,4457622&amp;hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.google.com&#x2F;newspapers?nid=1314&amp;dat=19661113&amp;id=...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.google.com&#x2F;newspapers?nid=1734&amp;dat=19661114&amp;id=Fd0eAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=EFEEAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=2284,994026&amp;hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.google.com&#x2F;newspapers?nid=1734&amp;dat=19661114&amp;id=...</a><p>Turns out he&#x27;d exaggerated a couple of details, but mostly, it was true. The captain had been killed, the 2nd officer at least injured, the 3rd officer wasn&#x27;t experienced enough to pilot the ship.<p>Moral of the story, just because the internet can&#x27;t back it up, doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s not true! And it turns out my Dad doesn&#x27;t always fib. And, wow, Google has load of old newspapers scanned and OCR&#x27;d.