"Recently in Boulder, CO and Santa Cruz, CA , law enforcement officials were called out to investigate what bystanders suspected was a bomb.
Last summer, a road was shut down in Ottawa, Canada when a pipe with dangling wires hanging out was discovered under a bridge. Four dozen policemen, the hazmat team and bomb experts were called out to investigate what turned out to be a geocache container. The cache owner thought his cache idea was funny. The law enforcement officials were not amused."