Lost lighter

[snopes]

Comment: I recently heard thsi story and it sounds very urbanlegend like.
Have you heard it?

A serviceman is in a bar in Naples talking about a unique zippo lighter he
lost in Isreal a year ago. Another guy he never met before, from some
other branch of the service, overhears them, produces the lighter and
tells him he found it while in Isreal months prior. I am thinking i heard
it before but with the substitution of some other sort of memorabilia.

[Salamander]

Wow... with a tale so thick on detail, it must be easy to verify

Really, the odds for something like what happened in the OP aren't that ridiculous. They're not small... but not impossible.

I've personally experienced something with appropriately similar odds. Many years ago I was beach fishing with my grandfather when a freak wave swept up the beach and took a lot of the fishing gear we had with it back out to sea. Roughly 1 to 2 years later I was on holiday with my family near a beach (but about 100 miles further south), we went for an evening walk and I spotted the wooden cutting board that had been swept out to sea in that previous incident.

It was unmistakably the same board, the stain & knife marks were quite unique.

[Skeptic]

On a flight once I dropped the lens cap off my camera. I reached down and picked it up, only to realise it wasn't mine, but another one that fitted. I searched for ages but never found mine.