Monumental Theft

aka: Monumental Thief

Gru: We stole the Statue of Liberty...
[Gru's minions cheer]
Gru: The small one from Las Vegas.
[cheering stops]
Gru: I won't even mention the Eiffel Tower! ...also Vegas.

— Despicable Me

As a way to prove your thieving credentials, the best Impossible Theft is to steal something HUGE.

Thefts of this trope come from characters who set their sights high, higher than would be even feasible: why raid an Ancient Egyptian tomb if you could steal the pyramid in which the treasure is buried? Sunken pirate ship? No problem, just pilfer the entire body of water under which it's trapped. Even if it's anchored to the Earth's core, or is the Earth's core, and there's no possible way someone could steal it without drawing attention. That is the Monumental Theft.

It may be considered the inverse to the Sister Trope, Intangible Theft. While an Intangible Theft of the Moon's gravity would cause tidal problems here on Earth, people can still see the Moon itself in the sky. A Monumental Theft would be stealing the Moon, so that no-one can find it. Both tropes are a type of Impossible Theft. Also see Monumental Damage.

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Examples:

Carmen Sandiego

• As the Trope Codifier and a character appearing in Video Games, Live-Action TV and Western Animation, Carmen Sandiego and her henchmen have stolen numerous things that should be otherwise impossible to steal. Her villainy ranged from "stealing something just to prove she could" to "stealing something that would cause The End of the World as We Know It."
  • The Moon, damage to the Earth be damned. Maybe she stole the damage too?
  • Countries.
  • The Bermuda Triangle. She probably made it get lost in itself.
  • The Ozone Layer. According to the Chief, it has caused a worldwide disaster (of course the detectives are on the advice of the Chief wearing SPF 9 Zillion Sunblock so that they can track down and arrest Robocrook before the environment gets any worse).
  • The frickin' Milky Way Galaxy. Theoretically, that means she stole Earth as well.
  • The World Trade Center's twin towers. Needless to say, that one's a whole lot less whimsical seeming now.
  • The Roman Forum.
  • In "The Case of the Unsolved Crime", Carmen and henchman Sam O'Nella steal the Pantheon from Rome, Italy. However, Carmen, punishing Sam for a past betrayal, ditches him immediately after the heist, leaving him with a thousand-ton stone monument of a white elephant. Sam unsuccessfully tries to sell the stone to be used in paper-weights before being caught.
  • Where in the U.S.A. Is Carmen Sandiego? varied in how realistic the thefts were. They ranged from entirely possible like the hand crank to the first Model T, the recipe for Coca-Cola, and the Indianapolis 500's checkered flag, to the ones practical but for the sheer scale like the Red Sox's socks, the Delta Queen Riverboat's paddlewheel, and Time Square's billboard, to more ridiculous such as all of the hour hands from the American Clock & Watch Museum, all of the water in Crater Lake, and all of the sand on Waikiki Beach, to the absurd like Monticello, Abraham Lincoln's log cabin, and The Breakers, to the very absurd such as the Space Needle, all of the maple syrup in Vermont, and every lobster bib in all of Maine. Even above those, they somehow managed to steal the Mason-Dixon Line.
  • Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? worked hard to make Carmen Sandiego's seemingly outrageous crimes semi-plausible in their execution. True to herself, she always commits her crimes just to prove she can, and allows the stolen goods to be recovered once the theft's been accomplished.
    • The opening credits have her stealing a Chinese stone lion, the Sphinx, and the Statue of Liberty in rapid succession.
    • A plan to make her the most famous crook in time by stealing the Roman Colosseum from Ancient Rome, deals with stolen miniature landmarks, ACME's first Chronoskimmer, a bust of a Roman leader, an electric magnet from the future, and Hannibal's elephants.
  • The Netflix series limits her to being an exceptionally capable thief of the physically possible... such that in the interactive "To Steal or Not to Steal?" adventure has her being blackmailed into lifting the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang, and Carmen briefly objects that stealing eight thousand statues seems like a bit much; the villain driving this allows that she just wants one.

Anime & Manga

• Issac and Miria from Baccano!! style themselves as Monumental Thieves. However, their ambition is offset by one simple fact: they are... mentally interesting. (For example, they once attempted to steal all of History itself... by stealing the front step of a museum, rendering it impossible to enter. Another theft saw them attempt to steal from the very Earth itself... by mining for gold. For nine months. In a cave that had no prior history of ever yielding gold.)
• FLCL has Atomsk the Pirate King.
  • He is said to have stolen entire solar systems.
  • In FLCLimax, he takes the Medical Mechanica building.
• Lupin III.
  • He'll sometimes steal things just to prove that he can. He once stole The Statue of Liberty.
  • He once stole the Cristo Redentor^note the giant statue of Jesus in Rio - because he needed someplace to hold the cash from the main heist of the episode.
  • In one movie alone he stole a submarine, a large nuclear fuel source, a space shuttle, and a satellite full of money.
  • In another he started a legitimate company by stealing oil from a rival company's well.
  • A subversion occurs in The Castle of Cagliostro, the treasure of the Cagliostro family is a lost and almost perfectly preserved Roman city which was hidden beneath the lake in which the castle rests. Lupin admits that it's the greatest and most valuable thing he's ever encountered, but it's simply too big for his pocket.
• In episode 5 of Space Patrol Luluco Luluco's mother steals the entire city of Ogikubo and puts it up for sale on the black market.
• The very first episode of Mouse has Mouse and company steal both an entire bank (they used a tunnel digging machine and some dynamite), and a whole artificial island (they used a submarine).
• In the movie Trigun: Badlands Rumble the megalomaniacal robber Gasback Gallon Getaway manages to steal an entire plant from a town.

Comic Books

• Alan Ford: During their second appearance, the Trius Fantasticus apparently steal the Statue of Liberty to show off. In reality, they just slathered it with invisible paint.
• The Black Knight: Le Chevalier Noir (The Black Knight) in Don Rosa's Scrooge McDuck stories is a Gentleman Thief who might pull one-off, now and then. At one point, he steals a whole Viking ship, whilst completely naked. Even he recognized the impossibility of swiping Scrooge's whole fortune, though, so he planned to disintegrate it instead. Scrooge doesn't find him as honorable as he claims to be, however, because he pulls off such heists to boost his ego, even calling the press beforehand and telling them where to be to cover the story.
• DC Comics:
  • Batman villain Dr. Tzin-Tzin once stole the Sphinx and hid it on the bottom of the ocean, for no adequately explained reason. Other than "because he Could!"
  • Justice Society of America, during The Golden Age of Comic Books, has the Injustice Society holding a competition amongst its members to see who could steal the most impressive patriotic item. Targets included Old Ironsides (which is, at least, designed to be mobile), the Liberty Bell, Plymouth Rock, the Freedom Train, and the Washington Monument! They then stole a stadium full of people to judge the winner.
  • Superman
    • The villain Brainiac will often use a shrink ray to steal cities. The Bottle City of Krandor is the one Kryptonian city that Superman was able to take from him.
    • A story written in The Silver Age of Comic Books has Lex Luthor planting bombs in all the world's great monuments, and then he threatens to detonate them unless Superman would physically steal them for him. Supes does eventually find a way to disarm the bombs, but not before he has had to carry half the world's monuments to Luthor's hideout.
  • Trinity has a group of villains performing ever-more elaborate thefts of items as part of a magical ritual. Among the items stolen are items related to the Origin Story to Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, including an entire street: (the space-plane rescued by Superman in his first public appearance, the clay Diana was made from, and Crime Alley). Ultimately they steal the heroes' status as The Trinity, the three most important people in the world, resulting in history itself changing.
• The title character of the Italian comic Diabolik stole an enormous platinum disk, so great it took a train to move it... It was stolen just as a cop stated it was too big to steal.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In his first incarnation, Paperinik (Donald Duck's superhero-avenger of himself alter ego) steals huge amounts at once.
  • He stole Scrooge's money-filled bed while he was sleeping on it in the very first story.
  • In one story he faked a Face–Heel Turn caused by a supposed amnesia and stole half of Duckburg piece by piece (at that point the police just gave up and started playing with flowers), and gave it back once he had dismantled the criminal organization he had set to infiltrate.

Fan Works

• In Eye of the Storm, Greater Grail was stolen from a cave underneath the Ryuudou Temple on Mount Enzou and it was done in such a way that Rin didn't notice until she reached the cavern itself (although she was in England for a few years). Moving Greater Grail in Fate/Apocrypha was done with two zeppelins.
• In Glorious Shotgun Princess, Kasumi Goto is a Sidereal Exalted and she steals a villain's house.

Film — Animation

• In Despicable Me:
  • Before the film, Gru has stolen the Times Square Jumbotron, the Statue of Liberty ("The small one, from Las Vegas"), and the Eiffel Tower ("Also from Vegas").
  • At the beginning, someone completely removed one of the Pyramids of Giza and replace it with an inflatable model without anyone noticing. While the audience was first led to believe that Gru stole it, it turns out Vector stole it.
  • Gru's notion of revenge is to concoct a plan to steal the Moon. (Admittedly after shrinking it to the size of a baseball.)

Film — Live-Action

• The villains in Halloween III: Season of the Witch steal Stonehenge and take it to California.
  We had a devil of a time getting it here.
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has Indy find an entrance to catacombs under Venice by reading Roman numerals inscribed on columns looted from the Byzantine Empire's capital Constantinople during the Crusades.
• The plot of Men in Black hinges on an entire galaxy being captured by war-inclined alien bugs. (Of course, since it's a microcosmic galaxy about the size of a marble, this is not as difficult as one might think.)
• In Once Upon a Spy, authorities are baffled as to how Marcus Valorium managed to steal the X-2 supercomputer, which is two stories tall. The answer? He used a Shrink Ray.
• X-Men Film Series
  • In X-Men: The Last Stand, Magneto takes the Golden Gate Bridge and relocates it to Alcatraz.
  • In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Magneto steals a stadium.

Literature

• In Bank Shot, Dortmunder and his crew steal a bank. (It was a temporary branch established in a mobile home, but even so, it shows some serious ambition.)
• Ben Snow: In "The Vanished Steamboat", the villain causes a entire riverboat to vanish while it is between two ports. And it wasn't sunk or sailed into a tributary or lake.
• Discworld:
  • Fred Colon justifies hanging around various Ankh-Morpork landmarks rather than going on an actual beat by the fact that he is guarding them against such grandiose thieves. This is made more impressive due to the fact many major landmarks were designed by Bloody Stupid Johnson, and are thus rather small.
    • In spite of this, Unseen University did get stolen once, but that was just a student prank.
    • As did the Brass Bridge. One wonders if Colon is really up to the job.
  • In Interesting Times, Cohen the Barbarian stole a country by going to the throne room and saying it was his.
• Frenchman in Englishman has a habit of stealing landmarks from other countries and relocating them to Paris.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: One inventor made The Bet that he could render the planet's largest mountain invisible, but lost when people noticed that (a) the "invisible" mountain was also quite intangible and (b) the planet appeared to have acquired an extra moon.
• Line of Delirium:
  • Curtis van Curtis owns a lot of land on Terra where parts of his enormous palace are located (connected by portals). When walking through it, Kay notes a circular collection of standing stones, likely Stonehenge, right near van Curtis's wartime ship.
  • Lyka Seiker's bath chamber is topped by the Sistine Chapel's painted ceiling. She reflects that the reclining figure on the central panel always reminds her of Kay.

Live-Action TV

• Objects stolen on Banacek have included a 3-ton sculpture and an immobilized DC-8 jetliner.
• CSI: In "Stealing Home", the CSI team investigate when an entire house is stolen.
• Danger 5. The episode "I Danced For Hitler!" opens with Those Wacky Nazis using Zeppelins from Another World to carry away the Eiffel Tower, causing despondent Frenchwomen to shoot themselves at the sight. They follow this up by stealing the Statue of Liberty, Taj Mahal, Roman Coliseum, and the Sphinx statue in order to build a giant statue of Hitler, for propaganda purposes.
  Col. Chestbridge: I think we can all agree, a world without monuments is not worth living in.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Smith and Jones": The entire Royal Hope Hospital is transported to the Moon.
  • In "The Stolen Earth"... well, you can guess. Not to mention the 26 other planets and moons that were also stolen.
• Played with in an episode of Eureka. It opens with Jack being excited about being called to a good old fashioned bank robbery, "no black holes, no blobs". When he arrives at the scene he finds an empty foundation and Deputy Andy informs him "they stole the whole thing". Halfway through the episode, it's averted when they learn it wasn't stolen but a problem with gravity made it float away.
• Madam Secretary season 3 has Henry McCord tracking statues of the Twelve Apostles stolen from the Monastery of St. Gabriel in Algeria by the Islamic terrorist group Hizb al-Shaheed (a stand-in for Daesh) before they blew it up.
• One episode of Michael Bentine's Potty Time had someone stealing Nelson's Column, the Eiffel Tower, and the Statue of Liberty. It turned out he had only removed them so he could have them cleaned as gifts to the respective governments.
• Sarah Silverman's show: After discovering that God is black (as in the race, not the color), Sarah Silverman snarks that she's cool with it and not one of those racists who would wonder if a black God is going to steal the Moon (heavily implying she is EXACTLY that kind of racist). Then again, since God is... well, God, that might actually put the scenario above and beyond this trope.
• Odd Squad: In "Disorder in the Court", Olive is accused of shrinking the town museum and stealing it. It turns out the ones actually responsible were Odd Todd and Shapeshifter.
• In Stargate SG-1, the Asgard have been known to remove entire Goa'uld pyramids and armies of Jaffa by beaming them up and not bothering to reintegrate them again afterward. They've also used this to borrow the Stargate more than once, and on one occasion, pilfer all of the food stores present in Cheyenne Mountain! Really, it's gotten to the point where Thor seems to be doing this simply for his own amusement!
• Super Sentai: Mirai Sentai Timeranger starts with the Big Bad stealing the prison instead of just breaking out the criminals they wanted as henchmen.
  • Also happens in its adaptation, Power Rangers Time Force.

Tabletop Games

• Exalted: The Sidereals have Neighbourhood Relocation Scheme at the peak of their Dodge Charm tree. This allows them to move regions of Creation anywhere from four to ten miles in radius, including terrain, habitations, and people, as far as they can run in a few hours (including movement enhancements from Charms). Doing so without proper authorization paperwork filled is grounds for an audit. It should be noted that the prerequisite Charms are the cheaper of the two Sidereal Perfect Defenses and a Charm that lets you use your Dodge Charms on other people, so taking it is easy to justify regardless of whatever else your life choices entail.
• High-Aspect miracles in Nobilis can allow the player characters to steal, for example, historic buildings. Aspect 9 goes so far as to give you temporary mastery of a "Superior Historic Building Thief" Skill, for when you desperately need to put the White House, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial all in Spokane for whatever reason.

Theme Parks

• In The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man at Universal Studios, Doctor Octopus and the Sinister Syndicate, with the aid of a levitation gun, steal the Statue of Liberty. They state that unless NYC surrenders themselves to them, they will destroy it. This thus propels forth the ride's storyline.

Video Games

• The Charlie's Angels video game starts with the Statue of Liberty being stolen.
• In The Elder Scrolls backstory, Rajhin, the legendary Khajiiti Impossible Thief, is credited with stealing the Bosmeri "migrating city" of Falinesti. It remained missing for several years before mysteriously returning on its own.
• Evil Genius eventually allows you to develop a shrink ray. Afterward, it becomes a mission goal to steal the Eiffel Tower. The sequel downplays this- you steal the Statue of Liberty, but only her torch.
• The Paris level of Gaia Attack 4 sees the titular team preventing alien saucers from stealing the Eiffel Tower, by shooting saucers trying to lift the Tower's four corners via Tractor Beam and destroying as many saucers as possible until the aliens retreat. It works, but in the succeeding cutscene the boss saucer then crashes into the Tower's side and blows it up. Oops.
• Invasion: The Abductors: Along with abducting people and turning them into mutants, the alien invaders are also attempting to steal landmarks. You prevent the theft of the Statue of Liberty in stage 2, the Hollywood letters in stage 3, and recover other famous landmarks already taken to the Mothership in stage 4.
• In Mario Is Missing!, the Koopas steal things like the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Montréal Tower and somehow fit them in small bags.
• In Paper Mario 64, Bowser manages to uproot Princess Peach's castle and lift it into the sky, using his own castle (presumably burrowed into the ground and moved over).
  • In the beginning of Paper Mario: The Origami King, the titular king does something similar, holding Peach's castle high into the air with several sets of giant streamers.
• Tachyon: The Fringe has a side quest wherein the player, a freelance starfighter, escorts a ship carrying the roof of the Sistine Chapel and protects it from a baron's forces (their master hoping to steal it so they can humiliate another baron in the region).
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time starts with Krang piloting a massive exosuit and stealing the Statue of Liberty on live television.
• Tropico 6 features stealing major monuments and plopping them into your Banana Republic as a late-game mechanic. Each one gives you a different benefit, too- stealing the Statue of Liberty causes immigrants to automatically like you, for example. However, there are some downsides- you can only steal one with each agency for a total of four monuments, and stealing them will anger the superpower who owned it.
• In Warframe, players might notice that the Earth's Moon is missing. It is revealed during The Second Dream that The Lotus teleported it into the Void, to protect the Tenno during the Old War.

Webcomics

• It doesn't actually happen in-story, but the main characters of Exterminatus Now propose a hypothetical scenario in which The Riddler leaves a clue with no answers, culminating in Batman's detective work being interrupted by a news broadcast in which the Riddler steals the moon.
• Girl Genius: In Othar's Twitter, he was at one point asked to help after the Louvre had gone missing. It turns out that it had been stolen using a shrink-ray and hidden inside a cake in a refrigerator because shrunken objects expand when heated.
• Megatokyo: Yuki stole a zilla. That is, a Godzilla analogue.
• The Brotherhood of Evil Henchmen, in the Nodwick comic, attempted to become a whole society of Monumental Thieves dedicated to the service of others. They abducted Nodwick, whose henchman "special power" is the ability to haul titanic weights around like other people would their luggage, and tried to get him to reveal the secrets of his amazing cargo-hauling strength. As their own "power" is the discovery and acquisition of small and rare items (magical artifacts, abnormal brains, etc.) for their masters, they hoped to make themselves even more powerful by being able to haul off whole arcane libraries instead of a single magic tome, or sealed buildings full of forbidden artifacts instead of having to break in just for the magic sword. They finally gave up when Nodwick proved to be too much trouble to keep contained for interrogation and realized that someone's more likely to notice a whole building gone missing long before a book.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3
  • In "Reptiles in the Rose Garden", King Koopa used a levitation beam to uproot the White House (with the President inside it) from the ground and transported it through a warp pipe to Dark Land, just so that Kootie Pie could rule the United States.
  • In "The Venice Menace", King Koopa intends to warp the entire city of Venice to Dark Land, just to turn it into a water park for Kootie Pie. However, the episode never really explains just exactly how Koopa would've transported the whole city, and the Mario Bros. foil his plan before he can carry it out.
• In an episode of CatDog, the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower are inside a crocodile, along with the real Golden Hydrant.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers:
  • In one episode, a crooked travel agent who ends up getting the same elastic powers as Dale uses his abilities to steal all the world's monuments for ransom. When the Rangers investigate his travel agency, Dale thinks the models of the monuments on his desk were the real things miniaturized.
  • In another episode, a crime boss captures Professor Nimnul and has his thugs use Nimnul's shrink ray to shrink the city's monuments so they can be held for ransom...with them being used as toys for his daughter in the meantime.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: A one-shot villain shrank and captured monuments - and his rival, Numbuh 2 - to defeat him in a spectacular mini-golf ("It's miniature golf!") game, also causing the planet to shrink so he could play a galactic golf game. Really.
• C.O.P.S. (Animated Series): As a birthday present for Big Boss, Berserko tries to steal the Cornucopia Bridge, by inflating the world's largest balloon and blowing up the supports. The C.O.P.S. stop him before he can fire the explosives so we don't see the bridge fly, but their reaction upon seeing the huge balloon inflated inside the bridge says that it wouldn't work.
• Darkwing Duck: An one-shot villain, Lilliput, steals Saint Canard's skyline with a Shrink Ray while Darkwing's back is (literally) turned.
• Futurama:
  • In one episode the crew visits Monument Beach, where a character mentions that New New York had a "supervillain governor" who stole the world's most famous landmarks, such as the Sphinx and the Eiffel Tower, and put them on the beach at Coney Island.
  • In the aptly named movie, Bender's Big Score, Bender steals everything. Items seen include the Mona Lisa (incomplete), Tutankhamen's death mask, and what has to be the True Cross.
• An episode of the obscure Garbage Pail Kids Cartoon did this. The Kids are called upon to investigate the disappearance of a "garbage" version of Abraham Lincoln (called Wrinklin' Lincoln) from Mt. Rushmore. The culprit turns out to be a man who wants to put Wrinklin' Lincoln's head on an incomplete Egyptian Sphinx using "crazy-paste" glue.
• In one episode of Super Chicken (part of George of the Jungle), the villain stole the state of Rhode Island, by towing it out to sea, and hiding it under smog.
• The Hoppity Hooper episode "Colonel Clabber—Limburger Cheese Statue" featured a villain who was stealing the world's great landmarks and having them transported to his estate because he was unable to travel to see them.
• In the short-lived series Inhumanoids, Metlar had what was likely the craziest motive for stealing the Statue of Liberty - he fell in love with it!. (Maybe it makes sense a little, seeing as he was a giant monster made of living metal.) Even crazier, once he brings Lady Liberty to life, she's surprisingly accepting of it, but nags him relentlessly, working him even harder than his former slave-driving master Sslither did. Eventually, he decides to de-animate her and return her to her pedestal after getting sick of it.
• "The Once and Future Thing Part Two" of Justice League Unlimited featured Lord Chronos stealing historic landmarks from throughout space and time. And displaying them in the streets of Neo Gotham. This included, among others, the Titanic, the Sphinx, and the Colosseum.
• In the first episode of Kim Possible, Drakken steals an entire toy factory.
• In The Looney Tunes Show episode "Eligible Bachelors", Colonel Frankenheimer attempts to steal the Eiffel Tower by hooking it to a zeppelin and flying it to Germany.
• In The Mask episode "Up The Creek", The Mask "borrows" the Eiffel Tower as a trap for the Phony Frenchman. This is not an important plot point.
• The Fmeks tried this in one episode of Men in Black: The Series, shrinking and stealing several US monuments for the planet they were trying to re-create (as their own was destroyed by one of their schemes backfiring). These included the Statue of Liberty and the Yankee Stadium.
• The Phineas and Ferb episode "Not Phineas and Ferb" has Doofenshmirtz attempting to shrink and steal various landmarks around the world, such as the Eiffel Tower, to spice up his train set.
• The Secret Show episode "Monument Racing" involves two mischievous scientists using experimental "weird little motor thingies" to uproot and race several monuments in the air. While U.Z.Z. works to put a stop to it, everyone else bets on which monument will be the winner.
• The Simpsons:
  • "Marge in Chains" has Snake steal the entire Kwik-E-Mart. "I'm taking this thing to Mexico!" It was left unguarded at the time.
  • In "Marge Be Not Proud", when Bart is caught shoplifting, Marge tells the security guard who caught him in the act that he's no shoplifter; he's "just a little boy". He takes this to mean she's downplaying how serious the crime was and his logic extends as follows:
    Don Brodka: Oh, sure, now he's just a little boy stealing little toys. But some day, he'll be a grown man. Stealing stadiums, and... er, quarries.
• 1973/74 Super Friends episode "Menace of the White Dwarf". The supervillain Raven uses a fragment of a white dwarf star to steal the Washington Monument.
• An episode of Totally Spies! featured a villain who used a shrink ray to steal several monuments (i.e. the Taj Mahal and Mount Rushmore).
• In the original series The Transformers episode 'Thief In The Night', the Decepticon Trypticon steals several famous landmarks - including Fort Knox, the Taj Mahal, the St. Basil's Cathedral (mistakenly called 'the Kremlin') and the Eiffel Tower) in return for large supplies of high-quality fuel from the fictional nation Carbombya. The heists were neither very well-planned nor particularly cunningly performed: he basically just went there and pulled the buildings out of the ground before carrying them off (Trypticon is rather a large Transformer).
• The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat: In "The Earth Heist", the entire planet Earth is deflated like a balloon and stolen by a giant spaceship belonging to an intergalactic repo company.

Real Life

• Cracked has the 7 biggest things ever stolen.
• Police in Jamaica have been baffled by a beach theft. What was stolen? It wasn't some random beachgoer's valuables, and it wasn't some easily-resalable asset. It was the beach itself.
• The theft of gigantic quantities of sand from riverbeds, coasts, and the sea floor is actually a massive problem around the world because so much of it is required to make concrete for construction. Desert sand is useless for this purpose because the harsher erosion from wind makes the grains too smooth and tiny to stick together well, causing the ironic situation of a country like Saudi Arabia needing to import sand from Scotland. There are many places where harvesting sand would damage the environment or even cause shifting that undermines inhabited coastal areas, causing them to be designated off-limits, but the potential haul is so profitable that criminals (often with the implicit cooperation of certain governments and businesses) will come steal it whenever they can get away with it. Some small islands in the South China Sea have outright disappeared because of illegal sand mining.
• Bridge outside Cheb, Czech Republic, discovered missing. Fifth such bridge to disappear in East Europe in last year. Reward offered. Culprit may also be hiding other bridges from New Zealand or Poland.
• A bridge also went missing in North Beaver Township, Pennsylvania.
• In 2024, thieves disconnected and stole the 200-foot radio tower of WJLX in Jasper, Alabama, along with the station's AM transmitter and other equipment from a nearby building.
• An entire river had been stolen in Russia.
• A particular urban legend celebrates this type of thief: a man chains his shiny new car to the ground with padlocks in an effort to prevent it from being stolen, and finds it the next morning still securely locked under the chains... but facing the opposite direction. Inside the car is a note: "If we want it, we'll take it."
• The Amber Room of Tsarskoe Selo, Saint Petersburg. Originally constructed in Prussia, and then presented by William I to Peter the Great as a gift. During the German invasion of Soviet Union, German soldiers disassembled the Amber Room and relocated it in Königsberg (today Kaliningrad). Since Königsberg was heavily bombed towards the end of the war, the fate of the room is still unknown. In the 70s, the Soviet government decided to construct a replica.
• Depending on who you ask, several large archaeological artifacts, such as the Ishtar Gate in Berlin, were "stolen" by Western colonial governments. A downplayed example is the Elgin Marbles, where the British took the sculptures off the Parthenon, but left the building. Greece still wants them back.
  • The Temple of Dendur is a subversion, as the Egyptian government actually gave it to the US in 1965 as thanks for helping to save several other archaeological sites in Egypt.^note Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy each got a temple as well. The "Cleopatra's Needle" obelisks in London and New York were also gifts from the Egyptian government (though at the time it was officially part of the Ottoman Empire).

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