The Ambush at Sheridan Springs

What catapulted the game into the national mainstream, however, was an accident of history. In July 1979, a student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from a Michigan college. A private investigator hired to find him learned that Egbert played an obscure game called Dungeons & Dragons. This sleuth then developed and widely publicized a curious hypothesis: that, believing the game to be real, Egbert was wandering the steam tunnels beneath the school in search of monsters and treasure. It transpired that this hunch was incorrect—Egbert had absconded to Louisiana for unrelated reasons—but the media furor surrounding this sensational conjecture thrust Dungeons & Dragons onto the front page of newspapers and into the popular imagination.

This world and why things happen is sometimes just beyond belief. Crazy that this is what made D&D huge.