President Joe Biden is, once again, giving his press handlers heartburn. Last week, during a campaign swing through the battleground state of Pennsylvania, the 81-year-old served up the bizarre tale that his late uncle, Second Lieutenant Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr., was eaten by cannibals. “Uncle Bosie,” Biden recalled, “flew those single engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones, and he got shot down in New Guinea” during World War Two. The hero’s remains were never found because, as Biden explained, “There used to be a lot of cannibals – for real – in that part of the New Guinea.”

Family lore or temporary delusion, almost none of Biden’s story is true. Uncle Bosie was never a pilot during the war. The courier plane on which he was a passenger crashed into the Pacific due to engine failure. Uncle Bosie was lost at sea, not to a tribe of cannibals. NBC News shrugged that Biden “mischaracterized the circumstances of his uncle's death.” The Associated Press allowed that Biden was “off on the details.”

A political science professor at the University of Papua New Guinea tells the Guardian that, while islanders did dabble in cannibalism at the time, “they wouldn’t just eat any white men that fell from the sky.” After special counsel Robert Hur described Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” the White House can only hope that Biden forgets the cannibals.