As the saying goes, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
And, if you feel so inclined, you can spend the rest of your life researching the most outrageous and weirdest things that have actually happened on this planet, and you’ll never run out of material.
AskReddit users shared facts that are so odd, they seem like they should be conspiracy theories. Enjoy these!
1. Sounds like fun
“The dolphin LSD experiment. NASA put a woman in a room that was flooded up to her hips, & let a dolphin loose in there to live with her in order to attempt to teach the dolphin to speak English & LSD was later used on the dolphin to see if it had some kind of reaction & if it affected its speech lessons.”
2. Wow
“Saddam Hussein was given the key to the city of Detroit.”
3. Those damn Dutch!
“The reason only the orange variety of carrots is widely available is because the Dutch like the colour orange. They leveraged their powerful trade networks to make it so.”
4. Never heard this before
“The US conducted a fake vaccination drive to find Osama Bin Laden.”
5. Awful
“The US government forcibly sterilized minorities until the 1970s. 25-50% of Native American women were sterilized between 1970 and 1976.
Some women were told they couldn’t receive welfare unless they were sterilized first. Some were told they would no longer receive healthcare if they refused. Some women were told that the procedure was reversible when it was not. Some women went to the hospital for something like a tonsillectomy and were given hysterectomies while they were unconscious.
It’s amazing to me that this isn’t widely known.”
6. Egg wars
“The egg industry as a whole embarked on a two year war on a single vegan mayo brand.
For a long time, there were theories that the egg industry, just as a whole, wanted to take down the vegan mayo brand Just Mayo. They felt threatened by the brand since it basically tastes exactly like the real thing, but without the egg that the industry relies on.
It was regarded as a conspiracy theory and there was no WAY the egg industry would all band together and try to take down a single vegan mayo brand.
Until, in 2016, emails were leaked and showed that yeah, they were banded together and were trying to take down Just Mayo. Some of the emails showed that some of their representatives talking with a rep from Whole Foods about how they could easily pull the brand as a whole from shelves.
As far as conspiracy theories go, its pretty mild, but still wild because it’s f*cking eggs.”
7. Look it up
“The Hawaiian royalty was toppled by a fruit company (Dole).”
8. The Monster Study
“The Monster Study was a stuttering experiment performed on 22 orphan children in Davenport, Iowa in 1939. It was conducted by Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa. Graduate student Mary Tudor conducted the experiment under Johnson’s supervision.
Half of the children received positive speech therapy, praising the fluency of their speech, and the other half, negative speech therapy, belittling the children for speech imperfections. Many of the normal speaking orphan children who received negative therapy in the experiment suffered negative psychological effects, and some retained speech problems for the rest of their lives.”
9. Awful
“The FBI sent an anonymous letter to Martin Luther King Jr. telling him to kill himself.”
10. Nazi scientists
“Operation Paperclip. Recruit Nazi scientists and insert them into key government tech operations after WWII. This is how the world transitioned from the German V2 Rocket to NASA and the ICBM in the span of 30 years.”
11. It worked
“In 1999 Russia killed 300 of its own innocent citizens and injured 1000 more through a series of terror bombings of apartment buildings.
The goal was to motivate public support for a war in Chechnya and to bring Vladimir Putin to power. It worked.
Some of the perpetrators were caught red handed by local law enforcement. After they were caught and identified as federal agents the FSB said it had been a training exercise.
The evidence is considerable and damning. Divulging details about the plan is also the reason Litvinenko was poisoned.”
12. Pardoned
“The US government pardoned hundreds of Japanese war criminals who did things that would have made Josef Mengele blush in exchange for their research on biological warfare that they conducted on live human subjects.”
13. Sounds about right
“Project Northwoods JFK was given an idea from the CIA in which they would reign terror on the American people via random terrorist attacks, military ships being sunk and plane hijackings in which they would blame on Cuba and therefore get the public behind the idea to go to war with Cuba.
Thankfully, JFK declined.”
14. That’s odd
“Both the U.S. and Russia use dolphins and whales to spy on countries.”
15. Poisoned
“During Prohibition, the US government added poisons to industrial alcohols because they were being chemically modified for consumption. This resulted in many deaths that the government justified by saying the dead had been breaking the law.”
