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Truth really can be stranger than fiction – there are some facts that, if you read them as part of a story, would make you put it down in disgust because the author went too far.
These 15 facts really do seem unbelievable…even though they are 100% true.
15. Yeah, I had to verify this one for myself.
Giant squids have a donut shaped brain so their esophagus can run through the middle.
If they try to swallow too large a bite of food they can get brain damage.
14. This really is pretty amazing.
Every day that you go to work you pass more people than an average medieval person did in their entire life
13. I would rather not think about that.
When the 22nd President of the U.S., Grover Cleveland was 27 years old, he was friends with a married couple who had a baby girl named Frances.
As a gift, he bought them a high-end baby stroller for little Frances. 21 years later, he married Frances and she became the youngest 1st Lady…Think about that….
12. Make a movie about this guy!
The life of Frane Selak, the luckiest unlucky man in the world:
• 1962 – Frane is riding on a train through a freezing canyon when it fell into an icy river. All 17 other passengers died while he escapes with a broken arm and hypothermia.
• 1963 – On his first plane trip he was sucked out of the plane’s door and landed in a haystack, unscathed. 19 other people were killed in the crash.
• 1966 – He was riding in a bus when it skidded off the road into yet another icy river. 4 passengers drowned while he only received some minor cuts and bruises.
• 1970 – His car’s engine burst into flames while he was driving but he managed to escape before it exploded.
• 1973 – In yet another driving incident, his car’s engine was doused with hot oil from a broken fuel pump. This caused flames to shoot through the air vents, singing off all of his hair. He was otherwise unharmed.
• 1995 – He was hit by a bus but only sustained minor injuries.
• 1996 – To escape a head-on collision with a United-Nations truck on a mountain curve, he swerved into a guard rail to break the impact. He jumped out of his car’s open door and grabbed onto a tree branch as he watched his car plummet off the cliff.
Suffice to say the guy had a complicated relationship with the Grim Reaper.
11. You learn something new every day.
Taser is actually an acronym for “Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle.”
T.A.S.E.R.
10. Don’t mind me. I’ll just be over here slapping the table.
There is a 1 in roughly 5.2 to the 61st power chance that if you were to slap a table, all of the molecules in your hand and the table would miss each other and your hand would go through it.
Story time: i learned this fact from a deep intellectual conversation with my engineering class 2 years ago, so there very well could be some kind of detail im missing here, but nonetheless, what i said is theoretically true.
9. Both of these are pretty mind-blowing.
You could take away all of Wayne Gretzky’s goals that he scored during his career and he would still be the all-time NHL points leader off his assists alone.
Bonus Gretzky fact: He and his brother own the record for being the highest scoring pair of siblings. Brent had 4 points in his whole career.
8. Numbers are weird and wild things.
The USA is the third most populated nation on earth. If you were able to add one billion people to the US population today, it would still be the third most populated nation on earth.
7. Do not try this at home, but it did happen once.
A morbidly obese person can survive with absolute starvation without any sickness or feeling ill (under close control).
There have been studies since 60’s, there is a patient in 1973 who went under a 382 day starvation diet for therapeutic purposes under close control with only vitamin and mineral supplements and water intake without protein, carbohydrate or fat intake (no food at all). Dropped from 207 kg to 88kg and maintained it.
After a follow up check-up 5 years later, the patient was 96 kilograms, stabilized. Prolonged fasting had no ill effects.
If anybody is curious about the article, the pubmed ID is: PMC2495396.
6. This is not at all a fun fact.
More people died making the V2 rockets during WW2 than were killed by them
5. See also: the Radium Girls.
There used to be a radioactive energy drink called “Radithor” that was in the US market for a decade from 1918-1928.
Some of the more prominent users had to be buried in lead coffins.
4. What in the holy hell.
The youngest mother to give birth became pregnant at 4 years old.
3. That would be handy for fixing the back of your hair.
The gravity of black holes is so great that it literally bends light around the black hole, so that if you could somehow stand close enough to a black hole and look straight ahead, you would actually see the back of your own head.
2. Well, that’s thinking outside the box.
People were deliberately infected with malaria to cure their syphilis, and the man who developed this treatment Julius Wagner-Jauregg received the nobel prize for it.
(The extremely high fevers of the malaria infections killed the syphilis bacteria, then the patients were cured of the malaria using quinine.)
1. Oopsies! Good thing neither place is run by hotheads.
Switzerland has accidentally invaded Liechtenstein thrice in the last 50 years.
On the first time in 1976, Swiss military got lost and ended up in Liechtenstein, so the Liechtensteiners offered them drinks like proper hosts.
On the second time in 1992, Swiss military forgot that a certain observation post was actually not in Swiss territory but in Liechtenstein territory, so they just said sorry and forgot about it.
Then again in 2007, the Swiss army got lost and entered Liechtenstein, but eventually realized they weren’t in Switzerland anymore, Toto, so they turned back. Liechtenstein didn’t even know this happened till the Swiss apologized (again), to which they basically said, no problem, bro.
Takeaways: The Swiss army are bad with directions. The Liechtenstein army people are chill bros.
I’m totally stunned by some of these in the best possible way?
Which of these surprised you the most? Tell us in the comments!
