Someone Asks What’s An Event In History That’s So Ridiculous It Sounds Fake, And 35 People Deliver
Interview
History is fascinating; from the development of entire continents and ancient civilizations to architectural heritage and stories about events that shaped the world we live in today. There is so much to learn about it, both people who’ve never held a history book in their hands and avid history enthusiasts would find something new to learn every day.
Members of the ‘Ask Reddit’ community recently discussed happenings in the past that might have been many people’s “new thing to learn for the day”. When this redditor started a thread about historical events that are so ridiculous they sound fake, netizens shared quite a few stories, ranging from difficult to believe to plain ridiculous. Scroll down to find them on the list below and enjoy a rather amusing history lesson.
Bored Panda has reached out to the OP and they were kind enough to answer a few of our questions. You will find their thoughts in the text below.
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The Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference. It would have been rejected for an episode of Veep because it was so ridiculous.
For a very long time the Roman empire was able to acquire silk through trade over 'the silk road' to China, but never able to unlock the secrets of producing it domestically themselves. Until 552AD, when two monks preaching in India then travelled to China, where they witnessed the guarded methods of using the live silk worm to spin the famous thread. Knowing the importance of what they'd learned, the monks returned to Constantinople to report directly to the emperor Justinian. He personally met the monks, heard all the details of what they'd seen, then asked them to return to China and find a way of smuggling these worms back to the empire. They agreed, and prepared for the 2 year ~6,500km (4,000mi) trek back to China on foot, hoof and wheel. Once back in China they acquired either eggs or young larvae, since the adults are too delicate for transport, and tucked them into hollowed bamboo canes for the long journey straight back home. Once the monks made it back to Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey), domestic silk production slowly ramped up and the need for long journeys along the 'silk road' ramped down. Over time, this allowed the same type of silk monopoly which China had enjoyed through the prior centuries to now be established in the Mediterranean, becoming one of the bedrocks of the Byzantine economy for the next 700 years.
It's crazy to think about these two guys. 1500 years before you or I were born, making their second multi-year, 6,500km trek back from China, smuggling two bamboo canes full of bugs which would fuel the economy of one of the world's largest civilizations for the next 700 years. I wonder if they knew and understood these possibilities when they went to scoop the worms from their baskets in China...Imagine the anxiety trying to keep them hidden and alive the whole way back!
Operation Mincemeat.
Basically, the British dressed a random dead guy in a military uniform, put fake invasion plans in his pocket, and dropped him on the shore of Spain. The Spanish found the body (and invasion plans) and informed Germany. Germany, believing the invasion plans were real, sent an army to Greece- which is exactly what the Brits wanted, because they were actually going to invade Sicily.
“I decided to ask that question because I was watching a video about rescued animals with my boyfriend, and an emu appeared on screen and he said ‘can you believe we lost a war with these guys?’,” the OP told Bored Panda, revealing how they got curious about the hard-to-believe historical events.
“I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, and he told me about the Great Emu War in Australia where the emus won! I thought it was so crazy and hilarious that I decided to ask Reddit about other crazy historical events.”
The Immovable Ladder.
In Jerusalem there is a tiny christian church called the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that is shared by six different, very old, denominations.
There is so much animosity between the groups that they were forced into an agreement where any change to a common area had to be agreed to unanimously (the Status Quo).
During repairs sometime before 1757 a construction worker left a simple wooden ladder behind on a roof landing.
It has been over 260 years and the church leaders still refuse to agree on how to remove the ladder, so there it sits.
Fun fact: to stop the denominations from fighting over the keys to the front door, the Sultan ruling Jerusalem entrusted the keys to a muslim family that still, to this day, open and close the church.
When America went to war with Spain, the Spanish forgot to tell their territory, Guam. The US sent a single warship to the island where they took 13 shots at the fort. The leaders on the island rowed out to apologize they couldn't return their "salute", they had no gunpowder.
That is why Guam is a US territory.
The redditor was taken aback by the response they received from the online community. “After posting, I was shocked with how many people had different events to share,” they told Bored Panda.
“The great emu war was one of the most common comments, but others like the Great Molasses Flood, Wojtek the Polish soldier bear, and the War of Jenkins’ Ear were also frequently posted and really surprised me. Most of the stuff I read I had never learned about in school so it was a really fun time going through each comment.”
Stanislov Petrov literally saved the world from nuclear destruction by not calling in a missile launch when he was in command. He figured it MUST be a malfunction even though all his computers told him it was not.
It was a malfunction. Had he called it in, there would have been several billion dead.
Not knowing whether to give the man a medal (for preventing a nuclear war) or to shoot him (for refusing orders), the Soviets decided to completely ignore the incident. Petrov later was promoted, though, for his completely unrelated "improvements of nuclear facilities"...
Hannibal saved his army by tying torches to the horns of 5,000 cows and driving them one direction. The Romans thought they were the enemy army and converged on them, while Hannibal quietly snuck his 10,000 man force out of the valley by another route.
“I’d also like to add that even events that were very commonly known were also posted a lot, like the moon landing, World War II, and the Manhattan Project,” the OP pointed out. “But while most people learned about these events in school and they seem like everyday historical facts, when you really process these events and rethink them, it is kind of mind-boggling that they actually happened.”
Ancient Egyptians went on strike building a royal necropolis in the year 1152 BC and were the first to ever strike. And in a pleasant turn of events, the workers received higher wages and returned to the project.
To be clear, they were not slaves or anything, just the craftsmen of their time, but I still found it odd that even thousands of years ago there is documented evidence of striking being successful rather than companies attempting to squash down modern strikes.
Those were no simple workers, though. They were highly qualified specialists. And as, according to the religious beliefs of the time, the wellbeing of the universe depended on the king being properly sent off into the afterlife, they were very conscious of their importance. That being said, their work conditions were extremely good for the time. Free healthcare, unlimited sickdays, free housing and food... "Wages" is a word that does not match fully, though. They were mostly paid in beer and bread.
The Battle of Pelusium. In short, Persians held cats hostage, forcing an Egyptian pharaoh to declare war to save them.
When two perfectly working pistols failed to fire on US President Andrew Jackson who then beat his would-be-assassin so badly that the presidential security detail had to pull him off to save the man's life.
There was no presidential security detail present there. The people who intervened were bystanders, including then-congressman Davy Crockett (also someone not to mess with).
The redditor with a newly found passion for somewhat bizarre historical events shared that their favorite one of them all has to be the Dancing Plague of 1518. “This one fascinates me a lot because I love mysteries and I’ve always wanted to know what caused it.”
“It was mentioned under my post a couple times, but it doesn’t seem like as many people know about it, which is crazy because it is such a bizarre occurrence. I can’t help but wonder if we’ll ever have answers to the cause.”
In 1982, Larry Walters strapped a bunch of weather balloons to a lawn chair and flew 16,000 feet in the air over LA. That's about half the height of commercial airline cruising altitude. Just a guy up there in a lawn chair taking in the sights. And he landed safely.
Sure and when the FAA caught him they were quite sure that he has busted some kind of aviation law, but it took some time to figure out exactly what to charge him for. But I guess that you still cannot enter controlled airspace without a clearance, eventhough you are sitting in our lawn chair.
Cadaver synod. New pope digs up the old pope, puts him on trial, finds him guilty, and punished the corpse. For whatever reason they don’t teach you about that in catholic school.
Stephen King was so obsessed with the song "mambo no.5" that his wife threatened to divorce him.
The Erfurt Latrine Disaster.
The Erfurt latrine disaster occurred on 26 July 1184, when Henry VI, King of Germany (later Holy Roman Emperor), held a Hoftag (informal assembly) in the Petersberg Citadel in Erfurt. On the morning of 26 July, the combined weight of the assembled nobles caused the wooden second story floor of the building to collapse and most of them fell through into the latrine cesspit below the ground floor, where about 60 of them drowned in liquid excrement.
The 1904 Olympic Marathon in St. Louis.
32 athletes took part, but only 14 were able to finish - there was only one water station in the entire 26-mile course. The “winner” was later disqualified because they found out he drove half the race in his car. The new winner (the guy who came in second) had to be carried over the finish line by his trainers because they’d been dosing him the whole time with a strange mixture of strychnine, brandy, and egg whites.
Several people almost died of internal injuries. Multiple runners stole things from passerby. Most people in the race weren’t even Olympic-level athletes, just amateur runners, many of whom didn’t even have to run a full marathon to qualify.
That time Denmark and Canada (I think) had a "war" over an island. Everytime a Navy vessel drove by they picked up the flag of the over nation, planted their own and left a bottle of alcohol.
I heard it stopped not that long ago.
I believe they now share it and still leave a bottle of alcohol whenever the island is visited.
The first chancellor of modern day Germany, Konrad Adenauer, traveled to Moscow in 1955 to treat with Chruschtschow. He achieved his main goal of ~10000 POWs returning to Germany. The legend goes that this feat was made possible because he outdrank Chruschtschow because he drank a lot of olive oil before which mellowed out the effects of the vodka they were drinking.
So 10000 people got to go home because one dude knew how to handle booze
Certainly one of the strangest German politicians ever. His ways to deal with leftover nazi staff in his administration and with what passed as the political right wing at the time was debatable at best, his political views complicated, his demeanor not very appealing. But also there are stories like this, which is absolutely in character. He had also been an unsuccessful inventor before the war, owning the patents for more or less unusual products like one-use trousers, vegetarian soy sausage (well, he simply was a few decades early for this to catch on), a see-through toaster, insect tasers (this one was rejected because it would have killed the insects but also the user) and a timer-controlled nightstand lamp. He only got his patents through in Austria and Britain, though. The only thing German patent authorities accepted was his cornbread receipe.
The Boston Molasses disaster
wikipedia is my friend: The Great Molasses Flood, also known as the Boston Molasses Disaster, was a disaster that occurred on Wednesday, January 15, 1919, in the North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. A large storage tank filled with 2.3 million U.S. gallons (8,700 cubic meters) of molasses, weighing approximately[b] 13,000 short tons (12,000 metric tons), burst, and the resultant wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour (56 kilometers per hour), killing 21 people and injuring 150. The event entered local folklore and residents claimed for decades afterwards that the area still smelled of molasses on hot summer days.
The Great Emu War
One of the things why I am still a regular visitor to the BP site, next to all the celebrity, weeding, tiktok nonsense: From time to time, you can actually learn something!
The Dutch ate their Prime Minister. And his Brother.
During one of the first Japanese delegations to the US, one of the Japanese guys was in culture shock (first time seeing the US) and confused about how to conduct himself politely, so at a fancy dinner when he finished his cigarette he put it up his sleeve to not appear rude leaving it out and set fire to himself
Easily my favourite fact on this list. I mean, who hasn't accidentally set fire to him or herself to avoid an awkward social situation?
That thing at Kitty Hawk where 2 guys in a bike shop cobbled together a glider and attached an internal combustion engine and started flying?
Not to mention that the engine was of their own design and construction.
The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist, the largest ($ value, inflation adjusted) heist in Canadian history
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_Heist
The Gombe Chimpanzee War. It sounds like something right out of a Planet of The Apes movie.
Roman emperor Caligula declared war on Neptune, god of the sea, and ordered his troops to "fight the sea waves" to show Neptune whos boss. I can only imagine the soldiers faces while listening to such absourdity.
The fact that some madman was the most powerful person in the Roman empire at some point in history is fascinating.
I can imagine The Dumpster doing this if he ever gets back into office......
In the 1600s, Japanese Samurai fought with Mexican soldiers in Acapulco. We know this because it was recorded by the grandson of an Aztec king.
The last guillotine execution in France took place after the first Star Wars movie was released.
PLEASE NOTE: correlation is NOT necessarily indicative of causation.
Russia sending their baltic fleet to fight the Japanese Navy. Yes, the Baltic is on the other side of the planet. No, the baltic sailors had never seen ocean, or naval war, ever. Yes, it was a sh*tshow. It lasted for months, they attacked everything from Danish fishing vessels to each other, again and again. Thinking the ship next to them was a Japanese torpedo-boat, outside of F**** Nigeria, it wasnt, it was also Russian. Luckily they were so inept that 99% of all shots fired went into the ocean.
What were the Danish fishing vessels doing near Japan? ...or were the just so unsure of where they were that that the thought they had almost completede the journy by the time they passed Denmark?
The Great Windham Frog War.
In 1754 Windham, Connecticut was still a frontier settlement. One hot night the residents awoke to gruesome sounds that convinced them that the local Indians were attacking. Throughout the night they strove to drive off the attackers with steady gunfire. In the morning they crept out, to find thousands of dead frogs who had spent the night competing for the dwindling water.
Rather than being ashamed, this has become a central part of the town’s character. The town’s symbol is a frog and the bridge is decorated with large frogs at each corner.
Used to drive by this every time id go to rhode Island to the beach as a kid. Laughed every time
The Field of the Cloth of Gold, where an English King and a French one tried to out-bling each other. The fact that two monkeys covered in gold leaf were far from the most ostentatious display is a good indication of how tasteful it was.
The Mongol Invasions of Japan
In the 13th century the Mongols were an absolutely unstoppable force wherever they turned their attention. The had captured the Korean Peninsula and were threatening Japan, putting together an enormous invasion fleet.
While sailing the relatively short distance to Japan they were struck by a typhoon and the fleet was absolutely devastated, sparing Japan from invasion.
Only seven years later the Mongols put together an even larger invasion force with larger storm-worthy ships. They were utterly destroyed by another typhoon.
The Mongols vessels are not actually storm-worthy due to differences in bottom hull design. Sea-going ships need to have deep hull where significant part of the hull is underwater. This provides stability from rocking sideways during strong winds. The Mongols, coming from land-locked country, used shallow hull ship design. This design is great to travel on rivers as they are less likely to get dragged on the bottom of shallow rivers. They are terrible for windy sea condition.
The Peking to Paris race. It was a car race from Peking China to Paris France in 1907. The winner was the Italian team lead by Scipione Borghese. In honor of the victory the color of his car, rosso corsa became the standard color for Italian race cars and the primary reason most sports cars are red.
The guy who founded Scientology once engaged in a multi-day naval battle with a log. He would then go on to commit an act of war against Mexico.
L. Ron Hubbard was a fruitcake of monumental proportions. But, by crikey, he was also a terrific swindler.
Video of President Bush Vomiting on the Prime Minister of Japan Kiichi Miyazawa, January 8, 1992.
Actually, there is one event which occurred back in January of 1992, which I as a senior in High School knew would sound like a far fetched tale after enough time had passed. President George Bush, who was 67 years old at the time and on an official visit to Japan engaged in trade talks, would on the morning of January 8, 1992 play a game of tennis doubles with the Emperor of Japan and the prince. Yet just hours later on the same day during dinner with the Prime Minister of Japan Kiichi Miyazawa, suddenly vomit onto the Prime Minister’s lap and then faint. The Prime Minister of Japan was dumbfounded but remained calm. President Bush regained consciousness but took several minutes to do so, he was able to leave banquet on his own, though the secret service personnel were trying desperately to assist. The next morning President Bush would try to down play the event and resume his schedule. Yet the image of the President Bush vomiting in Japan never left the media in 1992. In fact since it was a campaign year, it became an image which was exploited. For the rest of 1992 the image and video would become a source of jokes and though this occurrence of gastric distress really was not humorous in any mature way.
As time progressed the election ended in a defeat for President Bush, the image and memory of the event began fading. By the mid 1990s it was something you could bring up and most people would remember it. Today, the event is hardly known to many people who grew up long after this time. When I was discussing this event not too long ago, a person thought it was just something being stated as a joke rather than a true historic fact. I realized than, I had indeed been correct when I told my father all those years ago that people would never believe this happened years from now.
When they blowed up that whale and it just made things worse.
"The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds." The commentator will forever have a special place in my heart. Edit: video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34
Note: this post originally had 39 images. It’s been shortened to the top 35 images based on user votes.
Troy. Menelaus was so incensed at the loss of his wife Helen after a diplomatic mission from Troy that he sent a huge army to Troy. When he asked Troy to give Helen back, he received the reply "she's not here". Menelaus destroyed the city to recapture Helen. The Trojans were telling the truth, Helen had never been in Troy, she was in Alexandria. Menelaus sailed on to Egypt and brought back Helen. Menelaus the Greek had destroyed the wrong city, and totalled an entire innocent civilization, by accident.
The Vice President of the United States shot a guy in the face and that guy apologized. This wasn't that long ago.
Troy. Menelaus was so incensed at the loss of his wife Helen after a diplomatic mission from Troy that he sent a huge army to Troy. When he asked Troy to give Helen back, he received the reply "she's not here". Menelaus destroyed the city to recapture Helen. The Trojans were telling the truth, Helen had never been in Troy, she was in Alexandria. Menelaus sailed on to Egypt and brought back Helen. Menelaus the Greek had destroyed the wrong city, and totalled an entire innocent civilization, by accident.
The Vice President of the United States shot a guy in the face and that guy apologized. This wasn't that long ago.
