People Are Sharing Facts That Sound Fake But Are Totally True, Here Are 30 Of The Most Baffling Ones
Truth is stranger than fiction, they say. This recent Ask Reddit thread is a great example of that.
“What is a true fact so baffling, it should be false?” someone posed a question, sparking a viral thread full of random and hard-to-believe facts.
Did you know that cheetahs don’t roar? And what about the fact that we live many times closer to the last dinosaur than the first and last dinosaur did to each other?
Below we wrapped up some of the most unbelievable and mind-bending facts, so pull your seat closer.
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[Switzerland has accidentally invaded Liechtenstein thrice in the last 50 years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liechtenstein%E2%80%93Switzerland_relations).
* 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.
Even if 99% of Earth's population thought you were unattractive, 76 million people would still find you attractive
One day Mao Zedong saw a sparrow eating grain. Thinking that the sparrows were hurting China's grain supply, he and the Communist Party launched the *Four Pests Campaign*. The Chinese military and population [took out] every sparrow they could find. Embassies didn't allow the Chinese to [take out] sparrows on their property, so the Chinese banged pots and pans outside the embassies 24/7 until the sparrows died of exhaustion. Unfortunately for the Chinese, sparrows mainly eat insects, not grain. The locust population exploded and [***43 million people starved to death.***](https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-four-pests-campaign-objectives-execution-failure-and-consequences.html)
There were 2 countries that declared a war on birds - and both lost it.
The life of Frane Selak, the luckiest unlucky man in the world:
• January 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 that broke on impact. to save himself, 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.
Edit: Got his name wrong
Edit 2: Got the first edit wrong, turns out i was right the first time
It's simple: he's secretly a cat and has used up 7 of his 9 lives so far
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 [unalived] the syphilis bacteria, then the patients were cured of the malaria using quinine.)
It's pretty well known by now, but calculators today have more computing power than Apollo 11. We got to the moon with slide rulers and huge balls.
Yes and the men would have just typed in 80085 and giggled
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The computing power on the craft was there for control only. The calculations were all done on earth and then sent the necessary data to be entered in the onboard computers.
The Biography of Gene Krantz "failure is not an option" briefly describes the challenges of getting any computing power on Apollo at all. At the time, the smallest real computers were the size of a kitchen oven. It was a huge challenge to shrink it to a size and mass small enough to fit in a space capsule. And on top of that, there was the software struggle to fit as much useful software as possible into that small memory space.
We got to the moon for a myriad of reasons. For the sake of accuracy, however, some of those reasons were early computers and the work of Black women who had to push thru racist red tape so that a man could step forward. Or whatever. So big ovaries. Let's keep naming that.
This is slight misconception. The computers on Apollo 11 had only one function, unlike any calculator or smartphone. They are designed for multiple purposes, whereas Apol computers were single purpose.
A digital watch has more computing power than Apollo 11. A Commodore 64 had more than the first shuttle.
The Apollo 11 mission, as designed, had all the computing power it needed - even though it was quite actually rocket science.
Given that error codes caused by a lack of memory nearly caused the landing to be aborted, I'd say it was pushing it
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It's a widely used throughout history saying. I read on the saying once as I didn't like the connotation of it but found it's more entirely anatomy reference than a male vs female. There is some disagreement on when it was first referenced but many believe it was the time of Greco Roman wrestling which they did nude. There is a physical response to fear where if a male feels they are under attack or about to be harmed their testicles will retreat or "shrink" upward for protection. This can be observed in animals as well so they believe the reference is observable when two men are fighting and if ones hangs lower they are confident they are not going to be harmed or they are "brave".
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Oxford University Predates the Aztec empire by over 200 years.
And, for fun one of my favorites:
Woolly Mammoths were still around at the time the Great Pyramids in Giza were built.
I just read a post on /r/technicallythetruth.
We’ve all kicked a pregnant woman before.
If every single person on the entire planet took part in a rock paper scissors contest. Where everyone paired up and played, losers were knocked out and winners stayed on etc
You would only have to win 33 times in a row to beat all 7.53 billion people on the planet
From 1613 and 1620 a Samurai travelled to Rome by way of Mexico. During this time, Shakespeare was still alive, Virginia had been founded for around a decade, Gallileo was accused of heresy, and Pocahantes arrived in England. He met the Pope he was made a Roman citizen. His name was Hasekura Tsunenaga, and was the last japanese person to officially visit Europe until around 1860.
We live many times closer to the last dinosaur than the first and last dinosaur did to each other.
last dinosaur? hey, BP, summon feathered dinosaur. we need to figure out if this is true or not. I thought dinosaurs evolved, grew feathers, etc etc. FEATHERED DINOSAUR, I SUMMON THEE FOR A PEACEFUL MEETING/ DISCUSSION.
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.
In the last 3,000 years, there were only 268 years in which there was no war in the world
That's wars we have modern records for. That number should be way lower. For instance, the records of Ptolemjc Egypt's wars were lost when columns were destroyed to scrub someone from history and when the library of Alexandria burned. They could have been fighting 200 Taureg precursors in the Sahara for six months and there's no records.
if sound could travel through space, the roar of the sun would be deafening even though it's 93M miles away.
EDIT: because space is a vacuum. sound can't travel though a vacuum.
EDIT AGAIN: obviously lots of other things in the universe would change, and yes, presumably other stars and planets would make noise too. we'd probably all die screaming as the earth itself imploded from the pressure of traveling so fast though a universe that WASN'T a vacuum.
LAST EDIT: YES, JESUS CHRIST RICK AND MORTY, AS HUNDREDS OF YOU HAVE POINTED OUT.
The record for most children born to one mother is 69, to the wife of Feodor Vassilyev (b. 1707–c.1782), a peasant from Shuya, Russia. In 27 labors, she gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets.
Edit: wife name is Valentina Vassilyeva.
Had to edit to include the name of the woman who the fact was actually about!? Patriarchy is strong with this one.
The longest time between two twins being born is 87 days.
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 therapuetic 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.
Edit: fixed autocorrect
Under close control. I guess that’s the key. Don’t try this at home.
An eyewitness to Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater told his story on national television.
EDIT: Based on suggestions below, I’m proposing a new version of this factoid which makes it sound even crazier (but still factually true)...
An eyewitness to Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater appeared as a contestant on a nationally televised game show with Lucille Ball
Not only that, but you can watch the episode on YouTube. It's called What's My Line. (I love 1950s and 60s television). The witness was of course a very young boy when he saw the assassination.
A 500 lb. cigarette-smoking, beer-drinking brown bear named Wojtek was enlisted and served in the Polish army during WWII. "Private Wojtek" helped the Polish win the brutal Battle of Monte Cassino, and was even promoted to corporal. Following the war, he retired in Scotland.
He carried ammunition and got an official rank because pets weren't allowed on british ships
If you took every civilian-owned firearm in the US and laid them side-by-side, you would have a giant belt of guns long enough to go completely around the moon.
After going completely around the moon, you would still have enough guns left over to equip every soldier in the world with two guns.
Why would we want to encircle the moon with guns? I say encircle the moon with mousie toys and sofas to bat them under.
Stalin, Hitler, and Freud all lived in Vienna at the same time.
Edit: And as others have pointed out (including a source further down), Tito and Trotsky were also there.
Only four people have been to the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the ocean. One of those people is James Cameron, the director of Titanic.
When Mt Everest was first measured it was exactly 29,000 feet. It was reported as 29,002 because exactly 29,000 was not believable.
The phrase "plastic surgery" has nothing to do with the material. Plastic surgery as a field predates the development of plastics by 70 years. The two terms simply share a Greek word root meaning "sculpted" or "reshaped".
Ireland was a net exporter of food during the great potato famine.
If you earned $1 every second, it would take 2,921 years to have more money than Bill Gates.
If you made $50,000 a day, 365 days a year, from the time they were building pyramids in Ancient Egypt to now, you would only have about 70% of Elon Musk's wealth. Edit: 40%, thank you RafCo. His net worth is constantly changing though, that figure will change eventually
There were more planes destroyed in World War II than there are (currently intact) planes on Earth today
They were easier to produce and maintain back than, nowadays they are full of electronic systems, carry jet engines and cost a few millions. The numbers of operated planes during World War 2 looks comically ridiculous compared to current times. Edit: I forgot effectiveness - a modern plane can do much more in comparison and doesn't have to soley rely on numbers, the expected casualities are also way lower nowadays. (A wing of 12 planes had an average loss rate of 3-4 planes in the pacific)
To scale, the distance between a nucleus and orbiting electron is 16 times longer than the distance between the Sun and Pluto.
Electrons don't "orbit" nuclei in the same way as planets orbit the sun. They inhabit shells of probability density. The 1s electrons found in, for example, hydrogen, have a chance of being within the nucleus at any given time so this "fact" is meaningless. Also: what scale?
Note: this post originally had 65 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
Want another "believe it or not" factoid. There is only one other place in the solar system where you can find an ocean of liquid salt water the same size as Earth's. It's Pluto.
Pluto might have life as it’s also got the organic compounds necessary. Also, I know that many people know this by now but Pluto has a heart on its surface and I just can’t get over it
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There were about three facts in this list that haven't been on every flipping list on Reddit or BP. This site should be called Lazy Panda. But it IS getting boring.
Why are there always so many repetitions in these lists? This annoys me every time. Just make them shorter.
well a lot of the time it's people voting while you're in the middle of reading, which changes the order of the posts and sometimes makes them show up twice. you can check if it's a real repetition or just a glitch by comparing the comments for both
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Want another "believe it or not" factoid. There is only one other place in the solar system where you can find an ocean of liquid salt water the same size as Earth's. It's Pluto.
Pluto might have life as it’s also got the organic compounds necessary. Also, I know that many people know this by now but Pluto has a heart on its surface and I just can’t get over it
Load More Replies... There were about three facts in this list that haven't been on every flipping list on Reddit or BP. This site should be called Lazy Panda. But it IS getting boring.
Why are there always so many repetitions in these lists? This annoys me every time. Just make them shorter.
well a lot of the time it's people voting while you're in the middle of reading, which changes the order of the posts and sometimes makes them show up twice. you can check if it's a real repetition or just a glitch by comparing the comments for both
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