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.
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?
GPS satellites have to compensate for time dilation, because time runs at a different rate in orbit.
there is no universally accepted definition of "vegetable."
it's a cultural and culinary term, and varies from place to place.
There is an extremely rare condition called "Stone Man Syndrome", it causes any, smallest damage done to tissue to regrow into a bone, speaking briefly. People affected by this sickness slowly turn into living statues as they get older
At some point in their lives they have to make a choice to either be in a seated position for the rest of their life or a standing position for the rest of their life. I watched a documentary years ago where a lady argued that seated was better since she can easily use a wheelchair to get around, whereas a gentleman argued that standing was better since he could still comfortably lie down in bed. Horrifying disease.
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.
There are more trees on the earth than stars in the Milky Way.
Every time you shuffle a deck of cards, you've probably made an entirely unique order, as compared to every other shuffle in history.
There was this french guy named Tarrare in the late 1700s that could eat ANYTHING, in any amount. He was able to eat a quarter of a cow on one day and ate dinner for 15 for one meal when he was being tested. He was even able to swallow an entire eel, with bones included, without hesitating. When he went to the militar service, they used him as message transport, but after being captured he went back and tried to find a cure. In the hospital where he was staying, he was suspected of eating a baby so they kicked him out. He was average weight and when he died a few years later they could see inside his stomach just by opening his mouth. Here’s a video which explains it on better detail: https://youtu.be/nYHDj2sB-rc
Taser is actually an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle."
T.A.S.E.R.
If Earth was a basketball, to scale the moon would be a tennis ball. It would orbit around 7.5 meters away, which is a lot farther than most people think.
If the nucleus of a hydrogen atom was a tennis ball, to scale the electron would orbit at about 2500 meters away. There is no ball small enough to compare to how small electrons would still be at this scale.
If you're launching from Earth, the most difficult place to reach in the solar system is the sun.
The reason for this is that to fly directly into the sun you need to first launch from Earth, and then remove all of your orbital velocity around the sun. Anything less will just put you into a different orbit around the sun rather than directly into it. The amount of power required for that to do it directly is basically impossible currently.
As an alternative you could, for relatively little power, fly all the way out to Pluto distance, slow down much less, and then fall back into the sun. The trade off being the travel time is now about 90 years.
There are other in between paths that will could get you there for different balances of energy and time but all of them are tougher than getting basically anywhere else in the solar system with an equivalent balance.
There's a mission currently traveling to study the sun, the Parker Solar Probe, it won't be flying directly in, but plans to make the closest passes than any probe ever has. It's going to make seven passes by Venus to shed speed so it can get closer and closer to the sun. The full flight time is planned as just less than 7 years. As of this post they are 1 week shy of a year in.
I would strongly suggest not flying into the sun. I understand it's a wee bit warm there.
The smell of freshly cut grass is actually a distress signal. It's the smell of the grass releasing chemicals to save itself from injury.
More people died making the V2 rockets during WW2 than were [unalived] by them
In chess there are over 9 million variations after just 3 moves each. 288 billion different possible positions after 4 moves each. In a complete game there are more possible positions than there are electrons in the observable universe.
There is no good metric for 'the number of languages on earth'. This is mostly because linguists cannot agree on what constitutes a new language and what constitutes a dialect of an existing language.
The best current metric of how many languages exist is the number of translations of the Christian bible.
Saddam Hussein was an erotic romance novelist in his spare time as the dictator of Iraq.
[Sauce](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein%27s_novels)
You can fit every planet between the earth and moon, including all the gas giants. But if you lined up all of Jeff Bezos’s money from end to end, it wouldn’t fit between the Earth and moon. It could go to the moon and back 34 times.
Jeff bezos has enough money to make a ladder to the moon. And to make it out of money.
Nintendo was founded in 1889.
They had a really hard time finding an outlet, but with supreme patience they waited until the electrical grid was invented.
A black widow spiders web is 12 times the tensile strength of steel!
In 1000 BC, a war was cancelled due to rain.
Edit: Wooo first silver! Thank you stranger!
As a student of military history, I have no idea what almost war this person is talking about. Many battles were postponed due to inclement weather. But I suppose if the war never happened... I wouldn't necessarily be aware of it. My brain keeps going to the Battle of Rain, but that was named after a town in Bavaria, not the weather phenomenon. And it was a battle in the 30 Years War, which would have been in the mid 17th century between the Swedish Germans and the Holy Roman Empire via the Catholic League of States. And was a protestant vs catholic religious contest. Around 1000 BC the big conflicts in recorded history were in Egypt/Mesopotamia, India, and China. So maybe around something to do with those guys.
Mike the Headless Chicken lived without a head for 18 months.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34198390
The farmer was killing his chickens by removing the heads but left enough of the brain stem for Mike to survive. Has his own website, . https://www.miketheheadlesschicken.org/mike/page/history
If you shrink down our sun to the size of a white blood cell, the Milky Way galaxy would be equal to the size of the continental United States! Space is huge!
Horses can't vomit.
All herbivores lack the ability to vomit. (Regurgitation is not vomit.)
You see your nose all the time, but your brain just ignoring it.
The Tyrannosaurus Rex lived closer in time to us than it did the Stegosaurus.
The youngest mother to give birth became pregnant at 4 years old.
Poor girl, her name was Lina Medina and her son thought she was his older sister until he became 10
When a woman with breast implants is cremated, the implants will melt into "goo."
It drips to the bottom of the furnace, and needs to be cleaned up once cooled.
President John Tyler, born in 1790, has two living grandsons.
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.
well yes, china and india are each 1.4bn or thereabouts, and usa is about 350m.
1 billion seconds is about 31 years
1 million seconds is 11.5 days. 1 second is about 1 second.
Your head ages faster than your feet
My head asked my feet about it, but they were silent and just walked away.
We live closer to the lifetime of Cleopatra than she did to the building of the Great Pyramids.
If you could fold a piece of printer paper in half 103 times it would be the width of the observable universe.
I've done the maths. a standard piece of paper is around 0.102mm thick. Doubled up with each fold, according to OP the observable universe is 1,034,402,889,786,235,191,624,309.82 Km wide. Or in words: one septillion, thirty four sextillion, four hundred two quintillion, eight hundred eighty nine quadrillion, seven hundred eighty six trillion, two hundred thirty five billion, one hundred ninety one million, six hundred twenty four thousand, three hundred nine. Point Eight Two.
Sense of smell is molecular, meaning that molecules of what you are smelling are actually inside of your body as a result of smelling them.
Think about that the next time you enter a public restroom.
That's a common misconception but it's FALSE. Only some molecules or elements are volatile enough to be odorous. They should be light enough and able to evaporate, hygroscopic and hydrosoluble so they could bind to the nasal receptors, but not too volatile or they will pass through the mucous membrane. In a "public restroom" you won't smell excrements' particles: you would smell part of the sulphur content common in feces, maybe urea and other similar ammonia-based compounds, but mostly the organic compounds produced by decay of metabolic aminoacids, the most common being a compound called "skatole", an apparently innocuous methilic compound, made only of Carbon, Hydrogen and Nitrogen. So, you are breathing stuff that you are normally breathing, just arranged in an unpleasant way.
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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