Yahoo Lifestyle "The Odds Were One In Ten Quadrillion": 23 Ridiculously Unlikely Things That Actually Happened
1.During World War II, a bear — yes, a bear! — served as a private in the Polish Army.
Orphaned as a cub in 1942, "Wojtek the Bear" was adopted by the Polish II Corps, which was part of the Allied forces. He grew up among the soldiers and believed himself to be one of them, drinking beer, eating cigarettes, and playfully wrestling with them. When the Polish soldiers were moved to the front lines, they had to formalize his presence in the army so that he could travel with them. So, Wojtek was officially enlisted as a private.
Even more amazing? During the Battle of Monte Cassino in 1944, Wojtek helped his brothers-in-arms by carrying artillery shells to supply lines. After the war, he retired to the Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland, where he lived until 1963.
2.In 2001, red-colored rain — dubbed "blood rain" — fell in Kerala, India. It frightened locals, some of whom postulated it foretold the end of the world.
The real explanation? It was probably caused by spores from algae.
3.Former Oakland A's slugger Khris Davis hit exactly .247 every year for four consecutive seasons (2015–18). The odds of this happening are 1 in 100 million.
There have been 20,000 major leaguers in history, but he is the only player ever to have the same average four years in a row. Oh, and the year before he started doing this? He hit .244.
4.Speaking of long odds, in 2002, 51-year-old electrician Mike McDermott won the lotto TWICE in one year — and to make things even more improbable...he did it both times using the same numbers!
The Telegraph found the odds of this happening were one in 5.4 trillion!
5.Want to hear about even LONGER odds? Park ranger Roy Sullivan survived getting struck by lightning not once, not twice, but seven times.
Sullivan worked at Shenandoah National Park and was first struck in 1942; his last lightning strike came in 1977. In interviews, he hypothesized there was something about his physical makeup that attracted lightning to him.
The Guinness World Records recognized him as the person struck by lightning more than any other human. According to a statistician, the odds of being struck this many times are 4.15 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
6.There was an earthquake that was so massive it not only created a new lake, but made the Mississippi River temporarily turn against itself and flow backwards.
On Feb. 7, 1812, a massive earthquake — 8.8 magnitude on the Richter scale — hit near New Madrid, Missouri, and was felt as far away as Montreal.
The seismic upheaval was so powerful that it created an entire lake (Reelfoot Lake), and even temporarily altered the Mississippi River's course, forcing it to flow upstream. Many boatman survived the experience and provided firsthand accounts of this incredible happening.
7.Australian soldiers lost a war against emus, a flightless bird, while trying to control their population.
In 1932, in response to worries about the overpopulation of emus damaging crops, the military authorized soldiers with machine guns to eliminate 20,000 emus.
Unfortunately for the soldiers, the emus proved to be quite the opponent. They quickly scattered when shot at, outran trucks carrying marksmen, and even had tough hides that bullets had trouble penetrating.
After two months the soldiers had only killed 1,000 emus, and amidst public ridicule (and complaints of animal cruelty), the campaign was called off.
The emus, it seemed, had won the war.
8.In 1971, a then 17-year-old Dr. Juliane Diller was flying in a plane over Peru when it was hit by lightning and broke up in the sky. She fell for almost two miles — still strapped into her seat — before landing in the rainforest below, somehow not dying. She was the flight's sole survivor.
Upon regaining consciousness, she found she had "a broken collarbone, a sprained knee, and gashes on her right shoulder and left calf, one eye swollen shut and her field of vision in the other narrowed to a slit."
For 11 days, she walked through the Amazon. She was ultimately rescued by forest workers.
9.Bizarrely, one month later, Vesna Vulović — a 22-year-old flight attendant — was working a flight that exploded from a terrorist's bomb. Somehow, she fell 33,338 feet (more than six miles!) to the ground and survived.
Like Diller, Vulović landed in a heavily wooded area, contributing to her survival.
10.In 1954, Ann Hodges became the only known person to be hit by a meteorite when it crashed through the roof of her farmhouse in Sylacauga, Alabama, and hit her on the upper thigh and hand. She survived with only minor injuries.
The meteorite broke off the asteroid 1685 Toro and was about the size of a grapefruit. If it weren't for the roof of the house slowing the meteorite's descent, she'd likely have been hurt much worse or even killed.
11.Aron Ralston was climbing alone in Utah in 2003 when a boulder fell and pinned down Ralston's right arm, trapping him in a slot canyon.
He had only "one liter of water, two burritos, and a few chunks of chocolate." There was no hope of anyone finding him, since he told no one where he was going.
After failing to move or chip away at the boulder, Ralston — in order to free himself — was forced to amputate his own arm with a blunt knife from his "cheap multitool kit." Once finished with the daunting task, he applied a tourniquet and made his way to help. His story was told in the film 127 Hours.
12.An engineer for Mitsubishi named Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived being in the blast zones for both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in 1945.
Yamaguchi was doing a three-month job in Hiroshima when he headed to work late that fateful day (delayed by forgetting his ID). The blast knocked him unconscious and covered much of his body with radiation burns. Upon reaching the Mitsubishi office, he found it in rubble.
He decided to return his hometown of Nagasaki...and arrived just in time for the blast there. He survived that one, too, and lived to be 93 years old.
James Cameron is planning a movie about his story.
13.Instagram had only 13 employees when Facebook bought it for a whopping for $1 billion.
It sold to Facebook after launching just a year and a half earlier.
14.Some octopuses will leave the ocean and walk on dry land.
They do this to move from pond to pond, hunting for crabs. To move, they use their suckers (the actual name for them!) on their arms.
15.A woman named Violet Jessop survived the sinking of both the RMS Titanic and its sister ship, the Britannic.
Jessop was a 24-year-old stewardess aboard the RMS Titanic when it hit an iceberg on April 14, 1912. She quickly got out of bed, dressed, and helped women and children into the lifeboats before she was given a baby and told to get into a lifeboat herself.
Four years later, after training to become a nurse with the British Red Cross, she was sent to serve on the hospital ship HMHS Britannic. On Nov. 21, 1916, the ship hit a mine. She escaped into a lifeboat which was nearly sucked into the Britannic's propellers, but she survived and continued to serve on boats for another 34 years before retiring.
16.Shakespeare invented over 1,700 words in the English language.
Just a few examples? "Addiction" (Henry V), "Cold-blooded" (King John), "Hint" (Othello), and "Laughable" (The Merchant of Venice).
17.In 1977, a radio telescope at Ohio State University picked up a 72-second burst of unexplained radio signals from space that still baffles scientists today.
Called the "Wow!" Signal (because the astronomer who discovered it wrote "Wow!" on a printed readout of the data), it still isn't conclusively explained. Some believe it has extraterrestrial origins; others think it was caused by a rare astrophysical event, while others think — doh! — the telescope just picked up some sound source from the Earth.
18.Two NFL quarterbacks playing for the same team suffered the same injury under nearly identical circumstances on the same date exactly 33 years apart:
On Nov. 18, 1985, Washington quarterback Joe Theismann broke his right tibia and fibula in a home game that ended 23–21. Three-time Defensive Player of the Year Lawrence Taylor was involved in the injury, which occurred around the 40-yard line. Theismann’s Pro Bowl left tackle, Joe Jacoby, wasn’t on the field due to injury.
On Nov. 18, 2018, Washington quarterback Alex Smith broke his right tibia and fibula in a home game that ended 23–21. The only other three-time Defensive Player of the Year, J.J. Watt, was involved in the injury, which occurred around the 40-yard line. Smith’s Pro Bowl left tackle, Trent Williams, wasn’t on the field due to injury.
19.World War I was triggered by something as benign as a driver making a wrong turn.
On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, were visiting Sarajevo, Bosnia, when their driver mistakenly took a wrong turn and ended up idling in front of Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old member of the Black Hand (an anti-Austrian nationalist society).
Surely amazed to see the the Archduke and his wife suddenly in front of him, Princip fired two fatal shots at close range, killing them both. The assassinations escalated tensions in Europe, ultimately leading to the outbreak of the war.
20.To calm the public's fears about the strength of the Brooklyn Bridge, famed circus owner P.T. Barnum led 21 elephants across the bridge to prove its stability.
In 1884, the recently completed bridge was easily the longest suspension bridge ever built, and people feared it was doomed. The bridge's reputation took a further hit shortly after its opening, when people falsely believed the bridge was about to collapse, leading to a stampede that killed 12 people.
To allay the public's fears, Barnum decided to "test" the bridge's strength by marching 21 elephants — weighing around 200,000 pounds in total — across the bridge. This spectacle not only reassured the public of the bridge’s safety but also served as a brilliant marketing opportunity for Barnum’s circus.
In 2002, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus repeated the test on the soon-to-be-opened Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge in Boston.
21.In 1883, the Krakatoa volcano erupted creating what is believed to be the loudest sound in history. It was so loud it was heard 3,000 miles away.
It was so loud, in fact, that when residents of Rodrigues Island (3,000 miles away from the volcano) heard the blast, they assumed it was cannon fire from a nearby ship.
22.Legendary writer and humorist Mark Twain was born during Halley’s Comet in 1835 and predicted he would die during its return in 1910 — which he did.
He was quoted as saying, "I came in with Halley's Comet…and I expect to go out with it."
23.And lastly: NASA's Voyager Probes became the first human-made objects to leave the solar system.
Launched in 1977 as part of NASA's Voyager program, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 literally left the solar system! Voyager 1, traveling faster, entered interstellar space in 2012 after crossing the heliopause, the boundary where the Sun's influence ends. Voyager 2 followed in 2018, providing us with unprecedented info about the transition from the solar environment to interstellar space.
Despite currently being over 14 billion miles away, the probes continue to transmit data about the cosmos beyond our solar neighborhood.
Now I'd call that pretty damn unlikely considering 122 years ago humanity still had yet to figure out how even to fly!
