26Stu Roosa
On a trip to Nepal, Apollo astronaut Stu Roosa met Nepalese who believed that the spirits of their dead resided on the Moon. Roosa could not understand why a few of the local citizens treated him like a God, nor why they were distressed when he told them he saw no one else on the moon.
27. The human brain filters incoming information using prior knowledge. This leaves us with an experience of the outside world that is shifted away from reality and more towards our beliefs and expectations.
28. During the siege of Leningrad in World War 2, a group of Russian botanists holed up in a secret vault starved to death rather than consume the greatest collection of seeds they were guarding for a post-apocalyptic world.
29. The song “Midnight Special” is about a steam locomotive that used to pass the Louisiana State Prison and its light would shine into the cells. Prisoners developed a superstition that having the light shine on you would bring fortune and freedom.
30. Thanks to skyrocketing real estate prices, Manhattan gas stations are worth much more than the money the owner can make selling gas.
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31Boris Yeltsin
Boris Yeltsin made an unplanned stop at a grocery store in Texas after visiting the Johnson Space Center. He was so amazed by what they had in the store compared to the USSR that it led him to leave the Communist party and he tried to make massive economic reform in Russia.
32. Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who is believed to be the richest drug lord of all time died while getting plastic surgery to alter his appearance. The two surgeons that performed the procedure were later found dead, encased in concrete inside steel drums, with their bodies showing signs of torture.
33. The Church of Scientology sponsored a car in the 1988 Indy 500. It crashed on the second turn.
34. In 1926, President Coolidge and his wife were gifted a raccoon as a Thanksgiving dinner gift. They did not want to eat her, so they named her Rebecca and kept her as a pet. She had a free range of the White House and would go on trips with the couple.
35. Oleg Gordievsky was a KGB/MI6 double agent. If he required MI6 rescue, he was to stand on a street corner in Moscow at 7:30 pm on a Tuesday holding a Safeway bag, wearing a grey cap. MI6 would acknowledge by walking past him eating a chocolate bar. MI6 monitored this street corner for 10 years.
