50 Bizzare Facts Stranger Than Fiction – Part 3

There is a rare human condition called Trimethylaminuria, also known as Fish Odor Syndrome, that causes a person's sweat, urine, and breath to smell like rotting fish. It is caused by a defect in the production of a particular enzyme.

27. The Toynbee Tiles are cryptic messages placed in asphalt on roads in about two dozen major cities in the United States and South America. They started appearing in the 1980s and while there have been different suspects no one has been clearly identified as the creator of them.

28. There used to be a thing called horse diving. A person would literally jump a horse off a sixty-foot ramp into a shallow pool of water. A girl named Sonora Carver was a horse diver in the late 19th century, and she went blind doing it when her retinas detached during a dive.

29. A woman named Ruth Belville made a living selling people the correct time. Every day she will calibrate her pocket watch to the official Greenwich Mean Time and travel around town letting people set their clocks to hers.

30. Germans have a word for the proper labeling of beef: Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.

During the Norwegian Butter Crisis of 2011, two Swedes were arrested for illegally smuggling more than 250 kg of butter into the country. The police destroyed the confiscated illegal butter.

32. Alien hand syndrome is a neurological disorder that causes hand movement without the person being aware of what is happening. The afflicted person may reach for objects and manipulate them without wanting to do so, even to the point of having to use the healthy hand to restrain the alien hand.

33. A DMV employee named John Quijada invented Ithkuil, a language so precise and concise that the two-word Ithkuil sentence "Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx" can be translated into English as "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point."

34. The Danish Protest Pig is a reddish pig breed with a white stripe that looks like the Danish flag. When Danes in Prussian North Frisia were banned from raising their flag, they displayed the protest pig instead.

35. There is a delusional condition called "koro", seen in Southeast Asian and Chinese men, where the patient suddenly grasps his penis, fearing that it will retract into his abdomen and ultimately cause his death.

There is something called RAS Syndrome. RAS syndrome (where "RAS" stands for "redundant acronym syndrome", making the phrase "RAS syndrome" self-referential) is the use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym (or other initialism) in conjunction with the abbreviated form.

37. There was a procedure developed in the 1960s that restored vision to those that were blinded, but a critical step involved pulling a healthy tooth from the patient. It's called osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis.

38. A certain portion of the population will consistently feel the urge to defecate shortly after walking into bookstores or libraries. Named after the otherwise-unheard-of woman whose confession to a Japanese book magazine made it famous, it's known as the Mariko Aoki phenomenon.

39. Many people in the Indian state of Meghalaya have "odd" names, such as "Adolf Lu Hitler Marak", "Frankenstein Momin" or "Boldness Billykid" due to the former UK colonial presence in the state capital of Shillong.

40. Picking your nose (rhinotillexis) then ingesting your booger (Mucophagy) helps boost your immune system.

“Tetraphobia” or avoiding the number 4 due to the fact it sounds similar to the pronunciation of death in Mandarin is taken very seriously by the Chinese. In some cases, this can lead to buildings missing multiple floors, so a 20-story building elevator goes up to 22 because there is no 4th or 14th floors.

42. Chandre Oram is an Indian tea estate worker who lives in the Alipurduar district of Jalpaiguri, West Bengal. He is famous for having a 33 cm (13 inches) long tail, which has made him an object of devotion to many, who believe him to be an incarnation of Hanuman, a Hindu deity associated with monkeys.

43. "A Book from the Sky" is a 604-page long book filled entirely with meaningless glyphs designed to resemble traditional Chinese characters.

44. On November 30th, 1954 in Sylacauga, Alabama, a grapefruit-sized meteorite crashed through the roof of Ann Hodges' house and struck her while she was napping. It is noted as, "the first documented extraterrestrial object to have injured a human being."

45. Project Steve is a list of scientists in which all signatories (1) support evolution, (2) oppose intelligent design, and (3) are named Steve or a variation of that name. As of September 27, 2018, 1432 Steves have signed the statement.

Farmers feed large magnets to cows to prevent "Hardware Disease". Cow Magnets sit in their "stomach" for the lifetime of the cow and prevent accidentally eaten pieces of metal from lodging in the stomach folds causing illness.

47. Cadaver Synod was the posthumous trial of Pope Formosus. His corpse was dug up and found guilty, and his papacy voided. His corpse was then thrown in the River Tiber but became a source of miracles. His trial was then overturned and he was reburied, but a later pope upheld the conviction.

48. There is a square root day, like pi day but it is "celebrated on days when both the day of the month and the month are the square root of the last two digits of the year" (the next being 5th May 2025).

49. The Kerala red rain phenomenon was a blood rain (red rain) event that occurred from 25 July to 23 September 2001, when heavy downpours of red-colored rain fell sporadically on the southern Indian state of Kerala.

50. In 1888, a scientist found a fossil fragment which he determined was a dinosaur, "Aachenosaurus". When it was proved that the fossil was in fact petrified wood, he withdrew from science completely from pure embarrassment.