1Owen J. Baggett
Owen J. Baggett became legendary as being the only person to have downed a Japanese aircraft with an M1911 pistol. He shot the pilot in the head while he was parachuting down.
2. El Cid was a military leader in the Middle Ages who was so feared that after his death, his embalmed body was placed on a horse and sent into battle causing the enemy to flee.
3. During one of their numerous battles in the early 1700s, an unnamed South Carolina Catawba warrior was ambushed by a New York Seneca war party. He took off and shot and killed seven Senecas before being captured. They stripped him naked, tied him up and marched him back to New York, allowing people to whip him as he passed. When they untied him after traveling 500 miles, he dashed off into the nearby river, swam it without popping up once and took off into the woods. That night he killed the Seneca search party that was sent after him. The Senecas decided he was a wizard and gave up. He made his way back to South Carolina, dug up the bodies of the seven Senecas he had killed when he was caught and scalped them.
4. In 1922, a fur trapper named Ben Cochrum was attacked by a wolf pack in Manitoba. After shooting 7, beating four more to death, and shattering his rifle stock, he gave up and was torn to pieces. His body was found surrounded by the remains of the 11 wolves he had killed fighting for his life.
5. In 2015, MMA fighter Matt Hamill noticed a car speeding down the wrong side of the highway. So he turned his car around, gave a chase and safely forced the car to a grassy area. He then punched out a window to stop the car, potentially saving the child passenger and the inebriated mother’s lives.
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6John Clem
John Clem was a drummer boy in the Union Army during the Civil War, who at the age of 11 shot a confederate colonel who had demanded his surrender. Promoted to sergeant, he became the youngest NCO in Army history. He retired in 1915 as a general and the last actively serving veteran of the Civil War.
7. During World War 2, a Spaniard named Joan Pujol Garcia was a double agent that spied on Germany for the British. He was supposed to recruit spies in Britain for the Germans. Eventually, the Germans were funding a network of 27 fictional agents and decided they had enough “agents” spying for them in Britain and didn’t want anymore. He played an important role in the deceptive operation intended to mislead the Germans about the D-day invasions. He received the medal of service from both the Allies and Axis.
8. Harald Hardrada was a Viking who fled from his native Norway to Russia, then went on to become an elite guardsman in Eastern Roman Empire and fought in Iraq. He then went back to Russia to marry a princess, and arrived back in Norway as a king and finally invaded England with his army.
9. The real Grizzly Adams caught a 1-year-old brown bear. He then taught her to follow him around, carry a pack and then to pull a loaded sled. She even cuddled up near Adams to keep him warm in freezing condition. Eventually, the bear that he named Lady Washington allowed Adams to ride on her back.
10. In 1941, the world’s largest seed bank (Created by botanist Nikolai Vavilov) was housed in Leningrad. As the Germans surrounded the city forcing mass starvation, scientists inside the vault refused to eat from the collection, slowly dying of hunger as they maintained 16 rooms of edible plants.
11Adolphe Sax
Adolphe Sax (inventor of the saxophone) survived a three-story fall, a gunpowder explosion, drinking a bowl of sulfuric water, a near-poisoning due to furniture varnish, and falling into a speeding river, all before the age of nine. His neighbors called him “little Sax, the ghost.” He also suffered at least one assassination attempt due to the dislike of his new invention (saxophone) among instrument makers.
12. In 1996, a Texas man named Valentin Grimaldo was bitten by a venomous coral snake. He proceeded to kill the reptile by biting off its head and then used its skin as a tourniquet, a move that saved his life.
13. Matt Urban was nicknamed “The Ghost” by Germans during World War 2 for his habit of coming back from fights that would kill normal men. During one fight he blew up a German tank with a bazooka; took a 31mm tank-gun round to his leg, but continued fighting. The next day he suffered another wound and was evacuated. When he woke up in the hospital, he limped his way back with a cane and manned a machine gun under heavy fire. Days later he took shrapnel to the-chest and survived. After recovering, he took a shot to the neck, but survived again, only losing his voice. He survived the war and lived for another 51 years.
14. During the first major raid against the Germans in 1941, Canadian chaplain John Weir Foote was told to sit it out. He dared his officer to arrest him to keep him out, so he was assigned as a stretcher-bearer. During the raid, he helped carry 30 wounded soldiers to safety under fire and provided them with morphine. While retreating from the beach, he disembarked and surrendered himself as he considered a POW camp needed religious guidance more than a hunch of soldiers returning to base. After three years’ imprisonment with one serious escape attempt, Foote was released. He was awarded the Victoria Cross.
15. Werner Forssmann was the first man to perform cardiac catheterization. He ignored his department chief and persuaded the operating room nurse to assist him. She agreed, but on the promise that he would do it on her rather than on himself. He pretended to locally anesthetize and cut her arm whilst he actually did the procedure on himself. He then walked downstairs to the radiology department to take the x-ray to prove he would not die. He was fired, became a Nazi and then won the Nobel Prize.
16Irish Soldiers in Congo
In 1961, about 150 Irish soldiers defended a Congo town from 3000 African tribesmen and foreign mercenaries for six days. They killed 300 of them and didn’t lose any men themselves.
17. In 634, when Eastern Roman Empire met Rashidun Caliphate, among them was Zarrar Ibn al-Azwar, who was a tax-collector, but whenever war broke out he was charging the battlefield without armor earning him the nickname of “the half-naked warrior.” During this war, when the caliphate was on the verge of losing, they challenged the Byzantine officers with a series of duels against Azwar. He killed two governors and every other Roman champion, leaving the Roman army with no officers to lead. Caliphate won Syria and Palestine and ruled there for more than 1000 years.
18. A grandma named Sue Aikens lives in total isolation as the manager of river camp north the Arctic Circle in Alaska. She was once attacked by a bear and escaped. Because bears were known to be carriers of bacteria, she cleaned up the wounds, sewed her scalp, reset her dislocated legs, went out again and shot him dead. Then her hips gave out and she could only pull forward. She laid there for 10 days until a pilot found her.
19. Robert Landsburg, while filming Mount St. Helens volcano eruption in 1980 realized he could not survive it, so he rewound the film back into its case, put his camera in his backpack, and then lay on top of the back to protect the film for future researchers.
20. During World War 2, the Japanese were known to execute POWs on a whim if there was even a hint of rescue. So to rescue allied POWs from the Cabanatuan City, in the Philippines, allies devised a ridiculous plan. Capt. Kenneth Schrieber and Lt. Bonnie Rucks flew their P-61 low, backfired their aircraft several times while performing aerobatic maneuvers for 20 minutes over the POW camp. Every Japanese guard watched waiting for them to crash. While they were distracted, several hundred allied soldiers were able to sneak into the camp unnoticed and when the orders came they were able to kill every Japanese soldier within 15 seconds and liberated the camp.
21Karina Chikitova
In 2014, a 3-year-old Russian girl named Karina Chikitova survived for 11 days in Siberian taiga forest by drinking from a creek and eating berries while being protected by her dog, which went to get help after 9 days and returned with rescuers.
22. Bryan Cranston wore a suit of 10,000 live bees while filming an episode of Malcolm in the Middle. He was only stung once. After the writers asked him jokingly if he would be willing to wear a suit of live bees, he said he would, so they wrote a script around the idea.
23. In World War 2, when his submarine sank, John Capes swam 170 feet to the surface and swam 5 miles to shore. He then hid from Italians for 18 months before escaping to Turkey.
24. In 2015, when a Montana man named Chase DelIwo came face-to-face with a 400-pound grizzly bear, he used a tip he had received from his grandmother (large animals have bad gag reflexes) to save his life. He shoved his right arm down the bear’s throat and the bear left him. He survived with a couple of hundred stitches to his head and a punctured leg.
25. When Jimmy Carter was a young nuclear office in the US Navy, they sent him to help a partial meltdown in a Canadian nuclear reactor. They built an exact copy of the reactor to train with and then lowered him into the still extremely radioactive reactor to take it apart one piece at a time.
