Random Fact Sheet #108 – 40 Facts That Will Make You See The Beauty in The Unusual

In 1968, over 6,000 sheep died in Utah after a mishap at a chemical weapons test range some 50 miles away. A canister aboard a spray plane malfunctioned, dispersing a supposed nerve gas at a height of 1,400 feet instead of the intended 150 feet.

2. In 2016, a man named Benjamin R. Grafius in Pennsylvania was arrested for exposing himself to Amish women because he knew they wouldn't be able to phone for help.

3. Nearly 70 years after the Pearl Harbor attack, USS Arizona still continues to leak up to 9 quarts of oil each day.

4. McDonald's is experimenting with playing classical music over the restaurants' loudspeakers at night in hopes of stopping fights from breaking out.

5. Researchers have recently discovered multiple hidden “civilizations” of octupuses which they are referring to as Octlantis.

When the dying star VY Canis Majoris collapses, it will produce 100 times more energy in one second than our sun will produce over its entire 10 billion year lifetime.

7. The leading cause of non-natural death in the 20th Century was democide, which is a term used to denote “the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder.”

8. Domestic horses can detect negative emotion in human facial expressions.

9. Isla Fisher almost drowned during the filming of the piranha tank scene in the movie “Now You See Me.” She had to give the impression of being in distress but when Isla's chains became entangled for real, she began to genuinely panic and everyone thought it was just very good acting.

10. Actors have to pay $30,000 to have a star on the Hollywood walk of fame.

The Leonberger breed of dogs were used a lot in both World Wars in and around Germany. So many of the dogs were abandoned or killed in action due to invasions that every currently living Leonberger can be traced back to only 8 that remained after World War 2.

12. Chuck E. Cheese’s backstory is that he was an orphan and didn’t know when his birthday was. This made him sad so he started throwing birthday parties for kids.

13. There are many different types of bananas, including one that tastes like vanilla ice cream, however many of us only eat the common Cavendish banana, which has the most important commercial trait of surviving overseas shipping.

14. Jan Baalsrud was a World War 2 Norwegian commando, who was the lone survivor of a Nazi ambush. He survived an avalanche, severe frostbite and snow blindness, having to amputate his own toes, and being relentlessly pursued by Germans for 9 weeks before being whisked to safety in Sweden by locals.

15. The remote Ascension Island in the Atlantic was known as a barren, desert island when it was discovered in the 1700s, but today boasts one of the world's largest artificial forests, which was planned by Charles Darwin and botanist Joseph Hooker in order to make the island livable.

In 1976, the team studying a newly-identified virus in Africa didn't want to name it after the village where it was found, so they named it after the closest river they could see on a map, which was the Ebola River.

17. The loudest word ever shouted was the word 'quiet'.

18. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, but never tried to make an antibiotic out of it. It was not until a decade later that a man named Howard Florey found Fleming's little-known paper and realized the mold's potential. Florey's work is estimated to have saved up to 200,000,000 lives.

19. One of the most famous lines in movie history, "You're going to need a bigger boat" from 'Jaws' was actually an ad-lib on set. Furthermore, the audience screams at test screenings obscured the line, leading to a longer pause before hearing the line.

20. In 2017, Bud light sent a cease and desist letter to a small brewer who named their beer “Dilly Dilly,” referencing a nonsense phrase coined and trademarked for a series of Bud Light ads. The letter was written on a scroll and announced by a town crier.

In the United Kingdom, the April Fool's Day ends at noon.

22. There was a pristine version of the Apollo 11 moon landing footage at NASA for years, but around 1980 due to a data tape shortage they reused the tape for something else. This is the reason we only have a grainy version of the footage.

23. The Serpent Column, which the Greeks created in 478 B.C. to celebrate their victory over the Persians at Plataea, still exists and was made from the melted-down bronze from the Persian weapons.

24. The African elephant has the longest gestational period out of all mammals, with an average pregnancy lasting almost 2 years.

25. Tea is said to have been discovered in 2737 B.C. by a Chinese emperor named Shen Nung when some tea leaves accidentally blew into a pot of boiling water.