Storm Ride to Earth
26. In 1959, pilot William Rankin bailed out of his plane straight into a violent thunder cloud. The storm winds held him up for 40 minutes, striking him with hailstones and so much rain that at times he had to hold his breath to avoid drowning in mid-air.
27. In 1958, while widening a road, the RAF found that a fifteen-year-old display mockup of the biggest bomb ever used in World War 2 was not just a mockup, but was actually a live bomb.
28. In 1951, a 21-year-old Clint Eastwood was riding as a passenger in a Douglas AD-1 bomber that ran out of fuel and ditched off the coast of California. He escaped serious injury and swam 3 miles to shore.
29. In 1955, someone dropped a 600-year-old plaster Buddha Statue and then discovered that the plaster was hiding a solid gold statue underneath.
30. In 1952-54, Felisa Rincón de Gautier, the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, had snow flown in by plane to the city so that children who had never seen or played in the snow would be able to do so.
31. During a 1957 Phillies game, Richie Ashburn struck a fan named Alice Roth, the wife of Philadelphia Bulletin sports editor Earl Roth, with a foul ball and broke her nose. When play resumed, he hit her again with another foul ball as she was being taken out on a stretcher.
32. In 1956, two young girls named Patricia and Barbara, who were obsessed with Elvis Presley, vanished after going to see “Love Me Tender” for the 15th time. Elvis was so worried that he made a public appeal on the radio, asking them to be “good Presley fans and go home and ease their mother’s worries.”
33. According to a computer program that tracked news, April 11, 1954, was the most boring day in history. The most notable events that day were a general election in Belgium and the birth of a Turkish academic.
34. In 1950, Ladislao Kubala signed for Barcelona after getting drunk on the way to join Real Madrid.
35. In 1950, a disease called Myxomatosis was introduced to rabbits in Australia for population control. It wiped out 500,000,000 rabbits, caused skin tumors and blindness, and often killed them within 2 weeks.
Copper Needles In Space
36. In the 1950s, the United States military sent 480 million copper needles into space, which effectively formed an artificial ionosphere. The needles were intended to help facilitate global communication. This was called Project West Ford.
37. In 1957, American singer-songwriter Little Richard watched a bright red fireball move across the sky, which he viewed as a “sign from God” to repent from performing secular music and his wild lifestyle at the time until 1962. The fireball was actually the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite Sputnik 1.
38. In the 1950s, casinos in Las Vegas provided “Atomic Tourism,” where guests could observe atomic bombs being tested in the desert as entertainment.
39. In 1953, a North Korean fighter pilot named No Kum-sok defected to South Korea in his MiG-15 and received $100,000 from the United States.
40. In 1959, the USPS tried delivering mail by cruise missile and successfully sent 3,000 pieces of mail from Virginia to Florida in 22 minutes.
41. In 1950, four students from Glasgow stole the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey and smuggled it back to Scotland in a Ford Anglia. The stone, also called the Coronation Stone, is the stone upon which British royalty is crowned, and was taken by the English from Scotland in 1296.
42. In 1950, Brazil was so certain they would win the World Cup final against Uruguay that the local media called them “future champions” before the match, and 22 gold medals had already been made with the names of Brazilian players. They lost 2-1.
43. During the 1956 Olympic torch relay, a veterinary student named Barry Larkin deceived spectators by carrying a fake torch made of a chair leg, a pudding can, and flaming underpants. He managed to hand it over to the mayor of Sydney, who gave a speech without realizing it was a hoax.
44. Between 1950 and 1965, the US military lost a total of 10 nuclear weapons, mainly in the ocean, which is still missing.
45. In the 1950s, a Catholic Priest named Gerald Fitzgerald suggested banishing all sexually predatory priests to a remote island for life.
The SLAM’s Deadly Design
46. In 1955, the US created a nuclear-powered cruise missile. The SLAM’s unshielded reactor would sicken, injure, and/or kill living things beneath its flight path, and its strategically selected crash site would receive intense radioactive contamination.
47. In 1956, a magician named P. C. Sorcar was doing the “cut a person in half” trick with his assistant during a televised performance. Right after she was split, the host ended the show. People were horrified, believing she had been killed, but the broadcast had simply run out of time.
48. In 1952, President Harry S. Truman delivered the first televised tour of the White House. He described its history, paused before paintings and furniture to share stories, and even played the Steinway piano in the East Room.
49. In the 1950s, at the height of the Red Scare, Einstein offered to serve as a character witness in defense of W.E.B. Du Bois, who was being indicted by the feds for failing to register as a “foreign agent.” Einstein’s offer caused the judge to drop the case.
50. In 1952, Wernher von Braun wrote a book titled “Project Mars” that imagined human colonists on Mars being led by a person called “Elon.”
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