"What Are Some Events In Recorded History That Are Extremely Hard To Believe, But Without A Doubt Actually Happened?" (40 Pics)

There would have been a third, and a nuclear, world war and possibly the end of the world if Stanislaw Petrow didn't react like he did on the 25th of September 1983. In short: he was the only one that questioned the readings on the russian missle alert system and refused to launch nuclear counter-missiles.

There was a Japanese man called Tsutomu Yamaguchi who was on his way to work in Hiroshima in 1945, when he saw falling through the sky, two miles from where he stood, what ultimately turned out to be the atomic bomb.

He had just enough time to take cover in a ditch as the bomb detonated and miraculously he survived. Somehow the Hiroshima train station was still operational and so Yamaguchi, battered, bombed and bruised, decided to board a train to his family home so he could recover - in Nagasaki.

3 days later Yamaguchi was called into work to explain what he saw, which he did. At work as he began to tell the story of what happened, the second bomb dropped.

It was the reinforced concrete walls around him that saved him this time, and Yamaguchi quickly ran to find his wife and son. Ground temperatures in the city reached 4,000°C and radioactive rain poured down.

The family's home was destroyed, but Yamaguchi's wife and son had thankfully been out shopping - looking for burn ointment for Yamaguchi - when the bomb fell, and they'd survived.

Despite this ordeal of having survived two nuclear explosions and subsequent radiation exposure, Yamaguchi went on to live till 93 yrs of age. He died in 2010 after being recognised by the Japanese government as a 'nijyuu hibakusha', or 'twice-bombed person'.

Australia’s Emu war.

Not only is it hilarious that they went to war with a bird, but the fact that they lost to the birds is the cherry on top.

St Olga of Kiev. Her story is the ultimate revenge tale

I highly recommend people looking her up but in short, her husband was killed by a neighbouring tribe and she sought vengeance.

The neighbouring faction then sought to take over her own, seeing as she was a weak woman and ruling in her dead husbands place as her own son was too young. She invited them to her town as a show of honour.

When the large party of messengers arrived, they were soon attacked and backed into a massive trench that Olgas people had dug the nights before.

Standing over the trench she asked them “If they found the honor to their taste” and buried them alive. But she wasn’t even close to finished with her quest for vengeance.

She sent message back to the enemy saying she would accept an allegiance by marriage. Painting herself as such a feeble woman, that she would gladly relinquish her power to her enemy. But she requested all high chieftains to visit her town, to socialise and garner favour.

The chieftains came, she invited them into the bath house to relax before a feast. They were locked inside and burned to death.

But she wasn’t done. Her next feat is her most incredible.

After taking out most people of power from the other faction. She demanded tribute from their towns and villages… Not in gold, not in any material goods. But in the form of sparrows and pigeons.

Thousands were delivered to her.

The next night, she ordered her soldiers to tie a strip of sulfur to the birds legs, set it alight, and released the birds.

The birds flew back to the houses and homes they had nested in. And burned every village to the ground.

The sky was apparently a blaze of fire for days. Olga emerged victorious, and satiated.

Don’t f**k with Olga of Kiev

She is known, quite aptly, as the patron saint of vengeance and defiance.

Christmas day 1914. The truce on the WW1 battlefields.

Shows the humanity inside everyone, but they were able to wake up the next day and go straight back to war, kill the men that they’d spent a sincere day with.

This was the first thing I thought of and I’m surprised it’s not higher up.

nukalurk replied:

On paper it sounds like something out of a cheesy Christmas story or some feel-good childhood fairy tale about the “good and bad guys” just randomly deciding to stop fighting and get along, except it actually happened during one of the most horrific wars in human history - albeit temporarily.

The man who ordered all flights to be grounded on September 11, 2001, was Benedict Sliney, the FAA's National Operations Manager. He made his decision largely by himself, and with limited advice from his aides.

It was his first day as National Operations Manager.

In 1944, during the allied invasion of France, 2 American paramedics, Ken Moore and Robert Wright, 101st Airborne, saved around 80 soldiers of both sides, allied and axis. They set themselves up in a church, had only what was in their first aid kits and medic bags, and had a strict no gun policy. The church was almost destroyed by a mortar shell, but it didn’t go off. It was almost destroyed again, due to friendly fire. Ken Moore would risk his life by venturing out of the church and finding injured soldiers, and both medics stayed behind at the church, even though the rest of their forces had to retreat. Wright took on the responsibility of looking after the soldiers.

The church still stands in Angoville-au-Plain, France, the blood stained pews are still there, and a broken tile from the mortar shell was never fixed, to honor the legacy of these men.

This is very simplified, and probably inaccurate in a few ways, but it is still an incredible story.

The Battle of Halys

In roughly 6th century BC, the Medes and the Lydians were at war. The war had lasted for six years and climaxed at the Battle of Halys. During the battle, a solar eclipse began. Both sides believed that the Gods were angry at their long and bloody war, and were taking the sun away from them. They declared peace that day, and the sun was returned.

There was another plane that would have hit the Capitol on 9/11. The passengers took over the plane from the hijackers and crashed it in an open field.

My colleague was on the plane to Hawaii where the entire top of the plane ripped off… they flew the rest of the way without any overhead.. landed and everyone walked off. Absolutely insane to see the pictures. Talk about being given a 2nd chance..

que_he_hecho replied:

Aloha Airlines Flight 243 for those not familiar with it.

Not only could kids now not believe it, the public couldn't hardly believe it at the time.

Only one death, a flight attendant who wasn't buckled in a seat at the time the roof ripped off.

Roman emperor Caligula declared war on Neptune, god of the sea, and had the waves whipped and stabbed. His soldiers were ordered to collect seashells as prizes of war.

The Four Pests Campaign.
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Mao Zedong, in his infinite hubris, thought that there would be no repercussions from an attempt to completely eliminate rats, flies, mosquitos, and sparrows. Plot twist: there were repercussions.

Millions of people organized into groups, and hit noisy pots and pans to prevent sparrows from resting in their nests, with the goal of causing them to drop dead from exhaustion.

Sparrows were replaced with bed bugs, as the extermination of sparrows had upset the ecological balance, which subsequently resulted in surging locust and insect populations that destroyed crops due to a lack of a natural predator.

The ecological disruption was one of several factors that led to a famine that killed 45 million people.

In 1908 Russia showed up 12 days late to the Olympics because the world switched calenders while they did not.

Everything having to do with Mad Jack Churchill. He reads like someone’s self-insert OC in a historical fiction based on WWII, except he’s all real.

He was a Brit who fought in World War II without guns, instead preferring a longbow, a claymore sword, and bagpipes. Despite this, he won. A lot. He single-handedly took a whole village back from the Nazis by taking his shirt off and stealthing around to scare the c**p out of them with his sword. After the Nazis captured him one time and held him prisoner, (under the mistaken belief he was related to Winston Churchill,) the prison was raided by the Allies and he was set free…or he would have, had he not already escaped 2 weeks prior. He was on the beach on D-Day, with men under his command, and held them up in their boat while he played a song on the bagpipes, finished, lobbed a grenade onto the beach, and then charged. The war ended, and he was bored, so he went to the Pacific to go fight the Japanese. That ended too, so he got bored in retirement *and invented river surfing*.

This is just a scrap of the historical anomaly that is Mad Jack Churchill.

In 1903, The New York Times published an article about flying machines. They stated that it would take the combined efforts of all Mathematicians and mechanics 1-to-10 million years for powered flight to be achieved.

Anyway, about 9 weeks later, the Wright brothers achieved powered flight for the first time.

They were also overly cynical afterwards, In 1910 they said that flight would only ever be for billionaires, of course we had commercial flights by around the 60s achievable for many.

On the 24th of June 2023, the most important Russian mercenary group marched on Moscow, just to give up a few hours later.

During the salem witch trials, a man named giles cory was pressed to death with boards and stones to try to force a confession out of him. When asked for a plea, he simply said, "more weight." He never confessed, so he was never convicted as a witch, and his land passed to his son in laws instead of to the government.

Harrison Odjegba Okene - the Nigerian man who survived for 3 days inside an air pocket inside of a sunken ship in the Atlantic.

Divers went down to recover bodies and investigate, and they discovered and rescued him. There is footage from the diver rescue.

The Ghost Army in WWII. Essentially an American group of troops would deploy “dummy” tanks, broadcast fake radio chatter, and deploy loud sound effects over speakers to fool the Nazis into thinking there was a large military presence coming their way. The Ghost Army was used to deceive the Nazis and make them send their military presence elsewhere, which provided openings for the real Allied forces to move in. This was used in the later parts of the war.

I never learned about this in school but I discovered it on my own and thought it was fascinating. Imagine thinking a whole mess of tanks are heading your way but in reality, it’s a couple of inflatable dummies and a few speakers.

Halley's Comet appeared in the sky when Mark Twain was born in 1835. The comet moves in a seventy-five or seventy-six-year orbit, and, as it neared Earth once again, Twain said “I came in with Halley’s Comet and I expect to go out with it.” Sure enough, he died on April 21, 1910, just as the comet made its next pass within sight of Earth.