5 Minute Strange - True Stories You Never Knew

On September thirteenth, eighteen forty-eight, a premature explosion drove a three-and-a-half-foot iron rod completely through the skull of railway foreman Phineas Gage — entering below his left cheekbone and exiting through the top of his head. He remained conscious. He survived. He returned to work. But Phineas Gage, according to everyone who knew him, was no longer Phineas Gage. His personality...

Between nineteen forty-two and nineteen seventy-seven, Virginia park ranger Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning seven times. He lost a toenail, had his eyebrows burned off, had his hair catch fire twice, suffered burns to his shoulder, chest, and stomach, and was knocked unconscious more than once. He survived every strike. He became known as the Human Lightning Rod. He carried a can of water wit...

 On Christmas Eve nineteen seventy-one, seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke was the sole survivor when LANSA Flight five-oh-eight broke apart in mid-air over the Peruvian Amazon after a lightning strike. She fell nearly ten thousand feet strapped to her seat and landed in the rainforest. Ninety-one other people died. She then spent eleven days alone in the Amazon jungle, following streams downstrea...

On January twenty-sixth, nineteen seventy-two, a bomb destroyed a JAT Yugoslav Airlines flight at thirty-three thousand feet over Czechoslovakia. All twenty-eight people on board were killed — except one flight attendant named Vesna Vulović, who fell the full distance, was found alive in the wreckage, and spent twenty-seven days in a coma before waking up. She holds the Guinness World Record for t...

In nineteen thirty-nine, a University of Iowa researcher took twenty-two orphaned children and divided them into groups — some were told their speech was excellent, others were told they were stuttering badly and needed to correct a serious problem. The normal-speaking children told they might be stutterers developed speech problems, withdrew from social interaction, and cried. The researcher did...

Between the nineteen thirties and nineteen forty-five, a covert Imperial Japanese Army facility in occupied Manchuria conducted lethal experiments on thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Russian prisoners — deliberate infection with plague and cholera, vivisection without anaesthesia, frostbite experiments, pressure chamber tests, and biological warfare attacks on civilian populations. Estimates of t...

 In September nineteen fifty, US Navy vessels spent six days releasing bacteria into the air over San Francisco as part of a classified test to see whether biological weapons could be covertly deployed against a city. Eight hundred thousand residents breathed it in without knowing. Within a week, eleven patients at Stanford University Hospital developed unusual infections caused by the same bacter...

In August nineteen seventy-one, twenty-four ordinary college students were randomly assigned as guards or prisoners in a basement at Stanford University. The experiment was supposed to last two weeks. It was stopped after six days because the guards had become sadistic, the prisoners were breaking down, and the researcher running it had lost his own grip on what he was supposed to be doing. One wo...

In nineteen fifty-three, the CIA approved a covert program to develop mind control techniques using LSD, sensory deprivation, electroconvulsive therapy, and psychological manipulation — administered to thousands of unwitting American and Canadian citizens through hospitals, universities, and prisons. Most subjects were never told what had been done to them. In nineteen seventy-three, CIA Director...

In the middle of the Hoia-Baciu Forest near Cluj-Napoca, Romania, there is a perfectly circular clearing approximately one hundred metres across where nothing grows. The trees around it are alive. The clearing is dead. Scientific analysis of the soil has found elevated radiation and unusual mineral composition. Nobody has fully explained how a near-perfect circle of dead ground came to exist at th...

For decades, a small percentage of residents in and around Taos, New Mexico have been hearing a persistent low-frequency hum — a sound like a diesel engine idling, heard more strongly indoors than out, unaffected by earplugs, loudest at night. The majority of the population hears nothing. Those who hear it describe sleep disruption, headaches, nausea, and the particular distress of reporting somet...

Since the nineteen sixties, dogs have been jumping from the same spot on a Victorian stone bridge in Dumbarton, Scotland. The drop is fifteen metres to the rocks below. Some dogs have survived, been carried back to the top, returned to the exact same spot, and jumped again. Scientists have investigated. Warning signs have been posted. Nobody has produced an explanation that accounts for every docu...

In nineteen sixty-two, someone set fire to a landfill in Centralia, Pennsylvania. The fire spread into the abandoned coal mine tunnels beneath the town and has been burning ever since. It has been burning for over sixty years. Scientists estimate it will continue for at least two hundred and fifty more. The town of three thousand people that once stood above it is almost entirely gone — demolished...

In the Chihuahuan desert of northern Mexico there is a stretch of land approximately fifty square kilometres wide where compasses reportedly spin without direction, radio signals fail to transmit, and electronic equipment develops problems that disappear the moment it is carried away from the area. In nineteen seventy, a US military test rocket went off course and crashed there. The recovery team...

In late two thousand and twelve, fisherman José Salvador Alvarenga left the Pacific coast of Mexico on a routine shark-fishing run and did not return for over a year. When he stepped ashore at Ebon Atoll in the Marshall Islands in January two thousand and fourteen, he said he had been drifting for four hundred and thirty-eight days — surviving on raw fish, birds, and turtles, collecting rainwater,...

 In the early hours of May twenty-sixth, two thousand and thirteen, the tugboat Jascon-4 capsized off the coast of Nigeria in heavy Atlantic swells, killing eleven of its twelve crew members. Cook Harrison Okene survived by being swept into a small air pocket inside the overturned hull as it sank to the seabed thirty metres below the surface. For over sixty hours he held on in total darkness — no...

On December fourth, nineteen seventy-two, seven-year-old Steven Stayner was lured into a car in Merced, California, and told that his parents no longer wanted him. For the next seven years he was moved around California under a false name, enrolled in schools, and abused while living in plain sight as someone else's son. In March nineteen eighty, at fourteen years old, he walked into a police...

In December nineteen forty-four, Japanese officer Hiroo Onoda was sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines with orders to fight and a promise that someone would come back for him. Japan surrendered in August nineteen forty-five. Onoda did not come out. He decided the surrender leaflets were Allied propaganda, and for the next twenty-nine years he continued fighting — raiding villages, exchanging f...

On Christmas Eve nineteen seventy-one, seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke was thrown from a disintegrating aircraft over the Peruvian Amazon and woke up alone on the jungle floor on Christmas morning. She had a broken collarbone, no glasses, one sandal, and no idea she was the only survivor. What she did have was something her biologist parents had taught her years earlier — follow the water downs...

On June twenty-third, two thousand and eighteen, twelve boys from the Wild Boars football team and their assistant coach entered Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand and were cut off by rising floodwater. For nine days, nobody knew if they were alive. The cave system flooded. Visibility for divers dropped to almost nothing. British cave divers Rick Stanton and John Volanthen finally found them ali...

In September two thousand and twenty-three, experienced American caver Mark Dickey began vomiting blood more than one thousand metres underground in Morca Cave in southern Turkey. He was too weak to move. A fit caver could take fifteen hours just to reach the surface from where he lay. Dickey was not fit — he was losing blood in one of the deepest cave systems in Turkey, with no way out under his...

In June two thousand and fourteen, German cave researcher Johann Westhauser was struck by falling rock more than one thousand metres underground in the Riesending cave system in the Bavarian Alps — Germany's deepest cave. He suffered serious head and chest injuries and could not climb out. Before rescue could even begin, one of his companions had to spend over ten hours climbing to the surface...

 In January nineteen twenty-five, Kentucky cave explorer Floyd Collins crawled into Sand Cave alone and dislodged a twenty-seven-pound rock that pinned his leg in a passage too tight to work in. He was alive. People could reach him. Food and water were passed down. And then the story became national news — reporters arrived, then crowds, then vendors selling food, until thousands of people gathere...

On November twenty-fourth, two thousand and nine, twenty-six-year-old medical student John Jones crawled headfirst into an unmapped crevice in Nutty Putty Cave in Utah and became trapped upside down, roughly eighteen inches wide, one hundred feet underground. Rescuers reached him. They got an IV into him. They let him speak to his pregnant wife by radio. After twenty-seven hours underground, a rop...

In September two thousand and twenty-three, experienced American caver Mark Dickey began vomiting blood more than one thousand metres underground in Morca Cave in southern Turkey. He was too weak to move. A fit caver could take fifteen hours just to reach the surface from where he lay. Dickey was not fit — he was losing blood in one of the deepest cave systems in Turkey, with no way out under his...