People Are Sharing The Wildest Historical Events That Are Rarely Talked About, And I'm Gonna Need Documentaries About Several Of These
Recently over on r/AskReddit, u/thereisnomeme21 asked, "What are some crazy historical events that nobody talks about?"
E! / Via giphy.com
Being that I love going down a good historical event rabbit hole, I was instantly intrigued (and honestly, kind of shocked that I hadn't heard of some of these!).
Ozzy Osbourne / Via giphy.com
Here are 13 absolutely wild historical events that are rarely talked about, from songs that were investigated by the FBI to meat spontaneously falling from the sky:
1."In the late 1970s, Howard Hughes, who hadn't been seen in years, was supposedly building this huge prototype ship that was going to vacuum valuable minerals from the sea floor. Turns out it was a CIA cover story. An advanced Soviet submarine had sunk in deep Pacific waters, [and] they wanted to try to retrieve it. They spent years and millions [of dollars] on a top-secret ship. It had to remain top secret because the Soviets would do almost anything to prevent a new submarine falling into enemy hands." —u/3kniven6gash
In 1968, the K-219, a Soviet ballistic missile submarine, went missing with no explanation somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. After hearing about it the missing submarine, both the United States and the Soviets set out in search of the ship, both armed with nuclear weapons. Despite their best efforts, neither country was able to locate the ship. After two months, the Soviets decided to abandon the search, but the United States had something else planned. They had been able to pinpoint an approximate location of where the submarine had sunk using new Air Force technology but struggled to figure out the best way to raise the submarine without tipping off the Soviet Union.
After much debate, the United States decided that raising the submarine was worth it, considering how much information about the Soviet Union's war strategy was sure to be on board. They developed a plan to build a massive claw that they would use to raise the submarine. The issue? The United States couldn't risk the Soviet Union finding out and worried about potential charges of piracy or the threat of nuclear warfare.
The United States decided to enlist the help of Howard Hughes to develop a cover story that would prevent the Soviet Union from finding out about the ship's whereabouts. Hughes, an incredibly eccentric billionaire who was known for being reclusive, would allow the CIA to name the ship after him and concoct a cover story that Hughes was building the ship as a deep-sea mining vessel. The construction of the ship was kept incredibly secret, and many just assumed that it was all part of Hughes' reclusiveness.
During the summer of 1974, the ship set off to raise the submarine. Two Soviet ships were closely monitoring the activities of the boat, but they were able to raise part of the K-219. The United States thought they had gotten away with the scheme, but a 1975 raid of one of Hughes' offices brought the story into the spotlight. However, a lot of the details were foggy. After both the Soviet government and journalists continued to prod the United States for answers about the ship, they coined the term, "We can neither confirm nor deny," to use as their response.
2."The Kentucky meat shower. [In] 1876, chunks of red meat fell from the sky without explanation. It was examined, and was possibly lung tissue from horses or human infants. Some people even ate it." —u/Skevinger
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On March 3, 1896, a woman named Mrs. Crouch was making soap on her porch near Olympia Springs, Kentucky, when she saw chunks of meat "raining" from the sky. According to Mrs. Crouch, the meat rain looked "grisly." She also said that she and her husband believed it was an act of God. Some thought Mrs. Crouch was playing an elaborate hoax, and media from around the country descended on Olympia Springs to investigate her claims.
The chunks of meat were reported to be about 2-by-2 inches, with some even larger chunks found at the scene. People began to flock to the Crouch's farm to see the meat for themselves. While initial reports said the meat was beef, two men at the scene tasted the meat and said they believed it was either lamb or deer. A sample of the meat was tested, and the results said it was either tissue from a horse or a human infant.
While we will likely never know what exactly happened, theories have been swirling about what exactly caused the meat shower. The most plausible theory is that the meat came from a flock of vomiting vultures. Vultures are known to vomit when they feel threatened, and when a vulture sees another vomiting, they often vomit as well. Scientists said the vulture theory makes the most sense given the variety of meat that was found at the site. Others believe it was an unexplained phenomenon that was a message from God.
3."The MOVE bombing in 1985. The Philadelphia Police literally bombed a building from a helicopter and incinerated two city blocks." —u/selviano
Tensions between MOVE, a Black liberation group in Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia Police had been brewing for years. MOVE, which still exists today, stood against government, corporations, and technology, and focused heavily on animal and environmental rights, believing that people should return to nature. The group was known for nonviolent protests, but often had run-ins with authorities due to their outspokenness regarding police brutality.
In the 1980s, the group had moved to Osage Avenue, a quiet residential neighborhood in Philadelphia. Their neighbors frequently complained about the group to the government, and in 1985, Wilson Goode, who was the first Black mayor of Philadelphia, issued an order to evict the group from their home. They refused, setting the stage for a standoff between MOVE and Philadelphia officials.
On May 13, 1985, police entered the home and ordered everyone inside to get out. Nearly 500 officers were on the scene. When the residents refused to leave, police tried to forcibly remove the seven adults and six children who were inside. Police began throwing canisters of tear gas, and MOVE members responded by shooting. After the gunfight, officials ordered that a satchel bomb that was laced with Tovex, which is a dynamite substitute, be dropped on the house from a helicopter. The house went up in flames, killing 11 people and destroying 61 other homes on the block. More than 250 residents were left homeless as a result.
In 1986, a task force found that the actions of the Philadelphia government were unconscionable. Goode made a public apology, but no one was formally charged. Ramona Africa, who was the only surviving adult MOVE member, refused to testify in court and served seven years in prison for rioting and conspiracy.
4."The Radium Era, where people were actually ingesting radium." —u/yamsnavas2
In the early 20th century, glow-in-the-dark watches became all the rage. The watches were covered in shiny paint that gave the glow effect. Soon, companies began opening factories to create the coveted watches. Many of the factories hired women, and the jobs proved to be high-paying. Because the watches were so small, women would use their lips to hold the brushes. The issue? The watches were able to glow because the paint was made with radium, and the women who used their lips to paint were ingesting the radioactive element.
Radium, which had been discovered in 1898, became a massive fad because it was believed to give people energy. Soon, products like toothpaste and energy drinks full of radium began hitting the market. Once ingested, the body often confuses radium as calcium, and gets incorporated into the bone, leading to necrosis and bone cancer.
When some of the factory workers questioned the painting technique, factory bosses assured the women that the paint was totally safe. Others loved that they felt so energized after ingesting the radium, and believed they were healthier than ever. The women continued painting the watches for years, as the damage from ingesting the radium began to accumulate.
By the 1920s, many of the women who worked in the factories began complaining of toothaches and fatigue. Their jawbones began deteriorating, with some becoming so brittle that they disintegrated. In 1925, Grace Fryer decided to file a lawsuit but struggled to find a lawyer who would represent her. Two years later, she was finally able to file her case alongside four other women. In 1928, the case settled in favor of the women, sparking more lawsuits from others who had been affected by the radium. In 1968, radium paint was finally phased out of the market.
5."Ernest Shackleton’s voyage to Antarctica that went wrong. Most amazing survival expedition story I’ve ever read about." —u/Android_Replicant
In December 1914, Ernest Shackleton set out on the expedition of a lifetime in his attempt to reach the South Pole aboard the Endurance. He had unsuccessfully attempted to make it to Antarctica twice before, and this time enlisted the help of a crew of over 60 men.
As they approached the thick barrier of ice around Antarctica, the crew began chipping away to push the boat through. After weeks on the job, they were making decent progress until a heavy wind pushed all of the ice back together. The ship was stuck in the middle of the ice, unable to push forward to reach Antarctica and unable to backtrack to escape the ice. There was nothing the crew could do but wait out the winter, and hope that the ice would melt enough for them to dislodge the boat.
Crew members noted that while Shackleton never publicly expressed concern, he privately worried that they would never be able to free the ship. Meanwhile, the crew set out to salvage as many provisions as possible, while being forced to sacrifice anything that added unnecessary weight to the ship. They hatched a plan to walk across the ice in an attempt to reach land, but abandoned the idea when they only managed to make it seven miles over the course of a week.
By April 1916, the ice had drifted close to land and then broken apart, freeing the ship. Once the boat was back on the open ocean, the crew was depleted. Over half of them had dysentery, and Frank Wild, Shackleton's second-in-command, wrote that "at least half the party were insane."
The crew reached Elephant Island and touched dry land for the first time in 497 days on April 15. After spending days on the uninhabited island, they realized there was little chance anyone was coming for them. Shackleton and a few other crew members set out on a lifeboat in search of rescue. Two weeks later, they had reached land. They disembarked and hiked for three days until they reached Stromness, a Scottish town. In August 1916, Shackleton returned to Elephant Island to rescue the rest of his crew. The Endurance sunk, its whereabouts remaining a mystery for years. In 2022, crews found the shipwreck, finally ending the saga of Shackleton and the Endurance.
6."The Great Molasses Flood (also known as the Boston Molasses Disaster). It was a horrific event that occurred on January 15, 1919, in the North End neighborhood of Boston. A large storage tank filled with 2.3 million US gallons of molasses, weighing approximately 13,000 short tons, burst, and the resultant wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour, killing 21 and injuring 150." —u/Back2Bach
In 1915, a 50-foot-tall steel tank that held molasses was constructed in Boston on behalf of United States Industrial Alcohol, a company that took molasses shipments from the Caribbean to use in their products. The tank had been built during an elevated demand for molasses during World War I, and the construction had been quick and haphazard. Molasses would often leak from the tank onto the street, and people often noticed the tank creaking. Despite these issues, the company didn't take many actions to repair the tank.
Around lunchtime on January 15, 1919, the steel tank burst, sending 2.3 million gallons of molasses down the streets. The molasses wave was believed to be 15 feet tall, and traveled down the streets of Boston's North End at 35 miles per hour, destroying people, horses, homes, and buildings in its path.
Police, firefighters, and crew members from a nearby Navy ship arrived at the scene just minutes after the disaster to find the molasses already receding. As night dawned and temperatures dropped, the molasses began to freeze, trapping bodies and debris. People drowned in the molasses, and it took months for rescue workers to recover some of the bodies. Twenty-one people died in the flood, while hundreds of others were injured.
After the flood, 119 lawsuits against United States Industrial Alcohol were filed, but the company insisted that someone had destroyed the tank to sabotage them. The legal proceedings lasted over five years, and the court ruled that the company was at fault and ordered them to pay those affected $628,000, the equivalent of about $8 million in today's money.
7."The supposed hysteria over Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast was made up by local newspapers because they were afraid of being replaced by radio." —u/SnooChipmunks126
On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles' "The War of the Worlds" radio broadcast debuted. The show turned H.G. Wells' novel of the same name into a series of fake radio bulletins proclaiming that a group of aliens had invaded a New Jersey town. Some who heard the show believed that it was real, and began calling the authorities and newspaper offices to confirm the story. Soon, newspapers began reporting that the show had caused hysteria across the nation.
In later years, there was controversy about exactly how many people heard the broadcast. While some sources say that over 12 million people were listening, according to Slate, only a small portion of the country was actually listening in. During the broadcast, the C.E. Hooper rating service called about 5,000 households for its national rating survey. Only 2% of the households reported listening to "The War of the Worlds," and not a single household surveyed said they were listening to an emergency news broadcast. In fact, in some areas, CBS (which was the station that aired the show) pre-empted "The War of the Worlds" in order to play local programming.
Many people began pointing fingers at newspapers for stoking public fears about the show. In fact, some believed that newspapers made up all of the supposed hysteria in order to create distrust in radio, because they were worried radio was going to overtake newspapers. Others blamed the newspapers for exaggerating the few initial reports of people actually believing the play and said that their coverage made the hysteria even worse.
8."The Montreal biker war in the '90s and the life of Maurice 'Mom' Boucher." —u/wharblgarble
In 1994, the Hells Angels biker gang, which was notorious for their involvement in drug trafficking and other crime in Quebec, issued an ultimatum: anyone dealing drugs in Quebec needed to be buying them from the Hells Angels, or else they would face severe, or even deadly, consequences. Rival gangs, led by the Rock Machine, came together to form an alliance to fight back against the Hells Angels.
On July 13, 1994, three men walked into a motorcycle shop in Quebec and killed Pierre Daoust, an employee of the shop who was a Hells Angels supporter. This murder stoked a years-long biker war between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine that would determine which gang would control the drug trade in Quebec.
After Daoust's murder, members of the Rock Machine attempted to kill another Hells Angel supporter. Later that day, authorities announced that they had arrested five Rock Machine members after uncovering a plot to bomb a Hells Angel clubhouse. In the following weeks, Hells Angel groups across Quebec met to decide they wanted to take part in the biker war. Surveillance caught Maurice Boucher, the president of the Hells Angels who was known as "Mom," leaving one of the meetings.
After the meetings, all four of the major Hells Angel groups in Quebec decided to take part in the war against the Rock Machine. In 1997, Boucher ordered the murder of two prison guards in an attempt to destabilize the justice system. He also wanted to ensure that the crimes committed by members of the gang were so serious that police would be so disgusted by the gang members that they wouldn't want to convince them to become informants.
By 2001, police were able to piece together who was involved in the biker war, and arrested Boucher and 41 of his associates on drug trafficking and murder conspiracy charges. Boucher was later given three life sentences for the murder of the prison guards. The biker war ended in 2002, with over 160 deaths.
9."The Johnstown Flood. Some of the top industrialists in the region built a resort in Pennsylvania and filled a reservoir without properly reinforcing a previously existing dam. In 1889, the dam burst, and a raging flood swept through the river valley, completely destroying some smaller villages, and all but wiping out Johnstown, a city of 30,000 people." —u/IgnoreMe304
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, built in a river valley, typically flooded every year. The residents were used to weathering the storm, but in 1889, the flood proved to be deadlier than anyone thought possible.
On May 31, 1889, residents of Johnstown gathered their belongings and headed for higher ground to wait out the impending flood after a huge rainstorm. Just 14 miles away, the South Fork dam, which held back Lake Conemaugh, was struggling to keep up. All day, officials had been trying to find a solution to prevent the dam from failing. They initially attempted to add height to the dam to allow more water to accumulate, then tried to dig a second spillway to relieve some of the pressure on the dam. They also sent a man to warn those in Johnstown that the dam was likely going to burst, but the message was never delivered.
Around 3 p.m., the dam burst, pouring the contents of the lake into Johnstown with a force scientists said was equivalent to that of Niagara Falls. With the flood came 14 miles of debris that had accumulated as the water rushed to Johnstown. The wave was up to 40 feet high, and half a mile wide.
The death toll was officially counted at 2,208 people. A massive pile of debris that stretched for 30 acres took over three months to remove. Officials had to blow portions of it up with dynamite. Lawsuits were filed, but the flood was seen as an act of God, and nobody was held liable for the dam's failure.
10."There was the 1958 Tybee Island mid-air collision, which resulted in a Mark 15 nuclear bomb that was lost in the ocean nearby Tybee Island. To this day, it has never been found." —u/hiero_
On February 6, 1958, a routine military combat simulation on a B-47 bomber set out from the Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. On board was a 7,600-pound bomb. At about 2 a.m., the bomber collided with an F-86 fighter plane after the pilot of the F-86 ejected himself from the plane.
The B-47 plummeted 18,000 feet until Colonel Howard Richardson, who was flying the plane, was able to regain control. Worried about the damaged plane, Richardson asked if he could drop the bomb, which was in danger of exploding during an emergency landing. His request was granted, and he dropped the bomb over the ocean near Tybee Island, Georgia. When the bomb fell, nobody saw an explosion, leading officials to believe it sunk into the ocean.
The day after the collision, crews set off to recover the bomb, the capabilities of which were unclear. Some believed it contained a plutonium nuclear core, which would mean it had nuclear capabilities. Regardless if the nuclear core was installed, the bomb could still set off a dangerous explosion.
Air Force and Navy personnel combed the ocean for the bomb, but their search proved unsuccessful. On April 16, 1958, they called off the search, and said they believed the bomb was located under piles of silt off of the Wassaw Sound, a nearby bay. To this day, no unusual amounts of nuclear radiation have been detected in the surrounding waters.
11."The FBI investigated the song 'Louie Louie' because the lyrics were unintelligible. They thought it could be some kind of communist plot." —u/BarryStarkweather
12."There was a multi-year pandemic in 1957–58 that people just forgot. I've heard much more about the 1918 pandemic than this one." —u/dethtron5000
While the current COVID-19 pandemic often draws comparisons to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, there was actually a more recent pandemic that has some major similarities to COVID.
In 1957, a deadly respiratory virus originated in East Asia. As news of the virus began to spread, health officials at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research sprang to action. They arranged for members of the military to ship samples of the virus over to the United States, so they could run tests and determine the best course of action. Once the tests were run, they found that the flu, called H2N2, was unlike anything Americans had encountered, meaning that the entire population was susceptible.
Maurice Hilleman, a microbiologist who led the charge in preparing America for H2N2, predicted that the virus would begin infecting Americans in September 1957, right as school was starting. The government largely ignored Hilleman's pleas for them to take action, so Hilleman turned to his contacts at pharmaceutical companies. Most of the companies, while skeptical of the virus's danger, listened to Hilleman, who was a respected figure in the medical community.
The companies swiftly began producing vaccines for H2N2 using samples Hilleman provided. When the virus hit America, the vaccines were already in production. Over 1.1 million people worldwide died from H2N2. Meanwhile, 20 million Americans were infected, and 116,000 died from the virus, but researchers believe that without Hilleman's swift action, at least a million more Americans would have died from complications relating to H2N2.
13."Angel's Glow. After one of the battles in the American Civil War, some of the soldiers' wounds started to glow in the dark. Those that glowed healed faster than those that didn't." —u/viking_knitter
The April 1862 Battle of Shiloh was one of the bloodiest of the entire Civil War. Over 20,000 casualties were recorded between Union and Confederate soldiers, with thousands of more soldiers seriously injured.
In the days following the battle, some of the injured soldiers noticed that their wounds were glowing, emitting a greenish-blue color. Soon after, those who had experienced the glowing wounds realized that they were recovering quicker than those whose wounds had not glowed. Doctors also learned that those with glowing wounds had lower infection rates. Nobody could figure out what was causing the glowing wounds, but began referring to the phenomenon as "Angel's Glow."
In 2001, a high schooler named Bill Martin toured the Battle of Shiloh, where he learned about Angel's Glow. He decided he wanted to investigate the phenomenon for a school project. Martin, with the help of a microbiologist, began studying types of bacteria that glowed, then cross-referenced those with the types of bacteria that might have been at the battle site.
They found that the battle site was a breeding ground for a type of nematode that contained a glowing bacteria called Photorhabdus luminescens. While the bacteria normally couldn't live on humans, it was able to survive on the soldiers because they were damp and cold, with some of them even suffering from hypothermia. The bacteria fought off infections and consumed other dangerous pathogens that attempted to enter the wound, which explained the quicker healing times. Martin and his partners earned international recognition for their discovery.
Any other historical events that are rarely spoken about come to mind? Let us know in the comments!
Note: Responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
