Strange And Fun Facts About The World That You Won't Find In An Encyclopedia

Jul 05, 2018

They say fact is stranger than fiction. Well, that's not just a saying. Here are some bonafide facts that sound like something someone made up.

Steven Spielberg got rejected as director of a James Bond film and then whined to his friend George Lucas about it. George had a suggestion for what to do about that. The result of this kvetch session was the birth of the movie Indiana Jones.

Eighty percent of the world's vanilla is grown in Madagascar, an island nation. Vanilla isn't even native to Madagascar. Maybe it's because a kilogram of “plain vanilla” is worth more than a kilogram of silver.

About 90 percent of America's winter lettuce is grown in the region surrounding Yuma, Arizona. It is almost entirely harvested by legal guest workers from Mexican border towns.

The Salton Sea was created in 1905 by an engineering accident that redirected water from the Colorado River to the Salton Sink. This is a low lying area in a desert region that has a long history of cyclical lakes due to period flooding. Due to the lack of rain in the area and the lack of a river feeding the Salton Sea, they initially expected it to evaporate and disappear within a few years. Modern irrigated farming has prevented that from happening.

Housewives in India hold more gold than the Fort Knox. In fact, they hold more gold than Germany, Switzerland and the U.S. combined. Their holdings account for ten percent of the world’s gold reserves.

Even though it was the largest massacre of Native Americans in U.S. history, most people have never heard of the Bear River Massacre. It occurred on January 29, 1863 in what is modern Idaho. This puts it smack in the middle of the American Civil War, which helps explain why this tragic incident remains so obscure.

Although the TV show Macgyver showed him inventing creative solutions using science, most of the examples in the show were munged so that viewers couldn't get bright ideas. They changed some important detail so it wouldn't actually work as shown.

In contrast, Mythbusters always gave all the honest and true details. For this reason, when they created a particularly powerful explosive from common materials, they deleted the episode and notified the authorities of the potential danger from terrorists.

In spite of the height of Mount Rushmore and the depths of Mariana's Trench, in the grand scheme of things, the Earth isn't as jagged as you might think. If you shrank the earth down to the size of a golf ball and dried it off, it would be shockingly smooth.

Was your mind blown? Do you think this would blow the minds of your friends? Why don't you ask them what they think?