30 Extremely Unbelievable But Real Historical Events

‘The London Beer Flood of 1814’
30 Extremely Unbelievable But Real Historical Events
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There have been a lot of moments in history so incredible, we only really believe them because, well, we dug up the evidence. Moments that still raise eyebrows generations later, so must have been even more patently unbelievable in the moment. We’re probably living through a couple right now, but I digress.

Even among an impressive roster, there are certain events that stand out as especially wild. Historians and history buffs on Reddit shared some of the moments and happenings from history that they truly still barely believe, for you to read below. 

Hey, it’s a lot better than reading about what’s happening right now.

praxer300 . 6y ago Chernobyl disaster- If a few decisions were different, Europe might have been uninhabitable to this day
i_live_by_the_river 6y ago The Tulsa massacre. I'm not American so hadn't heard of it before (although neither have many Americans). It was recently depicted on a tv show and I didn't realise it had actually happened until I checked Wikipedia. Can't believe how little awareness there is about it, and that nobody was prosecuted.
cafeefac . 6y ago The 1977 New York City blackout. The entire city went absolutely batshit. Everyone from criminals to housewives looted everything. 1,616 stores were damaged, 1,037 fires were started, 3,776 people were arrested. There was only one homicide...
TerminalVR 6y ago The great soup kettle war. The only casualty was a kettle and the soup inside. No...I'm actually serious. There were also ones like the War of the Stray Dog and the Golden Stool War. Man we're a easily offended race...
Cobra VenomAintShii ii . 6y ago 9/11 still feels surreal to me.
SignificantRoof3 6y ago The great pyramids. I still have no idea how they were built like 5,000 years ago.
plb_stl 6y ago When the Berlin wall fell, a guy was reading the news off a paper on live tv on the evening news. Не got it wrong though and instead of announcing that people could ask for permission to visit their relatives in the west, he declared the wall and borders open asap. Again being on life tv, with no mobile phones to call someone to double check. Three hours later the overwhelmed soldiers on the wall gave in and actually opened the borders for good and that was that.
Bochock 6y ago The holocaust. just want it to be a big bad lie, humanity can't possibly be that awful right ? But here we are with all the possible proof that it happened, with evidence that citizens from all over Europe collaborated with the nazis to send their Jewish compatriots to camps, lying to themselves about the certain death that was awaiting them. Most of the people who lived through that buried it deep so they don't have to think again about how, in a way or another, they were part of it. Because let's face it, the resistance was
Andrew72727 . 6y ago The Alcatraz escape or Tylenol murders.
Wrong_Answer_Willie . 6y ago The Peoples Temple-Jim Jones- and drinking the kool-aid.
Portarossa 6y ago My usual answer for this is that time in pre- Revolutionary France when anal surgery. became a fashion statement, but the truth is that it's easy to believe stuff like that happens: people have always been followers of crazy fashions. Take Scheele's Green, for example, which is a pigment that was popular in Regency England -- in fact, it was so popular that many paintings set in that era have wall-to-wall green in the background. (Literally; it was extremely_popular for wallpaper.) Downside, though -- it was made with arsenic, so it was poisonous as all hell. Even though
Leather_Significance 6y ago The time that Nero tried to kill his mother by putting her on a ship that was supposed to sink. Except it didn't work because she climbed onto a bed and floated back to the shore. To fix this, he sent a small group of soldiers to go meet her on the beach and stab her to death.
SheridanThur . 6y ago That people crossed the open ocean in little wooden boats. Subscribing to r/HeavySeas drove the insanity home for me.
DLCss 6y ago How did the US win the Revolutionary War? I've learned about the war in class literally every year in my entire grade school career. Every time we learn about it the teacher always glosses over the war itself and it makes it sound like we were pretty much losing the whole time. I just can't fathom how a bunch of militia were able to overtake land from one of the greatest military forces at the time.
welcomexoverlords 6y ago | cannot believe that the Satanic Panic ever happened, and that it happened so recently!! People are still in jail over abuse allegations that are so absurd they should have been laughed out of court. Stories of secret basements where rituals occurred, but no basements exist (even after Sonar scans). Tales of children being murdered as sacrifices yet all children enrolled accounted for... Its just completely crazy stuff. But it happened in the 80s right here in the US of А.
DRW0813 6y ago The famines in China in 1958-1961 where TENS OF MILLIONS of people starved to death. Imagine, in your parent's generation, if millions of people died of starvation. And no one talks about it.
FutureComplaint . 6y ago We haven't been back to the moon in 47 years.
eternalrefuge86 . 6y ago Edited 6y ago The Dancing Plague otherwise knows as St. Vitus' Dance. It happened during medieval times and it involved spontaneous and continuous dancing by crowds of people until they collapsed of exhaustion, or died.
TimeMachineToaster . 6y ago Just the fact that dinosaurs roamed the earth. Imagine a T Rex walking around in a national park today.
HensieEalham 6y ago When ya boi Caesar was kidnapped by pirates and he laughed at them for low ransom and told them to raise it. Then over the course of time it took the Romans to raise the money, Caesar developed something of a friendship with the pirates to the point where he was joining in with their games and exercises. When the ransom arrived, he handed it over to the pirates and was set free. With his freedom he returned to the pirate ship (which was still where he left it), took them as prisoners and then crucified them.
. 6y ago Edited 6y ago The black death. It's unbelievable how a disease ended up killing somewhere between 30% and 60% of Europes population. It must've been hell for the people who lived at that time.
Sayoub0912 6y ago The 335 Years' War between the Isles of Scilly and the Netherlands started in 1651 and ended in 1986 when a historian was trying to debunk the myth that the two were at war. Не discovered that the two were in fact at war and didn't know it. This prompted the signing of a peace treaty to end the longest war to have zero battles and no bloodshed. The Dutch more or less declared war and forgot about it. The Dutch ambassador joked that it must have been harrowing for the Scillians to know we could have
6y ago Russia almost launched nuclear missiles at the U.S. over false alarms. However, one Russian soldier, Stanislav Petrov, decided the reports of a U.S. nuclear attack were a computer error. Не prevented World War 3 from accidentally happening.
EliciaTewell 6y ago There were still Japanese soldiers well into the 1970s who had no idea the WW2 was over. Like, they just got left behind by the Navy and held out on isolated islands. For decades. One guy in particular spent his time feuding with the Filipino police. Everyone tried to tell him the war was over, but he thought it was a bunch of propoganda. Word eventually got back to Japan, where they had to look up his commanding officer (who had since left the military for a career as a businessman) and fly him to the Philippines.
LordFluffy . 6y ago The Great Molasses Flood of Boston. In 1919, a storage tank of 2.3 million gallons of molasses dumped into the streets of Boston and killed 21 people.
azende6115 . 6y ago The London Beer Flood of 1814 where a vat burst and released over a million liters of beer and killed 8
UnlikelyPerogi 6y ago I still think the Fourth Crusade is the most absurd historic event ever. Basically the pope declares another crusade to try to reclaim Jerusalem. Somehow, the crusaders end up in Constantinople a year later and absolutely fucking ravage that city and massacre the population.
NearbyDistrict 6y ago When the English monarchy was restored in 1660, King Charles II ordered the posthumous execution of the Members of Parliament involved in his dad's execution who had died during the Interregnum. Basically, he wasn't going to let the fact that the guys were dead get in the way of vengeance. Не literally had them dug up, hung the corpses, and then beheaded them.
Vlade-B a 6y ago The story about that guy who got forgotten in a Russian prison for decades. And since non of the guards spoke hungarian, they just thought it was ramblings from an insane person. Eventually someone realised the mistake and he was freed. Does someone remember that story?
Rohrer_90 6y ago That time Emperor Napoleon escaped from the island he was imprisoned on after his army was finally defeated, snuck back into France under the nose of King Louis XVIII and literally every royal guard and roadblock from Marseille to Paris, then when he was actually caught just outside of Paris, he managed to persuade the soldiers (who just so happened to be former Bonapartists) to escort him into Paris where he managed to successfully cause the king to flee, on top of raising a full army to wage war against Europe AGAIN. The only time in history

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