Ripley Entertainment Inc.'s Blog, page 237
November 17, 2019
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November 15, 2019
Facing The Heat Of The Carolina Reaper Pepper
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Straight from grounds of Ed Currie’s PuckerButt Pepper Company—appropriately named—we ordered a shipment of the world’s hottest little peppers known as the Carolina Reaper. After taste-testing the world’s hottest mini chocolate bar, featuring the unreleased Black Reaper Pepper, we decided to take the heat up a notch with the current record holder and indulge in not one, but two Carolina Reapers.
To put this fiery little bugger into perspective, we’ll use the heat-driven Scoville Scale. Scoville Heat Units (SHU) are used to measure the spiciness of a substance according to the concentration of capsaicin—the chemical that gives peppers their extra kick.
Beginning at the bottom of the scale, bell peppers contain zero capsaicin, meaning they don’t actually produce any “spicy” at all. Tabasco sauce ranks around 3,750 Scoville and is considered mild enough to appear on restaurant tables all over the world.
The common jalapeño has a score ranging anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000 SHU. If you’re breaking a sweat at this point, we definitely don’t recommend the attempting to eat a Carolina Reaper, the pepper is about 600 times hotter than the measly jalapeño. The Carolina Reaper tops out at a staggering 2.2 million Scoville! Eating one is as close to getting sprayed in the mouth with police pepper spray that food has gotten.
Ed Currie, the father of the Carolina Reaper and widely known as the “pepper guru” engineered the Carolina Reaper by crossing a Ghost Pepper with a Red Habanero. Though its origins sound simple enough, Currie has been growing peppers for decades, raising over a hundred varieties and managing over 100,000 plants each year.
Despite being the hottest pepper in the world, aficionados insist the Reaper is more than just a pouch full of heat. It also has fruity undertones that make it taste like cinnamon and chocolate. All of that flavor can be easy to miss, however, as its heat wreaks havoc on your tongue. Capsaicin is a chemical reaction, resulting in a burning reaction so intense that the human body can react violently. Salivating, redness, sweating, and discomfort are just the start.
Drug-Sniffing Boars Destroy $20,000 Stash
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
This Week
[October 10-16, 2019] Drug-busting wild hogs, a puppy with an extra tail, and the rest of the week’s weird news from Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
Snort And Destroy
A smuggling operation in Tuscany was brought to a close thanks to the work of a group of feral hogs. Italian police had been working to bring down cocaine traders, even managing to wire-tap their phones. While monitoring their calls, they caught an interesting bit of conversation: the gangsters complained about wild hogs finding their hidden drug cache. All told, the hogs are believed to have destroyed $22,000 in cocaine.
Narwhal The Puppy
A puppy with an “extra tail” on its forehead was rescued by an animal shelter in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Mac’s Mission is a shelter for special-needs dogs and is glad to announce that the protrusion on this 10-week-old puppy is nothing to worry about. They plan on keeping him off the adoption listings for a bit longer until they can confirm his little horn won’t cause any problems as he grows. Otherwise, the puppy—which they’ve lovingly named Narwhal—can keep wagging his extra tail.
Hurricane Cows
When Hurricane Dorian swept up the coast it brought widespread rain and destruction to beaches like Cedar Island in North Carolina. Wild horses and cows were swept out to sea by the storm, and many thought they were lost for good. This week, a group of cows has come home. Up to six of the animals have been spotted grazing across the water at Cape Lookout National Seashore. Apparently, they were able to swim to the seashore, and have been living comfortably ever since.
Ice Eggs
Snow and ice can manifest in all sorts of strange ways, but nobody was expecting to find what looked like hundreds of frozen eggs along the shores of Hailuoto Island in Finland. Photographer Risto Mattila happened upon these strange objects while walking around the island in freezing weather. The frozen spheres stretched for about a hundred feet ranging in size from golf balls to footballs. Meteorologists note it takes very particular conditions for snow balls to occur, necessitating freezing water that is relatively still.
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A post shared by Risto Mattila (@rismatti) on Nov 3, 2019 at 10:08am PST
Fanged Deer Found After 30 years
While they weren’t sure if they were extinct or not, scientists hadn’t seen a silver-backed chevrotain in over 30 years until this week. These tiny mammals aren’t really mice or deer but are a tiny cloven-hoofed animals endemic to southeast Asia. A few other species can be found in zoos across Vietnam, but the silver-backed species hadn’t been officially recorded for decades. Experts didn’t know of anything that indicated something had hunted them to extinction, but still had a hard time finding them. Thanks to a trail cam set up in the remote woods, these fanged creatures are back to officially existing.
November 14, 2019
The Loudest (By The Numbers) Bands In History
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Popular music is a curious creature, one with plenty of shocking surprises and unbelievable tales collected over the ages. But no matter the artist, volume has been a key factor. In particular, as long as there’s been a means to “turn it up!,” musicians and engineers have set out to push the limits of sound.
And also, the debate over which is the world’s loudest band was born.
“As a musician, playing hard rock ‘n’ roll doesn’t feel right unless I’m doing it at an impossible-to-ignore volume level,” says Peter Aaron—frontman of the Chrome Cranks and the author of several books on music—most recently he coauthored Richie Ramone’s autobiography, I Know Better Now.
Aaron’s frank admission brings us some insight, perhaps, into mankind’s tendency to take things up a notch. There’s been no shortage of musicians through the ages doing so.
Decibels of Destruction
First, how would we measure such a thing? Well, engineers and authorities alike use special devices to measure decibels (dB)—basically, to measure how loud something is. Which brings us to the “World’s Loudest Band” discussion.
The first time it came up was following a legendary Deep Purple performance at the London Rainbow Theatre—the volume of which got up to 117 dB and was credited with causing a few fans in attendance to become unconscious.
Then, there was The Who. They took the crown with a 126-dB performance at London’s The Valley in 1976.
For reference, this may be a good moment to point out the average conversation is about 60 dB. A vacuum runs at about 75 dB, and most medical professionals advise that anything over 85 dB can damage hearing.
Okay, back to the story.
Heavy Metal Thunder
When heavy metal outfits pranced onto the scene, it made sense for them to amp up, too; after all, wasn’t it already understood that volume directly correlated with great music?
Here’s where Manowar and Motorhead did metalheads proud.
Manowar took particular pride in the title and did get acknowledged by Guinness in 1984. Ten years later, they claimed to have broken their own record—at 129.5 dB. Then, in 2008, Manowar’s soundcheck at Magic Circle Fest reached a reported 139 dB!
In the meantime, a writer for music magazine Spin proclaimed Motorhead as “the loudest band on Earth” back in 1986, referring to a tour stop in Cleveland that reached 130 dB.
Universal Appeal
Loud music may have been in the domain of metal bands, but times change and it wasn’t long until players of other genres took their turns at pushing the sonic envelope.
In the world of alternative rock, genre-defining outfits like My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr., Hüsker Dü and the Replacements all have reputations for ridiculously loud shows.
Electronic artists are represented in the shuffle as well: house/electronica band Leftfield dialed in 137 dB at a 1996 gig, causing plaster to rain down from the Brixton Academy ceiling, and punk band Gallows will tell you they topped 132 dB in a studio session.
“The loudest band I’ve ever seen,” Aaron recalls, “was Altar, a collaborative project between the groups Sunn O))) and Boris, at the US All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in 2010. Even with earplugs in, the sheer volume was so physically great that it jostled my intestines and chest cavity, and made my arms tingle from my shoulder blades to the tips of my fingers.
“I was impressed,” he adds. We can only imagine he’s putting it mildly!
And then, there’s KISS. No recount of popular music’s most daring artists reaching for unheralded extremes would be complete without mentioning one of the world’s most notorious hard rock bands. In the case of Gene Simmons and company, their 2009 Canadian concert reached a mind-numbing 136 dB.
What happened then? As you might expect, the neighbors took issue and called the authorities—and the band had to turn back down before finishing their set. Truly a bummer, and one that plenty of other musicians can relate to.
By Bill Furbee, contributor for Ripleys.com
How Columbus Failed To Prove The Earth Was Round
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On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from the port of Palos de la Frontera, Spain, in command of 90 men and three ships: the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. His crew sailed west leaving behind the comforts of the known world at the Canary Islands.
By October 10th, Columbus’s men had grown restless with no land in sight. They demanded Columbus turn back for Spain, which forced a quick negotiation. They’d head home in three days unless they discovered land. On October 12th, just two hours past midnight, Juan Rodriguez—a.k.a. Rodrigo de Triana—a sailor on the Pinta, caught sight of a shoreline.
Vindicated, Columbus set foot on San Salvador—literally “Holy Savior“—the next morning, forever laying to rest the medieval belief that the world was flat. He also discovered a “New World” in the process. Or, so we’ve been told.
Here’s the full scoop on what Columbus was really after and why it had nothing to do with disproving Flat Earthers or finding new continents.
In 1492
“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” We’re all familiar with this poem and the Portuguese captain who swaggered into history as the result of an intrepid voyage of scientific discovery. In reality, though, Columbus never feared sailing off the edge of the world.
As historian Jeffrey Burton has noted, “No educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat.”
History tells us that as early as 600 B.C., the Ancient Greeks made observations consistent with a spherical Earth. How? From Pythagoras to Aristotle, they used calculations based on the rising and setting of the sun as well as shadows and other physical properties of the globe.
Even though this knowledge was lost to most Europeans during the Dark Ages, by Columbus’s time, wealthy Spaniards immersed themselves in these ancient texts again. Educated people knew the Earth was round, which begs two questions. Why was Columbus’s voyage considered so controversial in Europe? And what was he really after?
Columbus’s Crazy Circumference Calculations
What kept many wealthy individuals in Portugal and Spain from wanting to fund Columbus’s trip? In a nutshell, his crazy circumference calculations. While Columbus knew the Earth was round, he calculated its circumference 25 percent smaller than it actually is. What’s more, he overcalculated the size of Asia so that Cipangu (a.k.a. Japan) lay just over 8,000 miles from Spain. Many of Columbus’s contemporaries disagreed with these calculations, saying he’d vastly underestimated the numbers. As Columbus’s first voyage showed, these critics were right.
Why was Columbus interested in Japan? At the time, it represented the gateway to Asia, which Europeans referred to as “the Indies.” As Columbus and his crew attempted to interact with the indigenous people of San Salvador and other islands, he became more and more frustrated. After all, the explorer thought he’d made landfall in Japan. But why didn’t he see any signs of the perfumes, silks, jewels, gold, and spices detailed by Rustichello da Pisa in The Travels of Marco Polo?
Marco Polo, who da Pisa had interviewed for the 13th-century book, never visited Japan, but he had heard about it from Muslim traders in China. These traders, in turn, had never been either. But that didn’t stop them from weaving fabulous tales about a nation overflowing with pearls and precious stones where temples and palaces lay covered in tremendous quantities of gold, including floors paved in the yellow stuff up to two fingers thick.
Of course, as we all know, Columbus never got closer to Japan than the east coast of Central America. But he went to his grave insisting he’d reached Asia. This insistence puts to rest the myth that Columbus wanted to find new continents. What’s more, considering the fact the Americas, the Caribbean, and Cuba teemed with people, the idea Columbus discovered anything depends on your cultural perspective.
American Myth-Making
How did the Columbus story become synonymous with a flat Earth? We can blame that on Washington Irving’s work, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828). While in Spain, Irving had the chance to search through a massive archive chronicling the explorer.
But Irving found the historical documents at his fingertips rather dull. So, he embellished the story, transforming Columbus into a heroic Enlightenment figure on a scientific quest to slay medieval superstition—namely, the flat Earth theory. Irving’s story had zilch to do with reality, but it sold books.
Today, Irving’s take on Columbus remains a myth deeply embedded in American pop culture and even our education system. And in one of those ironic twists of fate, more educated people probably now believe in a flat Earth than during Columbus’s time!
By Engrid Barnett, contributor for Ripleys.com
November 13, 2019
The Morbid Remains Of A Harpy Eagle Home
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Researchers at the Harpy Eagle Conservation Program watched from the ground as a mated pair of harpy eagles tended to their egg. The parents would hunt and guard the egg, bringing their prey to the nest to eat. After their family feast, the occasional body part would rain down from the tree while the remaining accumulated in the nest—like a collection of oddities. But after two months of this behavior, the diligent eagle parents abruptly stopped paying visits to their nest.
This odd activity—or lack thereof—puzzled Alexander Blanco, a vet at the Whitley Fund for Nature; something unusual was happening in this nest. Blanco scaled the tree to investigate. There, he found an abandoned harpy egg, as well as a treasure trove of other items.
Amidst the remains of the nest, Blanco uncovered beaks, nails, skins, feathers, hair, and armadillo shells. There were pellets, or “Egagrópilas,” which are balls of material that the birds can’t digest, like hair and bones, so they regurgitate them.
There were also dozens of bones: arms, legs, backbones, pelvises, and skulls. The skulls, in particular, looked eerily familiar—almost human.
Of course, the harpy eagle doesn’t hunt humans—as far as we know. As for their typical diet, these eagles are on the hunt for all sorts of monkeys that share their Venezuelan habitat. They also eat armadillos and almost any other animal they can get their claws on. Weighing in at about 11 pounds and equipped with sharp beaks and talons, it’s nearly impossible to escape a harpy eagle once it has you in its grasp. As formidable predators, harpy eagles are basically at the top of their food chain. Even larger predators, like ocelots and jaguars, rarely attack these birds.
The researchers examined and documented the contents they found within the nest—all the refuse and leftover material from their meals, as well as the dead egg that the eagle parents left behind. From their research surrounding harpy eagle nests, they found that the animals have a wide, carnivorous diet. In fact, they eat so much meat that they often incorporate bones into the structure of their nests!
A month and a half later, the pair of eagle parents returned to their now-empty home. “Indeed, the eagle realized that elements were missing,” Blanco explained. But, the animals stayed anyway, started hunting and bringing home food, and laid another egg. They kept the egg warm and, this time, succeeded in the successful birth of a new harpy eagle baby chick. Bring on the monkey feast!
By Kristin Hugo, contributor for Ripleys.com
Kristin Hugo is a science journalist with writing in National Geographic, Newsweek, and PBS Newshour. She’s especially experienced in covering animals, bones, and anything weird or gross. When not writing, Kristin is spray painting, and cleaning bones in her New York City yard. Find her on Twitter at @KristinHugo, Tumblr at @StrangeBiology, and Instagram at @thestrangebiology.
The Mysterious Tale Of The S.S. Ourang Medan Ghost Ship
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
We all love a good spooky story, and nothing quite hits the spot like the tragic tale of a ghost ship. There’s just something about these mighty yet small and vulnerable vessels, adrift on a boundless ocean. The chilling story of the S.S. Ourang Medan is as fanciful as Blackbeard’s headless body supposedly swimming around his ship before sinking beneath the depths. Despite the intrigue, it’s a mystery that’s gone unsolved to this day!
This seemingly impossible event is said to have taken place in the 1940s—the precise year tends to vary from source to source. According to the story, the S.S. Ourang Medan, a Dutch vessel, was passing through the Strait of Malacca when it ran afoul of a mysterious tragedy. Nearby ships reported receiving a horrifying distress call. “All officers including captain dead, lying in chartroom and on bridge, probably whole crew dead,” it stated. Then there was an unintelligible frenzy of Morse code. The radio operator had the final word: “I die.”
A Cursed Crew?
Rescuers who boarded the vessel, it’s said, found the stricken ship just as described. The crew was indeed dead, their bodies strewn across the decks. Not only that, but they were found “teeth bared, with their upturned faces to the sun, staring, as if in fear…” Even the ship’s dog was dead, frozen in this ghastly state, mid-growl at an assailant or horror unknown!
That’s just the start of the mystery of the Ourang Medan. Reports go on to suggest that, shortly after the ship was boarded, a fire broke out in its bowels, forcing those who had arrived to this grisly tableau to evacuate. Shortly after they did, the ship exploded with such force that it was lifted out of the ocean, before quickly sinking without a trace.
Naturally, this leaves us with not one but two incredible mysteries to ponder: what caused the mass demise of the Ourang Medan’s crew, and what caused the subsequent explosion? We’re getting ahead of ourselves, though, because there’s one more thing to consider: Officially, the ship may never have existed.
The Facts Of The Matter?
This famous story leads to all kinds of dead ends. Most notably, there’s no mention of the S.S. Ourang Medan’s registration in Lloyd’s Shipping registers, nor has any official recording of the bizarre ‘incident’ onboard been discovered. The reason the precise date of the event has been so difficult to pinpoint is that newspaper reports tell various versions of the story across a period of time, each adding and embellishing details along the way. Nevertheless, believers swear that this impossible, fantastical tale is absolutely true.
It’s said that the ship’s registry wasn’t found because it was actually registered in Sumatra. The vessel’s name translates to “Man from Medan”—Medan being a Sumatran island. More than that, Professor Theodor Siersdorfer, a German researcher who has been poring over the fascinating case for around half a century, discovered an old German publication from 1953, entitled Das Totenschiffin der Südsee, or The Death Ship in the South Seas. This little booklet, courtesy of now-deceased scholar Otto Mielke, is believed by some to offer evidence that the ship was real, as was its tragic fate. It offers an intriguing possibility as to the cause of the explosion that sent the Ourang Medan to the depths.
Das Totenschiffin der Südsee suggests that potassium cyanide and nitroglycerine were stored in the ship’s hold. If so, this could certainly explain the vessel’s sudden accidental destruction, as well as the nebulous nature of any records connected to the ship and the incident. In the tense international climate at the close of World War II, these were super sensitive materials to be transporting and would spark quite an incident should they be used carelessly. Perhaps the details of the S.S. Ourang Medan are so difficult to find because somebody wants them to be, all this time later.
What Really Happened?
As for the unfortunate crew, various possibilities arise. A pirate attack certainly wouldn’t be out of the question, but most accounts claim that the bodies were largely unwounded. The circumstances hint towards a release of dangerous gases—another volatile and controversial, yet familiar, cargo in the international climate.
The possibility of a supernatural or otherworldly incident has been raised, and that’s impossible to verify. There are so many loose ends here, but one thing is for certain: the case is one of the most fascinating in nautical history, and much like Jack the Ripper’s identity and countless other unsolved mysteries, it’s precisely impossible nature that continues to capture our imaginations.
By Chris Littlechild, contributor for Ripleys.com
Source: The Mysterious Tale Of The S.S. Ourang Medan Ghost Ship
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