Ripley Entertainment Inc.'s Blog, page 317
September 24, 2018
September 23, 2018
September 22, 2018
September 21, 2018
Science Says Cannibalism Isn’t Very Nutritious
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
[September 16-22nd, 2018] A whiskey a day means long life, a fast bicycle, alien planet, and the nutritional facts of humans.
Aged Like Fine Whiskey
British centenarian Grace Jones turned 112 years old this week. Living through 26 prime ministers and both World Wars, she attributed her long life to whiskey. For the past 60 years, she’s had a single malt whiskey night before bed. She says she’s got no intentions to stop now.
Wei Huang/Shutterstock
Pedaling 184 Miles Per Hour
Denise Mueller-Korenek has pedaled her way into speed history, reaching a staggering 183.932 miles an hour on her bicycle. To break the record, she traveled to Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats—a popular place for cars to break speed records. She was towed by a dragster up to 150 miles per hour and then detached. Pedaling like mad to try and add as much speed as she could in the car’s slip-stream, she managed to come incredibly close to 184 mph.
Here is our record run video. Tow release right around 1.5 miles, leaving 3.5 miles in the draft to achieve an average speed for the last mile of 183.9mph (between mile 4 & 5)! Orange signs are mile markers with an extra orange sign at mile 2.25 for the quarter mile on timing slip. Black smaller signs are quarter mile markers (except mile 2.25) mile 5-6 is the shutdown where Shea Racing – Shea Holbrook takes me from our 183.4 exit speed down to 110mph (a 70+ mph in speed reduction in 1 mile) before she pulls away to allow the 110mph wind to slow me down naturally. Video Credit to Ron Stoecky of Stoecky Films!
Posted by Project Speed Denise Mueller-Korenek on Monday, September 17, 2018
Vulcan Home World Discovered
We all know the science officer of Star Trek’s Enterprise comes from the alien planet of Vulcan, but, believe it or not, the show’s creator Gene Roddenberry once claimed the planet orbited the distant real-life star called 40 Eridani. Astronomer shave now found a planet orbiting the distant star! It has eight times the mass of Earth, however, meaning life is unlikely.
“Men sometimes see exactly what they wish to see.”—Spock
DMV Selfie Zone
Getting a new license at the end of a long and grueling Department of Motor Vehicles visit can feel like a time to celebrate, but a Delaware DMV didn’t like the way people were taking selfies with their photo IDs. The pictures showed the registrants’ names, birth dates, and driver’s license numbers. To keep excited citizens from putting their personal information on the internet for the world to see, they constructed a “Safe Selfie Zone” for drivers to pose in sans license.
Cannibalism Isn’t Nutritious
Believe it or not, there are doctors who study cannibalism. One of them, James Cole, has published a report detailing the nutritional value of humans. A 145-pound human, he says, is worth about 144,000 calories, making them much less calorie dense than animals like deer or mammoths for paleolithic humans. During this very early part of human history, he says cannibalism would not have been to stave off hunger but must have been solely some sort of cultural ritual.3
September 20, 2018
Shower Hairs: Taking Art Into The Bath Tub
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Lucy Gafford, a multimedia artist from Mobile, Alabama, creates artworks with her own shower hair. The practice started when Gafford watched loose strands of her locks wash down the drain. A daily ritual to prevent clogs, she wipes the hair off her hands onto her shower walls. One morning in 2014, she noticed the strands had formed the shape of a squirrel. Four years later, this prodigious shower artist has shared more than 400 shower hair drawings.
She’s made Princess Leia from Star Wars, Santa Claus, and Picasso’s Self Portrait—along with all kinds of cute animals, portraits of her friends and family, and even celebrities faces.
“Initially, it was intended to be funny, but I kept doing it—soon becoming obsessed with seeing how complicated I could get using my hair to create images.”—Lucy Gafford
What started with blunt clumps of hair forming rough shapes has now turned into detailed contour drawings where Gafford places each strand with utmost care. She uses her own hair for the drawings, though admits that some of her husbands might have snuck in at some point. Posting her work on social media, it seems people can relate to her medium of showers hair.
A hair hare.
Check out some of our favorite hair-raising art and an exclusive interview with Gafford in this year’s annual, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! A Century of Strange!
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QUIZ: Which A Century of Strange Personality Are You?
Do you great shower ideas like Lucy Gafford? Find out which friendly (or freaky!) face from Ripley’s Believe It or Not! A Century of Strange you are! Take this quiz to find out!
A Pilgrim UFO Sighting Came Long Before Roswell
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Or Not
In today’s world many misconceptions have been perpetuated—becoming modern day “facts”—when, in reality, myths and hearsay have taken over. Sorry to burst your bubble, but in this weekly column, Ripley’s puts those delusions to the test, turning your world upside down, because you can’t always…Believe It!
Today: Did Roswell start America’s fascination with UFO’s?
America’s First UFO Sighting?
Many Americans believe the first UFO sightings occurred in 1947 at Mount Rainier in Washington and then Roswell, New Mexico. These reports of flying saucers caused a sensation in American newspapers and have led to decades of speculation. But were these really the first UFO sightings in North America? According to the Puritans, the answer’s a firm no.
Strange Happenings in New England
The first recorded UFO sighting occurred in 1639 near present-day Boston and was recorded that same year by John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. His journal entry dated March 1st gives a detailed account of the strange events that set New England abuzz.
Winthrop’s story stands apart from his other, more conventional entries wherein he recorded the real-life successes and challenges facing the Puritans. But on March 1st, his writing described bizarre, otherworldly happenings.
From inexplicable lights to missing hours of time, the X-Files has nothing on this 17th-century tale of unidentified flying objects and even possible alien abduction. But instead of FBI agents, the “Men in Black” in this story wore the costumes of God-fearing Pilgrims.
“As swift as an arrow…”
Winthrop relates that James Everell, “a sober, discreet man” was rowing in a boat with two other men in the Muddy River, which emptied through a swamp into a tidal basin of the Charles River. All of a sudden, a great light came into view. According to the men, the light both hovered and then flew at high speed back and forth between their vessel and the village of Charlestown two miles away.
As Winthrop describes it, “When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square: when it ran, it contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton [sic], and so up and down about two or three hours.” Captivated by the sight, Everell and his companions watched the speeding light for hours. Yet, the strangest part of the story still awaited them…
According to Winthrop’s account, as the men watched the light event, “they were come down in their lighter (boat) about a mile” pushed by the tide. Yet, when the light vanished, the men realized their boat had returned to its original location. They had no memory of rowing against the tide or dropping anchor. They speculated that the light somehow transported them back to where they started.
The three men in the boat weren’t the only witnesses to the bizarre UFO event. According to Winthrop, “Divers other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place.”
1639: America’s First UFO Sighting
Theories abound about what the Puritans actually observed that night in 1639. The most common theory hypothesizes that the pale light in the sky was an “ignis fatuus.” This phenomenon appears over marshland at nighttime, the result of the combustion of gas from decomposed organic matter. If Winthrop’s account is accurate, though, the light shot back and forth across the sky rather than rose from the marsh below.
We may never know what Everell and his boat companions saw that night. But one thing’s for sure: the 1639 incident marks the oldest recorded UFO sighting in North American history. Some researchers also describe it as the first UFO abduction narrative from the New World.
By Engrid Barnett, contributor for Ripleys.com
September 19, 2018
A Sperm Whale’s Clicks Can Deafen Divers
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Brought to fame by Herman Melville’s whale-hunting epic, Moby Dick, sperm whales are some of the Earth’s most mysterious creatures. With the ability to dive 6,000 feet beneath the surface of the ocean—that’s four times the height of the Empire State Building—humankind has no way of knowing exactly what they do down there.
Blue whales may be uncontested as the largest animals living today, but sperm whales have them beat in a number of categories. Unlike their behemoth brethren who only eat tiny krill and plankton—and are incapable of eating anything bigger than a beach ball—sperm whales are the world’s largest toothed carnivores, measuring up to 68 feet long and weighing 112,000 pounds.
Capable of holding their breaths for over an hour, sperm whales make the long and dangerous voyage into the dark depths of the sea to hunt squid. While most of their diet consists of relatively small squid, they’re also known to do battle with giant and even colossal squid. These cephalopods have tentacles that can tear at the whale’s flesh. Nevertheless, sperm whales fight their prey all while holding their breath. To aid them, they have their own special characteristics.
Sperm whales’ giant jaws are lined with up to 52 teeth that fill their bottom jaw, allowing them to tear through squid flesh. To protect their eyes from the crushing pressure of the deep ocean, they don’t have eyelids, but instead, retract their eyes into their bodies. Sight would be useless to them in the deep anyways, so they rely on biosonar to locate prey. The clicks they emit are the loudest sound produced by a living creature, reaching up to 230 decibels. The sound can be used to track squid just a foot in length up to a mile away.
Not just used for hunting, the sperm whales song is also used to communicate with other whales, and to investigate their surroundings. The sound, which is more potent in water than in air is loud enough to crush a diver’s eardrums. Some scientists have even experienced nausea or fainting when bombarded by the sperm whale’s call.”
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