We recently asked members of the BuzzFeed Community to share the most hard-to-believe, mind-blowing fact they know. And wow...did they deliver a whole lot of wild facts I will be thinking about for some time:
1. The shortest commercial flight is only 57 seconds.
2. Park ranger Roy Sullivan survived getting struck by lightning not once, not twice, but seven times.
3. Some people have such a strong sense of smell that they can smell things like Parkinson’s disease or when someone is lying.
4. If a man pees on a pregnancy test and it comes out positive, it could mean he has testicular cancer.
5. In Canada, there's only four people per square kilometer!
6. For 20 years, a cat served as mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska.
7. In 2002, 51-year-old electrician Mike McDermott won the lotto TWICE in one year — and to make things even more improbable...he did it both times using the same numbers!
8. United States president John Tyler — who was born in 1790 and held the presidency from 1841 to 1845 — still has a living grandson.
9. A woman named Violet Jessop survived the sinking of both the RMS Titanic and its sister ship, the Britannic.
10. Speaking of the Titanic, in 1898, 14 years before it sank, author Morgan Robertson wrote a book about a huge, supposedly unsinkable British passenger liner that hit an iceberg during an April journey across the North Atlantic and suffered mass deaths because of an insufficient amount of life boats.
11. The Appalachian mountain range is older than people, land animals, and even trees.
12. Sharks are older than trees too!
13. Former Oakland A's slugger Khris Davis hit exactly .247 every year for four consecutive seasons (2015–18).
14. Pigeons can be trained to tell the difference between paintings by Picasso and Monet, and — once trained — even correctly recognize works by those artists they'd never seen before.
15. Cleopatra was alive closer to the invention of the iPhone than the building of the Great Pyramids.
16. Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970.
17. Harriet Tubman was alive during both the lifetimes of Thomas Jefferson and Ronald Reagan.
18. Two NFL quarterbacks playing for the same team suffered the same injury under nearly identical circumstances on the same date exactly 33 years apart:
19. There are a bunch of fruit that are part of the rose family, like apples, pears, cherries, and plums!
20. George H.W. Bush hated broccoli so much that when he was president, he created a mini-scandal by banning it from the White House and Air Force One.
