Not me, but a friend of mine - he was driving down the highway when his brakes went out. Naturally, he did what anyone would do in the situation: steer onto the shoulder and dive out of the car action-hero style. By that time, he was going relatively slow because he only ripped his jeans. The car went down into a ditch.
I still give him shit about it and it was years ago.
I grew up in a slum tenement. We knew the teen girl’s boyfriend next door was a druggy but maybe he was actually a dealer or something.
One summer afternoon the building was surrounded by a police swat team and group of men stormed the place with rifles, apparently looking for him. One look at the rifles and we all huddled in the apartment until it was over.
I don’t know if I have the guts to look at that site a second time.
Dang, I’m disappointed to think that in 56 hears I’ve never seen any of the events specifically mentioned in the OP. Closest, I guess, would have been seeing two security guards chasing a suspected shoplifter on foot through a mall one day about twenty years ago. The guy, running full tilt, managed to make a sharp corner leading to the exit; both guards lost their footing trying to do the same thing, fell flat on their asses and slammed into the opposite wall like two sacks of potatoes. A director couldn’t have choreographed it any better.
Over the years, I’ve seen at least a couple dozen traffic accidents as they happen; perhaps the most visually spectacular was a guy on a quad accidently running into a ditch and flipping over the handlebars.
I once saw a covert handoff of an envelope from one dude to another in a crowd of pedestrians in front of the Gare du Nord in Paris. The guy doing the handoff was even wearing a trenchcoat, would you believe.
Needless (perhaps) to say, I’ve also never seen the most glaring omission from the OP’s list: someone disarming a bomb equipped with a red digital display, reading less than ten seconds to go.
Once I saw a car drive past me at what I’d estimate was at least 30 mph, on four flat tires. IIRC, they looked like they’d been slashed. It was being chased by about four boys, maybe in their early teens, screaming, “Get the license plate number!”
I told it to them, and they turned around and ran back, chanting it.
I have no idea what that was about.
Dammit! :mad:
I once was driving behind 2 guys on a motorcycle who weren’t wearing any sort of safety gear. They were speeding, going about 40 mph in a 30 mph zone. As they came upon a curve in the road, the driver lost control, crossed the center line, and started to lay it down.
At that very moment, an oncoming car struck them. The driver of the car car never had a chance to hit the brakes. The motorcycle shot nearly straight up…I’d say about 15 feet. The riders shot straight across the road, left to right, and both went headfirst into the curb. It was the strangest thing…they were both laying there, headfirst against a curb, in nearly the same position they were in on the motorcycle.
I got out of my car and approached them, having already called 911. Within 30 seconds, I could hear sirens. I’ll never forget looking at them. At first glance they seemed relatively unscathed, except for bloody noses…then I noticed that the hands and feet protruding from their sleeves and jeans were pointing in impossible directions. We were very near a hospital, so paramedics were at the scene in 2 minutes.
The next day the story was in the local newspaper. The two men were father and son. The son had just received the motorcycle as a gift at his 18th birthday party, and they had left the party to go on a short cruise around the neighborhood.
The father died at the scene, and the son died that night at the hospital. They left behind a wife/mother and a daughter/sister. The thought of what the surviving family members must have gone through absolutely breaks my heart to this day.
Damn, I’m babbling* and* being a Debbie Downer. I just realized I’ve never typed out that story. My apologies!
…for half an hour.
I saw a helicopter clip an antenna guy wire and crash in a field in Vietnam. Landed upside down and killed everybody on board.
I saw the aftermath of an assassination attempt on three American diplomats in Cairo.
I was behind a van that suddenly swerved off the road, hit a berm, went airborne, did a complete roll in the air and came down on its wheels. The woman walked away from it.
I experienced the Anchorage earthquake in 1964, and saw buildings collapse.
I had a car with no headlights on barely miss me as it came by at over 100 mph, fishtail, then go head on into the concrete divider. It stood straight up, with the back bumper about 3 feet off the ground, then the tire smoke and concrete dust became too thick. I thought he went over the wall, but when the smoke cleared, he was in the middle lane pointed in the right direction. He drifted to the shoulder and I asked him what happened. He was trashed. He tried to leave when I called the cops, but the radiator, battery, etc. were missing from the front of the car. You could see the engine block. His sister pulled up to help him escape just as he was being loaded into a cop car.
I’ve seen what happens when a motorcycle doing 150 mph hits a trailer that is crossing the road. Motorcycles do explode and burn on impact.
I’ve also had a guy empty a shotgun in my general direction in the dark.
I’ve been to several car races, there’s always an action movie moment at those.
I could swear that I’ve seen a YouTube clip (or maybe video from some newspaper or TV station) within the past few years of that very sort of thing. Somebody was taking a video of the road ahead when the event took place and thereby caught the whole thing on tape. I’ll try to find it. It was amazing – and scary!
ETA: This is what I was taking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSPjC1Ek7vA
Similar, and again, not necessarily from an -action- movie, but from a movie none-the-less.
I’d been brought in to help cater a wedding due to my friend almost cutting off his thumb with a table saw. What I hadn’t been told was that it was an outdoor biker wedding, but that’s neither here nor there. A trailer had been set up for the guys to change in, and the women were changing elsewhere.
I’d finished the set-up, and was simply hanging out by the trailer and listening to the guys chat about this and that, when one says, “Holy expletive, who’s that?”
I could almost feel the trailer lean as all the guys rushed to the window to see the stunning blond in the off-white dress walking down the park path. There were a lot of … Appreciative… Comments about her form, and I’ll admit they were well-deserved. As she drew close, however, the tone changed.
“No… expletive… Way…”
Turns out the woman was someone they rode with a lot, but had never seen in anything other than leathers and denim. Apparently she cleaned up quite well. 
(As an aside, she asked me to dance at the reception. I looked at the various bikers who were staring death at me, and politely declined.)
I was driving on an expressway that abutted a nice residential neighborhood and saw two men in black jackets with FBI in big white letters on the back go racing on foot down the embankment and across a string of back yards. I kept trying to pick up on the news what the hell that was all about but I never did see, hear, or read anything about it.
Once while doing fieldwork in rural Mexico, I was in a bus on a road in the lowlands along the Oaxaca-Veracruz state borders, when we slowly passed a motorcycle lying in the middle of the road, followed a few meters later by a dead policeman (federal, I think) with a bullet wound. He hadn’t been dead long. We just kept quiet and kept going (I think we were aware an ambulance or something was arriving).
This was about a year before the current president began his anti-narco campaign, so it was probably just an example of local-rivalry “background noise violence”, nothing particularly related to the more recent surge in violence (which has only surged a little in that particular part of Mexico, anyway).
Not at the same time. But that would have been really cool. I have had a long and varied military career on both the active and the part time side. It looks more interesting on paper than it was in real life most of the time.
Yep, that was a bad thing to miss! Tsk, tsk.
I definitely haven’t seen that. I have seen - just about, because we weren’t allowed to get close - army people disarming a bomb, though. Just an old WWII one discovered during building works.
I thought of one.
One day, when I was a kid, I was in the back of my parents’ car as we went south on the two-lane Highway 28 near Peterborough. Two cars came towards us, side by side. They moved apart and we went between them, one flashing by on either side. Dad was driving and he must have been so scared… As a kid, I didn’t fully understand the danger until much later.
Weird how that plays out in your head, isn’t it? I was a crime victim at a particular restaurant here in town many years ago (in parking lot, nothing to do with the restaurant). To this day I won’t eat there.
My contribution to the thread: I walked outside my workplace (airbase) and watched an F-4 going down, apparently after losing power in the landing pattern. I saw the canopy jettison just before it disappeared behind some trees. There was a soft “whump” and a surprisingly small column of smoke begin to rise. I found later that neither pilot survived.
So proud. 
I have also seen a high-speed car chase down the Cowley Road. Blackbird Leys, the estate at the end, was called ‘the joyriding capital of Europe’ in the '80s.
I have seen a few marginally spectacular car accidents. Just the other day I came upon a bus lying on its side and about five hundred people gawping at it. And I once happened upon the aftermath of a triad shooting in Hong Kong.
Driving down I-20 from Atlanta toward Augusta, Georgia during a gentle rain.
A tractor-trailer came from rear and bypassed me, clipping my left tire.
I did a 720 degree spin and ended up in the right shoulder.
My car was undamaged and I was unharmed.
In fact, it happened so fast that I didn’t even have a childish accident in my underwear.
I sat there for a moment and continued on my way.
Not anywhere near as cool as all of the other stories, but I didn’t come here to lie.
