My brother maintains that he once observed an especially vicious fist-fight in which one man ripped another man’s arm clean off of his body, like pulling a branch off of a small tree.
I have asked him many times if this is indeed what he saw. He swears by his story. My brother reports that he was less than 50 feet from the fight, and looking on from slightly above street level, but that the immediate area was filled with people (it was on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, if that helps set the scene).
I still have my doubts, so I’m trying to think of what my brother might have seen:
the arm was a prosthesis.
it was not an arm, but a ripped sleeve of a jacket or shirt.
it was not an arm, but perhaps a nightstick, tonfa (sp?), or nunchuks (sp?).
my brother missed part of the fight and failed to see a severe stab wound upon the armless man’s shoulder that made the dismemberment easier.
my brother missed part of the fight and failed to see or hear a gunshot to the armless man’s shoulder that made the dismemberment easier.
…
That was all I could think of. It just seems the amount of strength required to pull off a person’s arm – especially if we assume poor leverage – is just a about superhuman.
Oh wait, I’m sorry. I just assumed this was about the tug of war thing because many people thought it was BS. The forces exerted obviously aren’t the same.
The Snopes link doesn’t describe someone pulling off someone else’s arm. It describes a tug-of-war, where a large number of people pulling together, along with the sudden jolt from a breaking rope, tears off two people’s arms.
Well, no, it hasn’t happened, at least not according to that site. If you read the description, it says the limbs were severed by the rope rebounding, not the force. That sort of thing is not uncommon. Ropes can stretch a tremendous amount under load, and when they break you better not be standing in the way.
Start with a fried chicken, where the drumstick hasn’t been cut loose from the thigh. Give it a yank. You’ll have to do a lot of extra twisting before it comes free.
Start with a newborn baby. You grab the kid by the ribcage with one hand, and by the upper arm with the other. Yank like hell.
The arm will pop out of the socket, but the ligaments, sinews, muscles, and skin will put up a LOT of resistance.
Now scale this up to an adult… No way.
Heck, apply Newton’s Law: equal and opposite forces… The force you’d have to apply to tear the other guy’s arm out…would be enough to tear your arm out!
-He may have missed the red cape and blue tights with an “S” on the chest the attacker was wearing
-He failed to hear the sunglass-wearing attacker ask the man if his name was John Conner.
-He failed to notice that the man was being attacked by a horde of zombies (the George A Romero kind, not the voodoo kind that you might expect in New Orleans).
-He missed the two sets of chains attached to two 18 wheelers driven by Rutger Hauer.
I guess it’s a relatively simple problem. What is the force required to rip a mans arm off and is a human being possible of generating it?
Maybe there’s something in the air in New Orleans… My sister’s former boyfriend used to insist that he had seen someone do some kind of martial arts maneuver that literally ripped someone’s heart out of their ribcage. He insisted this was true. However, the boyfriend was pretty on his last legs of alchoholism and I didn’t believe the story to be true.
The rumor that it’s possible to rip a heart out of a person is pretty well traveled.
Assuming your sister’s former boyfriend saw SOMETHING, he might have witnessed a stabbing. The perp may have used a small concealable knife, and may have hit a major blood vessel. Perhaps the perp’s hand was covererd in blood and was balled up into roughly a fist, thus faintly resembling a heart.
Another possibility: Was the “fight” he witnessed perhaps some sort of staged spectacle? If such a thing would be done anywhere in the world, I can imagine that it would be New Orleans. And there are probably ways to fake this convincingly enough.
How does the answer change, by the way, if it’s not a man’s arm we’re trying to tear off, but a monster which has been terrorizing the local feasting hall?