Things you wouldn't have believed unless you'd seen it yourself

In My Humble Opinion
1

Not the most elegant title I’m afraid

Basically as the title says what have you witnessed that you wouldn’t have believed unless you’d seen it yourself?

I was reminded of this story by the current icy weather we’re experiencing. About ten years ago we were having a particular cold winter and the local backroads were covered in ice and ungritted.

Coming from a rural area we used to make our own entertainment and part of this was taking our cars out onto isolated country roads to mess around in them on the snow and ice, handbrake turns, sliding around corners etc

Don’t worry, we made sure not to place any other motorists in any danger, mostly because there weren’t any…

Long story short, I was standing at an approx five-foot tall gate with four or five of my friends when one of the drivers lost control on the ice and started to spin towards us at a not insignificent rate of knots, I dived left out of the way, others dived right and my friend who was standing in the middle of the gate and had nowhere to go, reached behind himself, placed his hands on the top-bar of the gate and did a vertical backflip over the gate from a standing start, landing neatly on the other side just as the out of control car slammed into where he had been standing seconds before.

What made it more impressive was that my friend was significently overweight and unatheletic. He looked just as surprised as the rest of us…

Adrenaline huh? Its a wonderful thing!

2

Does it have to be amazing or just stumping?

I couldn’t wrap my head around counter-steering, but now I amaze my friends that will try it and get called a liar by ones that won’t. Basically, I tested it on my bike by remaining perfectly still while I pushed on one handle bar. Damned if I don’t turn the “wrong” way.

3

I once fell over the handlebars of a bike I was riding (the front tire got wedged in between two wooden beams being used as parking space markers)…the wheel stuck, the rear of the bike rose up, and I did a front flip over the bars and landed on my feet in front of the bike.

Now, to be fair, I didn’t actually “see” this, but I can imagine what it must have looked like. :slight_smile:

Another time, also involving a bike, I was about 11 and riding down a dirt road near our then home. Pretty rural area, and all of a sudden, this brightly colored snake (a coral snake, I knew even then, and highly poisonous:eek:) darted out of the woods on my left and across the road, directly into the path of my front wheel!

I did NOT, however, run over the beast, but it went OVER the rim and so INTO my wheel, caught in the spokes as they turned.

I raised my legs up and rested them on the handlebars as the snake’s ends flipped and spun just below me, praying my momentum would last …after several rotations, it slithered out the other side and went on it’s way, probably a bit dizzy but unharmed.

Finally, I have seen/heard a rabbit scream. A pet I had as a child and I was carrying it past the pen where our dogs where confined. They were barking furiously and lunging towards the rabbit (who was perfectly safe in my arms on the other side of the wire but apparently didn’t realize it). It took me a moment to realize that the sound I was hearing was, in fact, coming out of the animal in my arms…the most awful SCREAM, like a woman being murdered in a horror flick! :eek: And I mean that literally…very human in quality, even more so than wild cats I’ve heard. Wow. I MIGHT have believed such was possible, but I would have had my doubts had I not witnessed it for myself.

4

An “amazing home video” or some such I saw on TV 1.5 decades or more ago.
It was a dirt oval race track. They were running counter clockwise. A vehicle comes out of the leftmost turn (as seen from the spectators point of view), into the straightaway in front of the stands. As he does, one of his tires comes off the rim. Since he is still slowing, the tire gets ahead of him. But he catches up, and before he enters the rightmost turn, the tire actually goes back ON the rim.

Honest to god I am not making this up.

5

This probaby says something about my life, or the need to aquire one, but one of my major concerns after I was bitten by the lion was “No one’s going to believe me, and especially not my Internet friends.” Again, I really need to get a life.

6

I have heard a rabbit scream, too. It was pretty disturbing, because it did sound like a woman or child screaming. While taking a walk through a nice suburban neighborhood on my lunch break, the cute little bunny I was admiring was suddenly swooped up by a hawk to the top of the nearest tree. Cue Psycho noises. Before that, I had no idea rabbits could scream, or that loudly.

7

I was golfing once and a friend hit a great drive off of the tee. It was sailing through the air when a bird took off from a tree ahead of it and flew across the fairway. The ball hit it at the height of its flight and they both dropped almost straight down, a slow trail of feathers marking their wake.

8

I believe you–I saw that vid myself on some show about freaky sports accidents. It was pretty nifty to see!

9

First hit for video tire on off: VIDEO: Tire Falls Off Car Then Reattaches Itself

10

I too heard a rabbit scream. My friend’s dad was walking through high grass and stepped on one. Agreed. Freaky.

Brad Johnson’s touchdown pass. To himself.

Northern lights blew me away the fist time I saw them when I was 8 or 9. And they never cease to amaze me.

11

I have so many things that people wouldn’t believe that friends and family members told me to not to mention them to other people, even those that saw the same thing.

A simple one was the Pit Bull that LOVED to eat firecrackers. I grew up in a poor area of rural Louisiana and we obviously loved to set off firecrackers on holidays often spending hundreds of dollars on them with hard-earned teenager money. We fired a few off near the local river when a local guy from a nearby trailer park walked up with his pet Pit Bull and told us that we were making his dog too excited. Now you might interpret that as a complaint but it was the opposite. The damed dog had a fetish for chasing, ‘killing’, and even swallowing lit firecrackers. He wagged his little tail for hours like a kid in a candy store while we threw or fired them at him and they exploded in his face or mouth. A few did explode in his mouth and seemed to love those the most. That was one Pit Bull that rang in a happy New Year.

Another was an ex-train engineer named Skeeter Skinner who had a pet alligator named ‘Baby’. Baby was anything but and was a full sized female and lived in a pond directly behind his house. She came when she called him and could sit (the best way an alligator can) and heel. She could also open her mouth fully on command to be fed chickens. Skeeter would come into the grocery store where I worked in high-school to buy frozen chickens and tie them onto his side mirrors so that they would defrost as he drove home. You would usually see him going down the road that way. That was her dinner. He was a hermit and she could heel into the house on command. My father took me over there to see that a few times and, even though I was used to alligators, I have never seen anything like that since.

I could go on all night about this stuff. I come from an extremely eccentric area of the country but the volumes still grow to this day.

12

We live in a very rural area, and have coyotes. We also live near a train track. The train passes by once or twice a day. When it does, the engineer will always blow the whistle due to a nearby road crossing.

When the engineer blows the whistle, the coyotes will “answer” the whistle with howls that are exactly the same pitch as the whistle.

No one believes me when I tell them this. Until they spend the night here.

13

A friend and I were shooting clay pigeons by the river one day, when two teals flew over us at a pretty good range (read: pretty much what I would call out of range). My friend took aim, fired, and dropped both birds with one shot.

Perhaps not too unbelievable, except it was a 20 gauge.

With #8 shot.

THAT made it a once in a lifetime event.

14

Cats.

'nuf said!

15

A hot M16 rifle cook off a round.

We were doing a unit rifle shoot, and decided to dump a lot of ammo by going full auto on the selector switch. After three or four magazines, the guy next to me inserted a magazine, cycled the charging handle, and while keeping the weapon pointed safely down range, finger off the trigger and alongside the receiver, asked me a question. We spoke for about ten seconds when his weapon discharged a round. We both looked down at his M16 while he said, “that wasn’t me” when it went off again.

He downloaded, cleared and safed his weapon, grounded it, when further down the firing line we heard someone else say “shit, I’m cooking off rounds.” That was my CO.

The M16 is a fantastic weapon, but not so much when going fully automatic.

For the naysayers, I am Navy and our M16s have a three position selector switch.

16

I still marvel at a performance I saw about 25 years ago at an Ice Capades-type show. A badminton net was set up on the ice and a man came out and started skating in circles around the net. He then took a badminton racket and hit the badminton thing-a-ma-jig over the net, skated around to the other side and hit it back over the net before it touched the ice, skated back to the original side and hit the thing over the net before it touched the ice, and continued doing this until he finished playing a game of badminton with himself!

17

Shuttlecock.

18

No need to be rude about it.

19

When I was little I had a neighbor and she accused my dog, who happened to be perfect, of letting her dog out.

I was like “How is it possible that my dog can go out of the gate, walk over to your house and let your dog out of the gate.”

So one day I let the dog out when the nieghbor’s dog was out.

And yep sure enough…

My dog walked over to our gate, used his snout to lift the latch on the gate, then - get this - he went right over to my neighbor’s house and to their gate, used his snout and lifted that gate handle up. And her dog walked out.

I couldn’t believe it, to this day I can’t figure out how he learned how to do that. He was a collie/shepard mix, and they’re pretty smart but come on. I never would’ve believed that in a million years till I saw it.

It was simple to fix, we just put a hook pin in the gate to stop it from going up. Poor guy the skinned his snout quite a few times trying to lift it after the hook pin went in. But he eventually got the idea, his mode of escape was ended

20

Similarly, a wolf (wolf-mix anyway) crying. A friend of mine in high school lived in a trailer park. The asshole neighbors owned a wolf-mix. In a freakin’ trailer. While they were at work, the wolf-dog was kept on a very short chain outside the trailer and it would cry all day long. :frowning: It sounded like a child moaning, but it sounded just “wrong” enough that you knew it wasn’t human. Poor wolfie.