And we don’t mean “Ahhhh” as in, “this feels really good,” but “Ahhhh!!!” as in, “Something just scared the @&*# out of me!”
SETUP: One night in November 2009, a thief in Wuppertal, Germany, decided to steal a Mercedes Transporter van. What the thief didn’t know was that…
AHHHH! …an African lion was in the back of the van. The vehicle belonged to an entertainment company called Circus Probst and was fitted with a special cage in the back. The lion, a five-year-old male named Caesar, was being transported to a new circus site. Police found the van the next day, a few miles away from where it was stolen. Whoever had taken it had crashed it into a road sign and run away, leaving the engine running. Police said they assumed that Caesar had stayed quiet at the beginning of the escapade, then suddenly roared and scared the wits out of the thief. The thief was not caught; Caesar was fine.
SETUP: In September 2009, Mike Cunning and his five-year-old daughter, Caleigh, were fishing from a dock in Vancouver, British Columbia. Cunning was cleaning fish; Caleigh was sitting on the edge of the dock a short distance away, when…
AHHHH! …a seal jumped out of the water, grabbed Caleigh’s hand in its mouth, and pulled her into the water. Cunning only heard the splash and looked over to see that his daughter was gone. Caleigh popped up out of the water a few seconds later, screaming “Daddy! The seal! The seal!” Cunning scooped up the girl, who was bleeding profusely, and rushed her to an emergency room. She was treated for four deep puncture wounds to her hand. Caleigh asked her father why the seal would do such a thing. Cunning answered that maybe the seal wanted to go swimming with her. “She thought about that for a second,” he later told reporters, “and said, ‘Well, I think the seal was rude for not asking first.’”
SETUP: On the afternoon of November 9, 2009, eight-year-old Brianna Adams of New Market, Maryland, came home from school and told her mother that there was something in her eye. Her mother told her it was probably just an eyelash, but a short time later, Brianna complained again. Her mom agreed to have a look. She gently pulled Brianna’s upper eyelid open and…
AHHHH! …saw a tick in her daughter’s eye. “When I opened up her eye and saw a tick and all the legs were moving,” mom Christina Beachner said, “I almost fell on the floor.” It was stuck tight, so she rushed Brianna to the hospital, where doctors—who said they had never seen or even heard of such a thing before—put some ointment in the eye and covered it with a patch, hoping the tick would back itself out. (It was actually embedded in the fornix, a thin membrane between the eye and eyelid.) By the next day, the tick hadn’t moved, so the medical team had to anesthetize Brianna’s eye, pry the eyelid open, grab the tiny creature with forceps, and pull it out. Brianna’s eye was fine—and she even asked to keep the tick to show her classmates. (She named it Hurt because “it hurt my eye.”)
Odds of finding a 4-leaf clover on the first try: 10,000 to 1. Winning the NY lotto: 45 million to 1.
SETUP: A pilot for the Silver Falcons, an aerobatic-flying group affiliated with the South African Air Force, was giving a civilian friend a ride in one of the group’s two-seater jets. During a tricky and stomach-turning maneuver, the friend, apparently trying to steady himself, accidentally pulled a lever near his feet and.
AHHHH! …found out that it was the emergency ejection lever when he was instantly blasted out of the jet’s canopy and shot into the sky. After he and the rocket-propelled seat had flown about 300 feet, a parachute deployed, and the man floated unharmed (if embarrassed) down to the ground. Air Force officials reprimanded the pilot for taking a civilian on one of their planes, and they’d make whatever changes were necessary to the ejection system to ensure that such accidents would not happen in the future.
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“I feel pretty lucky. Thousands of people die every single day, and it’s not me.”
—Sarah Silverman
Scientists have created a genetically modified mouse that can run nonstop for five hours.