› added 11 years ago

93

TIL that in 1989-1990 the Belgian Air Force successfully got two missile locks on a UFO, only to be outmaneuvered. The object accelerated from 240 km/h (150 mph) to 1100 km/h (683 mph) almost instantly, descending 900 m (half a mile) in less than 2 seconds, something that would kill a human pilot.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

XEm4j TIL In 1920, a comedian called Harold Lloyd lost two fingers after picking up what he assumed to be a lit prop bomb at a photo shoot, that turned out to be a real bomb. It took 8 months to recover, and for the rest of his career, he had to wear a prosthetic.
6EAg7 TIL Gary Gygax's wife was convinced he was having an affair so she followed him to a dimly lit basement and burst into the room only to find him and his friends hunched over hand drawn maps. Gary would go on to invent the role playing game "Dungeons and Dragons"
yQbvV TIL the designer of the notorious font Comic Sans also designed Trebuchet, one of the most commonly-used fonts on the internet.
Pwjw TIL in 1991 Maurice Krafft, a french Volcanologist, was filmed saying “I am never afraid because I have seen so many eruptions in 23 years that even if I die tomorrow, I don’t care”. He was killed during an eruption the very next day alongside his wife on Mt. Unzen in Japan.
9wN8p TIL the surface of the Straits of Gibraltar constantly flow east, from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean Sea.