› added 7 years ago

88

TIL of a P51 fighter pilot captured by the Japanese after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Under torture for info about the Manhattan Project - which he was ignorant of - Marcus McDilda made up a lie that the US had 100 bombs and that Tokyo was the next target. Japan soon surrendered.

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MeeRK TIL that if the San Francisco Bay Area were a country, it would be ranked sixteenth in the world in terms of GDP.
wRLJ TIL that IRS scammers have been known to call in a violent emergency to the victim’s residence, which triggers a SWAT team response. This activity, called “Swatting,” is why one should simply terminate a call with scammers instead of escalating.
9wLB TIL only 6 people attended Thomas Paine’s funeral, one of the Founding Fathers of the U.S. because of his ridicule of Christianity.
xVB8o TIL that Cyndi Lauper, uncredited, sang the theme song to Pee Wee's Playhouse.
NZ9M TIL that the original surveyors of Mount Everest lied and added 2 feet to its height to make it 29,002 feet, because they didn’t think people would believe them if they said it was really 29,000 feet high.