As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction…

And these historical stories that AskReddit users shared prove that point in a major way!

Read on to learn about some stories from history that are almost too crazy to believe.

Get started now!

The comet.

“Halley’s Comet appeared in the sky when Mark Twain was born in 1835.

The comet moves in a seventy-five or seventy-six-year orbit, and, as it neared Earth once again, Twain said “I came in with Halley’s Comet and I expect to go out with it.”

Sure enough, he d**d on April 21, 1910, just as the comet made its next pass within sight of Earth.”

A terrifying ordeal.

“My colleague was on the plane to Hawaii where the entire top of the plane ripped off… they flew the rest of the way without any overhead.. landed and everyone walked off.

Absolutely insane to see the pictures. Talk about being given a second chance..”

Doh!

“In 1908, Russia showed up 12 days late to the Olympics because the world switched calendars while they did not.”

History’s witness.

“There was a Japanese man named Tsutomu Yamaguchi who was on his way to work in Hiroshima in 1945, when he saw falling through the sky, two miles from where he stood, what ultimately turned out to be the atomic bomb.

He had just enough time to take cover in a ditch as the bomb detonated and miraculously he survived. Somehow the Hiroshima train station was still operational and so Yamaguchi, battered, bombed and bruised, decided to board a train to his family home so he could recover – in Nagasaki.

3 days later Yamaguchi was called into work to explain what he saw, which he did. At work as he began to tell the story of what happened, the second bomb dropped.

It was the reinforced concrete walls around him that saved him this time, and Yamaguchi quickly ran to find his wife and son. Ground temperatures in the city reached 4,000°C and radioactive rain poured down.

The family’s home was destroyed, but Yamaguchi’s wife and son had thankfully been out shopping – looking for burn ointment for Yamaguchi – when the bomb fell, and they’d survived.

Despite this ordeal of having survived two nuclear explosions and subsequent radiation exposure, Yamaguchi went on to live till 93 yrs of age. He d**d in 2010 after being recognised by the Japanese government as a ‘nijyuu hibakusha’, or ‘twice-bombed person’.”

Got ’em.

“The Ghost Army in WWII.

Essentially an American group of troops would deploy “dummy” tanks, broadcast fake radio chatter, and deploy loud sound effects over speakers to fool the Na**s into thinking there was a large military presence coming their way.

The Ghost Army was used to deceive the Na**s and make them send their military presence elsewhere, which provided openings for the real Allied forces to move in. This was used in the later parts of the war.

I never learned about this in school but I discovered it on my own and thought it was fascinating. Imagine thinking a whole mess of tanks are heading your way but in reality, it’s a couple of inflatable dummies and a few speakers.”

Survivor.

“Harrison Odjegba Okene.

The Nigerian man who survived for 3 days inside an air pocket inside of a sunken ship in the Atlantic.

Divers went down to recover bodies and investigate, and they discovered and rescued him.”

Mad Jack.

“Everything having to do with Mad Jack Churchill. He reads like someone’s self-insert OC in a historical fiction based on WWII, except he’s all real.

He was a Brit who fought in World War II without guns, instead preferring a longbow, a claymore sword, and bagpipes. Despite this, he won. A lot. He single-handedly took a whole village back from the N**is by taking his shirt off and stealthing around to scare the c**p out of them with his sword.

After the N**is captured him one time and held him prisoner, (under the mistaken belief he was related to Winston Churchill,) the prison was raided by the Allies and he was set free…or he would have, had he not already escaped 2 weeks prior.

He was on the beach on D-Day, with men under his command, and held them up in their boat while he played a song on the bagpipes, finished, lobbed a grenade onto the beach, and then charged. The war ended, and he was bored, so he went to the Pacific to go fight the Japanese. That ended too, so he got bored in retirement and invented river surfing.

This is just a scrap of the historical anomaly that is Mad Jack Churchill.”

Big blast.

“The climactic explosion of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, the loudest sound in recorded history.

50 miles away eardrums ruptured. Sailors 3,000 miles away thought it was a cannon.

The pressure wave circled the entire planet more than three times.”

That’s wild.

“On December 5th, 1664, a man named Hugh Williams was the only survivor of a shipwreck.

On December 5th, 1785, a man named Hugh Williams was the only survivor of a shipwreck.

On December 5th, 1820, a man named Hugh Williams was the only survivor of a shipwreck.”

Close call.

“There would have been a third, and a nuclear, world war and possibly the end of the world if Stanislaw Petrow didn’t react like he did on the 25th of September in 1983.

In short: he was the only one that questioned the readings on the russian missile alert system and refused to launch nuclear counter-missiles.”

What a wild world we live in.