Stories

In 1936, on a rain-soaked court in Berlin, the U.S. men’s basketball team faced Canada in the Olympic final. Wearing bright white Converse All Stars with red and blue pinstripes, the Americans slogged through mud to win 19–8.

It began with a pun. “May the Fourth be with you” first appeared publicly on May 3, 1979, in a London Evening News ad supporting Margaret Thatcher’s election. But it wasn’t until decades later that the phrase became central to a fan-created celebration of the Star Wars franchise.

In 1958, Robert Timm, a WWII pilot and mechanic for the Hacienda Hotel in Las Vegas, proposed an unusual promotion: fly a Cessna 172 nonstop to break the flight endurance record. The hotel agreed, and the aircraft was heavily modified to support an airborne life.

In 1944, 19-year-old Hungarian soldier András Toma was captured by Soviet forces near Auschwitz while serving in an artillery regiment. He was taken to a POW camp near Leningrad, but in 1947, the camp closed and Toma was transferred to a psychiatric hospital in Kotelnich, Russia. There, he was misdiagnosed with psychoneurosis and removed from prisoner records.

In June 1955, Paul Anderson, a powerlifter from Georgia nicknamed the “Dixie Derrick,” stunned the Soviet Union. During a USA vs. USSR meet in Moscow, he clean and pressed 193 kg (425 lb) in front of 15,000 spectators.

On Christmas Day 1904, Swedish sailor Carl Emil Pettersson was shipwrecked off Tabar Island in Papua New Guinea. Carried to the local ruler, he soon married Princess Singdo, the king’s daughter. By 1907, he had become the island’s new king.

In 2000, the U.S. needed to refurbish aging nuclear warheads. But there was a problem: the government had forgotten how to make a classified material called Fogbank, crucial to their operation.

In May 1942, the U.S. Navy placed ten men and a dog named Explosion on Kiska, a desolate island in Alaska’s Aleutians, to operate a remote weather station. Their job was to report conditions to Dutch Harbor, nearly 700 miles away, unaware of what was coming.

On May 23, 1967, powerful solar flares erupted from the sun and reached Earth within minutes, triggering massive radio blackouts across U.S. military frequencies. At the height of the Cold War, this unexplained interference raised alarms of a possible Soviet electronic attack.

In March 1915, amid the thunder of World War I, a coal-heaver named Seyit Ali Çabuk performed an act that would be recorded in military reports and photographs.