Are You Sh*tting Me?: 1,004 Facts That Will Scare the Crap Out of You

by Cary McNeal

  FACT 617 The earliest written reference to a monster in Loch Ness is a seventh-century biography of Irish missionary St. Columba.

  FACT 618 Enthusiasts believe that a now-famous 1934 photograph depicts a long-necked creature similar to a dinosaur rising from Loch Ness. Some take this as evidence that “Nessie” is the last living plesiosaur.

  FACT 619 No conclusive scientific evidence exists to prove the Nessie myth true, though many have tried using sonar and other tools.

  FACT 620 Stories of a yeti, or abominable snowman, have existed in the Himalayan regions of Tibet and Nepal since the fourth century B.C.E.

  FACT 621 The term abominable snowman first appeared in the press in 1921, when a journalist wrote about a sighting by explorer Charles Howard-Bury of large dark forms twenty thousand miles up in the Himalayas.

  FACT 622 Howard-Bury provided the first credible sighting of a yeti. His group later found footprints “three times those of normal humans” at the spot where the animals had been spotted.

  FACT 623 The yeti is known as rakshasa, or “demon,” in ancient Sanskrit.

  FACT 624 Believed to be not one creature but many, yetis are thought to be intelligent enough to make tools and avoid humans.

  FACT 625 As interest in mountaineering has increased, so has the number of people who have allegedly seen yeti tracks or the yeti itself.

  FACT 626 Typically reliable sources such as Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay even claimed they saw giant footprints, although Hillary later said he was skeptical about the source of the prints.

  FACT 627 During a 2002 discussion on National Public Radio about crypto-primates like Sasquatch and the yeti, famed primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall said, “I’m sure they exist.”

  FACT 628 Despite long-standing myths of dangerous, fanged creatures that attack and drink the blood of livestock, scientists recently discovered that chupacabras are simply wild dogs and coyotes with a severe form of mange.

  FACT 629 The legend of the chupacabra—Spanish for “goat sucker”—originates from Puerto Rico and Mexico, where there were a growing number of reports of attacks on livestock, specifically sheep, which were discovered dead, completely drained of blood.

  FACT 630 The legend spread to other areas in Latin America and the United States, along with reports describing “evil-looking animals with long snouts, large fangs, scaly greenish-gray skin, and a nasty odor.”

  FACT 631 Experts say that animals inflicted with this form of mange would be quite debilitated and might resort to attacking livestock rather than their usual wild prey for an easier meal.

  FACT 632 The Mothman legend centers around the collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, on December 15, 1967, which killed forty-six people. For thirteen months before the incident, dozens of people reported sightings of a huge, semihuman winged creature in and around Point Pleasant.

  FACT 633 Many claimed to have seen the creature, dubbed “Mothman” by local media, not far from the bridge, leading to speculation that it was somehow involved with the bridge’s collapse.

  FACT 634 Most Mothman sightings described a shadowy creature standing six to seven feet tall with a ten-foot wingspan and large glowing red eyes.

  FACT 635 The creature reportedly flies using bat-like wings to glide rather than flap, and has the ability to fly great distances at speeds of up to a hundred miles per hour.

  FACT 636 The most well-known Mothman sighting occurred in November 1966 when the creature reportedly appeared to two couples necking in a car at an abandoned factory. The four witnesses saw a large animal shaped like a man, with glowing red eyes and big wings folded against its back.

  FACT 637 Other theories suggest that sightings of Mothman can be attributed to a large bird like a sandhill crane, which can grow to be over three feet tall with a wingspan of six feet.

  FACT 638 Shortly after the Silver Bridge collapsed, Mothman seemed to quietly disappear, and the sightings stopped.

  FACT 639 Some victims of the Silver Bridge collapse were Mothman witnesses, leading some to speculate that the creature might have been trying to warn of the impending disaster.

  FACT 640 According to cryptozoologist and author Loren Coleman, the legend of the Jersey Devil dates back to at least 1735, when a woman in southern New Jersey is said to have given birth to a cursed child who grew to become the beast.

  FACT 641 The Jersey Devil has been reported to be as tall as eight feet and is said to have a dog’s face, a kangaroo’s body, huge leathery wings, clawed hands, cloven hooves, and a forked tail.

  FACT 642 Perhaps the creature’s most frightening trait, however, is its fabled “bloodcurdling scream.” Which would be my most frightening trait, too, if I saw this fucker in the woods.

  FACT 643 Explanations of the Jersey Devil range from suggestions that the creature is actually a remnant dinosaur species or an undiscovered animal species to the belief that the monster is a mud-covered man living in the wild.

  FACT 644 The most credible Jersey Devil sighting occurred in 1993, when a park ranger on patrol in the Wharton State Forest came face-to-face with a large dark figure that stood over six feet tall and glared at him with piercing red eyes.

  FACT 645 Sightings of the Jersey Devil continue to occur, with one as recently as 2008 in Litchfield, Pennsylvania.

  FACT 646 “Champ” or “Champy” is the resident aquatic monster of Lake Champlain, between New York and Vermont.

  FACT 647 Champ sightings date back to the days when only Native American tribes lived in the area. Even the lake’s namesake, Samuel de Champlain, noted in a 1609 journal entry that he had observed an unusual twenty-foot-long serpentine creature in the water.

  FACT 648 Could Champ be a leftover dinosaur? Some eyewitness descriptions of the beast as a dark, long-necked, round-bodied creature up to thirty feet in length sound eerily similar to a prehistoric plesiosaur.

  FACT 649 The Skeptical Inquirer says that an amateur photo of Champy taken by a woman named Sandra Mansi in 1977 “stands alone as the most credible and important photographic evidence for a lake monster in Champlain—or anywhere else.”

  FACT 650 Some Australians believe in semiaquatic creatures called bunyips that live in bodies of water in the outback.

  FACT 651 The bunyip, which means “bogey,” “devil,” or “spirit” in an Aboriginal language, is described as being the size of a calf, dark brown in color, with the head of a horse and two large walrus-like tusks.

  FACT 652 A legend of Australia’s Aboriginal people, bunyip have been sighted since the 1800s. Such sightings were common in New South Wales, Victoria, and the Australian Capital Territory.

  FACT 653 The legend of Kongomato describes a large flying beast, similar to a bat or pterodactyl, that roams sub-Saharan Africa attacking fishermen in small boats.

  FACT 654 African locals describe the flying beast as having a long narrow head, a mouth full of sharp teeth, and a wingspan of up to seven feet.

  FACT 655 One zoologist has theorized that the Kongomato is an exceptionally large species of the hammerhead bat, a particularly ugly fruit bat. Others have suggested that the flying creature is a surviving pterosaur.

  FACT 656 Legend holds that a giant anaconda up to 50 meters (164 feet) long lives in the Amazon River. No proof has yet been produced that this creature, known as yacumama, or “mother of the water,” exists.

  FACT 657 Japan’s version of the kraken is the akkorokamui, a giant squid or octopus that lurks in Funka Bay off the island of Hokkaido, reaching sizes of up to 110 meters. Funka Bay—wasn’t that a Parliament album?

  FACT 658 Residents of East Anglia, UK, have feared a terrifying black dog, the Black Shuck, for centuries. Legend says that once you have gaze
d into the eyes of this demonic ghost dog, you will become ill or die soon afterward.

  FACT 659 The yowie, or doolagahl, which means “great hairy man,” is Australia’s answer to Bigfoot. Sightings dating back to the late 1880s describe an eight-foot-tall animal with a foul odor.

  FACT 660 The yowie was most recently spotted in 1997 in Australia’s Northern Territory. Police later found chewed water pipes and huge tracks where the creature had been seen.

  FACT 661 Accounts of an unknown type of giant earthworm or snake called the minhocão began to circulate from Brazil in the eighteenth century. One writer in 1878 theorized that the animal could be a Pleistocene giant armadillo, the glyptodont.

  FACT 662 At a reported two feet in circumference and up to five feet in length, the Gobi Desert’s Mongolian death worm is not a creature you want to encounter without a change of underwear.

  FACT 663 The death worm is said to spit a toxic acid-like substance and have the ability to shoot a deadly jolt of electricity from several feet away.

  FACT 664 A giant bat called the ahool has been spotted in Java numerous times since 1924.

  FACT 665 The ahool is said to resemble a flying monkey with long, sharp claws.

  FACT 666 According to Caribbean legend, the loogaroo are vampires that were once old humans who made deals with the devil; they give him blood and he gives them magical powers in return.

  FACT 667 If a Caribbean islander awakens without any enthusiasm or energy, he might suspect that a loogaroo has visited him during the night, draining his blood and vital essence.

  FACT 668 The loogaroo are said to be strangely compulsive. You can thwart an attack by throwing grains of rice, seeds, peas, and other items on the ground, which the monsters will be compelled to stop and count. They are the Rain Men of the cryptid world.

  “THIS CHAPTER IS THE worst!” my editor wrote in her notes on my original manuscript. “Why are you telling me things?”

  Because I care, that’s why, not just about my editor, but about you, dear reader. I don’t want you to be surprised the next time you discover maggots in your mushrooms or antifreeze in your balsamic vinaigrette (or “vinegar-ette,” as some people call it). I also figured you would want to know that the vanilla flavoring in some of your favorite foods comes from a beaver’s butthole.

  You’re welcome.

  FACT 669 For every dollar you spend on food, 19 cents goes to the actual food, while the other 81 cents goes to marketing and packaging.

  FACT 670 According to University of Washington researchers, two thousand calories’ worth of fast/junk food costs $3.52 per day; the same amount of nutritious foods costs closer to $36 per day.

  FACT 671 The Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition at London Metropolitan University discovered that, due to modern farm diets and living conditions, chickens today contain 266 percent more fat than they did forty years ago.

  FACT 672 Because livestock is fed hormones, cows produce double the amount of milk today than they did twenty years ago. The hormone, recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST), has been associated with many different types of cancer, including colon, prostate, and breast.

  FACT 673 U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations on trans fats are incredibly lenient: a company can claim zero trans fats on a bag of snacks even if there is up to 0.49 gram per serving.

  FACT 674 In the past forty years, the number of allotted daily calories has increased by five hundred for the average American. This translates to an extra fifty-two pounds per American per year.

  FACT 675 The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) subcontracts a company to remove the potentially harmful bacteria in meat for products like fast-food hamburgers. The company uses ammonia to do the cleaning.

  FACT 676 The FDA allows for a can of mushrooms to include more than twenty maggots and seventy-five mites in every one hundred grams.

  FACT 677 Government data shows that every 500 grams of frozen berries—roughly the amount that goes into the average pie—can contain an average of four or more larvae and ten or more whole insects. Also, up to 60 percent of the berries can be moldy.

  FACT 678 Four hundred or more insect fragments and twenty-two or more rodent hairs are allowed in every hundred grams of ground cinnamon.

  FACT 679 Up to 10 percent of canned asparagus is allowed by the FDA to harbor asparagus beetles or egg sacs.

  FACT 680 The FDA says that tomato paste is inedible only if more than 45 percent of it is moldy.

  FACT 681 As much as 5 percent of your maraschino cherries can legally contain maggots.

  FACT 682 The FDA allows chocolate to contain up to sixty insect parts per hundred grams.

  FACT 683 To create the turkey meat used in turkey burgers, patties, dogs, and nuggets, an entire turkey—including all of its bones and organs—is “mechanically separated from the bone.” The mechanical separation process involves putting the turkey under high pressure to form a “paste-like and batter-like poultry product.” *barf*

  FACT 684 A food preservative called butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) helps many of our foods from going bad, but it is also widely used in embalming fluid and jet fuel.

  FACT 685 Sodium nitrite is used to stop the growth of bacteria in meat products. It is also a component of textile dyes.

  FACT 686 There are 195 recognized countries in the world. Only 76 of them do not have a McDonald’s.

  FACT 687 McDonald’s worldwide daily customer traffic (sixty-two million) surpasses the population of Great Britain.

  FACT 688 McDonald’s has the world’s sixty-eighth largest economy, larger than Ecuador’s.

  FACT 689 An estimated one in eight Americans has worked at a McDonald’s in his or her lifetime. Only half of them will admit it, though.

  FACT 690 Shellac is used to make jelly beans shinier.

  FACT 691 Processed cheese is actually only 49 percent cheese; 51 percent is chemicals and additives.

  FACT 692 Fast-food salad dressings often contain propylene glycerol, which is also an element of antifreeze. The good news: your salad will always start on cold mornings.

  FACT 693 The average fast-food eater swallows twelve pubic hairs per year.

  FACT 694 Castoreum, a natural flavoring that is often used in gelatins or puddings, comes from a beaver’s anal gland.

  FACT 695 Titanium dioxide is a white chemical dye used in paint products. It is also used in icing, coffee creamers, and some salad dressings.

  FACT 696 Cellulose is a food additive used to make ice cream creamier and keep shredded cheese from separating. It is made of wood pulp and shavings.

  FACT 697 Animal bone char is an ingredient used to make foods like sugar whiter.

  WHEN WE TALK ABOUT crappy drivers, who are we really talking about? Everyone but ourselves! We are wonderful drivers, you and I. It’s all these other idiots who go too fast or too slow or forget to use their turn signals or can’t pick a lane, not us, right? Why can’t they drive like you and I drive: perfectly?

  When Albert Camus came up with the line, “Hell is other people,” I bet he was driving. Hell is other people, all right: other people in their cars.

  FACT 698 Texting while driving has become the leading cause of motor vehicle accidents and deaths for teenage drivers. OMG! DOA!

  FACT 699 Driving a vehicle while texting is six times more dangerous than driving while intoxicated, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Especially if you are texting something long like “the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.”

  FACT 700 NHTSA reports that sending or receiving a text takes a driver’s eyes from the road for an average of 4.6 seconds. Moving at fifty-five miles per hour, this would be like driving th
e length of an entire football field while blindfolded.

  FACT 701 Texting in moving vehicles causes more than 3,000 deaths and 330,000 injuries per year, according to a Harvard Center for Risk Analysis study.

  FACT 702 A texting driver is twenty-three times more likely to be involved in an accident than a driver who is not texting.

  FACT 703 Speeding is a factor in half of all fatal crashes involving sixteen-year-old drivers with three or more passengers.

  FACT 704 Motor vehicle accidents are the number one cause of death for Americans five to thirty-five years old. More than half of these accidents are caused by alcohol-impaired drivers.