15 Uncomfortable Moments from Modern History

During World War II, the Germans designed a submarine with new deepwater high-pressure toilets, but little did they know that feature would seal its fate. In 1945, someone used the toilet and opened the wrong valve to flush it, causing a leak. That flooded the submarine's batteries, which created chlorine gas. The submarine had to surface to clear the gas, and that's when they were detected by a British patrol and captured.

Liechtenstein is a small, peaceful country between Switzerland and Austria that has no military, but has been invaded many times, all of them by accident. The most famous case happened in 2007, when a party of 170 Swiss soldiers crossed the border and reached Liechtenstein's capital, only to turn back and ask for forgiveness. They didn't mean to invade the country, they were just doing a training exercise. The Liechtenstein government said that it was okay because nobody noticed it.

In 1969, approximately 100 thousand barrels of crude oil spilled into the Santa Barbara Channel, killing more than 3500 seabirds and marine animals. The event sparked new environmental legislation, social movements, and the creation of Earth Day.

The Free Breakfast for School Children Program was run by the Black Panther Party starting in 1969. The program reached nationwide, but the FBI tried to hijack it as part of its COINTELPRO agenda. They started rumors that the food was poisoned, and they even broke into churches to urinate on the food. They also raided breakfasts with guns drawn while children were eating what was probably their only meal of the day.

In 1942, a dental surgeon from Irwin, Pennsylvania, came up with an idea for a new weapon for World War II. The man was an acquaintance of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt at the time, so he could share his idea with the military. The idea was labeled as a Bat Bomb. Each bomb had many different compartments holding one hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a timed incendiary bomb attached. Tests were a disaster that ended up exploding a US airbase before they were even deployed.

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, migrants were blamed for taking all the jobs at the same time they were living off public welfare. Sounds familiar? Deportation campaigns started, and between 350 thousand and 2 million Mexican and Mexican-Americans were deported. Others were invited to leave the US “voluntarily.” Not a decade later, at the start of World War II, the US was desperate to have them back to replace their workforce.

In 1932, Australian farmers were encouraged to increase their wheat crops due to the tough times during the Great Depression. Wheat attracted more than 20 thousand Emus, big, flightless birds indigenous to Australia. The situation grew so much that farmers asked the military for help. Several attempts went nowhere, and the numbers divulged by government officials seem fabricated. The Emus were too many, and they moved too fast for that time's weapons.

In 1989, Soviet money wasn't widely accepted around the world, and if it was, it wasn't worth much. So when the USSR wanted to bring Pepsi, they had to get creative. They offered Pepsi 17 submarines and other military ships in exchange for billions of dollars worth of Pepsi, making the company the sixth most powerful military in the world for a brief time. Russia is the second biggest Pepsi market in the world after the US.

Similar to the Dancing Plague of 1518, the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic from 1962 was a mysterious outbreak that caused uncontrollable laughter. The outbreak started with a few kids in school but quickly spread, reaching more than a thousand kids. Schools had to close for months, but a cause hasn't been found.

In 1922, there was an unwritten fashion rule that said you couldn't wear a straw hat after September 15th. During prohibition, this escalated to people getting violent when they saw someone wearing a straw hat after September 15th. Gangs started knocking straw hats off people's heads, and the situation escalated to actual riots.

Ernest Hemingway's brother, Leicester, hopped onto a 240 sq ft bamboo raft near the coast of Jamaica and created a micronation called New Atlantis in 1964. Hemingway's wife and daughters joined him alongside a few others, and they all elected Leicester as their President, something that got wide news coverage in Jamaica. The raft wasn't strong enough and sank in less than two years.

England’s King Edward VII died in 1910, right when Halley’s comet was approaching Earth. This sparked superstitions and panic that led scientists to believe the comet was carrying deadly gases. While most astronomers debunked this theory, the idea had already taken root in society, so scammers took advantage of the times and started selling anti-comet pills alongside other anti-comet items like umbrellas and gas masks.

The 1904 St. Louis Olympic marathon sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie. The organizer, James E. Sullivan, believed that dehydration was good for the body, so he only placed one water station in the almost 25-mile race. The result? Only 14 of the 32 competitors crossed the finish line. The winner had to hop into a car to finish, and the second-place finisher had to be carried to the finish line because he had ingested rat poison as an enhancer.

This is one of the terrible war crimes committed by the Soviet Union during World War II. German soldiers found mass graves in the Katyn forest and used that name, but the massacres took place in many different locations. More than 21 thousand Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war were executed by the Soviet Secret Police under Stalin's orders.

Israeli Army forces attacked the USS Liberty ship during the Six-Day War in 1967, killing 34 crew members and wounding 171. While the official version of the events says the Israeli forces mistook the ship for an Egyptian one, survivors of the attack assert that this was a deliberate attack.