They walk among us! Some even fly among us! They may even take the bus among us from time to time! Homosapiens-Superior is here, and can do things that have scientists scratching their heads.
We're carefully tracking their progress, so that one day soon we may gather them together and fight crime. Or maybe commit crimes. We haven't decided yet.
Real Name: Unknown
Uberboy's name is being kept secret, presumably to protect the lives of his loved ones once Uberboy dons a mask and begins patrolling the streets of the world righting wrongs.
Superpower: Bona fide Super-Strength.
One day in 1999 a little baby boy was born in Germany, at first glance no different from any other. But, the nurses noticed that the baby's muscles were twitching and called the doctors to check him out. We can only assume Uberbaby was showing off his guns to the ladies since when doctors examined the kid, they reached a unanimous conclusion: he was ripped as hell.
But how did this happen? Was there a fully equipped gym inside his mom's uterus? No, as it turns out that's an extraordinarily stupid idea. It's actually a real X-Men-style genetic mutation that changes the way his body controls muscle growth. Cattle farmers have been intentionally using it for years to breed huge, muscular cows.
It's not clear what will happen as Uberboy grows up. All we have is this quote that is from The Washington Post despite sounding like it's from a Marvel origin: "But inasmuch as no one has ever encountered a child such as this boy or studied animals with defective myostatin genes into old age, his health--and eventual strength--remains unknown."
What we do know is that at 4-years-old, Uberboy could lift six times more weight than an average kid. If in a few years you see a guy clubbing a bank robber in the head with a minivan, you'll know what the hell is going on.
Scientists, instead of building giant laser shooting robots to hunt him down, decided to study him and try to find ways to use this new knowledge to help people with muscle dystrophy. And by that we assume they mean turn regular people into muscle-bound supermen to populate their Army of Doom.
Real Name: Ben Underwood
Superpower: Super Echolocation
That's a fancy way of saying he can "see" with sounds. Basically he's Daredevil, minus the girlfriends who become porn stars in Mexico, getting killed by ninjas and being Ben Affleck. So much, much better when you think about it.
Human echolocation is not really new. You can ask James "the blind traveler" Holman all bout it, assuming you have access to a working Ouija board since the guy has been dead for a century and a half. There is even an organization called World Access for the blind that teaches people how to use echolocation. But, few people have been able to take echolocation as far as Ben Underwood.
Ben was diagnosed with retinal cancer at the age of two and had his eyes removed at three. While this can easily go into our upcoming article "Top 7 Most Horrible Things God Can do to Children," Ben's story takes a different turn when at five, he learns he can detect things around him by making quick clicking noises with his tongue.
He's gotten so good at it that he's now capable of Rollerblading, skateboarding, playing basketball, foosball and even video games.
Wait, video games? How's he doing that? Actually, we don't want to know. All we know is that if you get this kid and a bunch of bad guys in a completely dark room, only one of them is walking out.
Real Name: Michel Lotito
Superpower: Super-Eating
This basically means the guy can eat and even digest metal, glass and even toxic, poisonous material without going "Oh, shit! What was I thinking!" before puking blood and dying, which is what normally happens when other people try.
Michel Lotito's stomach lining is twice as thick as normal, a rare condition that most doctors agree developed in the womb, though nobody is sure how. Was a pregnant Mrs. Lotito bitten by a radioactive billy goat giving goat genes to Le Fetus Mangetout? We're forced to assume so until prove otherwise.
Lotito knew that fate had endowed him with special powers, so he answered the call and when he was 9-years-old, he started eating a television set. In the years since, Lotito got himself a career in entertainment eating bicycles, supermarket trolleys and even a coffin (there was no body inside ... or so he claims).
Lotito even entered the Guinness book of records when he ate a goddamn airplane. Sure, it took him two years to do it, but he ate two pounds of metal per day during the whole thing. Recent X-rays show he still has pieces of metal in his stomach and even a chain still stuck in there.
As journalists, we feel compelled to draw your attention to the fact that his special power wasn't eating an airplane, so much as it was shitting an airplane. Anybody can swallow a foreign object. The other side of the equation is where it gets hard, and on our team of real-life superheroes, we're thinking the plane-shitting would actually be more useful than anything the Das Uberboy does (hey, we have some specific goals in mind).
Real Names: Numerous Buddhist monks
Superpower: Generating magical heat energy from their bodies.
Experts have been studying Buddhist monks for more than 20 years, trying to figure out just how in the hell they're doing what they do. By using a meditation technique called Tum-mo, these monks can lower their metabolism by 64 percent. To put it in perspective, your metabolism only drops 10 to 15 percent when you sleep. And yes, you should feel bad that there are people who make you look uptight when you're asleep.
But far more awesome than that, the monks can also increase the temperatures of their fingers and toes by 17 degrees. No one knows how.
After hovering there for a few seconds, the ball burst into flames
This control over their body temperature allows the monk to comfortably survive in temperatures experts call "scrotum-negating, penguin-urine cold." Not only that, in an experiment that sounds more like outright torture, a group of monks were put in a cold room with cold, wet sheets draped around them. We're not sure if some asshole scientists simply yelled "Hey, I found Nirvana inside this room," and then slammed the door shut after the curious monks went in to check. But using their body-temperature-controlling meditation the monks managed to avoid becoming very holy popsicles.
It's believed the monks' techniques can one day be taught to astronauts to be used during space travel, since during their meditation they consume far less resources. And once the astronauts arrive on another planet, they'll likely find a group of Buddhist monks waiting, having effortlessly teleported themselves there with their minds.
Real Name: Yves Rossi
Superpower: Flight, via a rocket pack strapped to his back.
Yves Rossi is a Swiss professional pilot and aeronautical engineer (we hope, since he designed his own jet pack) who, claiming to be inspired by his hero Batman, realized the first jet-pack-powered flight.
At this point someone should write the man a nice letter explaining to him that Batman doesn't really fly at all. We'd do it ourselves, but we don't like to argue about comics with a man who jumps out of a plane wearing nothing but a flammable death trap strapped to his ass. For all we care he can say Superman talks to fish, as long as he keeps flying homemade jet packs while he's saying it.
As you see, he doesn't just run along the ground and wait for his jet pack to lift him into the air. He throws himself out of a fucking plane, knowing either his invention will work or men in hazmat suits will be raking him into a trash bag in a few minutes. If you're still wondering where the mutant part of this guy's super power comes in, than you obviously haven't considered the size of the balls it takes to do what he does.
Jet-Man's jet pack is capable of flying at a speed of 160 mph for up to six minutes. After those six minutes, Yves has to activate his secondary power, the Go-go-gadget-oh-please-God-don't-let-it-fail-parachute since there is no way to land the jet pack without becoming a red and chrome stain on the ground.
There's no word on his plans to add a laser-shooting suit of armor to the jet pack, but of course you wouldn't let that information get out until it was time to use it. That time is coming soon, Mr. Rossi. We'll be calling.
Real Name: Tim Cridland
Superpower: Super Pain Tolerance
Tim Cridland is an entertainer and a former member of the Jim Rose Circus, which you may remember as that really creepy circus from that episode of The X-Files with the murderous conjoined twin fetus thing.
Anyway, Tim specializes in sword swallowing, fire walking, sleeping on beds of nails (once even with a Toyota over him), body skewering and electrocuting himself. Tim says he can do this because he has mastered mind over matter. Researchers on the other hand call bullshit and say it's because Tim was born with a mutation that makes it so he doesn't feel pain the way normal people do.
It's not that Tim and his ilk can't feel anything, because they can feel when they are touched, and they can feel temperature. They simply do not register pain thanks to malfunctioning receptors in the nerve cells that tell your brain "Ow-fuck-get-the-hand-off-the-stove!"
We assume this also turns off the "you just got punched by a supervillain" receptors that make most men shy away from a life of superheroism.
Real Name: Choi Yeong-eui, later changed to Masutatsu Oyama
Superpower: Super-Karate!
Masutatsu Oyama was born in Korea in 1927 and later moved to Japan, where he studied karate. Unlike most famous martial artists, Oyama is not famous for his movie roles, where stunt men and clever editing can make anyone look like a badass.
No, Oyama preferred a different sort of theater. He used to have live public demonstrations where he would fight and kill a bull with his bare hands. Just because it bears repeating, let's write that again: He could kill a bull with his hands. If you want to know how idiotically hard that is, we cordially invite you to go out and punch a bull in the face. Go on, we'll wait here. OK, we're not really waiting since whoever just went out to try that isn't coming back.
All in all, Oyama fought and killed 52 bulls, three of which were killed instantly with one blow. Forty-nine had their horns chopped off with karate blows. He gained the nickname of The Godhand and was considered the living manifestation of the Japanese warrior's maxim "One strike, certain death."
If you're thinking his skills only worked against livestock, you should know that Oyama once tested himself in a kumite, a series of two-minute fights against different opponents, each of which you must win to continue. Oyama took on 300 men over the course of three days. According to some, the only reason it didn't reach 400 was because opponents started to get tired of getting punched in the face.
There have been three movies made based on his life: Champion of Death, Karate Bearfighter, and Karate for Life. That's right, there exists in the world a movie based on an actual man's life that wound up with the title Karate Bearfighter. Why? Because it's probable Oyama actually fought a goddamn bear once, and that bear is buried in a shallow grave covered in dirt and the tears of his relatives as we speak.
Thus we introduce our superhero squad: Super-strong babies flying in jet packs, navigating with surgical precision through the darkest and coldest of nights, tearing your tanks apart with super strength karate blows and eating them, only to fly back up into the air and shit your own weapons back on top of you.
Good luck sleeping, rest of the world. We hope our maniacal cackling doesn't keep you awake.
This marks the third and final installment in our June superpower trilogy. If you missed the first two, check out 5 Superpowers Science Will Give Us in our Lifetime, before moving on to find out about 5 Superpowers from the Bible That Put Marvel and DC to Shame.
Juan Arteaga
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