6 Absurd Movie Plots You Won't Believe Are Based on Reality

There's now an award named after Andrews, given every year to people who continue his legacy of giving zero fucks in their quest for scientific kickassery. Winners include Lonnie and Ellen Mosely-Thompson, who explore "the most inhospitable places on the planet" in hot air balloons and on yaks, and once dragged a bunch of ice cores across the Gobi Desert simply because that seemed like something that couldn't be done. Then you have Mark Moffett, adventurer entomologist, who apparently once fought off Colombian drug lords with a blowgun.

Where superheroes have their Fortresses of Solitude and Batcaves, so too do supervillains need vastly implausible lairs just to show how evil they are. Think of the giant submersible in The Spy Who Loved Me or Blofeld's volcano lair. There's nothing particularly scary, after all, about a villain who goes home every night to a rented apartment in Brooklyn. Surely, though, such extravagances don't translate very well to the real world, as most of today's villains are too busy running banks into the ground to bother installing giant shark tanks into their houses.

But It Has Happened ...

Probably the closest things we've ever had to genuine comic book villains are the guys we were fighting in World War II -- and yes, there were lairs. In fact, we've already shown you what Mussolini's National Fascist Party headquarters looked like.

But Hitler, too, had an evil fortress -- the Wolfsschanze ("Wolf's Lair"), which was a castle in Germany obscured by trees and reinforced by a frankly stupid amount of cement. After the Third Reich fell, it took over eight tons of TNT to destroy it, and 10 years to uncover all the 54,000 land mines planted around it. Hitler also had a Sonderzug (translated rather unfortunately as "Special Train") that was equipped with two anti-aircraft guns and four cannon batteries. Have you ever seen a train shoot down an aircraft? Hitler wanted to make that happen.

But you don't need to search back through history. Even today there exists a man with a strange foreign accent, living out of reach of the law, who uses his vast technology to bring world governments to their knees. We're talking about Julian Assange, and he works here:

That's not a scene from one of the early Bond movies. That's the Pionen data center in Sweden, a high-tech server farm inside a former Cold War bunker that provides data storage for websites that nobody else wants to have on their servers, including WikiLeaks. Although Assange's dangerous stash of leaked documents don't require much server space, he was kicked out of so many Web hosts that he eventually had to move it to a building that looks like it houses a giant moon-destroying laser cannon.

In the movies, when our hero needs to crack the password in the villain's lair, he or she usually succeeds within the first three tries or so -- more often than not, it's the name of the villain's beloved daughter or dead wife, or the name of an object that's sitting there next to the computer. Movie logic therefore suggests that we have no ability to memorize the name of anything that isn't always in our direct line of sight.

But It Has Happened...

We've mentioned before how most people don't heed those warnings from the IT department about complex passwords because our stupid brains can't handle memorizing too many random sequences of symbols. But this degree of password slackness must be limited to Gmail and Amazon accounts, right? You could never hack into something really important, like a government facility, just by guessing some common phrases.

Well, as 4chan's militant wing Anonymous discovered, the Syrian government, for one, has a disturbing propensity for obvious passwords. Anonymous found that a large amount of Syria's sensitive information could be unlocked by using the password "12345," or if it's really top secret, "123456." But we probably don't have much to lose by giving control of Syria over to Anonymous. It's not like they have nuclear weapons or anything.

Actually, talking about nuclear weapons ... it turns out that through most of the Cold War, America's Strategic Air Command, the military division responsible for launching nuclear weapons and thus causing or preventing the apocalypse, kept all their weapon codes set to "00000000," because they were afraid a more complicated code would interfere with launch. Nobody wants to delay the end of the world just because someone can't remember their password.

That's right: During a time in history when we almost destroyed the world every five minutes or so, the only thing between us and nuclear Armageddon was the default code on your bike lock.

Sewers don't seem to work the same way in the movies as they do in real life. For one thing, if the characters go down there for whatever reason, no matter what kind of movie you're watching, you can just about bet that they're going to run into sewer people. It happened in Demolition Man, Batman Returns and of course dozens of horror movies (what, you forgot about C.H.U.D.?).

Whether it's a community of mole people, martial-arts-trained turtles or a penguin-themed supervillain, secret cities often just spring up inside movie sewers as though they're the hottest real estate in town, and nobody from the surface world suspects a thing. Of course, in the real world nobody really wants to live in a poop-filled flood channel. Even a homeless shelter would have to be preferable, or a nice park bench.

But It Has Happened ...

Meet Steven and Kathryn, poster-couple for the Las Vegas Flood Tunnels, a sewer designed to insulate the prostitution capital of the United States from floods, but which is also currently providing shelter for as many as 700 people.

And these aren't just cardboard-box shanties. Sewer dwellers like Steven and Kathryn have their own bed, wardrobe and bookshelves, and even a small kitchen. All things considered, their home looks more comfortable than ours, except for the way they have to keep everything up on crates due to the floor being a river of sewage.

Many of the Vegas mole people make their money from "credit hustling," trawling casinos for money that drunk people have left behind. But not everyone is unemployed -- in fact, at least one of them has a full-time job on the surface world. He's probably their president.

And it's not just Las Vegas. East Coast sewer people are represented by "The Tunnel" in New York City, where the most permanent resident has lived for more than 20 years. In the documentary Dark Days, you can see them debate whose house is nicer, set up barbershops and cultivate small gardens. No word on how many of them are skin-eating mutants.

But It Has Happened ...

Apparently, criminals are foiled all the time when they commit a crime and then forget to not tell everybody. More often than not, it's Facebook or some other social networking site that provides the temptation to confess. Apparently, people still consider the Internet to be some kind of "international waters" style of lawless wasteland, and anything you say or do there doesn't count.

Ask Heather Tucci, who pleaded "not guilty" to vehicular manslaughter and then admitted the crash was her fault in a MySpace post. Then there's Robert Powell, who posted a picture of murder victim Joseph Duprey on his MySpace with the words "Rest in Peace" -- hours before the death was reported to police.

But perhaps the best example is 18-year-old Eric Dykstra, who was involved in a drive-by shooting that injured a young girl. Brilliantly, his first port of call was to brag on Facebook about being "a free man after shooting up a house." It's unlikely that he has a long career of successful supervillainy ahead of him.

But It Has Happened ...

A lot of comics geeks and cosplayers will be happy to learn that many of our favorite superheroes have precedents. Ninja precedents.

In a bygone era, the ninjas of old used a weapon called tekko-kagi. Or, as you know them, wolverine claws. Typically made from horseshoes, the tekko-kagi were strapped to the wrists to use as defense against sword attacks and, presumably, enemies with a psychic control over magnetism.

But that's not all -- what many don't realize is that there were female ninjas, too, known as kunoichi, and they were for all intents and purposes a bunch of Catwomen who used a weapon known as neko-te, the same kind of steel finger-claws that Batman's nemesis uses.

As of yet, we can't find any evidence of batarangs in Japanese feudal history, but if we do, you will be the first to know.

J. F. Sargent blogs and tweets, and is the managing editor of PCulpa.com.

For more implausible events that came true, check out 6 Insane Prison Escapes That Actually Happened and 9 Absurd Movie Premises That Actually Happened.

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