Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for September 09, 2011

BANZAI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The largest nuts rise to the top? I guess that explains why so many CEOs are crazy as bedbugs.

That thing about the nuts has an important political message to it.

@muskratdottir,That’s a clever one!BTW, are you from Iceland?

The bullet must have made him a numbskull! “Help, I’ve been shot,” Wang said 23 years later. I hope he was ‘Tianqing’ the surgeon for removing the bullet!

Chisov landed on a mountain slope, and it was all downhill from there!

darn! and I thought i was because the smallest nuts went to the bottom

Not sure I buy the Ivan story. Why would you risk almost certain death by not opening your parachute, rather than a very good chance of survival if you did. It does not make sense. Many stories like this turn out to be not true. On this one I am an “or not”.

Apparently, the “rest of the story” on Ivan Chisov is that he intended to open his chute, but at a lower altitude, where he would be less visible. Instead, he blacked out before he got it opened.

The same thing that happens with the nuts happens with any container with items of varying sizes. The larger objects cannot pack as closely leaving space for the smaller ones to sift down.

I read somewhere that the Germans were experimenting with parachute-less drops into snow banks. Tests were terminated when the Allies white-washed a pile of rocks!

There was a British bomber gunner that survived a parachute-less landing as well, as I recall.

Hmm, correcting myself, there where two others, British Flight Sergent Nicholas Alkemade (18,000 ft) and American SSGT Alan Magee (22,000). Both survived falling without chutes, but where picked up by the Germans and spent the rest of the war as POWs.

I’ll be shaking cans of nuts from now on for Brazils and pecans.