Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for January 10, 1997
January 09, 1997
January 11, 1997
Transcript:
Ripley's Believe It or Not! Believe It or Not! The deer botfly can fly at speeds of 818 MPH and regularly flies fast enough to cover 400 yards in one second and 13 miles in one minute! Cardinal LaGrange of France requested in his will that his skeleton be buried in Avignon and his skin at Amiens! (1402) Young men from Orongo, on Easter Island, in the 16h century, annually took part in a race through shark infested waters to a neighboring island to find the first egg of the year laid by a sooty tern!
More From Ripley's Believe It or Not
Wikipedia: Using the original report as a basis, Langmuir estimated the deer botfly’s true speed at a more plausible 25 mph/40kmh. Time magazine published an article in 1938 debunking Townsend’s calculations. To maintain a velocity of 800 miles per hour, the 0.3-gram fly would have had to consume more than 150% of its body weight in food every second; The fly would have produced an audible sonic boom; The supersonic fly would have been invisible to the naked eye; and The impact trauma of such a fly colliding with a human body would resemble that of a gunshot wound.