8 Historic Footnotes So Strange You Might Think They Are Fake

From a war against birds to a flood of beer, these episodes sound like urban legends. They are all drawn from real events, even if the details have grown stranger in the retelling.

In Short

Governments have really fought a “war” against emus, dropped cats by parachute, and planned to nuke the Moon for prestige points.
Industrial accidents have produced waves of beer and molasses that acted more like tsunamis than slow moving spills.
Intelligence agencies once tried to wire a cat for sound, and church politics led to a full trial of a dead pope.

1. The Great Emu War

In 1932, Australian authorities sent soldiers with machine guns to Western Australia to cull emus that were trampling wheat fields. Media soon dubbed it the “Emu War” when it became clear the birds were hard to kill and the operation was not particularly effective.

After weeks of chasing fast moving birds and dealing with jammed weapons, the official kill count was under 1,000, far short of expectations. Farmers eventually relied more on fencing and bounties than on soldiers with Lewis guns.

Video: A Quick Look At The Emu War

2. The Great Molasses Flood

On January 15, 1919, a giant tank holding about 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst in Boston’s North End. The resulting wave of syrup reached an estimated 25 feet high and tore through streets at roughly 30 to 35 miles per hour, killing 21 people and injuring about 150.

Investigations found that the tank had been poorly built and inadequately tested.
The disaster helped push for stricter building codes and requirements that engineers sign off on large industrial structures.

Video: The Disaster in Detail

3. The London Beer Flood

In 1814, a huge wooden vat of porter burst at Meux & Co’s Horse Shoe Brewery in London, triggering a chain reaction that released hundreds of thousands of gallons of beer.

The wave knocked down walls and flooded nearby homes in a poor neighborhood. At least eight people died, including mourners at a wake. The accident nearly bankrupted the brewery and helped encourage a shift away from massive wooden vats in beer production.

4. The Dancing Plague Of 1518

In the summer of 1518, residents of Strasbourg (in the Holy Roman Empire) began dancing in the streets and could not seem to stop. Contemporary sources suggest that dozens, and possibly hundreds, danced for weeks, sometimes to the point of collapse and death.

Modern historians debate the cause. The leading ideas are mass psychogenic illness triggered by stress, possibly combined with religious beliefs and harsh living conditions.
Ergot poisoning from contaminated grain is sometimes mentioned, but evidence for that explanation is weaker.

5. Acoustic Kitty: The CIA’s Spy Cat

In the 1960s, the CIA experimented with turning a house cat into a mobile listening device.
The project, nicknamed Acoustic Kitty, involved surgically implanting a microphone and radio transmitter into a cat and attempting to train it to eavesdrop near Soviet targets.

The project ran into obvious problems. Cats are not great at following instructions, and training one to stroll to specific park benches on cue proved unrealistic. The program was eventually abandoned as impractical, after consuming a reported multimillion dollar budget.

6. Operation Cat Drop

In the 1950s and 1960s, widespread use of DDT in Borneo to control malaria carrying mosquitoes had ripple effects up the food chain. The pesticide harmed insects, geckos that ate them, and eventually local cats. As cats died off, rat populations surged and disease risk increased.

To restore some balance, British authorities flew in new cats and reportedly dropped crates of them by parachute into remote areas. The episode, often simplified in retellings, is now cited as a cautionary tale about unintended consequences of pesticide campaigns.

7. The Exploding Whale

In November 1970, a dead sperm whale washed ashore near Florence, Oregon.
State highway officials decided to solve the disposal problem with dynamite, expecting scavengers to clean up the small remaining pieces.

Instead, chunks of whale rained down over a wide area, crushing at least one parked car and creating a mess that lingered in local memory for decades. News footage of the blast has since become a staple of “what were they thinking” compilations.

8. Project A119: Nuking the Moon (On Paper)

During the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force quietly studied a proposal called Project A119, which involved detonating a nuclear device on the Moon. The idea was partly scientific but also meant to create a visible flash that would demonstrate American power after early Soviet space successes.

Scientists, including a young Carl Sagan, were involved in modeling the effects. The plan was never carried out and later arms control treaties banned nuclear tests in space, leaving Project A119 as a historical what if.

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