You can talk as much as you like about luck and bad luck and even listen to the assurances of psychologists who believe that the fate of a person is entirely in his hands, but there are people on Earth, on whose example fortune definitely proves: someone who, and she knows how to turn his back on us. So, we offer you a story about enchanting losers.
When on Tuesday, March 16, a resident of South Carolina went for a run on the beach, it could hardly have occurred to him that in a few minutes he would be shot down … by a single-engine plane. It was an incredible combination of circumstances: the pilot made an emergency landing due to an oil leak, which, when descending, hit the windshield and blocked the view. The man at the helm did not see the runner, and he, in turn, noticed the plane too late. It would be ridiculous to conclude from what happened that beach walks are deadly, because we are talking about catastrophic bad luck. And the unfortunate American who was shot down by a plane on his morning run is not the only tragic loser of his kind.
Englishmen Jason and Jenny Lawrence were on vacation in New York in the fall of 2001. This pleasure, which turned out to be more than dubious in the end, cost them a pretty penny and brought a lot of negative experiences. They were located near the World Trade Center just at the time when the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers was carried out. Although the spouses had a lot of terrible minutes, both survived and remained unharmed. In addition to this fact, the only thought that more or less comforted them after a failed vacation was the hope that henceforth in their lives they would hardly have to face terrorist attacks.
But the calculations of the British, alas, did not materialize: four years later they found themselves in the London subway just at the moment when a series of explosions organized by the militants thundered there, which killed a total of 52 people. Having emerged unscathed and out of this alteration, Jenny and Jackson decided that now they didn't care about anything. But the chance to try their luck again presented itself three years later - in 2008, when they ventured on an exotic vacation to the Indian city of Mumbai.
After learning about the shooting of tourists and civilians, a large-scale terrorist attack on public places and the seizure of hotels, the couple could not believe what was happening for some time. Although at least 173 people were killed in those days and more than three hundred were injured, most of them vacationers, the Lawrences were not injured. Now they, talking about their misadventures, laughingly call themselves the luckiest couple who ever lived on Earth. But they prefer to spend their vacation at home.
But the American Roy Sullivan, with his example, refuted the popular assertion that lightning does not strike the same place twice. This man got as many as seven blows, and the chance of such bad luck, according to the calculations of mathematicians, is 22 septillion (a number with 24 zeros) to one! For comparison: each of us has a three thousand to one chance of encountering an electrical discharge once in a lifetime. Due to his incredible ability to "attract" lightning, Sullivan got into the Guinness Book of Records as the person who survived the most natural strikes.
Roy worked as a ranger in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, during thunderstorms he often had to stay out in the open, sometimes he hid from the rain under the trees. But the costs of the profession can hardly be explained by the phenomenal bad luck, due to which he received seven strokes of heavenly "electric shock".
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Now remember the expression about a projectile that does not hit the same funnel twice, and get acquainted with the story of the Japanese traveling salesman Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who was born in 1916 in Nagasaki. On August 6, 1945, he came to Hiroshima on business - just as an American plane dropped the first atomic bomb there. At the moment of the explosion, our hero was getting off the tram. Finding himself at a distance of about three kilometers from the epicenter, Yamaguchi lost his hearing and practically went blind, received severe burns and spent a day in a local hospital, where he received the necessary assistance. After bandaging and receiving a supply of painkillers, the Japanese decided to leave the hospital the next day. The doctors did not hold him back, because there were so many patients that there were not enough beds in the wards.
Yamaguchi went to his hometown and even found the strength to go to work. On August 9, just as he was telling his boss about his experience in Hiroshima, the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Despite all his injuries, the Japanese recovered from them - he is alive to this day, wrote several books about his misadventures, but only on March 24, 2009, the Japanese government officially recognized the fact that he suffered two atomic bombings (until that time, his name was included only in the list of victims of the bombing of Nagasaki).
A completely unimaginable story happened over a hundred years ago with a Texas resident Henry Siegland. In 1883, this man, distinguished by extreme inconsistency and treachery in relations with the opposite sex, abandoned his next passion. The girl was so heartbroken that she committed suicide. Her inconsolable brother decided to take revenge on the offender and, appearing to him at the ranch, shot Siegland in the head with a pistol, after which he shot himself with the same weapon. The young man did not know that he had missed: the bullet, instead of hitting the womanizer directly in the forehead, flew near his ear and settled in the trunk of a tree. Siegland, of course, considered himself lucky and tried to settle down so that he would no longer mess with the angry relatives of his friends. But in fact, luck was not on his side, and the bullet that he incredibly escaped,still found my goal. True, twenty years later.
The very tree she was stuck in grew wildly and began to interfere with the rancher. The eccentric Texan, trying to avoid unnecessary work, decided to use … dynamite instead of a saw or an ax. Blowing up a hateful tree seemed like a funny idea to him. But, as it turned out, it was tantamount to suicide. The explosion turned out to be so powerful that fragments of the barrel flew in all directions, and with them a bullet. She went straight to the place where the brother of the unfortunate girl deceived by Siegland was aiming. The farmer died instantly, not even having time to marvel at the treachery of fate that overtook him two decades later …
And, finally, American Ann Hodges is a unique woman of her kind, the only victim of a meteorite on Earth. On November 30, 1954, she lay down on a couch in the living room of her own home for an afternoon nap. At that moment, a small (grapefruit-sized) meteorite hit the roof of the building. It hit the massive wooden cover of a large radio and bounced back into the owner's leg. The lady was wounded in the hip - and became famous throughout the country. Journalists besieged Ann to inquire about the incident and take photographs. From all over the United States, she received offers to sell the meteorite, and prices reached five thousand dollars - a lot of money at that time.
All major newspapers in the world published reports of an unusual case, but Mrs. Hodges herself did not get such fame. Upon learning of the meteorite's impact, representatives of the US Air Force came to her house and seized a sample of the rock of alien origin. Ann's husband, Eugene Hodges, even hired a lawyer to help them retrieve the relic. Negotiations and litigation took more than a year, after which the couple received "their" meteorite back. However, by that time, newspapers were already writing on completely different topics, the popularity of Hodges had faded, and no one was interested in buying a celestial body. As a result, the American woman was desperate to gain anything and, against her husband's insistence, donated the meteorite to the Natural History Museum in Alabama.
NATALIA SINITSA