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Gasoline in a glass jar

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Fengdu Ghost City

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Bre-X geologist Michael de Guzman salted core samples with gold shavings from his own jewelry to fake the world's largest gold deposit — 200 million ounces. He fell from a helicopter over the Borneo jungle before investigators arrived.

Bill Wilson co-founded AA on the principle of complete abstinence, then took LSD with Aldous Huxley in 1956 and spent years lobbying AA's board to adopt it as a sobriety tool. The board said no. He kept taking it.

Thomas Midgley Jr. invented both leaded gasoline in 1921 and Freon in 1928 — one poisoned global blood lead levels for fifty years, one carved a hole in the ozone layer. One man, two planetary-scale mistakes.

Michael Dillon, the first trans man to undergo phalloplasty in 1946, later vanished from British society entirely — resurfacing in a Tibetan monastery, ordained as a Buddhist monk, having shed every identity the West assigned him.

In 1971, a Soviet drilling rig collapsed into a natural gas pocket in Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert. Engineers lit it to burn off the gas. It has not gone out in over 50 years.

Gothic cavalry obliterated two-thirds of the Eastern Roman army in a single afternoon, killing Emperor Valens — whose body was never recovered. The battle proved infantry alone could not hold the empire. Rome began its long unraveling.

He sliced open his own abdomen, was sewn up by a doctor, then tore the stitches out with bare hands. Cato the Younger refused Caesar's pardon not once but twice — from the inside.

A five-ton circus elephant named Mary was hanged by a crane in Erwin, Tennessee, 1916 — the first chain snapped under her weight. She had killed her trainer the day before. A town decided justice required a railroad derrick.

The Japanese American Citizens League publicly urged Nisei to cooperate with internment orders in 1942 — calling resistance un-American. Decades later the JACL issued formal apologies to the resisters it had condemned.