27. It is illegal to sell a “bounceless” pickle to somebody in Connecticut.
This law put the Librarians of Connecticut in quite a pickle. In fact, the law emerged as a legend, and the people demanded the truth. For hours, state librarians searched past state law archives until one librarian finally found the truth in the Hartford Courant. The law was, in reality, an ordinance created in 1945 to thwart pickle packers Moses Dexler and Sidney Sparer. These two men were selling inedible pickles, so the scientists conducted research and found that if it doesn’t bounce, don’t eat an ounce!
28. The Bermuda Triangle isn’t any more likely to cause a mysterious disappearance than anywhere else.
This portion of the North Atlantic Ocean is often called “The Devil’s Triangle” since it is an area of the ocean that extends between the tip of Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. It was thought, apparently, to swallow ships and aircraft. Explorers as far back as Christopher Columbus have registered odd phenomena, such as fireballs in the sky (which turned out to be a meteor crash).
But historians, scientists, and the U.S. Coast Guard have shown that ships in the Bermuda Triangle are no more likely to disappear than they are just about anywhere in the ocean. Many of the previous disappearances were demystified as the remains of multiple ruins were found or explained by the weather conditions in the area at the time.
This ‘phenomenon’ was first mentioned in a 1952 magazine that specialized in paranormal stories when they highlighted this mysterious ‘triangle’. It would only get it’s full name when a 1964 copy of the magazine Argosy featured a cover with the caption ‘Lost in the Bermuda Triangle’.
