Last Week’s Blog Post asking that readers Be Smarter about phishing emails was read thousands of times, but apparently not by one long-time reader who sent me (yes, he sent it, not malware) an email with the subject, “O. M. G. -----The Darwin Awards are out!”
Just by the subject line I knew there was a 99.999 percent chance that it was fake.
Not only did he not reflect on the improbability of an annual “awards” summary coming out in July, rather than January or February, but what he sent was so old, it ended with the “winner” being the guy who strapped a JATO rocket to his car, which after ignition was found as “a pile of smoldering metal embedded in the side of a cliff.”
It concluded, “You couldn’t make this stuff up, could you?” Well most people couldn’t, but someone certainly did!
Because about 99.999 percent of you know that’s not just a made-up urban legend, but a very old one.
How Old? The Snopes write-up is more than 20 years old, but even at that point it was already old: they included a couple of versions of the story from 1995, and note that several of their readers remembered hearing versions of the story in the early 1960s.
That’s right: well over a half-century old.
It’s such a well-known urban legend that even Wikipedia has a page on it. It’s such a well-known urban legend that it was the very first myth tested by The Mythbusters TV show, first airing January 2003 — and they revisited it twice more over the years to give it every possible chance!
There are so many improbable clues about this one that it’s surprising that anyone who hadn’t seen it before wouldn’t be suspicious enough that they wouldn’t do the simplest of Google searches before sending it to the guy that publishes something called This is True.
As usual, it comes down to the need to think.
Related Good Reading: from Wired magazine published in August 2000, one possible origin of the myth: Heard the One About the Rocket Car? (First two words of the subhead: “Hasn’t everyone?” Nope! There was this one guy….) Warning: it’s LONG!
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Well, there’s a first time for everything in everyone’s life ~ and this IS the first time i’ve heard that urban legend, Randy. I tend to meander through the ancient ones with gods tripping up humans, not karms 😉
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You’re 1 in 100,000, my dear! 😉 But then, you spent a lot of time living behind the Great Firewall of China. -rc
I haven’t heard of it either till now, Marion!
Maybe not one in 100,000, but definitely part of Today’s Ten Thousand.
Have heard of the jet assisted Chevy. I first heard it years ago. Of course Wendy (I’m sure you know who she is) made a serious attempt to verify (Failed) so she reports it on her page as a myth. Still in the song dedicated to her page it’s a verse. (And now I wonder how many of your readers are asking “Who is Wendy and what’s her page. I will let you fill ’em in.)
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I’d guess a number of them know Wendy is the proprietor of the Darwin Awards — the real ones. -rc
My memory is going but that is a very old piece of…er…work, yes work!!! As Radar said in M.A.S.H ah, Bach! Lolol
Ah, the good ol’ days. I love that you included a pic from a LEGO Ideas submission inspired by the legend.
“JATO ignition at a distance of approximately 3.0 miles from the crash site.”
“automobile remained on the straight highway for about 2.5 miles”
“becoming airborne for an additional 1.4 miles”
If I created a story, I’d like to think the arithmetic would work.
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Indeed. The funny thing was, as I compared the story sent in the email to the samples on Snopes, I happened to notice the “approximately 3.0 miles” vs Snopes’ “approximately 3.9 miles”. Which means to me that somewhere along the way, someone was stupid enough to retype it rather than copy/paste it. Or, (much!) worse, saw fit to edit that detail. -rc
Despite having long since been proven as untrue, I still quite enjoy reading that story. It may well be my favorite Darwin Award story. I always get a chuckle out of imagining it happening as I read it.
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Yep: for the most part it’s imaginative and well written. -rc
I am absolutely delighted that I took the time to read the whole story on Wired. Great story, regardless of whether it’s true or not! 🙂
In case anybody wants to know:
According to Wikipedia, JATO was “pioneered” by Jack Parsons, a fascinating guy, if his biography is to be believed.
Also, according to Wikipedia, Jack Parsons was “one of the principal founders of … the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)”.
Does anybody know anybody who works at JPL, or who used to?
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Hm… sounds familiar somehow. Jack Parsons (born Marvel Parsons) was a co-founder of GALCIT (Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology), which became JPL, which is still run by Caltech today. GALCIT was indeed funded by the government to develop JATO into a more workable system. Parsons also was part of the group who founded Aerojet Corp., which still exists as part of Aerojet Rocketdyne. -rc
Wasn’t this also a segment in The Onion Movie?
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No idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised. -rc