Some world records require little practice, such as the record for the greatest number of people brushing their teeth all at once (26,382 people). Other records require little or no money such as the man with record-long ear hair (7 in or 18 cm). Or even require common sense (i.e. the man who received the record for the hardest kick to the groin). But they’re the exceptions. Most records require plenty of practice time or money or both. And when their attempt fails, it’s all the more tragic. Some even lose far more than time and money. Here are 10 attempts – some of which still set a record—that went awry.

10 World Records That Have Never Been Broken

10 Longest Car Jump Fail (Tignes, France, 2014)

After winning his fourth world title in freeriding, Guerlain Chicherit, hung up his skis to try his hand at rally and rallycross driving. After winning the French Rally Cup and the FIA Cross Country Rally World Cup, Chicherit tried stunt driving, performing the world’s first unassisted backflip in a car in 2013. But he wasn’t done. “I like this feeling—to play with gravity,” he said. “I think I need this like someone needs to smoke, someone needs to drink or need drugs; I need to have my adrenalin.” The next year he took a shot at breaking Tanner Foust’s’s 2011 record for longest ramp jump in a 4-wheeled vehicle (332 ft. or 101 m).

In March, 2014, Chicherit and his team calculated 15 different variables to launch a specially modified BMW Mini – the same Mini he used for his backflip—from a steel ramp, across a 360 ft (110 m) gap to a concrete landing. It still was not enough. Speeding down a snowy mountain, Chicherit’s Mini reached 99 mph (160 kmh) just as it hit the ramp. Chicherit said afterward he knew he was in trouble when he heard the back of the Mini scrape the ramp as it launched. At mid-flight, the Mini’s hood started to dip until it hit the landing nose first, sending the car cartwheeling. Miraculously, he was only slightly injured and stayed in the hospital one night for observation. Even before he reached the hospital he was planning to repair the Mini and jump again. To date, he has yet to do so.

9 Bird vs. Dominoes (Leeuwarden, Holland, 2005)

In October 2005, volunteers and crew for the reality TV production company Endemol began setting up 4,155,156 dominoes in a Leeuwarden exhibition hall in preparation for a record-breaking attempt for the most dominoes toppled. If you watch the videos from Domino Day 2005, you can see how elaborate the construction of the domino fall was and how much work it must of required.

Weeks into the building project, the exhibition hall had an unexpected and unwelcome visitor: a house sparrow. The little guy landed on a domino, which, inevitably, toppled its neighbors. Some 23,000 of its neighbors. When the crew failed to catch the winged saboteur, they called animal control. Eventually the officer cornered the sparrow and killed it with an air gun as it reportedly cowered against a wall. The gunman apparently neglected to do his research however, as that species of sparrow was on Netherland’s endangered species list.

Because of herbicides and pesticides which kill the creatures sparrows eat, Europe had seen a decline in the sparrow population over the previous century. The killing of the “Domino Sparrow” sparked a world-wide outcry and officials of the Dutch providence of Friesland investigated. The production crew began to receive death threats and a Dutch radio DJ offered $3,500 to anyone who’d topple even more dominoes before the November 18 live broadcast. A song called “The Domino Sparrow” was recorded and a website was created for people to post tributes to the deceased bird. More than 5,000 people signed its condolence register.

The carcass of the dead sparrow was stuffed and ultimately found its way into the Rotterdam Natural History Museum where it was displayed, mounted on a box of dominoes. Its sacrifice was for naught as the 4 million dominoes still fell, a record that lasted a whopping whole year when 4.3 million were toppled in Beijing. But the sparrow’s demise wasn’t the only thing that marred the Leeuwarden’s Domino Day. Guinness disqualified 153,000 dominoes from the record when a member of the crew inadvertently knocked that many dominoes down. There’s no word on whether the poor crewmember was cornered and shot with an air gun.

8 Zip Lining on a Ponytail (West Bengal, India, 2013)

A far darker record attempt happened over the Teesta River in 2013. Sailendra Nath Roy was a law enforcement officer who made a career of performing stunts with his ponytail. In 2007, Roy tied his ponytail to a rope strung between two buildings and “flew” from one high rise to the other. In 2011, he tied his ponytail to the trolley of a 271 foot (82.5 m) zip line, setting a world record. A year later he pulled a train engine and four coaches—together weighing 88,000 pounds (40 tonnes)—with his ponytail. In West Bengal, Roy tried to break his own record by stringing a 600-foot (183 m) zip line 70 feet (21 m) above the Teesta River.

Unfortunately, Roy had neglected to inform Guinness of his world record attempt. Nor did he inform the police or arrange for the presence of medical professionals for his attempt. And while he wore a life vest in the event he ended up in the river, he apparently did not provide himself with a knife. All of which conspired against him when his hair got tangled in the wheels of the trolley at the mid-point of his zip line journey.

Roy tried to pull himself down the rest of zip line by hand, but the trolley wheels refused to roll forward or backward. Spectators were watching him from the nearby Coronation Bridge and he yelled to them for help, but none – including his family—could make out what he was saying. In fact, a few of them began clapping, thinking his struggles were part of the show. Roy struggled for 30 minutes before he suddenly went limp, the victim of a massive heart attack. It was another 15 minutes before he was finally pulled onto the bridge and CPR could be performed. He was by then gone. His wife had begged him to stop performing dangerous stunts and he responded that this stunt would be his last.

7 Tender-Footed Firewalkers (Dunedin, New Zealand, 2004)

In July of 2004, a fundraiser was held to raise money to provide defibrillators to the Order of St. John, a New Zealand ambulance service. The main event was a world record attempt for the greatest number of people fire walking and Guinness was on hand to make sure it was done safely, that the fire pit was 3.5 meters (11.5 ft.) in length, and the participants were at least 14 years of age. Guinness officially certified that 341 people walked the fire pit setting a new record, but about 150 spectators also traversed the fire pit, most receiving little or no instruction. By the time it was over, 28 people had burns on their feet.

Dr. John Campbell, a physicist for the University of Canterbury, organized the fire walk and said that ideally a participant should take 4 steps across the fire pit, each step lasting just one second. To do this, the fire pit should be 3 meters (10 ft) long, but Guinness insisted it be 3.5 meters. Campbell claimed it did not require hypnosis or meditation to fire walk. As long as the fire pit had the correct charcoal and no metal within it, nothing more than minor blisters should result. About 1 in 10 firewalkers will have blisters, especially those with thinner skin around the arches of their feet and under their toes. The best fire walkers were those who regularly walked barefoot or weight lifted.

Campbell added that any burns should be minor and rarely required hospitalization. Unfortunately, 11 people at the Dunedin event had to be taken to the hospital, transported by the Order of St. John. To handle the extra runs, the ambulance service had to pay for more saline and burn dressings. Together with gas, it cost St. John well over $1,000 ($913 American dollars). And the fundraiser netted – you guessed it – under $1,000.

6 A Family Shattered (Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand, 2015)

In November of 2010, Chilean cyclist Juan Francisco Guillermo embarked on a five-year odyssey to set a world record for biking on five continents in five years for a total of 250,000 km (155,000 miles). By February 2015, Guillermo was in Thailand just months away from completing his round-the-world excursion in Australia. By then, according to a sign he displayed at stops, he had traversed 4 continents, had 793 flat tires, and biked 140,000 km (87,000 miles). He had also met his wife, Ng Poh Leng, during his sojourn, married her and by then had a two-year-old toddler, Lucas.

All three members of the family spent a week at the Khon Kaen monastary in northeast Thailand and, as they were leaving, Juan told his wife that he loved the temple so much, he wanted his cremation rite held there. On the road from Khon Kaen to Nakhon Ratchasima, Juan was in the lead towing a baby trailer with Ng and Lucas on a two wheeler behind him. A speeding pickup truck approached them from behind, the driver claiming he never saw either bike. The pickup struck Ng and Lucas first, then Juan, killing him instantly. Juan’s bride and baby sustained minor injuries. The accident occurred in the midst of two Thai campaigns, one to improve its terrible reputation for traffic fatalities, the other to promote bicycling throughout the country.

5 Plate Glass Break (Las Vegas, Nevada, 2013)

Jesus “Half Animal” Villa is no stranger to Guinness World Records. The former Cirque du Soleil acrobat held several: for a double backflip on spring-loaded stilts; for the most consecutive back flips (19) on stilts in under a minute (actually it was 21 seconds); the most consecutive 90 degree pushups (13 reps); and earned two records (longest front flip over a car on stilts and the most number of front flips—18—on stilts) all in one day. On December 12, 2012, he earned a sixth world record when he traveled the greatest distance (37 miles or 62 km) on stilts in a 24-hour period. But the coolest thing was that his girlfriend, the superstar Pamela Sue Anderson, was on hand to root for him at many of the attempts.

For his seventh world record – the fastest time jumping through 10 panes of tempered glass – Villa signed a contract with truTV to film his attempt for the show “Guinness Records Gone Wild.” Villa claimed that the show’s crew altered his equipment before his attempt and, as result, he never made it through even one pane of glass. As he ran up to the first window, he jumped on a trampoline, throwing him hard against the glass, breaking it as well as his neck.

According to his posts on his Fundrazr page, 50% of his neck and spine had to be reconstructed afterward with titanium. Even after years of rehab and physical therapy, he says his body will not be the same, able to perform its previous impressive feats. What is discouraging is that on-line trolls have peppered his Fundrazr page with disparaging, ugly posts. Whatever the cause of a person’s disability, they are still disabled and shouldn’t suffer still more at the hands of people who’ve forgotten the value of compassion.

4 Paralympic Rowing Champ Drowns (Pacific Ocean, 2020)

One woman whose life was the epitome of overcoming adversity and disability was Angela Madsen. She was a natural athlete, playing in both high school basketball and volleyball. In her junior year she became pregnant with her daughter Jennifer, the father out of the picture. But when Madsen applied to Ohio State, hoping for a volleyball scholarship, she was turned down because, as she states in her memoir, they thought “I would not be able to keep up with the practice schedule, be a full-time student, and be a single parent.” She joined the marines and played basketball for the women’s All-Marine Corps squad. While practicing one day, she ruptured two discs and damaged her sciatic nerve. Discharged from the Marines, she, at 21, found herself working as a mechanic despite excruciating pain in her back and legs. Finally in 1993, she had back surgery to fuse some of her vertebrae at a VA hospital, but the surgeons worked on the wrong ones, permanently paralyzing her from the waist down.

Because of a 1950 statute baring her from suing the VA, she was forced to live on tiny disability checks. And her partner began stealing them and not using them to pay their rent. Madsen came home one day, evicted, the apartment cleaned out, her partner, her savings, her 401(k) and her car gone. Jennifer, too, was gone, already into drugs and alcohol and running away from home. Then Madsen’s home followed suit and she became a homeless paraplegic on the streets. Her life changed the day her wheelchair wheels jammed, dumping her on railroad tracks, a train barreling down on her. Two people hauled her off the tracks just in time. She vowed to tuck her anger away, and focus on what life she had left.

She signed up for the National Veterans Wheelchair Games where she won five gold medals in swimming, wheelchair slalom and billiards. Then she discovered rowing, entering the World Rowing Championship in 2002, winning a silver medal. For the next four years, her medals were gold. Then she turned to large bodies of water, rowing parts of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. In 2013, Madsen attempted to row solo the 2,500 miles (4,023 km) from California to Hawaii. Unfortunately she was caught in a storm and had to be rescued. The next year she took a rowing partner and they completed the run in 60 days, some days rowing 70 miles.

Finally in April 2020, Madsen was ready to try the run again solo, setting a record as the first paraplegic rower, the first openly gay athlete, and the oldest woman to row from Marina del Rey to Honolulu. In late June, Madsen was halfway there when she was warned of an impending cyclone. Madsen decided to deploy a parachute anchor to stabilize her 20-foot fiberglass boat. But the anchor needed to be repaired and on the morning of June 21, Madsen, according to her wife Deb, climbed out, tethered to the boat. Deb speculates that Madsen, unable to feel anything below her waist, may have stayed too long in the 72-degree water, developing hypothermia or having a heart attack, and drowning. Madsen was found dead, floating and still tethered to her boat.

3 Tug-of-War Deaths (Frankfurt, Germany, 1995)

Almost all of us have at some point played tug-of-war, a staple of company picnics and kid gatherings all over the world. It may therefore come as a surprise that several people have been maimed and even killed over the years playing this seemingly innocuous game. According to the U.S. Tug of War Association, injuries and deaths are almost always due to using ropes not meant to handle the tremendous tension (or elastic recoil) a bout between two teams can put on it. The elastic recoil builds as the teams pulls and will snap even thick ropes if they’re made from improper material such as nylon. Worse, elastic polymers such as nylon will recoil like a giant rubber band, reaching speeds sufficient to sever appendages.

For instance in October 1997, 1600 people in Taiwan held a tug-of-war match, exerting 180,000 pounds of force on a 2 inch nylon rope meant to handle only 57,000 pounds. The rope snapped severing the left arm of two men and injuring 40 others. Among those hurt was a person who suffered a spinal cord injured and a ruptured liver and spleen. In 2007, two high school boys had their hands amputated when a rope recoiled. A man in Nova Scotia had his hand crushed and lost 4 fingers, In Harrisonburg, Pennsylvania, five middle schoolers had their fingertips severed and another lost his thumb.

The worst tug-of-war disaster ever happened in 1995 in Frankfurt, Germany. Some 650 boy scouts tried to set a world record and the nylon rope – just the thickness of a thumb – snapped. The rope whipped back with such force, it killed a nine-year-old. Another boy was crushed to death when those in front fell atop him. In all, 102 were seriously injured.

2 The Truck Driver at the Edge of Space (Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 1966)

It may be surprising, but the first head of a civilian space program was not Elon Musk, but a New Jersey truck driver with no connection to NASA, no college education and no formal training in aeronautics. Nick Piantanida, according to his brother Vern, was a driven man, always inventing new challenges for himself, whether it was breaking free throw records, climbing Venezuela’s Devil’s Mountain, or jumping off the garage with a homemade parachute. In 1963, Piantanida was an exotic pet store owner when he discovered skydiving. Soon after, he heard about two world records: the longest free-fall parachute jump (80,340 ft. or 15 miles) set by a Soviet Air Force colonel; the highest parachute jump (19 miles or 31 km) set by a USAF pilot. Piantanida set his sights on both records, believing both records should belong to an American. This was, after all, at the height of the cold war space race between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.

Piantanida got a job as a long-distance truck driver to free up time on the weekends. He began to read everything he could about balloons and high altitude skydiving. He enlisted experts such as Paul Edward Yost, inventor of the modern hot air balloon and pioneer of high altitude ballooning, and Jacques-André Istel, considered the “father of American skydiving.” He garnered sponsors such as New Jersey Senator Pete Williams to open doors. Piantanida approached Raven Industries, fabricators of high altitude balloons, to build a gondola not much larger than an outhouse. He convinced the David Clark Company to loan him a customized pressure-suit, much as they did for NASA.

After two short years, Piantanida was ready. The plan was to ride a balloon to 120,000 ft (36,500 m or nearly 23 miles), the edge of space, then jump out of his gondola and free-fall for 21 miles until the air was thick enough to deploy his parachute. He made his first attempt in October, 1965, over St. Paul, Minnesota, but his Strato Jump I only made it to 16,000 feet (4.900 m) before wind shear tore open his balloon and he had to bail out, parachuting into a city dump. He would have set the world record on his second attempt the next February, but when he tried to disconnect his oxygen supply from the gondola so he could jump, the valve jammed. It was either hold his breath for the 23 mile fall, or return to earth in his gondola.

His third attempt in May, 1966, went off without a hitch until his balloon reached 57,000 ft. (17,000 m) and the ground crew heard a “whoosh” and a cry for help over the radio. They remotely cut the gondola from the balloon and deployed a parachute and 26 minutes later they reached Piantanida’s gondola to find him barely conscious. He slipped into a coma before he reached the hospital and never regained consciousness before his death four months later. Piantanida often felt discomfort under the pressure in his suit and he’d open his visor to relieve the pressure. This is fine at ground level, but in a near vacuum, immediate decompression would form emboli and painful tissue damage and it’s speculated that when Piantanida lifted his visor, he may not have been unable to reclose it. For at least 4 to 5 minutes he was without oxygen.

1 Great Balloon Catastrophe (Cleveland, Ohio, 1986)

If any world record could be considered harmless, the least likely to endanger anyone, it would be a record for releasing balloons. Unfortunately, even balloons – given enough of them –could be weapons of mass destruction. Consider a fundraising event for United Way called “Balloonfest ’86,” an event Cleveland, Ohio, would long remember as a disaster. Cleveland was trying to rebrand its image after a horrible decade of setbacks. During the 1970’s, Cleveland’s steel industries declined, the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie were declared dead or dying, and rampant mafia violence gave the city the moniker “Bomb City USA.” A quarter of Cleveland’s population just packed up and left.

When the 1980’s rolled around, plans were made to develop the lake front and efforts began to bring the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to Cleveland. The city was also home to plenty of professional sport teams, but even they could tarnish its image. In 1980, the owner of the short-lived Cleveland Competitors, member of the even shorter-lived North American Softball League, decided to drum up publicity by attempting to recreate the 1938 record-breaking catch of a baseball dropped from the city’s tallest building: the Terminal Tower. It was calculated that a baseball falling from the 52-story, 708-foot tower would reach 138 mph. The average MLB pitch is around 90 to 92 mph. But the organizers failed to keep the foot of the building cordoned off and free of spectators and the first three balls dropped dented a car, bruised a spectator’s shoulder and broke the wrist of another. Eventually a ball was caught, but no one would remember the success, instead focusing on the injuries and the lack of planning. It was a lesson the organizers of Balloonfest ’86 should have heeded.

It started the previous year when Disneyland celebrated its 30th anniversary by setting the world record by releasing 1.2 million balloons all at once. Cleveland decided to give it a try. On the night of September 26 and morning of the 27, 1986, some 2,500 people – most of them students – converged on Cleveland’s Public Square which sits at the foot of Terminal Tower. A 3-story structure surrounded the Square with a huge mesh net stretched across it. Under it, volunteers filled helium balloons – two for every dollar donated – and simply let them float into the net. The plan was to fill 2 million balloons, but when reports of an approaching storm filtered in, the organizers decided to stop at 1,429,643 balloons. When they were released, they looked like a great cloud of colorful bees, swarming around Terminal Tower. They had set a new record.

The elation didn’t last long. The storm pushed the balloons north toward Lake Erie, the rain forcing them down. Down on highways causing a number of traffic accidents. Arabian horses at a ranch in Geauga County were so spooked by the falling, bursting orbs, they injured themselves. Burke Lakefront Airport had to be closed for 30 minutes while the balloons were cleared from the runway. The incident went international when the balloons sailed clear across Lake Erie, littering Canadian beaches. Worse, two fishermen had the misfortune to be out on Lake Erie when the storm capsized their boat. The Coast Guard had trouble finding the fishermen floating among the multi-colored latex. “It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” explained a rescuer. “You’re looking for more or less a head or an orange life jacket, and here you have a couple hundred thousand orange balloons. It’s just hard to decipher which is which.” They were forced to give up the search and the bodies of the two men washed ashore two weeks later.

Before the media fallout, before the lawsuits rolled in, a local DJ trumpeted: “There is no ‘mistake on the lake’ anymore!” The organizer was equally exuberant: “Cleveland, it’s your time…. It’s no longer the butt of jokes.” How about this joke? There’s an old saw that says “It’s all fun and games as long as it’s not done in the streets and it doesn’t scare the horses.” Fail.

10 Records Nobody Would Want To Break

About The Author: Steve is the best-selling author of “366 Days in Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency” and is a frequent contributor to .

There have been conflicts in the middle east for centuries, and the 19th century is no exception – in fact, some might say it has seen the worst conflicts of all. This is a list of the various attempts made in the 20th century to bring peace to the region.

The Faisal-Weizmann Agreement was signed on January 3, 1919, by Emir Faisal (son of the King of Hejaz) and Chaim Weizmann (later President of the World Zionist Organization) as part of the Paris Peace Conference, settling disputes stemming from World War I. It was a short-lived agreement for Arab-Jewish cooperation on the development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and an Arab nation in a large part of the Middle East.

The Armistice Agreements are a set of agreements signed between Israel and its neighbors Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. The agreements ended the official hostilities of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and established armistice lines between Israel and the West Bank, also known as the Green Line, until the 1967 Six-Day War.

The Camp David Accords were signed by Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on September 17, 1978, following twelve days of secret negotiations at Camp David. The two agreements were signed at the White House, and were witnessed by United States President Jimmy Carter. The Accords led directly to the 1979 Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty.

The Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty was signed in Washington, DC, United States, on March 26, 1979, following the Camp David Accords (1978). The main features of the treaty were the mutual recognition of each country by the other, the cessation of the state of war that had existed since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the complete withdrawal by Israel of its armed forces and civilians from the rest of the Sinai Peninsula which Israel had captured during the 1967 Six-Day War. The agreement also provided for the free passage of Israeli ships through the Suez Canal and recognition of the Strait of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba as international waterways.

The Madrid Conference was hosted by the government of Spain and co-sponsored by the USA and the USSR. It convened on October 30, 1991 and lasted for three days. It was an early attempt by the international community to start a peace process through negotiations involving Israel and the Arab countries including Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians. In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, US President George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker formulated the framework of objectives, and together with the Soviet Union extended a letter of invitation, dated October 30, 1991 to Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians.

The Oslo Accords, officially called the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements or Declaration of Principles (DOP) was a milestone in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was the first direct, face-to-face agreement between Israel and political representatives of Palestinians. It was the first time that some Palestinian factions publicly acknowledged Israel’s right to exist. It was intended to be a framework for the future relations between Israel and the anticipated State of Palestine, when all outstanding final status issues between the two states would be addressed and resolved in one Package Agreement.

The Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace (full name: Treaty of Peace Between the State of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), is a peace treaty signed in 1994. The treaty normalized relations between the two countries and resolved territorial disputes between them. The conflict between them had cost roughly 18.3 billion dollars. Its signing is also closely linked with the efforts to create peace between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization representing the Palestinian Authority. It was signed at the southern border crossing of Arabah on October 26, 1994, and made Jordan only the second Arab country (after Egypt) to normalize relations with Israel.

The Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David of July 2000 took place between United States President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. It was an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to negotiate a “final status settlement” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Beirut summit took place in March 2002, and held to present plans to defuse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jordan’s foreign minister said, “The Arab initiative put forth at the Beirut Summit in March offers comprehensive peace in the region based on the internationally recognized formulation of ‘land for peace’ — a return to 4 June 1967, borders in exchange for normal relations and a collective peace treaty.”

The “road map” for peace is a plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict proposed by a “quartet” of international entities: the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations. The principles of the plan were first outlined by U.S. President George W. Bush in a speech on June 24, 2002, in which he called for an independent Palestinian state living side by side with Israel in peace: “The Roadmap represents a starting point toward achieving the vision of two states, a secure State of Israel and a viable, peaceful, democratic Palestine. It is the framework for progress towards lasting peace and security in the Middle East…”

Most fans of American colonial history know about the harrowing disaster of Roanoke or the many problems faced by the first Jamestown settlers. What is less known, however, is that European attempts to settle North America started almost a century before the Jamestown colonists first landed in Virginia.

Despite numerous attempts between the 1520s and the 1600s to establish permanent, successful colonies in the modern US and Canada, nearly all of them failed—Santa Fe and St. Augustine being the famous exceptions. Colonial life was hard, and the early Europeans lacked the supplies, tools, and geographic knowledge they needed to thrive in the New World. In this list, we’re exploring ten of the most notable failed attempts to settle North America.

10 San Miguel De Gualdape
1526

In 1521, a Spanish expedition set out to explore South Carolina. They returned to Cuba with 60 captives and a glowing report of a land that would make a great colony, populated by friendly natives who wouldn’t need to be conquered. A wealthy local official, Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon, was impressed by their report and soon got permission from the Spanish crown to found a new settlement in the land. Ayllon indebted himself funding the expedition of six ships and 600 colonists. Laden with supplies, they departed in July 1526 to found the first European colony in North America since the Vikings over five centuries before.^[1]

They soon ran into trouble. After they landed in Winyah Bay in August, their native pathfinders abandoned them, and their flagship sank, taking many of their supplies with it. Finding the land unsuitable for building a settlement, Ayllon organized a wide-ranging scouting mission. Based on the scouts’ reports, they headed toward another site over 320 kilometers (200 mi) away, which they finally reached in late September. They christened the new town San Miguel de Gualdape after the feast day of Saint Michael.

It was too late in the year to plant any crops, and the natives were unwilling to trade. The weather was much colder than they had expected, and disease, especially dysentery, killed many and made more unable to work. In early October, Ayllon himself died, and the colonists split into two groups, one wanting to stay and wait for resupply and the other wanting to abandon the colony. The dispute broke out into a full-blown mutiny in which the leading rebels were captured, and their homes were burned down by slaves. By November, the survivors had decided to abandon the settlement, but only after three quarters of the colonists had died.

9 Charlesbourg-Royal
1541

The next settlement to be built in North America was founded by Jacques Cartier, who had spent many years surveying the coast of Canada with the original aim of finding a safe sea route to China. Though he was unsuccessful, he did note several spots that he thought would be good places to settle, and with the king’s permission, he established a colony of roughly 400 people in modern-day Cap Rouge sometime between June and September 1541.^[2] He named this settlement Charlesbourg-Royal after Charles II, duke of Orleans.

At first, the colony was successful, surviving its first winter despite the harsh Canadian weather and being on neutral, if not friendly, terms with the native Iroquoians. They built a fort in two sections, one by the base of the river to protect the ships and houses and another at the top of a nearby hill for defense. The colonists went hunting for precious metals and found piles of diamonds and gold. It seems, however, that Cartier struggled to discipline his men, and unruly engagements with the Iroqouians turned them hostile. While they were supposed to wait for the arrival of de Roberval, the official leader of the expedition, Cartier and his men believed the colony would fail and departed for France in June 1542, slipping past de Roberval’s vessel under the cover of night. When he arrived in France, however, Cartier learned that the diamonds and gold they’d thought they’d found were actually worthless (but very similar-looking) minerals.

De Roberval took over control of the settlement, but the situation only worsened, and they abandoned it in 1543 after disease, bad weather, and clashes with the natives made the fort uninhabitable.

8 Fort Caroline
1564

St. Augustine is famous today for being the oldest continually inhabited European settlement in North America. The story could have been much different, though. In June 1564, a year before St. Augustine was founded, 200 French colonists built Fort Caroline on the Northeastern Florida coast.^[3] The fort’s garrison struggled to contain bouts of mutiny while they wrestled with attacks by the natives, hunger, and disease. The fort persisted, though the morale of its inhabitants was very low by the time the Spanish learned of its existence in early 1565.

The fort was reinforced by Jean Ribault and hundreds more colonists and soldiers in August, but by that time, the Spanish government had already organized an expedition to conquer it. The Spanish expedition, led by Pedro Menendez de Aviles, sailed up the northern coast but ran into Ribault’s fleet, who drove them off. The Spanish soldiers made landfall further south and built a fort. This fort would come to be known as St. Augustine. Ribault gathered an army of 600 and sailed south to destroy the new fort, but his fleet was hampered by a sudden storm. Menendez took advantage of the weather and marched overland to Fort Caroline, launching a surprise attack in September and seizing it, killing all inside except 50 women and children.

The Spanish burned the fort down, but Fort Caroline continued as a rebuilt Spanish outpost until 1568, when a French adventurer, de Gourgues, burned it down in revenge.

7 Santa Elena
1566

Two years before Ribault built Fort Caroline, he and his followers had founded Charlesfort further up the coast, in modern-day South Carolina. The settlement failed within a few months, and they ultimately moved to Fort Caroline. However, Menendez (pictured above), whether to add insult to injury to Ribault or because he liked the site, decided to resettle Charlesfort as the Spanish colony of Santa Elena. It was intended to be the capital of Spanish Florida, and the government was moved there from St. Augustine in 1566.^[4]

Santa Elena quickly became the center of military and religious missions going north, particularly for Juan Pardo’s expedition, which established a string of short-lived forts up the Appalachian mountain range, the furthest European colonists would venture inland for another century. Santa Elena itself was, alongside St. Augustine, the first successful long-term European colony in North America, thriving until it was attacked and burned by natives in 1576. The Spanish returned next year, and in 1580, they successfully pushed back an attack by 2,000 natives. Despite Santa Elena’s size and heavy fortification, however, the Spanish ultimately lost interest in the Carolinas and abandoned the settlement in 1587, choosing to focus their efforts on Central America instead.

6 Fort San Juan
1567

Following the colonization of Santa Elena, the Spanish crown planned to extend its influence inland through what they called La Florida—modern-day North and South Carolina. The goal was to find an overland route to Mexico which the Spanish could use to transport silver to St. Augustine and ship to Europe without having to contest the dangerous Caribbean waters.

This expedition was led by Juan Pardo, who took a force of 125 men with him. They soon came across the native town of Joara. Renaming it Cuenca and claiming it for Spain, the Spanish built a fort to control the town, Fort San Juan, and left a garrison of 30 to protect it before moving on.^[5] They built five more forts across the Carolinas, but none were as big as San Juan. Pardo never made it to Mexico: Hearing of a French raid on Santa Elena, he turned back and headed straight for the Floridian capital. He never returned to the Carolinas.

Soon after the main body of troops had returned to Florida, the natives turned on the Spanish and burned down all six forts, killing all but one of the Spanish soldiers, who only escaped by hiding in the woods. The Spanish never returned to the North American interior, considering the venture a huge failure.

5 Ajacan Mission
1570

In 1561, a Spanish expedition to Virginia captured a Native American boy. He was taken to Mexico, raised as a Catholic, and christened as Don Luis. He was taken to Madrid and even met the Spanish king before he became part of another Spanish expedition back to Virginia in 1570.^[6]

Father de Segura, an influential Jesuit in Cuba, planned to establish an unarmed religious mission in Virginia. While it was considered highly unusual at the time to send a mission without soldiers, he was granted permission. He and seven other Jesuits, a Spanish boy, and Don Luis, their interpreter and guide, set off for Virginia in August 1570. They arrived in September and built a small wooden mission before establishing contact with the nearby native tribes. Don Luis told them he wanted to find his home village, which he hadn’t seen in roughly a decade. The Jesuits let him go.

As time went on, the Jesuits became increasingly concerned that Don Luis had abandoned them. They tried to find him, since they couldn’t communicate with the natives without his help. In February 1571, three of the Jesuits found Don Luis’s village. Don Luis and the natives killed them, and then he led the native warriors to the mission, where the rest of the Jesuits were executed. Only the Spanish boy was spared. He was taken back to the village.

In 1572, a Spanish expedition returned and recovered the boy, killing 20 natives in retaliation. The mission was abandoned, however, and the Spanish never returned to Virginia.

4 Roanoke
1585

In 1584, Queen Elizabeth granted Walter Raleigh a charter giving him the right to establish a colony in North America. His goal was to establish a base from which to harass the Spanish treasure fleet, which was the main artery of Spain’s economy at the time, and also for future exploration of the continent. While Raleigh never visited North America himself, he financed and organized an expedition in 1584 which scouted out the area of modern-day North Carolina, mapping the region and bringing back two natives with knowledge of the tribal relationships in the area.

Based on this, Raleigh organized a second expedition in 1585. They landed in Roanoke in August and established a small colony of around 100 people.^[7] The fleet then returned to England to bring more supplies. In June 1586, the settlement was attacked by natives. Sir Francis Drake stopped at the colony shortly after and picked up the colonists, taking them back to England. The original fleet returned with supplies from England after that and, finding the colony abandoned, left a small contingent of 15 men behind to hold the island in Raleigh’s name before returning to England.

In 1587, Raleigh dispatched another 115 colonists to collect the contingent and take them to the Chesapeake Bay, where a new colony would be built. When they arrived in Roanoke, however, all they found of the 15 men was a single skeleton. The new colonists remained in Roanoke instead, and the fleet returned to England to find help and support. Unfortunately, the outbreak of war with Spain made the long sea voyage almost impossible, and it was late 1590 when the fleet was once again able to make it to Roanoke.

They returned to find the settlement abandoned. There was no sign of a struggle, and the buildings had been dismantled in an orderly way, suggesting there was no rush to leave. All they found was the word “CROATOAN” carved into a fence post, and the letters “CRO” on a nearby tree. Since the colonists had agreed to carve a Maltese cross if they’d had any difficulty, it was assumed that the colonists had moved to the nearby Croatoan Island. Bad weather prevented the English from checking, however, and they returned home. The English didn’t return until the colonization of Jamestown 17 years later, and they never found any definite trace of the Roanoke colonists.

3 Saint Croix Island
1604

Today, Saint Croix Island is an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine, with no public access. In the early 1600s, though, it was the site of an early French colony that was supposed to be the first permanently occupied (instead of seasonal) settlement in the region the French called Acadia, or l’Acardie. Since the failure of Charlesbourg-Royal some 60 years before, the French crown had shown little interest in modern-day Canada. But after the attempts to colonize Sable Island in 1598 and Tadoussac in 1600, French interest in Canada was growing again.

Saint Croix was chosen after considerable surveying of the region had identified the best possible locations for settlements.^[8] The island seemed ideal: Well-defended from both the natives and the English, it could only be attacked from one direction by boat, which made it very defensible. The soil was good, and there were plenty of trees.

In the early days of the colony, morale was high, and the settlement was established very quickly. Natives even visited to study the colony and asked the French to mediate their disputes. However, it began to snow on October 6. The winter had come earlier than expected and lingered a long time, sealing the settlers on the island as the river froze over. Many succumbed to a strange “land disease” which made their teeth fall out and sapped their energy. Later analysis of their bones revealed that they were plagued by scurvy.

When the original leader of their expedition, Francois Dupont, returned in June the next year with boatloads of supplies, they made the decision to move to a different site. The buildings were dismantled and shipped across the bay to the new site of Port-Royal.

2 Port-Royal
1605

Port-Royal (replica pictured above) was a much better-suited location for a thriving settlement.^[9] Located on the shore of a huge bay, the French envisioned it as potentially mooring hundreds of ships one day, so they gave it the name Port-Royal, or Royal Port. They built their first settlement against the northern mountains by felling trees and putting up a simple wooden palisade around the buildings for protection. Supported by the fertile soil and temperate climate, and assisted by the nearby Mikmaq people, they prospered. Concerned about the low morale at Saint Croix, they even established a social club which hosted frequent feasts and art shows, including theater productions. However, the colony had to be abandoned in 1607 after its founder, Pierre Dugua de Mons, had his fur-trading license revoked, removing the colony’s main source of income.

The colony was left in the hands of the Mikmaq and recolonized by a small French expedition in 1610. The colony never grew to any considerable size, however, and conflicts over the involvement of the Jesuits in the colony led to divisions. It was burned to the ground while the colonists were out by the English adventurer Samuel Argall. The colony was abandoned once again, and the settlers went to live among the Mikmaq.

1 Popham Colony
1607

Encouraged by growing English interest in North America, King James invested two companies with the rights to settle New England: the London Company and the Plymouth Company, both of which were parts of the Virginia Company.^[10] To foster competition, the king specified that the company whose colony was most successful would win the rights to own the land that lay between them.

After a flurry of excitement and investment, the London Company established their colony of Jamestown in Virginia, and the Plymouth company settled theirs at Popham in Maine. Unlike the Jamestown colony, which lost over half of its people to disease, the Popham colony was largely successful to begin with. Things took a turn, however, when they were unable to trade with the natives as much as they’d expected, and their leader, George Popham, died in 1608. They continued their efforts to expand the colony despite this, even building the first-ever English seafaring ship in North America, the Virginia.

The winter was bitterly cold. The colonists complained about the unceasing snow. A fire burned down the storehouse, destroying most of their supplies. Following food shortages, over half the colonists chose to return to England on the next supply ship. The remaining colonists were determined to continue on, however, and the summer was better.

The settlement was ultimately brought down by a crisis not in America but in England. A supply ship arrived carrying news that the colony’s new governor, Raleigh Gilbert, had inherited his family’s lands in England following his brother’s death. Raleigh decided to return to England. Unwilling to face the prospect of another harsh winter—this time without a leader—the rest of the colonists glumly agreed to return to England with him.

Why are modern heads of state seemingly so impervious to old-school assassins? All the old presidents were constantly getting attacked. President Jackson famously, but unfortunately, even fought his assassins off with a cane.

Well the truth is attempts still happen. They just get less coverage than they used to. In fact, plots are often foiled before they take place — then downplayed or hushed up in the press.

10. Donald Trump

Showboating at North Dakota’s largest oil refinery in 2017, Trump was blissfully unaware that someone was planning to kill him. The president was in the state to talk about his tax plans. Ivanka was there too; he told the crowd she’d asked “Daddy, can I go with you?”

Meanwhile, a 42-year-old man was hijacking a forklift to flip his limousine. His plan was to drive the vehicle into Trump’s motorcade, disable the limo, and kill the president. In the end, however, he got the forklift stuck in a gated area. Although he abandoned the plan and dumped the forklift in a ditch, he was caught and arrested by police. 

But only because the area he was in was restricted for the visit. They had no idea he was planning to assassinate the president… until he told them. Later in court his attorney explained he had bipolar and ADHD. The uninterested judge sentenced him to 10 years in the state penitentiary.

9. Angela Merkel

On her visit to Prague, the seemingly harmless, grandmotherly German chancellor was the subject of furious protests. One placard showed Merkel with a Hitler mustache, while another linked the EU flag and the swastika. They felt the EU was invading, forcing Czech submission to NATO and its hawkish military orders.

One man took it upon himself to show the EU just how welcome its leaders were in the Republic. Driving a black 4×4, he maneuvered toward Merkel’s motorcade as it traveled from the airport to Sobotka’s government headquarters. But police intercepted and threatened to shoot him, despite him not being armed. Eventually he gave himself up. 

Defending their heavy-handedness later, the police claimed to have found “items” in his car that “could easily have been used as weapons.” What were they, you ask? Blocks of cement.

8. Theresa May

British prime minister Theresa May ruined a lot of people’s lives but it seems only one sought revenge. After his uncle was killed in a drone strike, a homeless 20-year-old Londoner approached militants online to get hold of some bombs. He told them he was planning to blow up Parliament, or to get May at home, at 10 Downing Street — both of which he’d scouted out beforehand. 

Unfortunately for him, these “Islamic State militants” were actually FBI, who referred him to their MI5 counterparts, who hooked him up with an undercover cop posing as an armorer in London. Oblivious, the would-be assassin kept them abreast of his plans and, once he’d got a (fake) bomb and a jacket filled with (fake) explosives, police surrounded and arrested the bereaved young tramp. He’d later admit he was glad it was over.

In court, he insisted the plan wasn’t genuine. He’d been set up and tricked by police, he said. He was always coming up with crazy schemes; he never followed through. One early idea had been to drop missiles from balloons at the edge of space. But the judge was unsympathetic and gave him 30 years.

7. Joe Biden

Old Joe Biden’s unpopular with young’uns. The senescent commander in chief has (obliviously) dodged several attempts on his life — all from the under-30s. In 2020, a 19-year-old was arrested in Delaware for driving a van containing guns and explosives within four miles of the president’s home. In addition to the weapons, the young man had $509,000 in cash, books about bomb-making, and a handwritten checklist ending with “execute”. Investigators later claimed to have found internet posts announcing his plan, including a meme on iFunny captioned “Should I kill Joe Biden?”

The following year, a 27-year-old tipped himself off to the Secret Service. “I’m going to come kill the president,” he told them over the phone, “I’m going to kill the Secret Service because I own this whole planet.” When they called him back to find out more, he defended his “right to free speech.” Then he asked them to pick him up and take him to the White House so he could “punch the president in the face, sit in his chair, and stay there until he dies.” They put him in jail instead.

Most recently of all, a 19-year-old was charged with “threatening to kill, kidnap or harm the president”, among other transgressions, when he drove a truck into a White House fence. He got 10 years in prison.

6. Justin Trudeau

After a 46-year-old man stormed the gates of Rideau Hall, the story was mysteriously downplayed. Although they detailed the weapons he had in the truck that he crashed through the gates (an unlicensed revolver, a prohibited semi-automatic rifle, and two shotguns), the media claimed he only wished to arrest, not kill, the Canadian prime minister. Later, they changed their mind and said he just wanted to talk.

In reality, however, the man was charged with threatening to kill or harm Justin Trudeau. A letter that may have contained this threat was never released to the public; only “selective summaries” were “provided to the media by anonymous officials.” The attempt also came just one day after the Dominion Day rally on Parliament Hill, where Canadians waved pictures of Trudeau in a gallows and demanded the prime minister be executed.

It’s thought the establishment was largely silent on the attempt (despite it being the first on any Canadian prime minister) because the assassin was in the armed forces. According to some, it would upset the narrative that soldiers all support their PM.

5. Queen Beatrix

Assassination attempts on royalty are fairly common too. On Queen’s Day in the Netherlands in 2009, a 38-year-old Dutchman crashed his car in a suicide attack on Queen Beatrix. Tragically, he plowed into the watching crowd instead, killing six bystanders and injuring ten others. He also hit a monument and sustained critical injuries. The man later died in hospital — but not before police (who, despite months planning security, had failed to protect anyone) extracted a confession from the brain dead assailant.

By contrast, for Elizabeth II’s VJ (Victory over Japan) Day celebrations in 2010, prime minister David Cameron didn’t entrust his queen’s protection to incompetent Metropolitan police. When he learned of a plot to assassinate her, he ordered a drone strike himself, killing the as yet innocent but suspected British citizens in Syria.

He did, however, leave the public’s protection to the police, who encouraged crowds to ignore credible claims of a pressure cooker bomb in the capital and line the roads for the cameras regardless.

4. Barack Obama

Remote assassination via the postal service would have been fitting for a president who proliferated drone strikes. But it was not to be.

In 2013, a 45-year-old Elvis impersonator sent him “a suspicious granular substance” identified as ricin along with a typewritten letter. “No one wanted to listen to me before,” it read, “There are still ‘Missing Pieces’ [a reference to the assassin’s own novel about black market body parts] …. To see a wrong and not expose it, is to become a silent partner to its continuance.” He signed the letter: “I am KC and I approve this message.” Copies of the letter, complete with ricin, were sent to the Republican senator Roger Wicker (for whom KC once performed) and Mississippi judge Sadie Holland. All were intercepted. 

The FBI claimed nobody died from contact with the letters, but this is hard to believe. Ricin, which is cheaply and easily extracted from castor beans and for which there is no antidote, is so deadly that as little as 500 micrograms (a dose roughly the size of a pin head) can kill. There’s also no specific test for exposure.

Another deadly package addressed to Obama was intercepted in 2018, this time a bomb. Others were also targeted, including George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and former CIA director John Brennan. The return address on them all was that of former chairwoman of the DNC Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who naturally denied involvement.

3. Fumio Kishida

Calling to mind the time George W. Bush had a hand grenade lobbed at him, Japan’s 101st prime minister was shocked to see an explosive device flying his way. He was about to give a speech at Wakayama when the pipe bomb exploded a meter from where he was standing. It probably would have hit him were it not for his guards blocking the attack with an unfurled ballistic suitcase. The 24-year-old attacker was swiftly arrested.

Surprisingly, though, Kishida kept to his schedule and, just six hours later, gave another speech to a crowd in Chiba. There weren’t even any bag checks or metal detectors.

Unlike the alienated relationship between government and the public in most developed countries, Japanese electoral campaigns require candidates to prove their trust in those they aspire to govern. In fact, the number of votes they get is said to be a measure of how many hands they shake.

2. Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Before early 2022, few outsiders had even heard of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, let alone painted his flag on their faces and prayed for God to protect him. By early March, however, people around the world were urgently told of the beleaguered president’s existence — as well as his heroic survival of three assassination attempts in a week (later corrected to 12).

The would-be assassins — Chechen special forces — were shocked before they were killed at Zelenskyy’s timely protection. Apparently, his bodyguards had been tipped off by Russian FSB agents opposed to Putin’s invasion. 

Kremlin-backed mercenaries with the “lunatic”, battle-hardened Wagner group were also dispatched to kill the president; they were thought to be the only ones crazy enough to pull it off. One of their plans was to get a laser target marker on Zelenskyy and call in an airstrike. The president has long since gone into hiding, delivering his speeches from in front of a green screen instead of on the ground in Ukraine.

1. Barack Obama (again)

In 2011, a lone gunman pulled up outside the White House, aimed his semi-automatic rifle, and unleashed a barrage of bullets. One smashed a second floor window by Obama’s formal living room, while another got lodged in a window frame and others hit the roof. 

There was no response. 

Although one Secret Service officer drew her gun and snipers scanned the lawn, the order came quick to stand down. “No shots have been fired,” said a supervisor over the radio. The sound of the gunshots was thought to have come from a vehicle backfiring nearby, or a shootout between neighboring gangs — all despite a witness tweeting that a driver in front of her cab had “STOPPED and fired 5 gun shots at the White House”.

It took the Secret Service four days to realize someone had tried to kill the president — or, rather, it took four days for a housekeeper to notice the debris and tell them about it. (Maybe they were too busy thinking about Colombian prostitutes?) In fact, the only reason the depressed 21-year-old got caught was his unnecessary haste in escaping. Crashing his car just seven blocks away, he left his gun inside when he fled. But he needn’t have worried at all. Even when police were finally alerted, they were looking for a couple of black men; the shooter was alone and hispanic.

Time is a weird thing. We don’t all seem to experience it in quite the same way—sometimes it passes quickly, sometimes slowly, and it seems to go by faster and faster the older we get. There have been plenty of theories that attempt to explain just what time is and why it’s so mysterious, and some of them are pretty mind-bending.

10St. Augustine’s Theory Of Mind-Time

Christian philosopher St. Augustine had a couple of things to say about time. First, he said that time was absolutely not infinite. Time was, according to him, created by God, and it’s impossible to create something that’s infinite.

He also said that time actually exists only in our mind, a bizarre conclusion that all has to do with how we interpret time. We may say that something lasted a long time or a short time, but St. Augustine said that there’s no real way to quantify that. When something is in the past, it no longer has any properties of being anything because it doesn’t exist anymore, and when we say something took a long time, that’s just because we’re remembering it that way. Since we only measure time based on how we remember it, then it must only exist in our memories. The future doesn’t exist yet, so that can’t have any measurable quantities, either. The only thing that does exist is the present (and that’s a complicated concept we’ll get to in a minute), so the only logical conclusion left is that time only exists in our heads.

9The Topology Of Time

What does time look like? If you try to picture time, do you see it as a straight line that goes on forever? Or do you think of time sort of looking like a clock, going around and around, circling back on itself every day or every year?

Obviously, there’s no right answer, but there are some intriguing ideas about it. According to Aristotle, time can’t exist as a line, at least one with a beginning or an end, even though there must have been a time when, well, time started. In order for there to be a moment in time when time began, there had to be something before that marked its beginning. The same goes for the end of time, he said. In order for the line of time to come to an end, there has to be something after it to mark that particular point as the end of time.

There’s also the problem of how many lines of time are there—is there one line of time that everything travels along together, or are there multiple lines of time that alternately intersect or run parallel to each other? Is time a single line with a lot of branches? Or perhaps moments in the time stream exist independently from other moments. There are plenty of opinions, but no answers.

8The Specious Present

The idea of the specious present deals with the question of how long the present actually lasts. The usual answer, something about it being the “now,” isn’t very descriptive. For instance, when we’re in the middle of talking to someone and we’re in mid-sentence, we’ve already finished the beginning of the sentence and it’s in the past, but the conversation itself is still taking place in the present. So how long does the present actually last?

E.R. Clay and William James refer to this idea as the specious present—the space of time that we perceive as being in the present. They suggest that it can be as short as a few seconds and probably not longer than a minute, but it’s the amount of time that we’re immediately, consciously aware of.

And within that, there’s still a little bit of wiggle room to argue.

It could theoretically have something to do with how long a person’s short-term memory is—the better that is, the longer the present is. There’s also the idea that it’s just a matter of instantaneous perception, and the second it’s passed and you’re relying on your short-term memory, a moment is no longer a part of the present. Then there’s the problem of the present and something of an extended present, which is where the specious present comes in. The present must have no length of actual time, because if it did, part of that time would be in the past and part would be in the future, contradicting itself. So the specious present tries to explain the present as an interval of time that has duration, yet is a separate thing from the objective present.

7Shorter People Experience ‘Now’ Sooner

It sounds weird, but it makes sense. This theory was put forward by a neuroscientist named David Eagleman, and it’s called temporal binding.

It’s built around the idea that we experience the world in packets of information that are gathered by our senses and processed in the brain. Different parts of the body, even if they receive information at the same time, take slightly different amounts of time to get to the brain. Say you’re texting someone, and you hit your head on a telephone pole at the same time that you stub your toe on the same pole—in theory, the information collected from your head injury will get to your brain faster than the information from your toe will, but you’ll think you feel them at the same time. That’s because the brain defaults to a sort of sensory organizational chart that puts things in an order that makes the most amount of sense to us.

That delay in processing information is what makes short people more “in-the-moment.” A shorter person is actually experiencing a more accurate version of time, because there’s less of a delay in information getting to the brain.

6Time is Slowing Down—And We Can See It

One of the long-standing problems of physics has been the existence of dark energy. We can see its effects, but we have no idea what it is. A team of professors from the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, and the University of Salamanca in Spain have suggested that all our efforts to find and define dark energy have been in vain simply because there’s no such thing. Instead, they say, all the effects of dark energy can be explained by the alternate idea that what we’re really seeing is time slowing down on its way to an eventual stop.

Take the astronomical phenomenon of red shift. When we see stars that have a light wavelength that’s red, we know that they’re accelerating. The group of Spanish professors is now explaining the phenomenon of the universe’s acceleration as being the result not of the presence of dark energy, but simply an illusion created by time slowing down. Light takes a good amount of time to reach us, and by the time it does, time has slowed down for us, making it look as though everything is accelerating away. The time-slow is extremely, immeasurably minute, but given the vastness of space, it’s magnified over the mind-boggling amount of distance, meaning that we can see it when we look to the stars.

They also say that, gradually, time will continue to slow until it just stops completely. The universe will freeze the way that it is for all of eternity—but don’t worry, that’s billions of years away, and Earth will no longer be around by then.

5Time Doesn’t Exist

There’s also the idea that time doesn’t exist at all, which was wholeheartedly argued in the early 1900s by a philosopher named J.M.E. McTaggart. According to McTaggart, there are two different ways we can look at time. The first, called A-Theory, states that time has an order and flows along a path; in this version of time, it’s possible to organize things as they happen. There’s a progression of events from the past to the present to the future.

B-Theory, on the other hand, states that the passing of time—and time itself—is a complete illusion, and there is no way to objectively assign events a particular order. This version of time is seemingly supported by our memories, which tend to recall events as individual pockets of time, not as an overall flow or passage of time.

Take both these theories into account, and it proves that time doesn’t exist because in order for it to exist, there needs to be a continuous change in events, the world, or in circumstances. The B-Theory is by its own definition not a reference to the passage of time, and there is no unfolding change. Therefore, time doesn’t exist.

But if the A-Theory is accurate, that too suggests that time can’t exist. Take a moment in time—say, your 21st birthday. At one point, this was a point in the future, but this same moment will someday exist in the past. Since a moment can’t be past, present, and future, McTaggart says that theory is contradictory and therefore impossible—along with time itself.

4Four-Dimensionalism And Block Universe Theory

The theory of four-dimensionalism and block universe theory are connected by the idea of time as an actual dimension. In four-dimensionalism, all objects exist in four dimensions rather than three, and the fourth dimension, time, can be thought of in terms of the other three dimensions. Block universe theory imagines the entire universe as a dimensional block made up of slices of time. It has width, depth, and height, and for everything and every event that has a measurable duration, there are essentially layers of time that form its whole. Every person is a four-dimensional object that exists in layers of time—there are layers of time for infancy, for childhood, for adolescence, and so on. Time doesn’t, in itself, exist in such a way that there’s a past, present, and future, but each point within the block is any one of those three things in reference to other points of time.

The block universe theory also leaves room for the idea of infinite time, both past and future, by saying that the dimensional block can extend into infinity in either direction. What it doesn’t leave room for is change in the future—since the occurrence of the events in the block of time already exist, the future has already been decided.

3The Oddball Effect

Occasionally, we hear stories of someone who’s in a life-threatening or terrifying situation in which they swear that time slows down. It’s often when we’re faced with an event that’s happening on a massive scale, or when something completely unexpected occurs; it’s such a widespread phenomenon that there’s been a lot of discussion on whether or not we’re really experiencing time slowing down to allow us to process all the information we’re being confronted with.

Researchers first looked at what it would mean if time really did slow down for us. We would be able to see things in greater quality, and we’d be able to pick out greater details as images flashed by us. The brain tends to blend stimuli together into one event, as long as that information is received less than 80 milliseconds apart. So if time slows, we should recognize stimuli as separate events.

Participants in the study were shown a series of flashing numbers to determine the point at which the brain overcame time and made it impossible to distinguish the different numbers in the series. Once they were tested for their baseline, they were then asked to do the same thing while being dropped from a 46-meter (150 ft) tower. Then, they were also asked to watch other people fall from the same tower, and estimate how long those falls were in comparison with their own.

When asked to time their own fall, participants estimated that it was about 36 percent longer than the falls of the people they were watching. That, coupled with the results showing that people weren’t any better at identifying numbers when placed in a situation that made them theoretically experience slowed time, suggests that it’s not the moment that’s slowed down for us, but our recollection of it. While it would have an amazing practical benefit if we could experience slowed time, it’s now hypothesized that it’s something in our memories that makes terrifying events seem to last forever.

2Khronos, Kronos, and Father Time

Before Greek philosophers took a crack at explaining time, there was a mythological explanation, and that explanation includes the original figure of Father Time.

Before there was anything, there were the primordial gods Khronos and Ananke. Khronos was the god of time, imagined as part man, part lion, and part bull. Ananke, a serpent, wrapped around the egg of the world in a symbol of eternity. Khronos also shows up in Greco-Roman mythology, where he’s depicted as standing within the wheel of a zodiac. Ungoverned by time, he can be either an old or young man, much like today’s images of Father Time and the baby of the new year.

Khronos was the father of the titans and is often used interchangeably with Kronos, who was also associated with time. Kronos was the titan responsible for de-throning and castrating his father, and who would later be killed by his own son, Zeus. It was Khronos who was responsible for the progression of time through the seasons and through the years from the very beginning, but the things that happened to men and women within that time were the domain of someone else.

We largely relate to time by what happens to us in its passage. We grow up and then we grow old. That life cycle of man wasn’t the domain of time, but of the Moirai. Klotho spun the thread of life, beginning the cycle for everyone. Lakhesis measured how long the thread would be, while Atropos cut the thread. The Moirai would foretell future events as well, suggesting that destiny had already been written. Although the gods controlled the passage of time throughout the seasons, the Moirai were in charge of things happening within it, such as Persephone’s return to her mother Demeter in the summertime or her months with her husband during the winter.

1We’re Not Good At Telling Time

Time seems like it would be one of the easiest things to wrap your head around when it comes to discussing the physics of space, time, dimensions, and everything that goes along with them. We’re not really that good at even telling time, though, and we have the track record to prove it.

On one hand, there’s sidereal time, which is the time measured by the placement of the stars and the Earth’s rotation. That obviously varies quite a bit, though, so we also have the solar day. That’s based on the amount of time it takes the Earth to make a single rotation on its axis, which is also pretty varied. That’s why we need to take a solar year and average out the length of the rotations to come up with our system of time.

Earlier in the 20th century, though, scientists and astronomers discovered that the Earth’s rotation was slowing down. They created Ephemeris Time to account for that, which was phased out in 1979.

Then there was Terrestrial Dynamical Time, which was more precise and is based on International Atomic Time. This was discontinued in 1991, when it was technically renamed Terrestrial Time.

And if keeping track of time zones seems complicated, even today the positions of the stars and other solar bodies are used in conjunction with Terrestrial Dynamical Time, but with the rest of the world on Universal Time as its practical standard, there needed to be a way to convert the two—that’s Delta T.

In other words, we just have no idea what to do with time, even though we use it and live it every day. The most apparently straightforward of all questions regarding time isn’t straightforward at all.

There’s a saying that goes “fake it till you make it” which basically means if you can’t do something or don’t know something, you can still have success by at least lying about it convincingly. It’s oddly optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. And there are real world examples of it apparently working out. But just as often there are cases of people faking it and not making it at all because they really forgot that “convincingly” part. Let’s take a look at some of the worst examples.

10. There Was Once an Attempt to Pass Of Molasses in Haiti as Crude Oil

The world still runs on fossil fuels, despite how bad they are for the environment and the fact the supply is finite. The world uses over 90 million barrels of crude oil every day. Some predictions suggest we have enough crude oil to meet demands until 2050 and then things start getting tight. So it makes sense that we’d want to make use of any new sources we could find, right?

Back in the 1960s, Egyptian-born businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed had managed to convince some British business associates, and those in Haiti, that he was a sheik from Kuwait. He had been contracted by Haitian President Papa Doc to help rebuild Port-au-Prince and, as part of that effort, he tried to convince the British that Haiti had oil reserves.

The British, before willingly investing in Haiti or its oil, needed it analyzed, so they asked Al-Fayed for a sample. The oil they received was not crude of usable quality or even pool quality because it wasn’t crude at all. They tried to pass off low-grade molasses from French plantations as crude oil. The only thing more remarkable than that weak attempt at fraud was the fact it happened in the 60s and Al-Fayed still went on to have a long and prominent career. His current fortune is estimated at just shy of $2 billion.

9. Zoos Have a Bad Habit of Poorly Faking Animals

Many zoos in the world operate on the idea that they can help educate the public about animals and also engage in conservation and protection. Many species would be far worse off than they are if not for zoo-backed breeding programs. So there’s something to temper the ire of things who feel zoos are exploitative and that the animals should be free in the wild. If not for zoos, many of those animals would no longer exist. But that doesn’t mean every zoo is noble all the time. 

In 2013, a Chinese zoo made headlines when a lion was easily identified as having a serious issue. Namely, it wasn’t a lion at all, but a dog. The fake lion was a Tibetan mastiff with a furry mane-like haircut. Apparently it was one of several dogs in the park being passed off as other animals. The zoo itself said that the real animals were removed for breeding programs and they just put in the substitutes temporarily, as one does.

This is far from the only case of animal swap fraud, too. An Italian circus that claimed to have pandas was caught out with a pair of chow chow dogs that were dyed black and white. 

In Egypt, another zoo was caught trying to pass off a donkey painted black and white as a zebra. Despite the fact that there are pictures of the color smudging on the animal’s face, the director of the zoo refused to admit it was fake.

8. Chinese Media Tried to Pass Off Top Gun as Real Military Footage

The sad truth of the world is that every country needs a military to defend itself because war is a reality and always has been. So many countries take pride in their military might and that includes innovations. New technologies and new weapons to ensure their dominance on the battlefield. 

Oftentimes the military will show off new tech as part of propaganda programs meant to either boost morale at home or maybe even subtly intimidate potential enemies. But it only works if it’s legit. Otherwise, it backfires badly, like it did for China in 2011.

Chinese state media aired footage supposedly of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force in an air combat exercise. In reality, they were scenes from Tom Cruise’s Top Gun (the original from 1986). In fairness, decades later those scenes are still amazing. But they’re also not Chinese combat exercises. One source claimed that this happens sometimes if an editor is being lazy or if the footage is just too good not to use, but the channel never made any statement that the footage was taken from a movie and not real. 

7. Russia Has Called Video Game Footage Real More Than Once

You can decide for yourself if this is better or worse than trying to use footage from a movie as combat footage. In 2018, Russia was called out for reporting on the war in Syria using footage not from the actual war and not even from movie war but from virtual war. In covering the story they included a scene from first-person shooter Arma 3.

More embarrassing for Russia is that this was not the first time it happened. In 2017, they posted an image from AC-130 Gunship Simulator: Special Ops Squadron claiming it was proof that the US was aiding the Islamic State in Syria. In both instances, Russia claimed it was simply a mistake that the footage was included. 

6. A Woman Tried to Use a $1 Million Bill to Shop at Walmart.

There probably aren’t too many people who couldn’t find a good use for a million dollars. Whether you use it to help others or help yourself, there’s always a way to make money do some good. The key to this is making sure it’s real money.

In 2004, a woman in Georgia tried to go shopping at Walmart with a $1,000,000 bill. She attempted to purchase just under $2,000 worth of stuff and fully expected her $998,000 in change. She had two more of the bills on her when police picked her up. 

The woman said her estranged husband, who collects coins, gave her the bills and that you “can’t keep up with the US Treasury,” in regards to why she may have thought they were real. She said she never tried to pass it off as real at all, despite the cashier saying the woman asked for change. She ended up being charged with forgery.

5. A New Hampshire Drive Tried to Pass Off a Cigarette Box as a State Inspection Sticker

In New Hampshire your vehicle needs to pass a state safety and emissions inspection to be legal on the road. You get a sticker to put in your window that proves you’ve been inspected. However, some people either forget to do this or maybe they just don’t pass inspection. It’s unclear which was the case with a driver who tried to pass off a fraud as the real deal back in 2019.

Making a fake sticker may not be that hard to do if you put in some effort but this driver did not. Instead, he wrote some numbers on a box of Camel cigarettes and put that on the car, maybe hoping no one would notice the whole Camel background. 

Regardless of their expectations, police did notice, and the driver was cited for it.

4. Would-Be Pot Dealers Tried to Pretend Vegetables Were Marijuana

Now that marijuana is legal in a number of places you don’t hear quite as much about crimes related to sale and use of it, but they do still happen. It’s unlikely many like this story from 2016 will happen again, but you never know.

In this case, a pair of men selling pot were involved in an assault after their would-be customer realized he wasn’t buying weed from them at all. They were trying to pass off shredded vegetables as marijuana. When the cat, or maybe cabbage, was out of the bag they hit the buyer with a BB gun and stole his money. 

3. Scammers Tried to Commit Insurance Fraud with iPad Made of Ice

Fraud is a dicey game to play and there are many systems in place to detect it at pretty much every level. Committing postal fraud, for instance, is not an easy task at all. And if you were to pull it off, you’d have to do a much better job than the guy who tried to defraud the UK Postal Service in an iPad scam.

The plan was simple and not very good. The scammer filled a box with ice that weighed as much as an iPad. They’d take it to the post office and have it insured as an iPad with the weight of the packaging backing up the claim. Then the ice would melt, and when the empty package was received later, they could claim it was stolen in transit and claim the $4,000 the packages had been insured for.

There were several issues with this scam. First, the guy showed up wet from the already melting ice. He said it was rain, but it wasn’t raining. Then he claimed he couldn’t remember his return address. An hour later, postal employees noticed water pooling around the package and investigated, discovering it was just a box of ice. 

The package was delivered knowing full well what was going on and as soon as an insurance claim was filed, the man and an accomplice were charged with fraud.

2. Chinese Media Posted a Story About Aircraft Carriers That Included Battlestar Galactica Imagery

We already saw Chinese state media play with Top Gun footage claiming it was real, but things didn’t end there. And give that earlier one credit for at least using footage from a highly regarded film that used real pilots and real jets to make convincing action sequences. This story has less going for it.

In 2013, the Japanese language version of a Chinese media site ran a story about trends in the design of aircraft carriers showing off what the future had in store. While the article covered a variety of aspects on technology and advances, the images that were included made use of a design schematic from Battlestar Galactica. Another image was just a concept piece for a floating city by a Dutch designer. There was no reason given this time around or whether or not this was also just chalked up to a mistake.

1. A Man Sold Crack to An Undercover Cop That Turned Out to Be Crushed Pop Tarts

Dealing drugs is a risky business at the best of times, but especially when you get caught up by undercover cops who can use the evidence of the deal to get you prosecuted. So what happens if the evidence isn’t technically of a drug deal?

A North Carolina man was arrested in 2014 after arranging to sell crack to an undercover officer. Instead, he smashed a Pop Tart in a bag and sold that to the cop. The cop tested it and found no traces of drugs but they did arrest him two months after the deal.

Turns out selling fake crack, even if it’s tasty, is still illegal and he was charged with both selling and creating a counterfeit controlled substance. 

Blackmail is about as old as secrets. The idea of someone using secret information to coerce another into doing what they want exists in all cultures throughout all time. It’s typically frowned upon and certainly considered a crime, but the blackmailer does need to get caught and, often, the victim wants to keep everything on the down low too, which is what makes it so attractive. The thing to remember is that blackmail only works if no one finds out. Sometimes it can backfire spectacularly.

10. The KGB Tried to Blackmail the President of Indonesia with a Sex Tape

One of the most popular sources of blackmail is a person’s sexual history. Individuals and even governments have weaponized sex against enemies for ages. In the case of Indonesian President Sukarno, the KGB thought they had the man over a barrel when they arranged for him to meet up with flight attendants during a visit to Moscow in the 1960s. They had his room bugged and apparently filmed his liaisons.

Sukarno was the first President of the country after it left Dutch control. But it offered a lot of strategic advantages to countries like the Soviet Union and America in the region. The Soviets thought filming him with a flight attendant and releasing it would discredit him and cause him to lose his position unless he bowed to their will. Legend has it he was quite tickled to find out they’d filmed him and asked for a copy of the tape. 

The CIA tried to do something similar, incidentally. They sought a lookalike to make some pornographic films and, when they failed, they had a mask created in his likeness for someone else to wear. The movie was apparently called “Happy Days” though no one knows what happened to it.

9. Soviets Attempted to Out a Reporter as Gay

Joseph Alsop was one of the most famous reporters in the country during the height of the Cold War. He was a man in the know and he had the ear of major politicians, including even the President. He worked with the CIA to gather intelligence using his job as cover, and his columns were read by millions.

The Soviet government was not a fan of Alsop, and as a covert agent of the CIA, you can imagine why. They seized on an opportunity for blackmail when he came to Moscow, thanks to rumors of Alsop’s sexuality. 

At a time when being gay could end a career, Alsop kept his own sexuality under wraps. The KGB set up the reporter with a man in a Moscow hotel room and then secretly photographed them together. Their intent was to blackmail him into becoming a spy for them. Things didn’t go as planned.

Rather than doing what they demanded, Alsop asked if he could get copies of the photos. He then provided a detailed sexual history to the CIA, which included the Moscow encounter, robbing the Soviets of any ammunition they may have thought they had. Word of the incident made it to J. Edgar Hoover and then the President. But even as those in certain circles came into the know, no one weaponized the knowledge and Alsop’s career was not damaged. In fact, years later, someone would release the photos, but the media sources they sent them to refused to publish them.

8. Scientology Tried to Blackmail Trey Parker and Matt Stone 

The Church of Scientology has been steeped in controversy for decades. Things in the present aren’t much better and the church finds itself the butt of numerous jokes, with few more brutal than those made on the show South Park.

In 2005, South Park aired an episode entitled Trapped in the Closet that took serious digs at Scientology and its beliefs. The church, notoriously protective, aggressive and litigious, did not take this well. They hired investigators to look into South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone in the hopes of finding dirt on the two men that could be used for blackmail. This included doing records checks and even sorting through their trash. 

The church denied ever engaging in such behavior, but a leaked memo stated otherwise. However, it seemed as though there was no information to turn up and all they determined were useless details like what catering service they used and the kinds of cars they drove.

7. The FBI Tried to Blackmail MLK into Killing Himself 

The FBI devoted years to trying to bring down Martin Luther King Jr. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was apparently deathly afraid that MLK would join up with the Communist party, so they wanted to strike first and bring the man down through any means necessary. That included trying to make him kill himself. 

King was put under surveillance and while no ties to Communism were found, they did find evidence that he had been having extramarital affairs. Hoover decided to use that information, along with tapes, to try to blackmail King a year after his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

An anonymous letter was sent to King along with the tapes. The letter repeatedly insults him, calling him a fraud and abnormal and an animal. The writer threatened to give the tapes to the churches and the public at large. They went on to say, “there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.” King took it to mean they wanted him to take his own life. 

King quickly deduced that the FBI was behind the letter and, obviously, he didn’t fall for the ploy. Instead, he went on to secure his legacy as one of the greatest civil rights leaders of all time. 

6. The Nestle Pigeon Blackmailer

Tampering with food is an insidious crime that can cause mass panic. We expect the things we eat to be safe, and there’s no rhyme or reason to someone poisoning food at random on store shelves, so it can leave even the best of us shaken. In 1999, a man tried to blackmail Nestle after lacing products like mayonnaise and mustard with cyanide. He threatened to do more unless the company paid him off with $14 million US worth of diamonds. 

The plan was for Nestle to put the diamonds in little bags around the necks of homing pigeons that would return the loot to him. Instead, police just put a tracking device on the pigeon and followed it to the man’s home, where he was arrested. He got 11 years in prison for his troubles.

5. Jaromir Jagr’s Model Blackmail

The one thing necessary for any blackmail plot to work is the victim giving a damn. That just wasn’t the case with the model who tried to blackmail hockey player Jaromir Jagr after taking a selfie in bed with him.

Jagr, who was 43 at the time, was asleep when the 18-year-old model he was in bed with snapped the pic. It’s unclear whether the model herself or someone else tried to use the photo to extort $2,000 from Jagr. The problem was that Jagr was a single man sleeping with an adult woman. He didn’t care if anyone saw the picture. He told the blackmailer to do whatever they wanted. The photo was released and no one, Jagr included, cared at all.

The only consequence of the whole debacle seemed to be that the model, who was dating a junior hockey player at the time, got dumped by her boyfriend. Apparently Jagr was one of his hockey idols and he was less than amused. 

4. The Staged Illicit Photo of George Ratterman To Get Him Out of An Election

Former pro football player George Ratterman was running for Sheriff of Campbell County, Kentucky, back in 1961. The local mob was not amused by this and didn’t want him in the position which, historically, had been tied to corruption. A new, law-abiding sheriff would be bad news. 

Ratterman’s family was getting threatening phone calls and then, in May 1961, he was kidnapped and drugged. Once unconscious, he was photographed in bed with a stripper named April Flowers. The plan was to blackmail him into dropping out. Instead, the entire plot was exposed and rather than causing him to lose support, it skyrocketed him to the head of the race and won him the election. 

3. The Failed John Stamos Blackmail 

Next to politicians, celebrities are the likeliest targets of blackmail. They are often wealthy and they have a public persona they typically want to preserve. Someone like John Stamos, for instance, would want to maintain his image of a charming, handsome, but mostly harmless man. In 2010, a couple threatened to blackmail him with photos showing Stamos naked with an underage girl and doing drugs. That would have surely ruined his career.

Rather than pay the $680,000 they demanded, Stamos went to the police. He said there were no photos, and it was all lies. The FBI raided the home of the blackmailers and, wouldn’t you know it, there were no pictures. The couple claimed they did exist and implied the FBI stole them for some reason. In any event, the couple were sentenced to four years in jail. 

2. A Merchant tried to Blackmail Constance Kopp, Which Led to Her Becoming the First Female Sheriff in America

Constance Kopp was not a woman with whom to trifle. In July 1914, silk merchant Henry Kaufman ran his car into Kopp’s buggy. He caused damage to it but refused to pay, and Kopp was not about to let that happen. She sued him and then began to receive threatening letters. Cronies of Kaufman demanded money from her and threatened to kidnap her teenage sister and sell her into white slavery. Another letter demanded $1,000 or their house would be burned down. 

With the help of the local Sheriff, Kopp was able to implicate Kaufman and his underlings. The Sheriff was so impressed with her resolve, he appointed her Under Sheriff, a job no woman had held previously. 

1. Chevalier D’Eon Tried to Blackmail the King of France and Was Exiled

Few figures in history lived a life anywhere near as interesting as the Chevalier d’Eon. For 49 years, the Chevalier lived as a man and worked in service of the King of France as a diplomat and a spy. Then, for the next 33 years, she lived as a woman. If that sounds a little confusing, it’s because it is.

D’Eon was sent to the British court after the Seven Years War under the guise of being an ambassador but really to spy for King Louis XV. Unfortunately, d’Eon was living large and ended up getting fired for wasting money. Fearing the Bastille, he threatened to spill all the secrets he’d learned in his time as a French spy. 

The British embraced d’Eon openly and the French King paid him off to stay quiet. But he was exiled and could never return home. Years passed and when the King died, his son wanted all documents d’Eon had in return for him being allowed to return home. And d’Eon would then be recognized as a woman. The story was that d’Eon was born a woman and forced to live as a man and soon it was embraced by all. D’Eon went on to become a celebrated member of French society until the American Revolution, when she wanted to work as a soldier again. The idea was not received well for women were not soldiers. She was told to join a convent. Any political influence she’d once had was all but gone entirely. Eventually, they tossed her in jail. The switch had backfired on her this time. 

D’Eon returned to England and eventually lost her pension. She died poor at the age of 81, sharing an apartment with another elderly lady.