For most of us, getting an X-ray, ultrasound, angiogram, CT, or MRI means walking into a windowless room that has more in common with a dungeon than a clinic. The technologist gives us a flimsy garb and contorts us in painful positions. We almost expect to find torches on the wall and an iron maiden in the corner. Here are 10 images that might make these procedures a little less scary.

10Bertha Roentgen’s Wedding Ring

In November 1895, physics professor Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen of Worzburg, Bavaria, was studying electrical rays when he discovered that they penetrated objects and projected their images on a fluorescent screen. When he put his own hand in front of the rays, he noticed that the image showed a contrast between his bones and his translucent flesh.

Roentgen realized the implications immediately—doctors could see a person’s anatomy and anything wrong with it without evasively opening the skin. He replaced the fluorescent screen with a photographic plate and captured the first X-ray image on November 8, 1895. The X-ray was of his wife Bertha’s left hand and her wedding ring (as pictured above).

The world was initially dubious about Roentgen’s discovery. The New York Times spurned it as a simple photographic technique that had already been discovered. Just a week later, however, the Times began to run reports about how Roentgen’s X-rays were in fact beneficial for surgical purposes. One of those reports were of a British doctor named John Hall-Edwards who was the first to use X-rays to diagnose a problem—a needle lodged in a hand. Roentgen received the 1901 Nobel Prize in physics, and his findings are now considered “one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.”

9Moving X-Rays Of The Heart And Digestive System

Things moved quickly after Roentgen’s discovery. Almost immediately, scientists worked to merge X-rays with cinematography—essentially moving X-rays. The first to produce one was John Macintyre, a throat surgeon and electrician at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Macintyre already had the distinction of setting up the world’s first X-ray department, and his unit would later be the first to X-ray a foreign object (a halfpenny lodged in a child’s throat). That unit also was the first to detect a kidney stone with an X-ray.

In 1897, Macintyre presented a short film at the London Royal Society demonstrating what he called a cinematograph. He had X-rayed a frog’s leg since it required less energy to penetrate than a human leg. He then X-rayed it every 300th of a second as he flexed and extended the leg. He then spliced them together. Later, he filmed a human’s beating heart. He also fed a patient bismuth and filmed his stomach as he digested it (see video above).

These X-ray movies are now called “fluoroscopy” and are used to film the placement of heart catheters, the digestive and urinary systems at work, and surgical procedures. In 2013, 1.3 million fluoroscopic procedures were performed in the United Kingdom alone.

8Major Beevor Hunts For Bullets

Within months of Roentgen’s discovery, X-rays were used on the battlefield. They were first used during the Abyssinian War when Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1896. Lieutenant Colonel Giuseppe Alvaro used an X-ray machine to locate bullets in the forearms of Italian soldiers. Those X-rays have since been lost to history.

A year later, X-rays were again used in the field during the Greco-Turkish War. Those films have also been lost. Despite multiple successes, the military was slow to appreciate the use of X-ray for their wounded.

In June 1897, war broke out between India and Afghanistan. Britain sent soldiers to the Tirah plateau to open the mountain passes. Major Walter Beevor purchased X-ray equipment and set it up at a field hospital at Tirah. He took more than 200 X-rays in the field including the one above of an Indian soldier’s elbow with a bullet lodged in it. Beevor even located a bullet lodged in General Woodhouse’s leg.

The next year Beevor made a presentation at the United Services Institution—from then on, Britain brought field X-ray units onto the battlefield. Other countries slowly followed suit.

Like many other technologies, X-ray imaging benefited from its use in war. One of those advances was in portable units. Marie Curie and her daughter Irene drove 20 X-ray units in the back of vans to the battlefront during World War I.

Today, mobile X-ray machines are brought to a patient’s bedside, taking radiographs of them when they are too sick to be moved to the hospital’s radiology department.

7Proof Of The Damage Caused By Metal Corsets

In one of the earliest known uses of medical imaging to raise public awareness of a problem, French doctor Ludovic O’Followell X-rayed the torsos of several women with and without corsets. The films clearly show that tight metal corsets narrowed the ribcage and displaced internal organs. O’Followell did not advocate the banning of corsets—merely the development of more flexible ones.

And that’s exactly what happened. O’Followell’s films, along with the opinions of other physicians of the time, influenced the industry and society to adopt less-restrictive corsets.

The question that later experts asked was whether O’Followell should have used X-ray radiation to prove his point. Back then, X-ray units required the subject to be exposed to radiation for lengthy periods of time. In 1896, an X-ray of a man’s forearm required 45 minutes of exposure. The first dental X-ray took 25 minutes.

The women in the X-rays above were exposed twice—both with and without a corset—and in the most radiation-sensitive parts of their body: the chest (breasts and sternum) and the abdomen (reproductive organs).

The dangers of X-ray radiation exposure was already well-known. In the first year of testing X-rays, a Nebraska doctor reported cases of hair loss, reddening and sloughing off of skin, and lesions. Clarence Dally, while working on X-rays for Thomas Edison, repeatedly exposed his hands to radiation for at least two years. He had both arms amputated before dying of cancer in 1904. One by one, the pioneers of the field—John Hall-Edwards, Marie and Irene Curie, and Wilhelm Roentgen—all died of radiation-induced diseases.

But the world was slow to realize the dangers of unnecessary X-rays. Women had their ovaries irradiated as a treatment for depression. Radiation was used to treat ringworm, acne, impotence, arthritis, ulcers, and even cancer. Beauty shops irradiated customers to remove facial hair. Water, chocolate, and toothpaste were spiked with radiation. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, many shoe stores had fluoroscopes—called Foot-o-scopes or Pedoscopes—that X-rayed customers’ feet to show how well their shoes fit.

While X-rays are much safer today and are almost never used for non-medical purposes, unnecessary medical X-rays still pose some risk. One study showed that 18,500 cases of cancer worldwide are the result of medical X-rays, and in America 0.5 percent of cancer deaths are attributable to X-rays.

6The Very First Catheter

While working as a surgeon at the August Victory clinic, Werner Forssmann developed a theory that a flexible tube (catheter) could be inserted in the groin or arm, through the veins that feed blood to the heart, and directly into the heart’s atrium. Forssmann believed that the heart’s volume and the blood’s flow rate, pressure, and oxygen content could be measured with this catheter. Medicine could also be directly injected to the heart in an emergency.

Most experts believed the catheter would get tangled among the surge of blood and the beat of the heart. Therefore, his superiors at August Victory would not sanction experiments conducted by the rookie doctor.

Undeterred, Forssmann convinced a fellow resident to insert a needle into his left arm. Then, Forssmann advanced the catheter up the resident’s cephalic vein, through the bicep, past the shoulder, and into the heart. It took a total of 60 centimeters (2 ft) of tubing. He then walked down to the X-ray department and took a picture to prove the catheter was in the resident’s heart. He later performed the procedure several times on himself.

Unfortunately, Forssmann’s colleagues derided this procedure as a mere circus stunt. Discouraged, Forssmann moved on, becoming an urologist. He was unaware that his contribution was gradually being recognized for its importance (by 2006, 3.7 million heart catheterizations were performed annually in the United States alone). So he was quite puzzled when he received a phone call in October 1956, informing him that he’d won the Noble Prize in Physiology and Medicine. He simply responded, “For what?”

5Hyperphonography

One of the drawbacks of X-ray technology is that it only images dense anatomical structures such as bones and foreign bodies (like bullets). Another drawback is that it uses radiation that could harm a baby in the womb. The medical world needed a safer way to image less-dense structures in the body.

The answer came from a tragedy: the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. In order to better detect icebergs, Reginald Fessenden patented devices that emitted directed sound waves and measured their reflection in order to detect distant objects. His sonar was capable of detecting icebergs from a couple miles away.

World War I erupted at the same time, and German U-boats threatened Allied shipping. Physicist Paul Langevin developed a hydrophone that used sound waves to detect submarines. On April 23, 1916, a UC-3 U-boat became the first submarine detected by hydrophone and sunk. After the war, the technology was used to detect flaws in metals.

In the late 1930s, German psychiatrist and neurologist Dr. Karl Dussik believed that sound could measure the brain and other parts of the body inaccessible by X-rays. Dussik became the first to apply sound diagnostically. Unfortunately, much of his work was performed in Austria—it wasn’t until after the war, when he repeated and expanded his work, that the world heard of what he called “hyperphonography.”

A decade later, Scotland obstetrician Ian Donald borrowed an industrial ultrasound machine and tested it on various tumors. Donald was soon using the machine to detect tumors and monitor fetuses.

4The First CAT Scan

One limitation of X-ray images is that everything between the X-ray tube and the film appears on the image. Pathologies such as tumors can be hidden by tissues, organs, and bones that lie above or below it.

The 1920s and ’30s saw the development of tomography. This took an X-ray at a certain level of the body, blurring anything above and below it. It did this by moving the X-ray tube (and film) while exposing the image. It could cut across all three planes of the body: sagittal (left to right sides), coronal (front to back), and axial or cross-sectional (feet to head).

In 1967, Godfrey Hounsfield, a scientist working for EMI (Electric and Musical Industries), thought up an axial tomographic scanner. EMI was also the record company that sold 200 million Beatles records. Using their Fab Four funds, EMI funded Hounsfield for the four years it took for him to develop a prototype.

His scanner used sensors instead of film, and the patient was slid through moving tubes and sensors at a proscribed pace. A computer then reconstructed the anatomy. Hounsfield’s invention was thus dubbed a computed axial tomographic scan or CAT scan (now simply CT scan).

On October 1, 1971, Hounsfield used his invention for the first time. He located a woman’s brain tumor as seen here. The oval on the left side of the film (her right frontal lobe) is the tumor. Later, after the surgeon removed the tumor, he remarked that it “look[ed] exactly like the picture.”

3The First MRI Scan

In a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan, the machine creates a static magnetic field that aligns all of the patient’s protons in the same direction. Short bursts of radio waves then misalign the protons and, once the radio waves are shut off, a computer measures the time it takes for the protons to realign. The computer then uses these measurements to reconstruct the image of the patient’s body.

While CT and MRI machines look similar, they are very different. CT scans use potentially hazardous radiation while MRI does not. An MRI can also visualize soft tissue, organs, and bones better than CT. It is used especially when the doctor wants to see the spinal cord, tendons, and ligaments. On the other hand, CT is better to see bone, organ, and spine damage.

Physician Raymond Damadian first conceived of a whole-body MRI scanner in 1969. He began testing his theories and published an article in Science Magazine in March 1971. In September of that year, Paul Lauterbur, a chemist at State University of New York, had an epiphany about the very same thing, and even bought a notebook to document his “invention.” Lauterbur later admitted that he had watched a graduate student reproduce Damadian’s experiment, but did not believe it would work.

In March 1972, Damadian filed a patent for his idea. That same month, Lauterbur’s scanner produced an image of test tubes. A year later, Lauterbur published his findings and his image in Nature. He did not refer to Damadian’s critical contributions. In 1974, Damadian’s patent was accepted.

Then on July 3, 1977, Damadian and his team took the first scan of a human. None of his staff wanted to climb into the machine, so Damadian did it himself. When it didn’t work, they speculated that the doctor was too big. One of his graduate students, Larry Minkoff, was thinner and climbed in. The above image is of Minkoff’s chest.

A fight then erupted between Lauterbur and Damadian over who invented the MRI. Despite the fact that Damadian held the patent, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1988, and was acknowledged as the inventor by President Ronald Reagan, the 2003 Nobel Prize went to Lauterbur. Despite the Nobel committee being able to name up to three recipients of the prize, Damadian was snubbed. His supporters claim he was ignored because he was an outspoken Christian and advocate of creationism which was frowned upon by academia.

2Laparoscopic Surgery

Surgeons have been removing things from people’s abdomens for centuries, but the entire abdomen always had to be opened. This made the patient susceptible to infections and required long recovery times. But in 1901, a Russian gynecologist introduced laparoscopy—surgery done not through a large opening but through one or more small slits or holes. This came to be called “key-hole” or “Band-Aid” surgery.

Laparoscopes allowed the surgeon to use one eye to look directly into the abdomen or chest with a device that resembled a small telescope. Instead of using their hands, they utilized scissors, forceps, clamps, and other tools on long rods that were inserted through adjoining holes in the abdomen.

Unfortunately, this meant that the surgeon had to contort his body in order to view the laparoscope. One surgeon remembered he had to lie on the patient’s thigh in order to remove her gallbladder. After 2.5 hours, he was physically exhausted. For that reason, laparoscopy saw only limited use.

In the late 1970s, Dr. Camran Nezhat, an obstetrician and gynecologist, attached video equipment to laparoscopes and operated watching a television monitor. The equipment was initially big and bulky, but Nezhat embraced technology that streamlined equipment and magnified the images. This allowed everyone in the operating room to watch what the surgeon was doing. As Nezhat put it, surgery went from a “one-man band” to an “orchestra.” Nezhat’s early videos are not available, but the above video is of a laparscopic removal of a gallbladder by another surgeon.

Nezhat believed that most surgical procedures could be done laparoscopically rather than with huge evasive holes in the patient’s body. Many others could not believe that complicated surgeries could be done this way and were hostile to Nezhat’s claims. His procedures were called “bizarre” and “barbaric.” When others embraced laparoscopy, they too were ridiculed. But by 2004, when the New England Journal of Medicine recommended laparoscopy, Nezhat had officially ushered in a revolution in surgery.

13-D And 4-D Ultrasounds

For 30 years, ultrasounds were limited to two dimensions, where equipment would send a sound and then measure the echo. Millions of parents have tried and failed to glean from these black-and-white images just what their baby looks like. This is because 2-D scans go right through the baby’s skin, visualizing their internal organs instead.

Since the 1970s, investigators had been working on 3-D ultrasound for babies. This sends the sounds in different directions and angles, catches the facial features and skin of the baby, then reconstructs the echoes in much the same way CT scanners do. In 1984, Kazunori Baba at Tokyo’s Institute of Medical Electronics was the first to obtain 3-D images of a baby in the womb. But the quality of the image and the amount of time that it took to reconstruct the image (10 minutes) made it unsuitable diagnostically.

In 1987, Olaf Von Ramm and Stephen Smith patented the first high-speed 3-D ultrasound that increased the quality and reduced the processing time. Since then, there has been an explosion in ultrasounds, especially with the addition of 4-D versions where the parents can see their baby move. Boutiques have even sprung up that offer 3-D and 4-D video keepsakes—for a hefty price tag naturally. While there are no documented negative effects from these ultrasounds, a debate now rages over whether a diagnostic tool should be used in such a recreational way.

Steve is the author of 366 Days in Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency: the Private, Political, and Military Decisions of America’s Greatest President.

Extreme sports are extremely scary.

Millions of people around the world live their daily lives without engaging in extreme sports, which either puts them on the right side of Darwinian evolution or demonstrates that they are simply too scared to push themselves to the limits of their nerve and endurance.

For those of us who don’t go outside when it is windy because tree branches are a hazard, the concept of dying while doing an extreme sport can seem like a waste of life. For extreme sport devotees, though, the thrill that they get from flying, falling, or hurtling is what makes this life worth living.

So with no further ado and a parachute that might not even open, let’s free-fall into this list of 10 people who died while participating in the extreme sports they loved more than life itself.

10 Uli Emanuele
2016

BASE (Building, Antenna, Span, and Earth) jumping is an extreme sport in which people with nerves of steel jump from objects like bridges using parachutes or wingsuits and then parachutes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, BASE jumping has a high fatality rate and is illegal in many places.

One of the most widely known BASE jumping wingsuit deaths took place while it was being live-streamed on Facebook. Uli Emanuele was filming a wingsuit flight in the Italian Dolomite mountains when he crashed and died on impact.

Emanuele had previously performed amazing stunts, passing through tiny gaps in cliff faces in his wingsuit. He was certainly no amateur. His death shocked the wingsuit community because he was known for his precision and attention to detail when planning flights.^[1] Emanuele was 29.

9 Malik Joyeux
2005

Malik Joyeux was a big-wave surfer who grew up in Tahiti. An antidrug advocate and all-around good guy, Joyeux had won an award for surfing one of the biggest waves on his home break of Teahupo’o.

The French-born, goofy-foot surfer (which means that he led with his right foot on the board) was also a professional kite surfer and windsurfer who scraped by on sponsorship money and friendship. He was just starting to make a name for himself when he went for a surf on a seemingly uneventful day at the famous Oahu Pipeline on Hawaii’s notorious North Shore.^[2]

Joyeux’s last wave was a 2.5-meter (8 ft), thick one that crashed down on the young surfer. It pushed him under the water and destroyed his board, flinging it out of the water.

The wave was part of a set, so Joyeux was kept under the water while two other waves crashed. It took 15 minutes to find his body. Despite lifeguards and paramedics using CPR and a defibrillator, it was simply too late for the young surfer. Malik Joyeux was 25.

8 Dwain Weston
2003

Dwain Weston was a legendary Australian BASE jumper with loads of experience and air time. He was considered to be one of the top BASE jumpers of his time. However, with a sport that has an almost nonexistent margin for error, this does not guarantee safety.

Weston was a computer analyst who traveled the world, making well over 1,000 jumps. In 2002, he won the world BASE jumping title. Little did anyone know, he would not survive more than another year.

Weston’s final performance was a wingsuit jump from a plane with another person as part of a demonstration in the first year of the Go Fast Games in Colorado.

The flight plan was that both men would jump from the plane, with one flying over a bridge that spanned a railway track and the other flying under. Weston was meant to fly over the bridge. Instead, he slammed into it at 193 kilometers per hour (120 mph) and parachuted to the rocks below, his leg severed at the hip.

He died on impact with the bridge. However, this was not initially clear to the people watching from the bridge because his parachute deployed after the hit. Dwain Weston was 30 years old.^[3]

7 Jay Moriarity
2001

Jay Moriarity was an American professional surfer who received worldwide attention at only 16 when a photo of him wiping out on a big wave at Mavericks, a renowned surf break in Northern California, was published on the front cover of Surfer magazine. Mavericks is a famous ocean break that is 3 kilometers (2 mi) offshore and is known to produce waves up to 18 meters (60 ft) high.

Several top surfers have died at Mavericks dues to the heavy, pounding surf. Jay Moriarity was not one of them.

Instead, Jay died while he was training for big-wave riding. A serious surfer, Jay was intent on conditioning his body to withstand being deep underwater for long periods of time. This is important when you are riding waves the size of mountains.

Jay died free diving after climbing down a buoy rope to sit on the bottom of the ocean in the Maldives without scuba gear or flippers. Jay descended to a depth where he would usually need these things and may have blacked out while returning to the surface.^[4]

He never came up for air. Jay Moriarity was 22 years old.

6 Jimmy Hall
2007

Jimmy Hall was something of a celebrity in his home state of Hawaii. He wasn’t just involved in one extreme sport, though. He spent his life being involved in several.

Hall lived on the island of Oahu and owned a business called Hawaii Shark Encounters. Sharks are also something that millions of people successfully avoid. But Hall’s business catered to the demographic that wished to encounter them.

He was a shark expert who had swum with Hawaii’s only great white shark. After seeing footage of Hall’s experience, the Discovery Channel signed him to host Shark Week.

Hall had already booked a trip to Nunavut in Canada to participate in BASE jumping when he got the Discovery Channel contract. He was filming a documentary on Baffin Island when he died.^[5]

The documentary was to include footage of Hall BASE jumping off mountains on Baffin Island. It was during one of these parachuting jumps that Hall died. Jimmy Hall was 41 years old.

5 Erik Roner
2015

Erik Roner was a German extreme sports enthusiast who achieved a level of fame on the MTV show Nitro Circus. Sadly, he died doing an unremarkable jump with two other parachutists. The three were performing the skydiving stunt during the opening ceremony for a celebrity golf tournament in California when things went horribly wrong.^[6]

While the other two parachutists landed safely on the ground, Roner slammed into a tree and became entangled, hanging from the tree. Although onlookers and officials tried to rescue him, even going so far as to form a human ladder, the efforts were futile and Roner died in the tree. Erik Roner was 39 years old.

4 Mark Sutton
2013

When the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in London celebrated the book and movie character of James Bond, Mark Sutton was the experienced stunt double for Daniel Craig, who was playing 007.

A year later, Sutton was dead, another extreme sport victim of gravity and speed.

Sutton had jumped from a plane with fellow veteran wingsuiter Tony Uragallo. The pair had decided to follow a preplanned course. Their jump was part of a three-day wingsuiting event called HeliBASE 74, which was to be filmed by Epic TV. Sutton’s jump took place on the first day of the event.

Sutton was traveling at about 200 kilometers per hour (125 mph) when he veered off course and hit a ridge. He died on impact. A rescue helicopter immediately located his body, but there was nothing anyone could do. His parachute did not deploy. After his death, the event continued on in honor of Sutton.

Footage of the tragic flight was given to the local police. Mark Sutton was 42 when he died.^[7]

3 Caleb Moore
2013

The 2013 Winter X Games were in full swing when onlookers were horrified to see Colten Moore crash his snowmobile in an accident that separated his pelvis. At the time, Colten didn’t know that his brother, Caleb, had crashed his own snowmobile in the same spot moments earlier.

Caleb Moore had attempted a backflip off a jump. But he under-rotated, and the vehicle’s skis caught in the snow. Caleb ended up beneath the snowmobile. He walked away, but the damage was done. His heart had been injured, and he went into cardiac arrest before he was able to have surgery. Having sustained brain damage due to lack of oxygen, he died a few days later.^[8]

He was the first person to die at the Winter X games. Caleb Moore was 25 years old.

2 Dario Barrio Dominguez
2014

Dario Barrio was a popular Spanish TV chef. His successful television show had allowed him to travel all over the world and explore the culinary delights found in other countries. He was also a keen wingsuiter. Unfortunately, this led to his death.

Dominguez jumped with two other wingsuiters at the International Air Festival in the Sierra de Segura mountain range in Spain. Footage of the tragic event shows that the other two wingsuit flyers landed safely with parachutes. Dominguez has no such luck and smashed into the ground over a ridge, dying on impact. His parachute had simply not deployed.^[9]

Dario Barrio Dominguez was 41.

1 Kuraudo ‘Cloud’ Toda
2015

Kuraudo “Cloud” Toda was an inspirational young Japanese motocross rider who was involved in a serious accident while testing Suzuki bikes in 2008. This accident had left Toda paralyzed from the chest down, but the intrepid young man wanted to keep riding.

After he had healed as much as he could from his injuries, he began to ride again. Toda had a cage installed on his bike that allowed him to ride without using the lower half of his body. The cage effectively strapped him to the bike.

Toda was training for the X Games Best Whip competition when he landed in a foam pit that he had constructed with the help of his friends as a safety measure.

Tragically, the foam pit was ignited by his bike. He was unable to free himself from the bike due to the cage, so he burned to death in the pit. His helpless friends watched in horror as the flames were too hot to approach. Kuraudo “Cloud” Toda was 34 years old.^[10]

Christy Heather is an Australian novelist, lawyer, and professional writer who would never jump out of a perfectly good plane.

TV game shows are the one place left in the world where you think everything would be on the up-and-up. Regular, hard-working folks earn the chance to win huge amounts of money and prizes in front of an audience and millions of viewers at home. It’s everyone’s dream, right?

Well, believe it or not, there’s quite a sinister underbelly in the game show world. There always has been, but the glitz and glamour of Hollywood do a good job of deflecting the scandals. Here now are some of the biggest controversies to ever come out of popular game shows. 

10. Guy Hacks Press Your Luck

Press Your Luck was a hugely popular show in the 1980s, revolving around contestants answering questions and then hitting a button to stop at a random point on the board. A bad turn would result in a “whammy”, which would then trot out the show’s adorable little animated goblin mascots, who would do some kind of funny act, while also erasing the contestant’s current winnings. 

An Ohio ice cream truck driver named Michael Larson figured out how to hack the seemingly-random game board, after analyzing it for some time. He noticed the lights and patterns on the board actually had some methods to them. So he got on the show in 1984, won over $100,000 dollars and a vacation to the Bahamas, but the network didn’t seem to think it possible his odds could have been as good as they were. While they were right, they couldn’t prove it, but the producers did reprogram the game board soon after. The show would fold three years later. 

9. Pasapalabra Contestant Cheated With Her Phone During The Show

The Spanish quiz show Pasapalabra teams up regular folks with celebrities in an assortment of games and tasks. Correct responses build up a time meter, which is then used in the final round to correctly guess specific words. One celebrity who appeared on the show was model Adriana Abenia, whose beauty belied a shockingly bad proficiency for cheating. 

Abiena was involved in a music listening trivia segment where the participants had to guess a song after hearing only a short snippet. What no one knew at first was that she had her iPhone open between her legs, with the Shazam song recognition app pulled up. Too bad she received a text message during that time, which set the phone off with lights and vibrations. The host quickly saw this and playfully called her out, and you have to almost admire the sheer ballsiness of it all. 

8. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Cheater

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQoNWw0G2AY

The British version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is exactly like the American version you’re probably familiar with, but with 100 percent more cheekiness. Contestants answer a series of progressively-harder multiple choice questions, on the way up to potentially winning a million dollars. 

Charles Ingram, a former member of the British Army, appeared on the show in 2001. Funny enough, Ingram’s wife and brother-in-law had previously been on and won their own money. When Charles came on, he had his wife in tow, as well as a college professor planted in the audience. When the multiple choice answers were read aloud, one of them in the audience would cough, and Ingram would know the correct answer. It worked, at least initially. He won all the way to the million mark, but they were found out somehow. All the money was suspended, and they racked up all sorts of fines and assorted (suspended) jail sentences. 

7. Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire Guy Wasn’t A Millionaire At All

The name of the show itself is cringey enough as it is. Who wants to watch a cast of ladies show just how shallow they are to try and marry a man for money? And what kind of guy would allow that to take place in front of him? Hollywood doesn’t care! That was the show: purported rich man Rick Rockwell had to sift through 50 women to pick the true love on the reality show. 

We say “purported” because ole Rick already had a history of being less than stellar. There’s the story of him being abusive to a former girlfriend of his. And the fact that Rockwell wasn’t even his name, and he wasn’t even a real estate giant like he claimed. He was actually a part-time stand-up comic. Darva Conger, the “winner” of the show, found all this out after the fact, and it didn’t take long for her to seek an annulment for the wedding. 

6. Super Password Contestant Was Actually A Wanted Fugitive

Patrick Quinn appeared on the game show Super Password in 1988. He was introduced as a systems analyst for the government, and then proceeded to win over $58,000 that day. The thing is, he wasn’t a systems analyst. He was a wanted fugitive. 

Quinn thought he wouldn’t be discovered. He told the producers after the show that he needed to pick up his winnings quickly, as his job was taking him to Turkey very soon. What he didn’t know was that people watching the show recognized him. Quinn, real name Kerry Ketchem, had apparently racked up some forgery and fraud charges in his home state of Indiana, and some of his victims called in to alert the showrunners. When Ketchem arrived at the show offices to receive his money, two Secret Service agents were there waiting for him, handcuffs in hand. 

5. Price Is Right Keeps Firing Pregnant Models

The Price Is Right has been the perfect sick day accompaniment for decades now, but it hasn’t always had the most storied history. Going back to the Bob Barker days in the ’80s and ’90s, there have been allegations of sexual harassment and abuse from the host towards the show’s models. Time hasn’t necessarily helped the program learn from its mistakes, either. 

There have been numerous stories in recent years concerning the models on the show becoming pregnant and then subsequently losing their jobs. Brandi Cochran was one such model who filed a lawsuit in 2010 after the show dismissed her. Another former employee, Shane Stirling, filed a suit that same year, also claiming a firing after her own pregnancy. The judge on this case, however, deemed that the show changing hosts from Barker to Drew Carey was sufficient reason for her dismissal. 

4. Dating Game Winner Wins A Date With A Serial Killer

In 1978, Rodney Alcala appeared on The Dating Game, the famous show where people are blindly matched up with a set amount of hungry bachelors. The lady who would get to choose the best man on this particular episode was Cheryl Bradshaw. After she asked each bachelor a series of questions, she eventually picked Alcala as the best of the bunch. 

Too bad Alcala was already convicted of raping an eight-year-old girl a decade before. He quickly showed his true self to Bradshaw after he was unveiled. Immediately backstage, he began giving Bradshaw the chills, and she declined to go on an official date with him. He didn’t take that rejection well, and within the next two years, Alcala would become a legitimate serial killer, murdering at least five people. 

3. Bullseye Contestant Was A Murderer, Went On To Murder Again

Many murderers have shown a shocking ability to lead what appears to be a normal life. Most of them don’t have the kind of sheer fortitude to land on a TV game show in the middle of their killing sprees. But most killers aren’t John Cooper. Cooper was a contestant on the darts-centered Bullseye show in 1989, and already had plenty of blood on his hands. In fact, the episode he appeared on would be used to help track him down and convict him. 

In 1985, Cooper had shot a farmer and his sister to death. And merely a month after he was on Bullseye, he shotgunned down a middle-aged couple, after robbing the husband and raping the wife. Years later, police would use a tape of the show to see that he actually mentioned the area where he would go on to kill the couple. They also had a sketch from 1989 to compare his onscreen face to, and it led to him finally being jailed in 2011. 

2. Man Studies Price Is Right And Wins To The Exact Cent

The Showcase Showdown is the final stage of The Price is Right, where the final two contestants guess the price of a package of extravagant prizes. If their guess is higher than the actual amount, they lose, but that’s rarely a worry, because most people aren’t even close to being right. One man figured out a way to hack into the game show’s process and get the amount right to the exact dollar. 

Terry Kneiss and his wife Linda had a couple of gifted brains for seeing patterns in things, and they watch the show obsessively to learn how things worked. Finally Terry got onto the show and made it all the way to the Showcase Showdown. When the other finalist passed on guessing the price of a karaoke machine, pool table, and camper, Terry conjured a price seemingly out of thin air: $23,743. It was exact to the cent, something that had never happened on the show before. The show was cut short, host Drew Carey was visibly irritated, and allegations of cheating already started to fly around. There was even a side story of a possible plant in the audience. Eventually, Kneiss was awarded his gifts, but the story remains shrouded in suspicion.

1. Twenty-One Was Totally Rigged, As Were Most Quiz Shows In The 1950s

You may have heard about the film Quiz Show from 1994, directed by Robert Redford. In the film, a man wins a game show called Twenty-One, but it’s revealed after a series of scandals that the winners were told the answers beforehand. That show was a real thing, and those scandals really happened. And they’re almost crazier than the movie version. 

The NBC show Twenty-One saw its downfall begin after an episode was won by Herbie Stempel in 1956. Stempel, it was found out later, had been coached on the answers by the show in order to help him win. But the sponsors of the show wanted someone more appealing in the limelight, so another contestant, Charles Van Doren, was coached even harder to overtake Stempel’s throne. During the next few years, it was revealed just how many of Twenty-One‘s contestants were helped along by the show to get rigged results. And it was rampant among the game shows of the time: The $64,000 Question blindsided contestants with much harder questions if they were on a winning streak. Dotto on CBS was found to be giving out questions to contestants beforehand. These stories began to trickle out, and that spelled the end of the game show bubble for quite some time.

TV game shows are the one place left in the world where you think everything would be on the up-and-up. Regular, hard-working folks earn the chance to win huge amounts of money and prizes in front of an audience and millions of viewers at home. It’s everyone’s dream, right?

Well, believe it or not, there’s quite a sinister underbelly in the game show world. There always has been, but the glitz and glamour of Hollywood do a good job of deflecting the scandals. Here now are some of the biggest controversies to ever come out of popular game shows.

This is an encore of one of our previous lists, as presented by our YouTube host Simon Whistler. Read the full list!

TV game shows are the one place left in the world where you think everything would be on the up-and-up. Regular, hard-working folks earn the chance to win huge amounts of money and prizes in front of an audience and millions of viewers at home. It’s everyone’s dream, right?

Well, believe it or not, there’s quite a sinister underbelly in the game show world. There always has been, but the glitz and glamour of Hollywood do a good job of deflecting the scandals. Here now are some of the biggest controversies to ever come out of popular game shows.

This is an encore of one of our previous lists, as presented by our YouTube host Simon Whistler. Read the full list!