You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

The odds of being struck by lightning are much higher than you may think. The phenomenon is actually one of the highest causes of weather-related human death. In any given year, the probability of getting struck is one in 700,000. But over the course of an entire life, odds improve considerably to one in 3,000.

[Lee Stewart]

Take a deep breath and board that plane with confidence: Your chances of being killed in an airplane crash are only one in 11 million. Even if your plane does crash, 95.7% of passengers in a crash survive.

[Lee Stewart]

Paying taxes is stressful enough without worrying about getting audited. Of the millions of returns filed for the 2016 fiscal year, the Internal Revenue Service only audited 0.5% of them. People who file incomes of $0 or more than $10 million are more likely to get that call from the IRS.

[Lee Stewart]

Car theft was in decline for decades, but it’s been creeping back up. There were around 773,139 thefts in the U.S. in 2017. Albuquerque, N.M., claimed the #1 spot for most thefts relative to population size, while Honda Civics and Accords were the top targets for thieves.

My son was recently a victim of this crime. Someone tried to steal his 1994 Olds Cutlass Ciera from his workplace - a busy parking lot. All they managed to do was screw up his ignition switch which cost $600 to fix!

[Lee Stewart]

“Sharknado” and “Jaws” have primed people to fear shark attacks, but in reality, it’s very unlikely to happen—Baltimore’s National Aquarium estimates the odds at one in 3.7 million. Surfers are most likely to encounter them, because the best places for catching a wave are also the places where sharks like to gather.

[Lee Stewart]

If you always dreamed of being an astronaut when you grew up, we’ve got bad news for you. Of the 18,300 people who applied to NASA in 2016—the first time the agency opened applications since 2011—only 12 made the cut for the 2017 training class.

[Lee Stewart]

If you crack an egg every day, you’re only likely to get a double yolk once every three years. Because the universe can be truly random, you could also end up with an entire carton of double-yolk eggs—like one British man did in 2016.

[Lee Stewart]

The best hand in poker, a royal flush consists of a 10, jack, queen, king, and ace of the same suit in your hand. There’s only a 0.00015% chance of being dealt this, and only four possibilities—one of each suit—out of 2.6 million possible poker hands in a normal five-card game.

[Lee Stewart]

People born on Feb. 29, the extra day added to the calendar every four years to keep calendars matching up with the rotation of the sun, are the subject of fascination and constant jokes about how they only have a birthday every four years. The chances any person being born on that day are 1 in 1,461, the number of days in four years plus one.