• Who has been through more than 800 car crashes without any serious injuries?
How did a man bring a cup of water to a near-boil with only his own body?
These are 10 people – or groups of people – with actual, real-life superpowers.
10 –The man that never sleeps • There are a few examples of people who
have been able to completely cut sleep out of their lives.
• Thai Ngoc, a humble Vietnamese farmer, is one of those people.
For no apparent reason, he just stopped sleeping in 1976, and hasn’t gotten a wink of sleep
since.
• It’s not for a lack of trying, either.
He says he’d love to be able to take a nap, and he misses dreaming.
But for some reason, which was dumbfounded scientists, his body is incapable of sleep
now.
• One of the other famous cases of extreme insomnia is Paul Kern, a Hungarian man who
didn’t sleep for 40 years.
But his insomnia was caused by a head injury in World War 1.
Thai Ngoc has no such story, it just happened seemingly at random.
9 –People with perfect pitch • Perfect pitch won’t exactly help you
fly through the air or anything, but it is something only one in 10 thousand people have.
It is the ability to identify an exact pitch just from memory.
• Perfect pitch is basically the Holy Grail of musical ability, and even most of those
who have successful musical careers can’t claim perfect pitch.
• Scientists still can’t identify the source of perfect pitch.
They’re not even sure if it’s genetic or something that can be trained.
• The one thing they have been able to figure out is that speakers of tonal languages, like
Mandarin, tend to show significantly higher rates of perfect pitch.
8 –The human phonograph • Identifying music today is generally as
simple as just pulling up your app of choice and looking it up, or having the app listen
and just tell you what the song is.
• But one man, Dr. Arthur B. Lintgen, was once able to identify music by SIGHT.
• Specifically, he could look at a vinyl record of a classical music piece, study the
grooves in it, and announce exactly what the record contained.
• His ability was so sharp, he could even tell the differences between different recordings
of the SAME PIECE directed by different conductors. 7 –Aquaman
• The Orang Bajo people of Indonesia are indigenous nomads, travelling from island
to island in the South Pacific, living off the ocean.
• Deep-sea diving has long been a part of their culture, to the point where fathers
submerge their newborn babies in the water within minutes of their birth to test their
lung capacity.
• The early and frequent exposure to water causes babies to develop improved underwater
vision by constricting the pupils and changing the shape of their eye’s lens.
• This culture is home to a man named Sulbin, who can dive to depths of up to 20 meters
and remain underwater for over five minutes, without an oxygen tank.
• For most humans, that depth can be literally lung-crushing.
But since these are basically Atlanteans, they’re totally fine.
6 –Miss Hawkeye • If you have perfect vision, you’re hoping
for maybe 20/20 or even 20/15 vision.
• Veronica Seider’s vision is around 20/2.
• That means she can see detail in people about a mile away.
She can tell people apart from that distance, and even tell about how far they are from
her.
• She can also see color, but not like we do.
She can look at a television set and see how the color is COMPRISED of red, green, and
blue shades, almost like a human telescope.
5 –The Linguist • When Harold Williams was seven years old,
he found himself fascinated with languages, so he studied Latin.
• And then he mastered Latin, and he moved on to the next language, also when he was
seven.
• By the time he entered high school, he had taught himself more than 10 languages
through self-study.
• He continued studying languages throughout his life, and by the time he had completed
his PhD in linguistics, he was a master of 58 different languages from around the world
and throughout history.
4 –Beastman • Kevin Richardson is better known as the
“lion whisperer.”
And it’s not just because he cares for lions and knows how to get them to not maul him
to death.
• He seems to be able to actually communicate with them, with purrs and soft growls.
He is working as a conservationist in Africa, where he owns a preserve.
• He claims to have been accepted as part of the pride, and it’s hard to tell him
he’s wrong, given how he runs and plays in the fields with his feline family.
3 –Balls of Steel • 70-year-old Zhou Cheng-Li has an unusual
workout regimen.
Instead of taking a walk or doing some relaxing Tai-Chi… he hits himself in the nuts with
a brick.
Repeatedly.
• This is the basis of “iron crotch qigong,” one of the rarest forms of Shaolin kung-fu.
The whole point of the discipline is literally just to train men to withstand blows to the
crotch.
• The guiding philosophy is that if a man’s genitals are strong, then he is also strong.
With that in mind, even basic iron crotch qigong courses have been known to allow men
to lift 50-pound weights with their genitals. 2 –The Crash Test Dummy
• W.R.
Rusty Haight is the director of the Collision Safety Institute, and one of the few institute
directors that regularly puts his life on the line to prove his points.
• Haight is an expert in car crashes – preventing them, making them safer, reconstructing them…
and being in them.
• Haight regularly volunteers himself to be a human crash test dummy, wearing monitoring
equipment to better understand what happens to the human body during a car crash, and
how to make them better.
• He has now been in over 800 car crashes of up to 53 miles per hour – a Guinness
World Record, but the most serious injury he has sustained is a minor cut from an airbag.
1 –The Battery Man • SlavisaPajkic first set a world record
by taking a 20 thousand-volt charge without a problem back in 1983.
• He set another record in 2003 when he heated a cup of water to 97 degrees Celsius
– near boiling – with only his body.
• The Serbian man can act as an insulator, conductor, or heater, depending on the circumstance.
He can light a bulb, cook food, and even set fire to alcohol using his body.
• His next goal is to take a charge from a million-volt generator and fire a laser
from his fingertips.
• If he can do that, he may as well just call up the rest of the X-Men right then and
there.