Unbelievable But True: The Weekly News That Defies Logic

A car, parked nearly a quarter of a mile away, had its roof completely crushed by a three-foot chunk of flying whale blubber. Hold on. Flying? You’re saying blubber was airborne? Airborne. And you know, last week we talked about true stories that defy belief. This one might be the reason that category was invented. Okay, I need to know how you get to a point where whale parts are falling from the sky and crushing cars. Please start at the beginning. Florence, Oregon. November 9, 1970. An eight-ton, forty-five-foot sperm whale washes ashore. It dies. And then it starts to rot. Which, as you can imagine, becomes a public health and smell problem very quickly.

Right. So who do you call? The coast guard? A marine biologist? You call the Oregon State Highway Division. The... highway division? For a whale? The beach was technically under their jurisdiction. And here's where we see a pattern. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The Highway Division's job is clearing things like rockslides off roads. And how do they do that? Oh no. Dynamite. Half a ton of dynamite, to be precise. The engineer in charge, a man named George Thornton, had a plan. They'd blow the whale into tiny, bite-sized pieces. The seagulls and other scavengers would clean it all up. Problem solved. This sounds like a cartoon plan.

There is no way they thought this would work. They absolutely did. A reporter at the scene, Larry Bacon, said the officials literally described it as blowing the whale "out toward the sea" for the fish and gulls to eat. They gathered a crowd of spectators a quarter-mile away, and at 3:45 p.m. on November 12th… they pushed the plunger. And I'm guessing the seagulls were not impressed. The seagulls were probably terrified by the deafening blast. Because instead of disintegrating, the explosion acted like a cannon. It launched massive, hundred-pound chunks of rotting whale flesh and blubber high into the air. Raining down on the spectators.

Raining down on everyone. It sent people running for cover. The news crew from KATU-TV was there. Their reporter, Paul Linnman, had this legendary line in his broadcast: "The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds." You can't write that! It's perfect. So what about the car? That was the exclamation point on the whole disaster. A brand new Oldsmobile, crushed. And the smell… people said it was indescribable. One reporter said, "People were retching. It stuck to your clothes and everything." And what about the engineer, Thornton? He must have been mortified. This is the best part. When interviewed afterward, he said the explosion went "exactly right." His only critique was that the dynamite had funneled into the sand, directing the blast straight up instead of out.

A minor technicality, apparently. Unbelievable. So what happened to the rest of the whale? Because the blast didn't get rid of it. Not even close. They had to bring in bulldozers and work crews to bury the massive chunks that remained. The exact thing they were trying to avoid. Today, Oregon's official policy for dead whales is, unsurprisingly, burial. A lesson learned the hard way. The very, very hard way. And the town of Florence, Oregon? They now have an "Exploding Whale Memorial Park." They commemorate the event every year. It's become a point of civic pride. A reminder that sometimes, a mistake can be so spectacular, so profoundly wrong, that it becomes immortal.