Strange But True: Original Celtic bonfires

By Lucie Winborne

• When women run, their breasts don't just move up and down; they move in a complex figure-eight pattern, with about six inches of motion with each stride.

• Snakes had back legs for 70 million years before losing them.

• Early sodas were marketed as cure-alls for impotence, stomach pain, scurvy, alcoholism, opium addictions, nervousness and more.

• During WWII, the Japanese launched 9,000 paper and rubberized-silk balloons carrying incendiary and anti-personnel bombs to the U.S. More than 1,000 hit their targets, and reached as far east as Michigan.

• If the U.S. Army were a city, it would be the 10th largest in the U.S.

• During the 1986 World Cup quarterfinal against England, Diego Maradona punched the ball into the net without the referee noticing, quipping afterward that it had been scored "a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God."

• Before the Civil War, disbelief in the in Bible or profaning the Sabbath were campus crimes at Yale.

• The United States American Nurses Association ended their policy of racially segregating nurses in response to the urgent need for nurses during WWII.

• Original Celtic bonfires were more aptly named bone fires, as the Celts threw animal bones into the flames to ward off evil spirits.

• The word "Nintendo" roughly translates to "leave luck to heaven."

• Police officers in Hawaii were once allowed to have sex with prostitutes during undercover sting operations.

• The term "Indian" originated with Christopher Columbus, who thought he had landed in the East Indies.

• According to the Giant Impact theory, a Mars-size planet struck a blow to Earth and splashed off rocks and debris into space, creating a huge ring that later formed the moon.

(c) 2026 King Features Synd., Inc.