15 Less-known People with Extraordinary Superhuman Abilities

Source: https://www.unbelievable-facts.com/2...abilities.html

While reading superhero comics book, we often fantasize that how wonderful it would be if we could possess even one superpower. Sometimes, for some of us, this dream comes true. All over the world, there are quite a few people who actually possess extraordinary superhuman capabilities such as the ability to generate heat with hands or the ability to run forever. In this article, we have made a list of 15 less-known people with extraordinary superhuman abilities.
Advertisements

1. Liew Thow Lin is a real life “Magneto” and can stick metal objects on his body. He is popularly known as “Magnet Man”, “Magnetic Man” or “Mr. Magnet”.



Magneto is a very well-known fictional character associated with X-men comics series. He has the ability to control any metal object. Liew Thow Lin from Malaysia has a similar superhuman capability. Even though he cannot control metal objects like Magneto, he can stick up to 36 kg of metal objects (each object weighing 2 kg) to his body without any adhesive. He can also pull a car using this ability. Liew discovered his ability to stick metal to his body at the age of 60 when his tools started getting stuck to his body.

When scientists at the University of Technology in Malaysia examined Liew, they found that his body does not contain any magnetic field. The credit goes to the high level of friction present in his skin. The abnormally high level of friction makes his body super-sticky providing a suction effect. Similar kind of ability is displayed by his three grandchildren proving that his sticky skin is genetic.

2. The internationally renowned Kung Fu, Tai Chi, and Qigong grandmaster Zhou Ting-Jue can generate extreme heat using only his hands. He can also stand on thin sheets of paper without falling through it.



Zhou Ting-Jue is an 89-year-old grandmaster of Kung Fu, Tai Chi, and Qigong. He is famous all over the world for his amazing ability to channel his inner Chi to generate heat through palms of his hands. The heat generated by him is quite close to the boiling point. He is also well known for his ability to shift his body weight from his legs to his chest due to which he can stand on a thin sheet of paper without going through it.

Zhou Ting-Jue is also a healer and claims that through his Qigong treatments, he can dissolve tumors, heal severe chronic injuries, and successfully treat “incurable diseases”. In the past, he had treated Dalai Lama, members of the LA Lakers basketball team, Olympic athletes, celebrities, and dignitaries. His achievements have earned him huge respect in China where he is known as “The Jewel of China” and “Treasure of the Nation”

3. Hailed as one of the most accomplished polyglots in history, Harold Whitmore Williams is said to have known more than 58 languages. He used his knowledge of languages as a tool of diplomacy and talked with every delegate of the League of Nations in their native language.



Harold Whitmore Williams was born in Auckland in 1876. He had stated that at the age of seven, he had ‘an explosion in his brain’ due to which his capacity of learning language grew to an extraordinary degree. His amazing capacity to learn new languages can be verified by the fact that in his lifespan of 52 years, he could speak more than 58 languages including English and Old Irish. He knew every language of Austrian Empire Hungarian, Czech, Albanian, Serbian, Rumanian, Swedish, Basque, Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Coptic, Egyptian, Hittite, and other dialects.

4. Michel Lotito from France can eat anything, including glass, metal, and even poisonous materials. He had even consumed an entire Cessna 150 airplane. Oddly enough, he has trouble eating and digesting bananas and hard-boiled eggs.



Michel Lotito is a French-based ‘entertainer’ who has the amazing ability to eat everything, and by everything, we literally mean everything. He can eat anything ranging from bicycles to an entire Cessna 150 airplane. This superhuman feat has achieved him the name “Monsieur Mangetout” which means “Mr. Eats All”. Between 1959 and 1997, he ate an estimated nine tons of metal. Michel suffers from a medical condition called Pica due to which he has a craving to eat dirt, glass, and anything metal.

Michel Lotito can eat metal without any harm to his digestive system owing to a very thick lining in his stomach and intestine. While eating an object, he usually breaks it into pieces and swallows them by drinking water and mineral oil. He consumes 1 kg of metal per day. That’s why it took him two years to eat the entire Cessna 150 airplane.

5. An autistic artist, Stephen Wiltshire, also known as Human Camera, has this amazing ability to draw any landscape from memory after seeing it just once. He stunned the world when he drew a spellbinding 19 feet long picture of New York from memory after a 20-minute helicopter ride over the city.



While visiting a new city we need a map, GPS or at least a reliable person to show us the right way. This is because our brain takes some time to create a mental map of any place when we visit it for the first time. The exception to this rule is an autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire. He had shocked the world with his ability to draw an extremely intricate, accurate, and detailed picture of entire cities from his memory based on the single, brief helicopter rides.

In May 2005, he drew a 32.8-feet-long panoramic memory drawing of Tokyo which he completed within seven days following a helicopter ride over the city. When Wiltshire created the panoramic drawing of Rome after a helicopter ride, he drew it in such great detail that the exact number of columns in the Pantheon was there. His longest ever panoramic memory drawing is a 250-feet-long drawing of New York which is now displayed on a giant billboard at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

6. Due to the physiological advantage of no lactose threshold, ultramarathon runner Dean Karnazes can run continuously for more than 3 days and nights without stopping and without sleeping.



For most people, running continuously for a few hours seems to be an impossible task. This is because each body has its own lactate threshold. Once we start performing some physical activities beyond the lactate threshold, our heart begins to pound rapidly, lungs gasp for air, and fatigue sets in the muscles. But none of these symptoms occur for ultramarathon runner Dean Karnazes, even when he keeps running for days and nights without any sleep.

This superhuman feat is achieved by Karnazes because of his lack of lactose threshold. He has completed some of the toughest endurance tests on the planet such as a marathon to the South Pole at a temperature of -25C without snowshoes. He had even run a marathon in 50 states in 50 consecutive days in the year 2006. For Karnazes, running for three days and nights without stopping is an easily achievable feat.

7. Famously known as the Human Computer, Shakuntala Devi was a human calculator who once defeated a UNIVAC computer by 12 seconds.



Born in an orthodox brahmin family, Shakuntala Devi’s mathematical ability was recognized by her father when he indulged his 3-year-old daughter in a game of cards. It turned out that the little girl easily beat her father by memorizing the cards. Since then, she and her father have headed out on foot to display her talents at school and business settings. By her teens, she moved on to a bigger stage in London, and soon, the child prodigy became famous all over the world as “Human Computer”. Her talent earned her a place in 1982 edition of Guinness Book of World Records when she multiplied two 13-digit numbers (7,686,369,774,870 and 2,465,099,745,779) and presented the answer (18,947,668,177,995,426,773,730) in just 28 seconds.

Some of her other famous mental calculation feats are:

  1. In 1977, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, she extracted the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds, beating a UNIVAC 1101 computer, which took its 62 seconds.
  2. In 1988, a professor of psychology, Arthur Jensen, decided to test her performance. So, she was asked to calculate the cube root of 61,629,875 and the seventh root of 170,859,375. Jensen reported that Shakuntala Devi provided her the solution (395 and 15, respectively) even before he could copy down the numbers in his notebook.
  3. While in a tour in Europe, once on the BBC and second at the University of Rome, her testers pronounced her wrong, but then, they had to admit calculation errors in their own work.


Shakuntala Devi was also a successful astrologer, cookbook writer, and novelist.

8. A woman named Veronica Seider has 20 times better vision than the average. She can identify people more than a mile (1.6 km) away.



Veronica Seider was born in West Germany in the year 1951. When she enrolled as a student in Stuttgart University in West Germany, her extraordinary vision came to the attention of the general public. The University claimed that Veronica could see details from as far as 1.6 km. Her superhuman vision can be derived from the fact that normal human being can barely see details from 20 feet away. While the visual acuity of a normal human eye is 20/20, Veronica has the acuity of 20/2. Veronica’s eyesight is comparable to that of a telescope as she claims that she can view the constituent colors that makeup color in color television sets.

9. Blinded at the age of 13 months, a man named Daniel Kish taught himself to see the world around him with bat-like echolocation. He has trained himself to hear the echo of a sharp click produced with his tongue and then interpret their meaning.



Daniel Kish was born with a form of eye cancer called retinoblastoma. To save his life, doctors removed both his eyeballs just when he was 13 months old. Daniel started using the technique of echolocation at the age of two. He says that clicking the tongue for echolocation came instinctively to him. Using this technique, he can detect buildings 1000 feet away, a tree 30 feet away, and a person six feet away. He can even echolocate a one-inch diameter pole nearby or a golf ball. Also, he can differentiate objects by using this technique. He can easily tell the difference between a pickup truck, a passenger car, and an SUV.

Daniel Kish is now the President of World Access for the Blind (WAFTB), which is a nonprofit organization founded by him in 2000. With the help of his organization, he had taught echolocation to at least 500 blind children around the world.

10. “The Iceman” is the nickname of a daredevil adventurer, Wim Hof, who has the ability to withstand extremely cold temperatures. He had even climbed to 67 kilometers altitude at Mount Everest wearing nothing but shorts and shoes.



Remember the time when your mom used to cover you from head to toes in winter so that you won’t suffer from the cold? Even when we grow up, we cover our body in warm clothes before stepping out in the chilly winter winds. But surprisingly, a Dutchman, Wim Hof, requires no such protection from cold. He has this incredible ability to withstand extremely cold temperatures due to which he earned him the nickname “The Iceman”. Wim Hof credits this superhuman ability to exposure to cold, meditation, and a breathing technique similar to Tibetian technique Tummo. He even scaled up to 67 kilometers altitude of Mount Everest wearing nothing but shorts and shoes. He couldn’t reach the top due to a recurring foot injury.

His other feats include:

  1. 2008: Hof created Guinness World Records by staying immersed in ice for 1 hour, 13 minutes and 48 seconds.
  2. 2009: In February, Hof reached the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in two days wearing just his shorts. In the same year, he completed a full marathon of 42.195 kilometers above the arctic circle in Finland. He finished in 5 hours 25 minutes wearing nothing but shorts.
  3. 2010: Hof broke the ice endurance record by staying immersed in ice for 1 hour 44 minutes.
  4. 2011: He again broke ice endurance record by staying immersed in ice for 1 hour 52 minutes and 42 seconds. In September he ran a full marathon in the Namib Desert without water.


11. Stig Severinsen is a Danish freediver who holds a Guinness World Record for holding his breath for 22 minutes. He is also a four-time world freediving champion.



While normally people start gasping for air within a few minutes of diving under the water, Danish freediver Stig Severinsen can hold his breath for 22 minutes under the water. Severinsen started swimming at the age of 6. He became National Champion four times in a row at the age of 9,10,11, and 12. While studying in Barcelona, he played underwater hockey on the Spanish National Team.
Advertisements

His amazing feats are:

  1. Severinsen achieved Guinness World record in March 2010 when he swam 236 feet under ice, wearing only swimming trunks and goggles.
  2. In April 2010, he inhaled pure oxygen and then, held his breath for 20 minutes 10 seconds in a tank full of sharks at the Kattegat Centre in Grenaa.
  3. He created Guinness World Record in May 2012 by holding his breath for 22 minutes in a tank filled with water cooled to 30F.
  4. In April 2013, he set two new world records. One for “longest swim underwater – breathe held” when he swam 500 feet in 2 minutes and 11 seconds while wearing a wet suit and monofin. Another one for 250 feet wearing only swimming trunks.
  5. He also holds four AIDA freediving world records.


12. In Japan, a man who calls himself a modern-day samurai warrior can slice a speeding bullet in half. His seemingly superhuman feat has been videotaped, and the camera had to slow down by 250 times for viewers to watch the movement of his sword.



Japanese laido master Isao Machii can move his sword so fast that he can cut a speeding bullet in half. For normal people, it is impossible to even view a bullet fired from a gun. But laido master Isao Machii can not only watch the bullet shot from a pistol, but he can also cut the bullet in half mid-air. His sword movement is so fast that it is impossible for a normal human eye to catch the act. So, he was filmed at a firing range outside Los Angles with a special camera. The film was then slowed down 20 times for the viewers to watch the act.

Isao Machii also holds many Guinness World Records for his katana skills. Some of them are “Most martial arts katana cuts to one mat (suegiri)”, “Fastest 1,000 martial arts sword cuts”, “Most sword cuts to straw mats in three minutes” and “Fastest tennis ball (820 km/h) cut by a sword”.

13. In Sacramento, California there lives an apiculturist called Norman Gary who not only raises bees but also has the amazing ability to summon and control bees.



Bee wrangler and apiculturist Dr. Norman E. Gary is unlike any other apiculturist in the world. This is because he can handle thousands of bees and summon and control them. Due to his unique ability, he had worked in the sets of a number of movies such as The X-Files: Fight the Future, Terror Out of the Sky, Invasion of the Bee Girls, The Savage Bees, and Leonard Part 6. He has also been featured in a number of TV shows such as Fear Factor, The Tonight Show, Real TV, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and others.

14. An autistic American, Laurence Kim Peek, also known as Megasavant, was the only savant known to science who could read two pages of a book simultaneously – one with each eye. He also has an exceptional memory.



In the movie “Rain Man”, it is impossible to miss the character of Raymond Babbit performed by Dustin Hoffman. This character is inspired from the “megasavant” Laurence Kim Peek. Kim Peek is known for his exceptional memory. According to his father, he started memorizing things just when he was just 16 – 20 months old. He can read a whole book within an hour and can remember almost everything he reads. His unique reading technique include reading left page with left eye and right page with right eye.

15. Mas Oyama, a karate master, would fight live bulls with his bare hands during his martial arts demonstrations. Occasionally, he would kill them with a single blow, earning him the nickname “Godhand.”



Mas Oyama was a Korean karate master who spent most of his life in Japan and founded the Kyokushin Karate. Along with his karate skills, Mas Oyama was also known for fighting bulls bare-handed. He used to give a public demonstration of bull-fighting and had battled 52 bulls in his lifetime. Out of the 52, he had killed 3 bulls instantly with just one strike. This seemingly impossible act earned him the name “Godhand”.