Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for March 31, 2021

Baltimore Orioles may eat a lot of caterpillars, but can they catch flies?

where can one even find one dozen caterpillars plus four individuals within a sixty-second timeframe in that Maryland city?

I guess you could use the shotgun to recoil yourself back to the spaceship.

Those shotguns must have been a pretty good deterrent. They were never threatened by anyone while they were in space.

They were expecting monsters, I guess. But there’s nothing out there but a bunch of dirt.

Why would anyone want a shotgun in space? Wouldn’t a shot put a hole in the spacecraft, letting out the oxygen?

They must’ve gots the shotguns just in case them aliens shows up.

Cosmonauts landed on the ground in areas where there may be bears.

Technically, the cosmonaut shotgun (properly dubbed the TP-82 survival pistol) was mainly to be used upon landing in the wilderness to defend them from wild animals…

…a concern mainly held during the days of the Voskhod capsule because of the fears of one crazy cosmonaut. (That same crazy cosmonaut would have been the USSR’s Neil Armstrong had their moon program not been cancelled. Anyway, the Leonov crater was named in his honour, so I suppose that’s something.)

Admittedly, the buttstock machete would have been a nice feature to implement in the survival rifles of today.

See the history of this unique weapon below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TP-82_Cosmonaut_survival_pistol

And they can play great baseball

Would a shotgun have even worked in zero gravity?

They brought them in case something went wrong and they had to do some trouble shooting.

I don’t get it… they do that when they win or when they lose the game? :D

is that why the orioles finish last every year?

I don’t know, but doesn’t Russia have gun control laws?

More crazy, unsubstantiated ornithology and weren’t the Soviets then defying the non-militarization of space agreements?

The cosmonauts gun was because their re-entry capsules landed on the ground, not in the ocean like the US. Apparently, once capsule landed off course in Siberia and the guys almost got eaten by a bear. So, the gun from that point on. I imagine there was also vodka on board. Vodka, guns, Russians…what could go wrong?

As a “waterless” planet, I would think that all land on Mars is dry. The belief is that there is some underground water at the poles but it is covered with “dry land”.

A low powered shot gun because the BBs would not pierce the skin of the space vehicle whereas a bullet would, I guess. The same landmass because it is much smaller but mostly land, very little water, just around the poles, I guess.

Shotguns – first line of defense for aliens wanting to probe you…

If the Mars surface is not dry, what is it? Is there ice/water on Mars?

I could see taking a gun to the moon just to know what it’s like to shoot the surface.

Shotguns? I’d love to know the justification for such a weapon!

does Mars have wet land

Shotguns in space: I empathize, especially after seeing those Alien, Aliens, etc., movies. (Corporal Hicks: Eat this!)(The end of his shotgun in the Alien’s mouth, just before pulling the trigger).

I was under the impression that the shotguns were for use after the Soyuz had landed, to discourage the wolves who probably looked at the returning capsule as a canned ham

If “sashimi” is “raw fish”; what is “raw insect”? Asking for a friend (above) …

Is that the bird or the team?…

About the Cosmonauts…why?