10 Insane Things That Happened In Oregon You Won’t Find In History Books

In 1970, something extremely strange happened on the Oregon Coast near Florence. A dead 8-ton whale washed ashore, and no one was quite sure what to do with the enormous carcass. They decided to use dynamite to disintegrate the body, but as you might expect, things didn't go quite as planned. It literally rained huge chunks of blubber all over the area; some pieces were so big they smashed cars. The whole thing was caught on film, if you want to see for yourself just search "oregon exploding whale" on YouTube.

In 1971, an Oregonian astronaut by the name of Stuart Roosa brought a capsule full of tree seeds on a trip to the moon and back to see if the trees would germinate upon returning. To the amazement of many, the trees did grow, and six of them were planted right here in Oregon. The rest of the seeds were given as gifts and are scattered across the world.

If the coin had landed on the other side, Oregon's big city would have been named Boston.

In 1950, someone took this photo of a flying saucer in the sky above McMinnville, Oregon. The photo was published all over the world creating a controversy so big the FBI even looked into it.

In 1974, a Bigfood Trap was erected by the North American Wildlife Research Team in the Siskiyou National Forest. They weren't joking around - the trap was kept baited with animal carcasses for six years!

Oregon's gold rush is quite famous, but most people aren't aware that during the Cold War Oregon had a Uranium Rush as well! People came to southeast Oregon from all over hoping to find uranium and score the big bucks.

Until 1970, anyone in Oregon could buy or make dynamite. There were plenty of practical ways the dynamite was used (for farming, construction, etc.) but of course not everyone was very responsible about it; dynamite was also used quite often for jailbreaking and train robbing.

Speaking of jails, in 1963 a small jail house was surprisingly found standing conspicuously in the middle of Canyon City. As it turned out, an unidentified group of people had stolen the entire jail from the nearby ghost town of Greenhorn and brought it to Canyon City for unknown reasons.

In 1938, 70 pairs of sandals were found in a Central Oregon cave preserved beneath a layer of volcanic ash from the same eruption that created Crater Lake. The shoes turned out to be more than 10,000 years old, making them the oldest shoes in the world.