Believe it or Not

There is a saying truth is stranger than fiction. It means some real happenings are harder to believe than made up stories. Over the years I have collected a large number of such stories from news papers, local and foreign. Going through these stories recently, I thought of sharing some of them with Junior Observer readers. Here is the story of a nine-year-old boy who was a week in a well and how a toddler landed on the top of a tree.

Toddler lands on tree top

Do you know what a tornado is? It is a violent storm with whirling winds. Tornadoes are quite frequent in the southern states of America, especially in Florida the peninsular at the South Western tip of the United States.About 10 years ago dozens of tornadoes, some with winds reaching 210 miles per hour (MPH), slammed into Central Florida.

Roofs were torn from houses, pick-up trucks were on top of a tree, a super market was reduced to twisted metal and seven people were killed. Debris from destroyed homes lay everywhere.An 18-month-old infant was hurled into the air and he fell-where? Onto his own mattress which had been blown into the branches of a tree.

Jonathan Waldick was in the bedroom of his parents’ wood frame house which was destroyed as the tornado struck. Jonathan and his mattress had been snapped up by the swirling winds and carried outside. The wind had snapped off the top of a large oak tree and deposited the mattress in the branches. Jonathan landed on the mattress. Rescuers spent 40 minutes searching for the toddler. They feared that he was buried under the rubble of his bed room. As they were looking for any sign of the boy, one man spotted a foot sticking out from a mattress up on a tree. He climbed up the tree and found a toddler lying there, not moving and eyes open. He called out to the others.

Rescuers kept looking at him,. They thought he was dead. In a little while he moved. He was brought down carefully and taken to hospital. Doctors examined him and said there was nothing more than a bump on the head. Other stories of strange survivals came to light, as President Clinton began to tour the area.

No sign of Tiago

Tiago Felix de Souza is a boy in Brazil. He is the 11th in the family and when this happened he was nine-years-old. On a December day he took lunch to his father who was working on a farm, and didn’t return. His mother waited and waited, but there was no sign of Tiago.

When the father came back from work the mother told him that Tiago had vanished. What could have happened? Where had he gone? The father was non-plussed. What a tragedy and it was just before Christmas.

Benedicto de Souza gave up his job on the farm to look for his son. He and the family and a few neighbours searched and searched for a whole week, but all in vain.Then, on Sunday, Christmas Day as Beneidcto was walking past a well covered by vegetation, he heard a voice-someone calling for help. He stopped and listened. It was a voice calling for help.

He went to what looked like a deep pit, cleared the grass and plants and looked below. There at the bottom of this deep well was his son. He called out to the family. They came and so did some of the neighbours. They couldn’t haul the boy up. Fire fighters were called and they hauled up the boy. The well was 65 feet deep.

Tiago was rushed to the intensive care ward in a hospital in the nearest town. Doctors who examined Tiago said he was exhausted and famished, but he had no broken bones.Tiago told rescuers that he survived by drinking rain water.