Top 10 Craziest Escape Plans In History
You may think of the famous Alcatraz escape, or drug lord El Chapo’s breakouts. But escape plans aren’t only for criminals. Take Harriet Tubman’s escape for example. Here are 10 Craziest Escape Plans In History. Before we go through, remember to share this to your Friends!
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10. The Canadian Caper
Let’s kick off with a plan so crazy that it could easily be the plot of a movie, which it actually was. Eventually. The Canadian Caper was led by the joint forces of the Canadian government and the CIA on the 14th of November 1979. The aim? To help six American diplomats to escape, the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran, after it was seized.
The diplomats escaped the assault and turned to the Canadian embassy, who gave them shelter. Meanwhile, Tony Mendez, the authentication chief of the CIA’s Graphics and Authentication division, developed a plan to convince the Iranians the group was a Canadian film crew, who were scouting locations for Argo, a sci-fi movie set in outer space. The plan required the CIA to set up a whole movie production office and generate publicity for a fake film. They also had to obtain Canadian passports
and trained the group in how to sound Canadian. Amazingly, despite all the things that could have possibly gone wrong, the plan worked.
On 27 January 1980, the fake-film-crew took an early morning flight to Frankfurt untroubled Ironically, this was then adapted into a movie by Ben Affleck in 2012 entitled Argo.
9. The Korean Houdini
We hear every day that age doesn’t matter. And here’s a story to prove it. Also, you will find out that a 50-year old man is more flexible than you. In 2012, Choi Gap-bok, known as a yoga master after improving his physical fitness for 23 years during previous detentions, was arrested on suspicion of robbery. He was put in a detention cell at the police station in the city of Daegu, South Korea.
However, after just five days, he managed to escape by applying skin ointment on the upper part of his body and squeezed through a tiny food slot at the bottom of the cell. As reported by Dongbu Police Station, Gap-bok put his plan in motion at 5 am, while all the police officers on duty w
ere sleeping. He managed to escape his cell in just 34 seconds, and by the end of one minute, he had already left the building.
Sadly for him, his yoga skills couldn’t prevent his second arrest, six days later, when the authorities placed him in a cell with a much smaller food slot.
8. High-Wire Escape
Living in East Berlin from 1961 to 1989 was a nightmare. From one day to another, entire families were being split apart. And, as if being cut off from your family, friends and the rest of the world wasn’t enough, the censorship took care of the rest. Horst Klein was a trapeze artist living on the East side of the Wall. He’d been banned from performing for being anti-communist, which was unbearable for him. So, In December 1962 he decided to climb an electricity pole near the wall and made his way onto a cable, hanging on it from both arms. He knew what he was risking: if he touched the t
ower and the cable at the same time he’d been electrocuted, and if the East German soldiers spotted him, they would have shot him right away.
Steadily, he inched his way into the West, moving one hand over the other. Just as he made it over the border, his hands had numbed from the cold and he fell from 12 meters, breaking both his arms. So yeah, this wasn’t a successful plan in EVERY way...
Luckily, he soon recovered and was able to perform again.
7. Dazzle Camouflage
Think of Art and War together, what comes to your mind?
Perhaps Picasso's Guernica...But what British artist Norman Wilkinson did in 1917 was beyond all limits. He actually merged Art and War together, through a technique he invented himself. During World War I, Wilkinson was assigned to submarine patrols. At the time, one of the most feared and effective weapons used by Germany was its fleet of submarines. The British didn’t know what to do. Until Wilkinson saved the day… Wilkinson thought - if hiding a ship on the ocean is impossible, why not make it even MORE visible? He suggested painting ships with startling stripes, in such a way as to break up their form to confuse enemies. The patterns would make it more difficult to figure out the ship’s size, speed, distance and direction, making it a target harder to hit, and therefore easier to escape. So Dazzle Camouflage was born.
At the time, results suggested that dazzled boats may have been struck more often, but less effectively, by the enemy during the war. However, experts today are not so sure the technique was actually effective.
6. Messages Through Cornrows
In recent years, cornrows have become the favorite hairstyle for women of many cultures. Whereas it used to be worn by children, especially young African and African American girls, the style has become widely popular across women of all ages. But while to many braids are just a fashionable way to style their hair, to African American culture it’s so much more than mere aesthetics. During the Atlantic Slave Trade, cornrows became a secret messaging system for slaves to communicate with one another underneath their masters’ noses. It is most documented in Colombia where Benkos Bioho, an escaped slave, who was the first to come up with that idea in the 17th century. No one ever thought slaves could hide entire maps in their hairstyle, so it was easy to circulate them without being noticed. So, for instance, the number of plaits worn could indicate how many roads people needed to walk. They also used braids to hide gold and seeds which, in the long run, would have helped them
to survive. Pretty clever, don’t you think?
I bet you’ll never look at women’s hairstyles the same way…
5. Hot-Air Balloon Escape
Hans Strelczyk, a former aircraft mechanic, and his friend Gunter Wetzel [vet-zell] had been dreaming of leaving East Berlin for years. But, with a challenge already in itself hard to achieve solo, having their families to bring with them would have made any escape plan impossible. However, one night, a tv ocumentary on air-ballooning gave Hans an idea... After consulting with Gunter, they decided to build a hot-air balloon to cross the border without being noticed by the guards. Their wives would have stitched the balloon together out of pieces of old canvas and bedsheets. After two failed attempts, the third balloon, built with an engine made from four old propane cylinders, was ready. On the night of 16 September 1979, the two men gathered their wives and their four children onto the highest nearby hill. They floated toward West Germany at 2,400 metres, but, as they appro
ached the border, searchlights turned on them. Luckily though, they were already too far for the lights to make them visible.
Finally, when the balloon ran out of gas, they landed safe and sound in a Bavarian blackberry thicket.
4. Freaky Friday Escape
A gang leader wearing pink, and not even on Wednesday!
On 4 August 2019, Clauvino da Silva, a Brazilian gang leader and a member of Brazil's Red Command drug faction, was caught trying to escape from a prison in Rio De Janeiro. And so far nothing strange, but hear me out… Da Silva was serving a 73-year sentence when he tried to esc
ape with the help of a silicone mask, a black bra and wig, and a skin-tight T-shirt emblazoned with three pink doughnuts. According to the gangster, known by his alias Baixinho, which means Shorty, had planned to trick prison officers into thinking he was his 19-year-old daughter, who had been visiting him.
And, to be fair, his plan was actually working. According to wardens, it was Da Silva’s nervousness that gave him away. It’s still not clear what Shorty planned to do with his daughter once he
made it out of jail. You know, a woman in a male prison, sooner or later - but mostly sooner - might be noticed.
In any case, wardens caught him and posted the video of him unmasking online.
3. Cycle Espionage
During WWII, the work of the resistance fighters was vitally important to win the war and to save innocent lives. Any small action could have made the difference and anyone with the sense of what is right and a bit of courage could have joined them. Some of those daily heroic acts have never found a voice to come up. In other cases, a thoughtful son, following his father’s death, may reveal his dad’s brave act. In 2003, Andrea Bartali, son of Italian champion road cyclist Gino Bartali, published a memoir on his father’s life. As stated in the book, during WWII, right when Bartali was reaching the peak of his career, he was asked by the Cardinal of Florence to join a secret network. The organization
offered protection and safe passage for Jews and other endangered people.
Bartali became a courier. On the surface, he was training in long rides for the races. In reality,
hidden in the frame and handlebars of his bicycle, he was carrying photographs and counterfeit identity documents to help oppressed people to leave the country.
2. Wooden Horse Escape
War brings out the worst in most people. But there are always kind human beings who prove that peaceful cooperation of individuals is possible even in the most extreme circumstances. During WWII, Stalag Luft III was a war camp for prisoners who tried to escape and held captured Western Allied air force personnel. In 1943, three brilliant men came up with a plan that would have set them and many other people free.
Lieutenant Michael Codner, Flight Lieutenant Eric Williams and Oliver Philpot decided to construct a vaulting horse and used it to cover the opening of a tunnel entrance close to the perimeter fence. If there’s one place where they teach you teamwork pays off, is the army.
They knew they had to trust each other and the other prisoners, if they wanted the plan to work. So, while they dug the tunnel, the other camp inmates vaulted continuously over the
horse to mask the vibration of the tunneling work. Once they escaped through the tunnel, by posing as French laborers, the trio made their way by train to the Baltic and then headed to Britain.
1. Escape From Auschwitz
Many Holocaust survivors’ testimonies, unfortunately, not as many as we wish, have documented the horrors behind the walls of concentration camps. But Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler ’s report was the very first written evidence of the mass murder that took place between 1941 and 1945. Vrba and Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944. The two men climbed inside a space they had prepared in a pile of wood stacked between the camp’s fences. They stuffed the logs with Russian tobacco soaked in gasoline to put off sniffer dogs and hid there. The following day the Gestapo started searching
for the fugitives. They knew from previous escape attempts that the guards would have searched for them just for three days. So they waited there, soaking wet, with strips of flanne
l tightened across their mouths to muffle coughing, for three nights. On the fourth night, using a page from a children’s
atlas as a guide, the pair slipped out and headed toward Slovakia. Some Polish peasants gave them shelter along the way, and finally, eight days later, they crossed the border.
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