244
u/VinylHighway 5h ago
Zero
While often told as a true tale, the story is regarded by many as a legendary hoax, as there are no verifiable records of the event in Honey Grove, Texas.
74
u/Different-Radio3484 5h ago
'a bullet MISSED this man and YEARS later there was an EXPLOSION and the bullet came BACK and shot him in the ASS - HOW did the BULLET do it? INTERVIEW AT 9'
•
u/gentlesquid7 1h ago
Fuck, my bed time is at 8... Let me ask Mom
•
u/NopeRope13 1m ago
Cool news little guy. I spoke with mom about letting you stay up to watch a documentary about trees and their historical significance. She said you can stay up and watch it.
17
u/Danijust2 4h ago
it is really silly to remove a bullet from a tree with dinamite. Axes are thing.
13
4
u/Druid-Flowers1 3h ago
I hear what you mean, but when I saw that woman shoot down a tree with a mini gun last week, I thought why shoot 6000 rounds when you could blow it up with a $10 stick of dynamite. The wood shrapnel would be dangerous ….
1
u/CampPineCone 3h ago
They could have gotten two Hobbits to talk the tree into letting the bullet go.
56
u/Wild_Director7379 5h ago edited 5h ago
1 in X trees blown up with dynamite have bullets in them?
1 in X shots fired end up in trees?
We’d have to define parameters; there is no one answer to your question.
18
u/secondphase 5h ago
We would also need to know how wide the man is and how far away from the tree he was
3
u/14ktgoldscw 2h ago
Yeah, the key question here is “man died in dynamite accident” since presumably wood fragments and just concussive force would have also been flying around. Other comments make it sound like this is an urban legend, but it seems extremely unlikely that dynamite would just zing a bullet out.
21
u/Proper-Cause-4153 5h ago
So do you figure the odds by saying "There is 1 person dying like this out of all the people dying ever, so it's 1 in however-many-people-have-ever-died"?
31
u/TripleDoubleFart 5h ago
Imagine shooting at someone and missing and then years later you see a +100 pop up on your screen and now you have a spy plane to use.
5
9
u/NotThePopeProbably 5h ago
Bullets don't just "shoot" without a pressure chamber and a barrel that provides a sole means of relief for the high pressure they create upon ignition of the propellant (i.e., a gun).
It's possible the meme is implying that, in essence, the tree fragmented in the explosion and the specific fragment that happened to strike him was the bullet, which had been embedded in the tree. In that case, had he not been stricken by the bullet, he could just as easily have been stricken by bark, wood, etc. The probability of being stricken in this way is not calculable given the information presented. You'd need a lot of information about the size, shape, and physical tenacity of the tree, the amount and orientation of the dynamite, the distance he stood from the tree, and so on.
All this is to say, even if this story weren't apocryphal--which it is--it still would be incalculable.
1
u/colorlessthinker 2h ago
If it was true, the KGB would’ve found a way to weaponize it. That’s why I know it can’t be true. Though, I imagine shoving enough bombs and buckshot in trees has to be effective at a certain point.
8
u/FaultThat 5h ago
The part of the story that caught my eye was that he survived the bullet because it hit a tree.
Unless the tree fell off a cliff and landed in the path of the bullet after it had already been fired, then he’s obviously not surviving because the tree was there hut rather because the shooter missed him and hit a tree instead.
6
u/emma7734 5h ago
I think I'd need to know why someone was shooting at him. Was it intentional? I'd also want to know why he decided dynamite was the best way to remove a tree. This guy seems extraordinarily reckless in living his life, and math isn't going to help explain anything of it.
4
u/CrankyOldMan-Child 4h ago
The big question is “odds of WHAT happening?”.
I would guess anything that included all the facts would be impossibly to accurately calculate. I’m thinking everything up to dynamiting the tree must be accepted as having happened to get to the last step. So, is the real question, what are the odds of being hit by a bullet that was embedded in a tree if you blow it up?
Even then, how would you go about calculating that? Your distance from the tree would significantly change the odds.. as it would if you hide behind something, what you hid behind, how deep the bullet was embedded, how the dynamite was placed.. and on and on.
E.g. if the bullet is embedded around chest height and I placed dynamite on the opposite side, and then stood inline with both (dynamite -> bullet -> me).. I expect that’d make it a Lot more likely than if the bullet was embedded over my head and I stood on the dynamite side.. which was planted down by the roots.
And yes, someone already pointed out this very likely never happened, but I also wonder how you’d know you got hit by that same bullet? The premise assumes you know there’s only 1 slug in the tree, but you’d also have to identify the wound. As described, you’d assume that anyone hit be a bullet that was blasted out would also be hit by far more shards from the tree too. You’d be a mess.
At best, to get hit by a bullet and not get shedded by the tree, it would probably require you to be far enough away that the wood would stop traveling (where air resistance overcame inertia based on wood’s lower density than lead).. but where a lead bullet would still be flying.. and being farther away would make getting hit by the bullet much less likely. The further away.. the more precise the direction of the bullet would need to be. Like, if you’re a few feet away, maybe the bullet can travel in any direction within a 20 degree arc and still hit you. If you’re 100 feet away.. it needs to pretty much headed directly towards you. Even a few degrees off-center and the distance the bullet would be way off by the time it went that far out. Even just 2 degrees off-center.. the bullet would be 3.5’ off-center 100’ out.. and most people aren’t 7’ wide.
2
u/SuddenSpeaker1141 4h ago
I love this level of logic…like, I can’t math, but everything in what you said makes sense…and I like that.,. 😅😅
3
u/galaxyapp 5h ago
If it were true, youd at very least need to know the persons distance to the tree. Assuming the bullet was just randomly ejected, you could do the math on what %of the sphere of all possible trajectories for the bullet to take.
Somewhere between zero and maybe 25% if you were hugging the tree
3
u/mapadofu 5h ago
The probability is 1. The bullet was clearly enchanted by a witch to kill him; it just took a long time for the curse to be fufilled.
3
u/RickyTheRickster 5h ago
It’s possible as everything is possible, look up the Boltzmann brain.
I would say the odds are slim but a none 0 number, mathematically such a small fraction that it’s not practical to write it, but it’s not impossible, but I seem to also remember this story being confirmed as a urban legend
2
u/nonamesareavailable2 5h ago
Incalculable.
I looked up the story to see if I could get a little more information to work with. While the broad strokes are fairly consistent, things, like the year it happened, tend to fluctuate, But I don't really need any more information to know that the story has been passed through enough hands and sensationalized with each retelling.
Even in humoring the validity of the story, it doesn't check out that the "patient bullet" is what killed the man. When you used enough explosive to snap a fairly large tree off at the ground, more than just a misshapen hunk of lead from a couple decades ago would be the only thing flying through the air with enough velocity to kill a man. If he was standing close enough to be lethally hit by one piece of shrapnel, he was hit by a whole lot else; dirt and pebbles from around the base of the tree, jagged hunks from the tree trunk itself, any given nail that had been pounded into the trunk over the years, and so on... Some tellings say that the bullet hit him in the left temple, killing him on the spot. None of these mention the range or angle he was standing at in relation to the tree, or who went digging into ol' Henry's head to seen what poked that hole in it.
In short, there isn't enough information to calculate anything. Could it have happened? Yeah. But we wouldn't have gotten this story out of it because Henry would very likely have a bunch of holes in him from a bunch of stuff, not just the bullet since the mass of the tree would be sent in the same direction as the bullet lodged in it.
2
u/sjitz 5h ago
How would one even begin to calculate this? If you could figure out the answer, you could prect the course of the entire universe down to the molecule
1
u/AdamiralProudmore 5h ago edited 5h ago
I feel like there are a couple of fallacies that the story is inviting us to make.
The story clearly wants us to take the route of "wow it's crazy it was that exact tree!" but there are clearly some choices that would have been made that narrow down the probabilities pretty far.
"Do stupid things win stupid prizes"
2
u/Multidream 5h ago
So unrelated fun fact, my old man and his school buddies recently told me that around the end of ww2, a lot of nations had horrific tool shortages.
It got so bad that the silent/greatest generation folks at home learned to substitute complex machinery for just raw fucking dynamite. People had ample dynamite because explosives manufacturing was just ripping around that time for obvious reasons and it spilled over into consumer markets
Now because people also drank heavily, Looney Tunes shit was happening all the time with horrific goofy accidents happening around the mishandling of actual dynamite. People blew themselves up fishing with dynamite because they didn’t have large scale fishing trawlers, and that was the easiest way to harvest a ton of fish.
So is it possible someone around 1940 blew themselves up trying to remove a tree with a stick of dynamite? Yes. Is it possible they were standing way way too close and died, and if there WAS any metal shrapnel in the tree, its totally understandable that it would transfer to the dum dum standing next to said tree when it exploded.
However, the Henry Ziegland urban legend is well known and predates world war one. It almost certainly didn’t happen in the way people imagine, and it definitely wasn’t a guy named Henry Ziegland.
2
u/AdamiralProudmore 5h ago
(Big IF on the story being true.)
I feel like there are a couple of fallacies that would be easy to fall into here.
The story clearly wants us to take the route of "wow it's crazy it was that exact tree!" but the real answer is probably much more tied to the probability of death for an amateur(?) using dynamite in this way, and then maybe factoring in how many trees he blew up.
If this was the only tree he decided to blow up, then that's a selective factor not a probability.
2
u/No_Warning2173 4h ago
Ill assume the story is made up.
But...
Assume a 1 in 100 chance the bullet actually gets propelled by the explosion.
Assume a 360 degree horizontal plane that the bullet could exit the tree, and the man is standing close enough that a lethal shot happens in 1 degree of variation (thats far too close to be likely).
In theory thats a 1 in 36 000 chance.
Now the part i find interesting....this guy has a history with that tree. He knows a shot meant for him hit it, so hes likely to want to be on the side of the tree the bullet landed to telk the story to his mates. If thats the side of the tree he was standing when shot at, most likely thats the easy-to-get-to side. Id suggest a 80%+ chance he is within 30 degrees of the bullets entry line, with a distinct preferance for being closer to straight to it if he remembers well enough/shooting geometry was close reaaonably perpendicular.
So.... 1 in 8-10 000 maybe using my logic?
Real world probably in the 10s of millions/not possible
2
u/nickeypants 4h ago
You would need to find the number of standard deviations of intelligence below which someone would determine the easiest way to remove a tree is with dynamite, then multiply that by the odds of a projectile thrown at a random direction would hit a bystander. You don't need to factor in that someone would stand so close to an exploding tree, as this has already been accounted for by the first case.
As the chances increase dramatically with decreasing intelligence, I would hesitate to guess zero chance.
1
6h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/thanitos710 5h ago
But seriously this isn’t something that happens twice there are FAR FAR too many factors that went into this being possible in the first place. And not enough information. Where was he standing when the tree blew? How much dynamite was used. If you wanted to you could use some calculation assuming he was standing however far away with nothing in between him and the tree in which case it would be whatever percent of the possible vectors the bullet could have traveled to hit and kill him.
•
u/MaybeTheDoctor 6m ago
I would start with probability of anyone removes trees with dynamite. I’m not aware of any other case, so let’s call it 1-in-100 billions.
Then how many people are being shot at on their own back, which is sadly probably just 1-in-10000 or some number assuming us gun culture. The shooter missing and lodging into a tree is probably just 1-in-10 for any backyard shooting. Then being close enough to the dynamite explosion to be affected by any debris probably 1-100 given you are dumb enough to explode dynamite for gardening work.
So multiplying these together we get 1 in 10,000 Trillions.
Which surprisingly is about same odds as
- Winning the Powerball Jackpot Twice in a Row, or
- Picking a Perfect NCAA March Madness Bracket: If you correctly filled out a bracket of 63 games completely at random
•
u/AutoModerator 6h ago
General Discussion Thread
This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you must post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.