Danger - Falling (absurd) Objects:
Blue Ice. There are several known cases of houses being struck by frozen airplane-lavatory waste, euphemistically known as “blue ice.” The ice can form when a plane’s lavatory develops an external leak; frozen at high altitude, the waste warms and dislodges as a plane descends. Luckily, there are no known instances of people being struck by blue ice.
Suicide Jumpers. At least one case exists in which a person has been struck and killed by another (falling) person: just this year, a Ukrainian man was crushed and killed in Barcelona by a 45-year-old woman who had thrown herself out of her 8th-story window in an act of apparent suicide.
Pennies. Empire State Building + dropped penny = fatality, or so the myth goes. In reality, there are no recorded instances of a falling penny (or any coin, for that matter) injuring/killing a pedestrian. The popular science show Mythbusters disproved this urban legend based on a penny’s light weight and low terminal velocity (64 mph), going so far as to fire a penny at a co-host’s hand at the correct velocity. It merely left a welt.
Coconuts. They do not, as occasionally claimed, “kill around 150 people worldwide each year” (see the Straight Dope’s thorough debunking of this claim), but coconut-related injuries are reported every year. A report by the ANZ Journal of Surgery states that, in 5 years, 19 people were admitted to the Solomon Islands’ Central Referral Hospital with falling-coconut-related injuries: “16 patients had a coconut fruit fall on them,” and a further “three patients had a coconut palm [i.e. the whole tree] fall on them.”
