The Scream Was Stolen Twice — Once by Masked Gunmen in Broad Daylight

The tempera version of The Scream hanging in the National Museum survived two separate thefts. On the opening day of the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics, thieves broke into the National Gallery, cut the painting from the wall in under a minute, and left behind a note thanking the museum for its "bad security." It turned up undamaged at a hotel south of Oslo about three months later. A decade after that, a different version of the painting was stolen again — this time by masked gunmen who walked into the Munch Museum in broad daylight and took it along with Munch's Madonna at gunpoint. That painting stayed missing for two years before police finally recovered it.

The man behind the Kon-Tiki expedition spent most of his life afraid of the water he became famous for crossing. Thor Heyerdahl nearly drowned twice as a child and didn't learn to swim properly until his twenties, yet at thirty-two he set out on a balsa-wood raft to sail thousands of miles across the Pacific and prove his theory that ancient South Americans could have settled Polynesia. He spent months at sea fending off curious sharks, by his own account frightened for his life more than once — proof that his conviction about the theory mattered more to him than his own fear of the ocean.