Page 8 - IAV Digital Magazine #617

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Climber Rescued Twice From Mt. Fuji After Returning For Lost Phone
Uruguay Man's Eye- popping Trick Earns Him A World Record
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Ks4L9oDBw
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VHQesWLD64A
By Ben Hooper
April 28 (UPI) -- A Uruguay man living in Italy found himself with a Guinness World Records title thanks to an unusual party trick: popping his eyes out of their sockets.
Williams Martin Sanchez Lopez, who is from Montevideo, Uruguay, and currently lives in Milan, Italy, said he learned when he was about 8 or 9 years old that he was able to relax the muscles around his eyes and cause his eye- balls to pop out like a car- toon character.
"It started when I was a kid," he told Guinness World Records. "I could basically move the upper and lower part of the mus- cles around my eyes, [and] over time I perfected my skill until at last I was able to move the eye completely out of its socket."
Lopez's doctor performed official measurements and found his eyes could pop .74 inches out of their sock- ets, enough to earn him the title for the farthest eyeball pop (male).
"The funniest thing is when maybe a person doesn't realize what they're about to see, when I come close to them and pop out my entire eyeball in this way, people definitely don't just sit there and watch, but they basical- ly jump two meters high," Williams said.
Williams' bizarre talent has made him a star on social media, where commenters ask him to perform his trick while saying their names.
"I'm a person that likes to kid around and laugh, so the fact that I can pop out my eyes, let's say that it's a very different point of view in general," he said.
By Tom Sanders
A mountain climber had to be rescued from Mt. Fuji twice in the space of a week after he returned to the same spot days later to retrieve his lost phone.
The 27-year-old moun- taineer, a Chinese college student living in Japan, first made the ascent on Tuesday but had to be res- cued from the 12,000-foot peak after losing his cram- pons—a spiked device attached to the bottom of climbing shoes which allows for better traction. But on Friday, just days after being airlifted from the summit, the hapless climber returned to Mt. Fuji in a vain attempt to recover a backpack containing
some of his lost belongings, including his phone—and had to be rescued again.
After scaling 9,842 feet, the climber developed altitude sickness, and was once again airlifted back to safe- ty. It is unknown whether he recovered his lost phone.
Due to harsh weather con- ditions, people are discour- aged from scaling Mt. Fuji outside of the official climb- ing season, which runs from July to September.
It now costs 4,000 yen ($28) to scale the mountain after a tourist tax was implemented in 2024, and the mountain is limited to 4,000 visitors a day.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine