W W Pool

popular name: Julia Lennon

date_of_death: July 15, 1958

age: 44

cause_of_death: Blunt force trauma - stuck by automobile

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Julia Lennon was the mother of English musician John Lennon, who was born during her marriage to Alfred Lennon. After complaints to Liverpool's Social Services by her eldest sister Mimi Smith (née Stanley), she surrendered the care of her son to Mimi. She later had one daughter after an affair with a Welsh soldier, but pressure from her family made her place the baby for adoption. Later she had two daughters, Julia and Jackie, with John "Bobby" Dykins. She never divorced her husband, preferring to live as Dykins' common-law wife for the rest of her life. She was known as being high-spirited, impulsive, and musical, and for having a strong sense of humour. She taught her son John how to play the banjo and the ukulele. She kept in almost daily contact with him, and when he was in his teens he often stayed overnight at her and Dykins' house. John was traumatised by her sudden death and wrote several songs about her, including "Julia," "Mother," and "My Mummy's Dead." Biographer Ian MacDonald wrote that she was, "to a great extent ... her son's muse".

popular name: Joan Merriam Smith

date_of_death: February 17, 1965

age: 28

cause_of_death: Plane crash

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Joan Merriam Smith was an American aviator, famous for her 1964 solo flight around the world in which she became the second woman to complete the trip, by following the equatorial route attempted in 1937 by Amelia Earhart. (Jerrie Mock set off the same week on a different route, and finished before Smith did.) In doing so she also became the first woman to fly a twin-engine aircraft around the world, and the first woman to fly the Pacific Ocean from west to east in a twin-engine plane. Following the equatorial Amelia Earhart route, Joan became the first person in history to successfully complete a solo flight around the world at the equator, as well as the first person to complete the Amelia Earhart route. Smith also was the the first person in history to fly solo around the world at the equator, to complete the longest single solo flight around the world, first woman to fly a twin-engine aircraft around the world, the first woman to fly the Pacific Ocean from west to east in a twin-engine plane, the first woman to receive an airline transport rating at the age of 23, the youngest woman to complete a solo flight around the world, and the first woman to fly solo from Africa to Australia, from Australia to Guam via New Guinea, and from Wake to Midway Island. Sadly she died the following year when the plane she was piloting suffered structural failure and crashed in California.

popular name: Barney Hill

date_of_death: February 25, 1969

age: 46

cause_of_death: Brain hemorrhage

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Betty and Barney Hill lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire where Betty was a social worker and Barney was a postal worker. The couple were catapulted into the international spotlight when in September 1961 they claimed to have been abducted by aliens in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The two were returning home to Portsmouth from a trip to Montreal, Canada, when as they were driving in the middle of the night, they saw lights approaching from the sky. What followed is said to be the first well-documented, "feasibly legitimate" UFO abduction in history. The couple claimed that they saw bipedal humanoid creatures in the window of a large spacecraft that landed in a field. They claimed they were followed by a spaceship and eventually accosted, kidnapped, examined, and then released by its extraterrestrial crew. The event has since become the best documented and most famous case of alien abduction in the history of UFO-ology. The story of the Hills grew big enough to prompt a best-selling book by John Fuller entitled "The Interrupted Journey", inspire a television movie called "The UFO Incident" starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons. Over time their story was subjected to a brutal debunking by multiple people including the famous intellectual Carl Sagan.