At the request of a television experimenter who needed items to broadcast, Robert L. Ripley states unsubstantiated oddities including that a Spanish lady had her husband's portrait tattooed on her tongue as penance for nagging him to death. He also shows a house and the blind man who built it by himself in Wayne, New Jersey. The longest word in the world (184 letters, from a work by Aristophanes), is written on a blackboard and pronounced and translated by a professor. There are animated sequences of a rifle fish, which shoots at flying insects for food, and how a strange home run was hit in 1890, when the ball bounced off the outfielder's head and over the fence. Ripley demonstrates his skill as an artist by drawing several items, such as a Chinese man who had fingernails 22.75 inches long. Finally, in the most amazing sequence, Ripley introduces Carl Vaughan, who demonstrates how he picks up 12 pocket billiard balls with one hand and without touching the table or the balls with any other part of his body. There are scenes intercut throughout showing a family watching the show on television.