WTF

20 true things about Las Vegas and Southern Nevada that make no sense.

The Las Vegas Strip is not in Las Vegas.
Almost all of it sits in Paradise, an unincorporated town created in 1950 so casino owners wouldn't have to pay city taxes. The Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign is in Paradise too.
Hotels sold tickets to watch nuclear bombs go off.
The government set off 100 above-ground nuclear tests 65 miles from the Strip between 1951 and 1962. Casinos threw dawn "atomic parties" on their roofs, and the mushroom clouds were visible from Fremont Street.
The state constitution was sent by telegram.
Nevada needed statehood fast in 1864 so it could vote for Lincoln. The whole 16,543-word constitution was telegraphed to Washington for $4,303.27. It was the longest telegram ever sent at the time.
Prostitution is illegal in Las Vegas.
Nevada is the only state with legal brothels, but they're banned in Clark County, the one county everybody visits. The nearest legal ones are in Pahrump, an hour west.
Gambling is illegal in Boulder City.
The federal government built the town for Hoover Dam workers and banned casinos to keep them sober. It's the only city in Nevada where gambling is still against the law.
Hundreds of people live in the flood tunnels under the Strip.
Hundreds of miles of concrete storm drains run beneath the city. People live in them, with beds and bookshelves, and get washed out when it rains.
The Luxor beam has its own food chain.
The light on top of the pyramid pulls in clouds of moths. The moths attract bats. The bats attract owls. All of it, nightly, over a casino.
Hoover Dam would still be cooling off today.
Poured as one solid block, the concrete would have taken about 125 years to cool. So they ran 582 miles of pipe through it and pumped ice water inside.
Howard Hughes bought a casino because he didn't want to check out.
The Desert Inn asked him to leave the penthouse in 1967 to make room for high rollers. He bought the hotel instead, then bought 5 more without ever leaving the room.
Las Vegas means "the meadows."
The city exists because of natural springs that made a green patch in the desert. The springs were pumped dry and stopped flowing in 1962.
The military owns a piece of Nevada bigger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined.
The Nevada Test and Training Range north of Las Vegas covers about 2.9 million acres. Area 51 is inside it.
The Bellagio fountains run on a private well.
The water comes from a well on the property, originally drilled to irrigate the golf course of the Dunes, the casino that was imploded to build the Bellagio.
Lake Mead gave up bodies when the water dropped.
As the reservoir hit record lows in 2022, human remains surfaced on the shoreline, including a body in a barrel that police said was likely a 1980s murder victim.
Someone built a house 26 feet underground.
A millionaire afraid of nuclear war built a full home under a lot east of the Strip in 1978, with a fake backyard, fake trees, and a sky that switches from day to night.
Las Vegas gets about 4 inches of rain a year.
That's less than Phoenix and about a tenth of what Seattle gets. Then there are the fountains.
Nevada gets less than 2% of the Colorado River.
Southern Nevada's share is 300,000 acre-feet a year, the smallest of any state on the river. California gets 4.4 million.
The Sphere is the biggest ball ever built.
It stands 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, and the outside is wrapped in about 580,000 square feet of LED screen. It's the largest spherical structure on Earth.
Nobody owns the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign.
Betty Willis designed it in 1959 and never copyrighted it. Anyone can print it on anything, which is why everyone does.
The biggest slot jackpot in history hit at Excalibur.
A 25-year-old software engineer from Los Angeles put about $100 into a Megabucks machine in 2003 and won $39.7 million.
The city was created at an auction.
On May 15, 1905, a railroad sold 110 acres of desert lots in a single day. That was the founding of Las Vegas. The land had been a ranch.