Against All Odds:
21 Miraculous True Survival Stories
From Aron Ralston's Canyon to the
Andes Mountains — Real People, Impossible Odds
Every
story in this collection is documented, verified, and real. The people
described here were not special in the ways that are usually meant by that
word. They were not superhumanly strong or uniquely trained. What separated
them from those who did not survive was a combination of factors that resists
easy categorization: knowledge applied at the right moment, a refusal to stop
thinking, and — in nearly every case — a reason they chose to name. These are
their stories, written at full length and without softening, because survival
at this level deserves to be understood as it was actually experienced.
1. Aron Ralston — The Man Who Broke His Own Arm — Then Cut It Off — Then
Hiked Seven Miles
π
Bluejohn Canyon, Utah — April 2003
Aron Ralston had told no one
where he was going. On the morning of April 26, 2003, the 27-year-old
mechanical engineer and avid climber set off alone into Bluejohn Canyon in
southeastern Utah — a slot canyon so narrow his shoulders could nearly touch
both walls — carrying two burritos, a small bottle of water, and a cheap
multi-tool he described as 'the kind you'd get free if you bought a $15
flashlight.' Seven miles in, an 800-pound boulder dislodged and crushed his
right hand against the canyon wall. He was 100 feet below the desert surface
and 20 miles from the nearest road.
For five days he remained
trapped. He rationed his water to near nothing, drank his own urine as
dehydration set in, and made repeated futile attempts to chip at the rock with
his dull blade. On Day 3, he carved his name, birth date, and presumed date of
death into the sandstone. He filmed video farewell messages for his family.
Then, on Day 5, he experienced a vivid hallucination: a small child running
toward him across sunlight, the child reaching up to take his arm — an arm that
ended at the wrist. He took it as a premonition. His son.
He made his decision. He used a
mechanical advantage from his climbing ropes to torque his arm against the rock
until the radius and ulna snapped. Then, with the same dull blade, he spent
over an hour sawing through the remaining flesh, tendons, and nerves. He later
described the severing of the nerve as producing a sensation beyond the
register of pain.
Once free, he applied a
tourniquet, rappelled a 65-foot cliff one-armed, and hiked seven miles through
the desert before encountering a Dutch family on vacation. A search helicopter
found him four hours after the amputation. It took 13 men with a winch and a
hydraulic jack to move the boulder and recover his severed limb — which he
later had cremated and scattered in the canyon on his 28th birthday. After
recovery, Ralston became the first person to solo climb all of Colorado's 59
peaks above 14,000 feet in winter. He has a son. The child's name is Leo.
2. Joe Simpson — Dropped Into a Crevasse, Left for Dead, Crawled Three
Miles on a Broken Leg
π
Siula Grande, Peruvian Andes — June 1985
Joe Simpson and Simon Yates had
just achieved something no one had ever done: they had climbed the West Face of
Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, 20,813 feet of near-vertical ice and rock.
They were the first. The descent was when everything came apart.
Simpson slipped and fell,
shattering his right leg — the tibia driven up through the knee joint. In the
Andes, a broken leg at altitude is a death sentence. Yates, unable to carry his
partner, devised a system to lower him down the mountain in stages using their
rope, working in the dark, in a blizzard, suspended above a void he could not
see. Then Simpson went over an ice cliff Yates couldn't detect in the darkness
and dangled in space over a crevasse, unable to climb back. Yates held him for
an hour, being slowly pulled off the mountain himself. Then he cut the rope.
Simpson fell 150 feet into the
crevasse. By every reasonable calculation, he was dead — and Yates, consumed by
guilt, returned to base camp believing this to be true.
Simpson was not dead. He had
landed on an ice ledge just wide enough to hold him, suspended above a further
drop into blackness. Crippled, frostbitten, with no food and a nearly empty
water bottle, he spent three days dragging himself across five miles of glacier
and moraine, navigating by willpower and a tune he couldn't get out of his head
— 'Brown Girl in the Ring' by Boney M., which looped through his mind
incessantly as he crawled. He reached base camp hours before Yates had planned
to break it down and leave. His account, Touching the Void, is considered one
of the finest survival narratives ever written.
3. Vesna VuloviΔ — The Only Person to Survive a 33,333-Foot Fall Without a
Parachute
π
Czechoslovakia — January 26, 1972
Vesna VuloviΔ, a 22-year-old
Serbian flight attendant, was not supposed to be on JAT Yugoslav Airlines
Flight 367 that day. She had been assigned to the flight by accident — a
scheduling mix-up with another flight attendant named Vesna. She didn't argue.
She needed the hours.
A bomb planted in the
aircraft's luggage compartment detonated at cruising altitude over
Czechoslovakia, blowing the Douglas DC-9 into three pieces in midair. All 27
other passengers and crew were killed — most ejected immediately from the
disintegrating fuselage. VuloviΔ was not. She was wedged between a food service
cart and the tail section of the plane, which fell as a unit. It hit the
snow-covered slope of a mountain at an angle, with a dense forest of trees
helping absorb and partially deflect the impact. She was found unconscious by a
local man, a former WWII medic, who kept her alive until emergency services
arrived.
Her injuries included two
broken legs, three broken vertebrae (one of which was crushed), a fractured
skull, broken ribs, and a shattered pelvis. She was in a coma for 27 days. She
learned to walk again within a year. The Guinness World Records certified her
fall — 33,333 feet, over six miles — as the longest survived without a
parachute. In a 2008 interview, she said: 'I was broken, and the doctors put me
back together.' She died in 2016 at age 66, having outlived her incident by 44
years.
4. Poon Lim — 133 Days Alone on a Raft in the Atlantic — a Record No One
Has Ever Broken
π
South Atlantic Ocean — November 1942 to April 1943
On November 23, 1942, the
British merchant vessel SS Ben Lomond was sailing from Cape Town to Surinam
when it was intercepted and torpedoed by German submarine U-172. The ship sank
in two minutes. Of 55 men aboard, only one survived to tell the story: Poon
Lim, a 24-year-old Chinese steward from Hainan Island.
Lim found an eight-foot square
wooden raft in the wreckage, with enough rations — biscuits, chocolate, water,
sugar — to last perhaps a month. He understood immediately that no one was
coming quickly. When the food ran out, he fashioned a fishing hook from wire
stripped from his flashlight, and a knife from the lid of a biscuit tin. He
caught fish, dried them on the raft in the sun. He caught seabirds by hand,
baiting them with fish entrails. He collected rainwater in a canvas jacket
cover. When a shark investigated the raft, he beat it unconscious with a water
jug and hauled it aboard.
He was spotted three times by
passing ships and aircraft — all of which failed to stop or missed him. After
133 days at sea, three Brazilian fishermen found him and pulled him ashore. He
had lost nine kilograms but was ambulatory. He spent four weeks in a Brazilian
hospital and made a full recovery. King George VI awarded him the British
Empire Medal. The Royal Navy incorporated his survival methods into their
maritime survival manuals. He later said: 'I hope no one will ever have to
break my record.' No one has.
5. Louis Zamperini — 47 Days on a Raft, Two Years in a Japanese Prison Camp
— Olympic Athlete, Unbroken
π
Pacific Ocean and Japan — 1943 to 1945
Louis Zamperini had run the
final lap of his 5,000-meter race at the 1936 Berlin Olympics in 56 seconds —
fast enough that Adolf Hitler reportedly asked to meet him. Seven years later,
he was a bombardier in a B-24 Liberator on a search mission over the Pacific
when his aircraft's engines failed and the plane went down into the ocean. Of
11 crew members, three survived the impact: Zamperini, pilot Russell Phillips,
and tail gunner Francis McNamara.
They drifted on two small
inflatable rafts with no food and almost no water under the equatorial sun,
circled constantly by sharks. Zamperini kept them alive through discipline: two
squares of chocolate and three sips of water per day, each. They caught rainwater
in their mouths. They caught albatross by hand and ate them raw. They caught
small fish. Japanese aircraft attacked them twice, strafing the rafts with
machine gun fire. McNamara died on Day 33 and was committed to the sea. At Day
47, the raft made landfall near the Marshall Islands — where the Japanese Navy
immediately captured them.
Zamperini spent over two years
in three different POW camps, enduring systematic starvation and torture under
a sadistic prison commander nicknamed 'The Bird.' The U.S. government
officially declared him dead. He survived, returned home, and lived to age 97.
Laura Hillenbrand's account of his life, Unbroken, spent four years on the New
York Times bestseller list.
6. Juliane Koepcke — The 17-Year-Old Who Fell Two Miles from the Sky — Then
Survived the Amazon Alone for Eleven Days
π
Peruvian Amazon — December 24, 1971
On Christmas Eve 1971,
17-year-old Juliane Koepcke boarded LANSA Flight 508 in Lima with her mother.
The plane was overloaded, its maintenance records disputed. An hour into the
flight, it flew directly into a severe thunderstorm over the Amazon. Lightning
struck the right fuel tank. The aircraft disintegrated in midair at 10,000
feet.
Koepcke, still strapped into
her row of seats, was ejected from the fuselage with several other passengers,
still buckled in. She fell two miles through a thunderstorm, through the jungle
canopy, and into the forest floor. When she regained consciousness the next
morning, she was alone. Her mother, who had been seated beside her, had not
survived. Of 92 people on the flight, Juliane Koepcke was the only one.
She had a broken collarbone, a
torn knee ligament, a gash on her arm already starting to attract insects, a
concussion, and one sandal. She had been raised at her father's remote jungle
research station and remembered his survival principle: follow water
downstream. Streams become rivers. Rivers lead to people. For eleven days she
walked, waded, and floated through the Amazon, eating nothing (she had been
trained that eating unknown plants could be fatal), fighting mosquitoes and
exhaustion. She found a lumberjack camp on Day 11. A wound on her arm had
become infested with larvae; she removed over 30 maggots using petrol from an
outboard motor, as her father had once taught her to do. She was airlifted to
hospital. She went on to earn a doctorate in biology, specializing in bats.
Today she works as a librarian at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in
Munich.
7. Douglas Mawson — The Antarctic Explorer Whose Skin Began to Fall Off —
Who Kept Walking Anyway
π
Antarctica — December 1912 to February 1913
Douglas Mawson was leading an
Australasian Antarctic Expedition in 1912 when, 310 miles from base camp, the
worst possible sequence of events began. First, his companion Belgrave Ninnis
fell without warning into a hidden crevasse, taking with him most of the
expedition's food, their best dogs, and nearly all their critical equipment.
The drop was so deep that no sound was heard from below.
Mawson and his remaining
companion, Xavier Mertz, faced an impossible return march. They began eating
their remaining dogs to survive — starting with the weakest — not realizing
that husky livers contain toxic levels of Vitamin A, sufficient to cause hypervitaminosis
A. Mertz deteriorated rapidly: his skin blistered and peeled, his hair fell out
in handfuls, he became delirious. He died in Mawson's arms on January 8.
Mawson was now alone, 100 miles
from base camp. He was beginning to experience the same symptoms: the soles of
his feet had detached as sheets of skin, which he strapped back on with
bandages. His hair fell out. His skin sloughed off in strips. He fell into a
hidden crevasse, caught himself on his harness, and spent an hour hauling
himself out hand over hand with the rope tied to the sledge above. He covered
the final 100 miles in 29 days, reaching base camp the same day his relief ship
departed — visible in the distance. It was too far to recall. He spent another
year wintering in Antarctica before he could be evacuated home. He had lost
half his body weight.
8. Ernest Shackleton — His Ship Was Crushed by Ice. He Sailed 800 Miles in
an Open Lifeboat — and Saved All 27 Men
π
Antarctic Ocean — 1915 to 1916
In 1914, Anglo-Irish explorer
Ernest Shackleton led 27 men on an attempt to make the first land crossing of
Antarctica. The expedition never reached land. In January 1915, pack ice closed
around the ship Endurance in the Weddell Sea, trapping it completely. For ten
months the crew lived aboard as the ice slowly compressed the hull. On October
27, 1915, the pressure became insurmountable. Shackleton gave the order to
abandon ship. Three weeks later, Endurance sank.
The crew camped on the ice for
five months, watching the distant wreck slowly submerge, hauling three small
lifeboats with them. When the ice began to break up in April 1916, Shackleton
launched the boats into open, storm-tossed water in one of the most inhospitable
ocean regions on Earth. After seven days, they reached the remote, uninhabited
Elephant Island — the first time they had stood on land in 497 days.
Shackleton understood that no
rescue would come to Elephant Island. He selected five men and set off in the
22-foot lifeboat James Caird, across 800 miles of the most violent ocean on the
planet, the Drake Passage, to reach South Georgia Island, where a whaling
station was located. The journey took 16 days through hurricane-force seas and
freezing spray. Then, because they had landed on the wrong side of the island,
Shackleton and two companions crossed South Georgia's unmapped mountain range —
without equipment, in deteriorating boots — in 36 hours. They reached the
station on May 20, 1916. Shackleton returned four months later and evacuated
every surviving member of the original crew. Not a single man had been lost.
9. Mauro Prosperi — Lost in the Sahara for Nine Days — Survived by Drinking
His Own Urine and Eating Bats
π
Sahara Desert, Morocco/Algeria — 1994
Mauro Prosperi was an Italian
police officer and experienced ultra-distance runner who entered the 1994
Marathon des Sables — a 150-mile, six-day foot race through the Moroccan
Sahara, widely considered the world's most grueling foot race. On Day 4, a violent
sandstorm swept across the desert. When it cleared, Prosperi was alone and
entirely disoriented, miles off course, with no GPS and no way to signal his
location.
He found an abandoned Muslim
shrine and sheltered inside. To survive, he caught and killed bats roosting in
the rafters, eating them raw and drinking their blood for moisture. When his
urine turned black from dehydration — a medical sign of severe kidney stress —
he drank it anyway. He attempted to take his own life by opening his wrists,
but found that his blood had thickened to the consistency of jam and simply
scabbed over without flowing. He took it as a sign and continued walking.
Search aircraft flew directly
over him. He waved. They didn't see him. He walked for nine days across 181
miles of desert, crossing from Morocco into Algeria without knowing it. He was
finally found by a nomadic family in the Algerian desert, barely alive, 35
pounds lighter than when he started. He was hospitalized for several weeks. His
wife assumed he was dead. He recovered fully. The following year he entered the
Marathon des Sables again. He has run it six more times since.
10. Beck Weathers — Left for Dead Twice on Mount Everest — Walked Into Camp
with His Hands Frozen Solid
π
Mount Everest — May 1996
The 1996 Everest disaster —
documented in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air — killed eight people in a single
day in one of the mountain's deadliest storms. Among those left for dead on the
mountain, twice, was Dr. Beck Weathers of Dallas, Texas.
Weathers had been snow-blind
since his first day above Camp Three — a condition he concealed from his
guides, fearing they would send him down. When the storm hit during the
descent, he collapsed in the open with several other climbers and fell
unconscious in temperatures that dropped far below zero Fahrenheit. A rescue
team found him and pronounced him effectively dead. He was left on the
mountain. Hours later, a second rescue party reached him, took his pulse, and
again concluded he was too far gone to recover. He was left again. The news was
radioed to his wife in Dallas.
Sometime during the night, Beck
Weathers regained consciousness — alone on the mountain, in the dark, in a
storm, completely blind. He could not feel his hands, which were frozen solid
at his sides. He made the decision, as he later described it, that he could lie
there and die or he could stand up. He stood up. He walked, blind, into the
wind — reasoning that wind at high altitude on Everest moves toward the
mountain, so walking into it meant walking toward camp. He stumbled into High
Camp and collapsed in front of a tent. Rescuers who found him in the morning
were so shocked he was alive they didn't know what to do. He was evacuated by
helicopter in the highest helicopter rescue in history at that time. He lost
his right hand, all the fingers of his left, and his nose to frostbite — and
rebuilt his life as a pathologist and motivational speaker.
11. Yossi Ghinsberg — 19 Days Alone in the Bolivian Amazon — Without a Map,
a Knife, or Survival Training
π
Bolivian Amazon — 1981
In 1981, 22-year-old Israeli
former naval officer Yossi Ghinsberg and three companions — two of whom they
had barely met — set off into the heart of the Bolivian Amazon with a
self-described guide who, they would later determine, had no expertise in the jungle
whatsoever. When they realized they were lost and their guide had misled them
entirely, the group fractured. Two of the companions were never seen again.
Ghinsberg and his friend Kevin
Gale attempted to navigate downriver on a handmade raft. The raft capsized in
rapids, separating them. Ghinsberg washed ashore alone without a knife, a map,
a compass, or any formal survival training. He was 19 days in the Amazon alone
before being found.
He built fires, foraged for
fruit, constructed rough shelters, and fashioned shoes from his jacket to
protect his feet. He was attacked by a jaguar in the night — and survived when
the animal abruptly retreated, apparently startled. He contracted parasitic
infections. At one point, he stumbled into a swamp and sank to his chest in mud
before spending hours extracting himself inch by inch. His friend Kevin had
survived and traveled with local men downriver searching for him; they spotted
Ghinsberg on the riverbank and pulled him out. He had lost a significant amount
of weight but recovered. His memoir was adapted into a 2017 film starring
Daniel Radcliffe.
12. Ricky Megee — Drugged, Buried, and Left in the Australian Outback —
Survived 71 Days Eating Frogs and Leeches
π
Northern Territory, Australia — January to April 2006
On January 23, 2006, Ricky
Megee, a 35-year-old man from Brisbane, was driving across remote Australia
toward a new job when he stopped to help what appeared to be stranded motorists
on the Buntine Highway. The last thing he remembers is accepting a drink from
one of them. He woke up in a shallow grave in the Outback, covered by a plastic
tarpaulin weighted with rocks, dingoes scratching at the surface above him.
His car was gone. He had no
phone, no food, and no water. He was in one of the most remote and inhospitable
regions on the continent, where daytime temperatures regularly reach 104°F and
the nearest inhabited settlement was dozens of miles in any direction.
He walked for ten days in bare
feet before finding a cattle dam — a water source — and made the decision to
stay there. He built a shelter from branches, barricaded it with rocks each
night to keep dingoes out, and survived for the remaining weeks eating frogs,
leeches, grasshoppers, and whatever small animals he could catch. He lost over
130 pounds. When a cattle station manager named Mark Clifford came across what
he initially described as 'a walking skeleton over six feet tall' in April
2006, Megee had been alone in the outback for 71 days. He was hospitalized for
severe dehydration and malnutrition and made a full recovery. A doctor
confirmed his physical condition was entirely consistent with the ordeal he
described.
13. Tami Oldham Ashcraft — Hurricane, Capsized Boat, Her FiancΓ© Gone — She
Sailed 1,500 Miles Alone to Hawaii
π
South Pacific Ocean — 1983
In 1983, 23-year-old American
sailor Tami Oldham and her British fiancΓ© Richard Sharp were hired to deliver a
44-foot yacht named Hazana from Tahiti to San Diego — a 30-day voyage. Nineteen
days in, Hurricane Raymond overtook them. The storm generated 50-foot waves and
sustained winds well above 140 miles per hour. Sharp sent Tami below decks to
shelter. She was knocked unconscious by a falling object as the boat capsized.
She woke 27 hours later. The
yacht had righted itself, but the mainmast had snapped, the cabin was flooded,
and all her navigation electronics had shorted out. Richard Sharp was gone. His
safety line had broken. She was alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a
badly damaged vessel, with no working motor and no mast, over 1,500 miles from
Hawaii.
Over the next 41 days, she
hand-steered her improvised rig — using a salvaged emergency sail and a
handheld compass — across 1,500 miles of open ocean, navigating by the stars
using the celestial navigation skills she had studied. She rationed her food to
the edge of malnutrition. When she reached Hilo, Hawaii, she was barely
coherent and severely weakened. She had sailed one of the most remote stretches
of open ocean on the planet, alone, on a crippled vessel, without losing her
course. Her memoir, Red Sky in Mourning, became the basis for the 2018 film
Adrift.
14. Bahia Bakari — A 12-Year-Old Who Could Barely Swim — Clung to Wreckage
for 13 Hours in the Indian Ocean
π
Indian Ocean, near Comoros — June 2009
On June 30, 2009, Yemenia
Flight 626 attempted to land at Moroni in the Comoro Islands in deteriorating
nighttime conditions. The Airbus A310 struck the water short of the runway and
disintegrated on impact. Of 153 people aboard, 152 were killed. The sole
survivor was a 12-year-old French girl named Bahia Bakari, traveling with her
mother.
Bahia could not swim well. She
had no life jacket. She was in the Indian Ocean, in the dark, surrounded by
debris and the bodies of the other passengers, with a search and rescue
operation that had no idea where to look. She clung to a piece of floating wreckage
and stayed conscious.
For 13 hours — through the
night and into the following morning — she held on. She did not let go. When a
rescue vessel finally spotted her the next morning, she was conscious but in
shock and hypothermic. Her mother did not survive. Bahia was hospitalized,
recovered physically, and was reunited with her father in France. She has
spoken rarely about the night, saying only that she does not know how she held
on for so long. She was 12 years old.
15. Dougal Robertson — Orca Attacked and Sank His Boat — He Kept His Family
Alive for 38 Days on the Open Ocean
π
Pacific Ocean — June 1972
In June 1972, former Royal Navy
officer Dougal Robertson was sailing across the Pacific with his wife, four
children, and a young friend aboard the 43-foot schooner Lucette when a pod of
killer whales rammed and attacked the hull. The vessel sank in 60 seconds.
Robertson, his wife Lyn, their three sons, daughter, and one crew member had
time to launch a small fiberglass dinghy and a nine-foot inflatable raft before
the Lucette went under.
They were 200 miles west of the
Galapagos Islands, in waters with no regular shipping lanes. They had no radio.
Robertson's experience — and his wife's extraordinary composure — held the
family together for 38 days. They caught rainwater in sails. Robertson, who had
watched his naval survival training materials carefully, taught his family to
catch and eat sea turtles, small fish, and flying fish that landed in the boat.
They ate the turtles raw, drinking their blood for hydration. As the inflatable
raft deteriorated, all six survivors crowded into the nine-foot dinghy.
On Day 38, they were spotted
and rescued by a Japanese fishing vessel. All six survived. Robertson later
wrote that his most important asset was his wife: 'Lyn was the key. Without
her, the children would not have believed survival was possible.' The story
became the book Survive the Savage Sea, later used in Royal Navy survival
instruction.
16. Ada Blackjack — The Woman No One Remembered — Who Survived Alone in the
Arctic for Two Years
π
Wrangel Island, Arctic Ocean — 1921 to 1923
In 1921, Canadian explorer
Vilhjalmur Stefansson organized an expedition to claim Wrangel Island — a
remote Arctic landmass north of Siberia — for the British Empire. He sent four
young men and a Yupik Inuit seamstress named Ada Blackjack, hired as a cook and
seamstress. She was 23, had never been in the wilderness, was afraid of polar
bears, could not swim, and had been separated from her young son. She agreed
because the pay would cover his medical care.
The expedition immediately went
wrong. The supply ship that was supposed to return for them did not come. The
men's hunting skills proved inadequate for the Arctic winter. Three of the four
set off across the ice toward Siberia to seek help — they were never seen
again. The fourth, Lorne Knight, developed scurvy and was unable to move. For
months, Blackjack nursed him, then taught herself from the expedition's
survival manuals to trap foxes, shoot a rifle, and navigate a boat alone.
Knight died in June 1923. For the next two months, Ada Blackjack was entirely
alone on Wrangel Island, trapping foxes, shooting seals, and managing a small
camp — also keeping a detailed diary and teaching herself to read more
fluently. A rescue vessel arrived in August 1923. She was the sole survivor of
the five-person expedition. The story was barely reported at the time; she
received almost no recognition or compensation.
17. Hiroo Onoda — The Japanese Soldier Who Kept Fighting in the Philippine
Jungle for 29 Years After the War Ended
π
Lubang Island, Philippines — 1945 to 1974
This entry occupies a category
slightly different from the others: its subject did not know he needed to
survive. Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda of the Imperial Japanese Army was
stationed on Lubang Island in the Philippines when the war ended in August 1945.
He had received no orders to surrender. His commanding officer had instructed
him to 'continue the mission' under any circumstances and never to surrender or
take his own life. Onoda followed his orders.
For 29 years, he fought. He
evaded Filipino soldiers and police, conducting guerrilla actions from the
jungle. Leaflets were dropped, announcements were made, newspaper front pages
were nailed to trees — all declaring the war over. He interpreted each as enemy
propaganda. His three fellow holdouts were gradually killed or surrendered over
the decades. He continued alone.
In 1974, a young Japanese
adventurer named Norio Suzuki traveled to Lubang specifically to find Onoda. He
did. Onoda explained he would not surrender without direct orders from his
commanding officer. Suzuki returned to Japan, located the now-retired Major
Yoshimi Taniguchi — then working as a bookseller — and brought him back to the
island. Taniguchi formally relieved Onoda of duty on March 9, 1974. Onoda was
52 years old. He had spent 29 years in the Philippine jungle, living on
bananas, coconuts, and whatever he could forage, and had never stopped
believing in the mission he had been given. He surrendered his sword, his rifle
(still operational), 500 rounds of ammunition, and several hand grenades. He
was pardoned by the Philippine government.
18. Larisa Savitskaya — She Survived a Mid-Air Collision That Killed 37
People — Then the Soviet Government Paid Her $75
π
Siberia, Soviet Union — August 1981
Larisa Savitskaya was 20 years
old, returning from her honeymoon with her husband Vladimir, when their Antonov
An-24 regional aircraft collided in midair with a Soviet military bomber over
Siberia on August 24, 1981. The collision killed 37 of the 38 people aboard.
Vladimir was killed instantly.
Larisa was blown into the aisle
by the impact, regained consciousness in her seat, and buckled her seatbelt —
later saying she had thought of Juliane Koepcke's survival story, which she had
seen dramatized in a 1974 film. The plane fell for eight minutes before a
fragment of the cabin, with Larisa still inside, struck birch trees that slowed
the descent enough to make survival possible. She hit the ground in the
wreckage and lay there for three days before rescue teams found her — alive,
with arm fractures, two broken ribs, and a damaged spine.
The Soviet government,
reluctant to publicize air disasters, handled her survival with characteristic
indifference. She was awarded 75 rubles in compensation — approximately $75 at
contemporary exchange rates. She was told by a government official: 'Don't make
a fuss.' She recovered fully, remarried, and later received broader recognition
after the Soviet Union's collapse allowed the story to be more freely reported.
She holds the record as the sole survivor of a Soviet mid-air collision.
19. Steven Callahan — 76 Days Alone on a Five-Foot Inflatable Raft in the
Atlantic, Spearfishing to Survive
π
Atlantic Ocean — 1982
American sailor and boat
designer Steven Callahan was crossing the Atlantic alone on a small sloop he
had built himself when, on the night of January 29, 1982, his boat struck
something — possibly a whale — and sank in minutes. He had time to grab a small
survival bag and inflate a five-foot circular life raft before Napoleon Solo
went under. He was 800 miles west of the Canary Islands.
For 76 days, Callahan drifted
westward across the Atlantic on a raft barely large enough to lie flat on. He
had a spear gun, and learned to spear dorado and triggerfish with increasing
skill as his survival depended on it — using every part of each fish, including
the eyes for liquid and the organs for nutrients. He used a solar still to
convert seawater to drinking water. He tracked his position using the stars.
The raft was punctured multiple times by fish and had to be repeatedly
repaired.
He was spotted and rescued by
fishermen near the island of Marie-Galante in the Caribbean on April 20, 1982,
having drifted 1,800 miles. He had lost a third of his body weight, his legs
were barely functional, and he had numerous sores and infections. His memoir,
Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea, became a classic of the survival
literature genre and was praised by Callahan's contemporary Dougal Robertson as
technically and emotionally authentic. He later served as a survival consultant
on the film Life of Pi.
20. Frane Selak — Survived Seven Near-Fatal Accidents Over 40 Years — Then
Won the Lottery
π
Yugoslavia/Croatia — 1962 to 2003
Frane Selak, a Croatian music
teacher, accumulated a catalogue of near-death experiences across four decades
that strains statistical credulity. In 1962, a train he was aboard derailed and
plunged into an icy river, killing 17 passengers. He swam to shore with a
broken arm and hypothermia. In 1963, a door blew off a small aircraft in which
he was a passenger; he was sucked out, fell from the plane, and landed in a
haystack — the only fatality on the flight was a crew member sucked out at the
same moment. In 1966, a bus he was riding in skidded into a river, killing
four. In 1970, his car caught fire while he was driving; he escaped seconds
before the fuel tank exploded. In 1973, a faulty fuel pump on a different car
sprayed flames through the heating vents while he was driving; he lost most of
his hair but survived. In 1995, he was struck by a city bus in Zagreb. In 1996,
a truck forced his car off a cliff road; he grabbed a tree branch as the car
went over and watched it explode on rocks 300 feet below.
In 2003, at the age of 74,
Frane Selak purchased his first lottery ticket. He won the Croatian national
lottery: approximately $1 million U.S. He subsequently gave most of it away to
family and friends, saying he had already had all the luck he needed simply by
being alive.
21. The Andes Survivors — 72 Days in the Andes After Their Plane Crashed —
They Made an Impossible Choice to Live
π
Andes Mountains, Argentina/Chile border — October to December 1972
On October 13, 1972, a
Uruguayan Air Force charter plane carrying 45 people — largely members of the
Old Christians rugby club and their families — struck a mountain peak while
crossing the Andes and crashed at over 11,500 feet elevation. Twelve people died
in the impact or immediately after. The survivors — mostly young men in their
twenties — found themselves stranded in one of the most remote mountain
environments on earth, in sub-zero temperatures, with the wreckage of the
fuselage as their only shelter.
The aircraft's radio had picked
up a broadcast before failing: after eight days, the Chilean search and rescue
operation had been called off. The mountains were too vast, the snow too
uniform. They were alone.
Their food was exhausted within
days. The decision the survivors made — collectively, and after prolonged moral
deliberation — was to consume the flesh of those who had died, treating it as a
gift from the dead to the living. Most were deeply Catholic. They framed it in
those terms, and they survived. On Day 61, an avalanche buried the fuselage
with survivors inside, killing eight more. The remaining men dug out.
On December 12, three of the
strongest survivors — Nando Parrado, Roberto Canessa, and Antonio VizintΓn —
set off on foot across the Andes with no mountaineering equipment, no map, and
no certainty of which direction led to Chile. After ten days of crossing
glaciers and peaks in summer ski clothes, they made contact with a Chilean
muleteer on the far side. All 16 remaining survivors were rescued. They had
been in the Andes for 72 days. Piers Paul Read's account, Alive, remains in
print over 50 years later.
Sources:
Aron Ralston, Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004); Joe Simpson, Touching the
Void (1988); Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken (2010); Piers Paul Read, Alive (1974);
Alfred Lansing, Endurance (1959); Dougal Robertson, Survive the Savage Sea
(1973); Steven Callahan, Adrift (1986); Tami Oldham Ashcraft, Red Sky in
Mourning (2002); Jennifer Niven, Ada Blackjack (2003); Hiroo Onoda, No
Surrender (1974); Yossi Ghinsberg, Lost in the Jungle (1993); National
Geographic; Guinness World Records; History.com; BBC News Archive.
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