- 11 months ago
Defying death doesn't even begin to describe these incredible stories! Join us as we count down the most miraculous survival tales ever recorded. From a man who survived an iron rod through his skull to a woman who fell 33,000 feet without a parachute, these stories challenge everything we know about human endurance. Which survival story do you find most astonishing?
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00:00Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at 10 of the most unbelievable stories of miraculous survival.
00:21Number 10. Phineas Gage
00:23Phineas was a railroad worker in 1848 who had a nightmarish accident. A large iron rod was driven completely through his head.
00:32On September 13, 1848, railroad worker Phineas Gage experienced one of the most famous accidents in medical history.
00:39While using an iron tamping rod to pack explosives, a premature detonation shot the 43-inch, 13-pound iron rod straight through his skull.
00:49At high speed, the heavy rod entered under Gage's cheekbone and exited straight out the top of his head.
01:01Miraculously, Gage not only survived the blast, but was able to walk and talk immediately afterward, even regaling horrified bystanders with his tall tail.
01:10It remained touch-and-go for a while, but Gage made a miraculous recovery.
01:14Though his personality reportedly changed after the accident, his physical recovery astounded doctors at the time, proving that the brain could adapt even after catastrophic injury.
01:24But his injury resulted in a complete change to his personality. So much so that friends that knew him started referring to him as no longer Gage.
01:34Number 9. Roy Sullivan
01:36A single lightning strike carries a charge of several hundred million volts and has a peak current of around 20,000 amps, which is a lot.
01:46A lot. And while they say that lightning never strikes twice, it certainly did in the case of this park ranger.
01:53Known as the human lightning rod, US park ranger Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning not once, not twice, but a staggering seven times between 1942 and 1977.
02:05Each strike left him with bad burns, but he somehow lived through every single one of them.
02:10Statistically, the odds of being struck by lightning on seven separate occasions are astronomically almost unfathomably small.
02:17The odds of him surviving every single one are even smaller than that.
02:22You're brought up to know that lightning never strikes twice, it's that awful phrase.
02:27But here was living proof that you can be hit that many times, and more amazingly, I think, is to survive it.
02:33Someone up there is looking out for him. Sullivan's resilience made him both a legend and a medical curiosity.
02:39And his story proves that he may have simultaneously been the luckiest and unluckiest man alive.
02:46So Roy is very, very, very much deserving of his place in the curious casebook.
02:53Number eight, Aaron Ralston.
02:55There was no way his pocket knife could slice through the bones, but if he could break them, maybe he'd have a chance.
03:02He would have to snap both of the bones in his arm to make it work.
03:06We don't know about you, but if an 800 pound boulder pinned us to a canyon wall, we'd probably be done for.
03:12In 2003, Aaron Ralston faced the unimaginable when a massive boulder pinned his arm while he was canyoneering in Utah's Blue John Canyon.
03:21Trapped for five days with little food and water, he realized that no rescue was coming.
03:25You didn't tell anyone where you were going.
03:30Yeah, that's absolutely correct.
03:33In a desperate act of survival, Ralston used a dull multi-tool to amputate his own arm.
03:38An almost unthinkable decision that required immense courage and pain tolerance.
03:43But that's not all.
03:44After freeing himself, Ralston rappelled down a 65-foot cliff and hiked for seven miles before finally encountering help and rescue.
03:52That's just insane mental fortitude, and very few but Ralston could do it.
03:56And then, boom.
03:58And I wasn't even attached anymore.
04:00And I fell down like this, and I...
04:03I was free.
04:08Number 7.
04:09Sutomu Yamaguchi
04:1129-year-old engineer, Sutomu Yamaguchi, is walking to work when a blinding flash, brighter than the sun, fills the sky.
04:22Imagine surviving an atomic bomb, and then surviving another one just three days later.
04:28That's what happened to Sutomu Yamaguchi, a Japanese engineer who was in Hiroshima when the first bomb dropped on August 6th, 1945.
04:36While he was badly burned, deafened, and temporarily blinded by the bomb, Yamaguchi returned home to Nagasaki, just in time for the second bomb on August 9th.
04:46So he gets on a train, travels 186 miles from Hiroshima to Nagasaki, and then for a second time, he sees this flash of light coming from an atomic detonation, the Nagasaki bomb.
05:02Luckily, he escaped uninjured.
05:04Doctors credited his survival to the sheer luck of his positioning during each explosion, being about three kilometers away from ground zero on both occasions.
05:13While he suffered some lasting damage, and his children suffered various health ailments, Yamaguchi lived a long and happy life, working for Mitsubishi and dying in 2010 at the age of 93.
05:24Anyone who was in that type of a radius from an atomic bomb would experience anywhere from 95 to 98 percent chance of dying.
05:35Number 6.
05:36Joe Simpson
05:37I took the decision pretty quickly, really. To me, it just seemed like the right thing to do under the circumstances.
05:46Back in 1985, mountaineer Joe Simpson and his partner Simon Yates attempted to climb the Peruvian mountain Ciula Grande.
05:54But disaster struck when Simpson shattered his leg during the descent.
05:58With a horrible storm raging, and with his own life at risk, Yates was forced to cut the rope holding Simpson, sending him plummeting into a deep crevice.
06:07Against all odds, Simpson survived the fall and crawled for three agonizing days back to base camp, without food and consuming nothing but snow.
06:32And in a twist that would seem unlikely in a movie, he arrived literally just as Yates was preparing to leave.
06:38Simpson never blamed Yates for what he did, even saying that he would have done exactly the same thing.
06:43I remember Simon grabbing my shoulders and holding me.
06:53I remember that.
06:55That feeling of being held.
06:57Number 5.
06:58Beck Weathers
06:59Have you thought about the fact that on that morning of the 12th, someone actually found you out there in the snow and gave you up for dead, thought you were gone?
07:12Well, I didn't know that.
07:14And I would have to say that probably as cold and as frozen as I was, that I would look pretty dead.
07:21From one doomed mountain climb to another, the Mount Everest disaster of May 1996 claimed eight lives, but Beck Weathers wasn't one of them.
07:30Though by all accounts he should have been.
07:32Caught in a brutal storm at the top of Everest, Weathers was left for dead after falling unconscious.
07:37He slept overnight in the dark and fatal cold, and in nothing but his climbing equipment.
07:42No tent, no sleeping bag, nothing.
07:52Incredibly, he woke and staggered into camp the next morning, despite severe frostbite, his face and hands black with damaged skin.
08:00Though he lost a number of limbs, including his right forearm, nose, and some fingers, Weathers pulled through.
08:06Enduring conditions on Everest that no human should have endured.
08:11Well, you were truly a blessed man, I think.
08:14Perhaps there was a guardian angel watching over you that night.
08:18Well, I think there must have been.
08:21Number four, Juliana Kopka.
08:23The seatbelt squeezed my stomach, and I couldn't breathe anymore.
08:26And in this moment, I realized with absolute clarity what had happened to me.
08:31But I had no time to be afraid, because apparently I lost consciousness.
08:36I can still see the jungle beneath me, a deep green, like broccoli.
08:41Seventeen-year-old Juliana Kopka boarded Lanza Flight 508 on Christmas Eve 1971, a domestic flight between Lima and Iquitos, Peru.
08:50But Kopka got the worst Christmas present of all time when lightning struck, destroying the aircraft and sending her plummeting two miles to the ground.
08:59Amazingly, she survived the fall, albeit with some bad injuries like a broken collarbone, a concussion, and a torn knee ligament.
09:07When I came to, I realized pretty quickly what must have happened to me.
09:11I had crashed down in the middle of the jungle, and the plane was gone.
09:15I tried to get up, and could barely manage because my concussion must have been very severe.
09:21But that wasn't the end of the story.
09:23All alone in the jungle, she hiked for over a week, following streams until she was found by some lumberjacks.
09:29Kopka's miraculous survival is owed partly to her childhood knowledge of the rainforest, but also to sheer luck in surviving a fall that should have certainly been fatal.
09:39The man who is assisted by relatives up the embankment of the river is Marcio Rivera.
09:44He's a lumberman, and he worked in the area of Rio Sibonia.
09:49He was the one who found Juliane.
09:51Number three, Anna Bagenholm.
09:53And all of a sudden, she broke through the ice and hit an ice ledge and went in under the ice ledge into the water.
10:02Swedish radiologist Anna Bagenholm was skiing in Norway on May 20th, 1999, when she fell into a frozen stream.
10:10By the time she was pulled out, Bagenholm had been trapped under the ice for a staggering 80 minutes.
10:15At the time, her body temperature had dropped to just 56.7 degrees Fahrenheit, a level which absolutely should have killed her.
10:23Normally, when your heart stops beating, death will inevitably follow a few hundred seconds later.
10:30By the time they called to the rescue helicopter for Anna, her heart hadn't beaten for well over an hour and a half.
10:36Miraculously, doctors managed to save her life, with the extreme hypothermia slowing her metabolism so much that her organs survived the lack of oxygen.
10:45To this day, Bagenholm remains one of the very few people to survive such fatally low body temperatures.
10:51She returned to work just five months after the accident, and has suffered no lasting brain damage.
10:57Slowly, the blood temperature increased.
11:00We had an echo probe down her oesophagus.
11:03We saw the heart still standing like this, shivering a little bit, and suddenly…
11:09Number 2. Anatoly Bogorski.
11:12Then the cellular damage begins to manifest.
11:16The bone marrow dies.
11:19The immune system fails.
11:21The organs and soft tissue begin to decompose.
11:25The arteries and veins spill open like sieves.
11:28Imagine getting a proton beam straight to the head, and living to tell the tale at cocktail parties.
11:34Soviet scientist Anatoly Bogorski doesn't have to imagine.
11:37In 1978, Bogorski was working on a particle accelerator, when a proton beam measuring 300,000 Röntgens passed straight through his noggin.
11:47What does the decimeter say?
11:493.6 Röntgen, but that's as high as the meter.
11:523.6.
11:53Not great, not terrible.
11:54The beam entered the back of his skull and exited near his nose, delivering radiation doses hundreds of times the lethal level.
12:02He was a dead man walking, but against insurmountable odds, Bogorski survived the accident, completed his PhD, and went back to work on the same particle accelerator that injured him.
12:13He suffered deafness, periodic seizures, and a paralyzed face.
12:18But hey, that's a pretty good price to pay for taking a proton beam.
12:22Within three days to three weeks, you're dead.
12:27That is what will happen to those boys.
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12:45Number 1. Vesna Vulevic
12:48This is Vesna Vulevic.
12:5350 years ago, she fell 33,333 feet from the sky.
12:59At the top of our list is Serbian flight attendant Vesna Vulevic, who holds the Guinness World Record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute.
13:08On January 26, 1972, her plane exploded over Czechoslovakia, and she plummeted over 33,000 feet while trapped in the spiraling fuselage.
13:19Though she sustained severe injuries, including broken bones, skull fractures, and temporary paralysis, she miraculously survived.
13:27Officials typically attribute her survival to the fuselage landing in snow and heavy tree cover, thereby cushioning the landing.
13:35Vulevic humorously attributes it to Serbian stubbornness.
13:39Whatever it was, Vulevic's endurance wasn't just miraculous, it was unprecedented.
13:44Surviving a fall without a parachute from cruising altitude makes her story perhaps the ultimate example of surviving the unsurvivable.
13:52Vesna Vulevic's story for me is one of the most incredible survival stories, if in fact not the most impressive, that we have here at Guinness World Records.
14:02How would you handle yourself in these conditions? Let us know in the comments below!
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