People who survived impossible situations
The human body is more resilient than we think, but it can only take so much. That’s what makes the following stories so incredible, the fact that anyone else who went through the same things they did would be dead by now, but for some strange reason they came out alive.
Vesna Vulovic – Fell 10,000 meters and survived
This Serbian air stewardess holds the world record for the highest fall ever to be survived by a human. On 26 January 1972, Vesna was at work onboard a Yugoslav airlines Douglas DC-9 transport plane when an explosion ripped the side of the hull open. The plane had 28 people on board including Vesna, and all of them were now plummeting to earth through the freezing winter air with no chance of escape. Vesna was in the rear of the plane when the explosion happened and was separated from the other passengers when the tail ripped off and fell in another direction to the main section. Vesna was trapped in place by a food cart and came crashing down to earth still inside the plane. The crash was seen for miles and she was quickly found and taken to hospital where she learned everyone else on the flight had died, but she didn’t escape unharmed. She suffered several broke ribs, a fractured skull, a broken pelvis, two crushed vertebrae and both her legs were broken, but she was still alive and went on to make a complete recovery.
Jean Hilliard – Survived being frozen
The thing that makes Jeans story even more amazing is that it should technically be impossible, but somehow happened anyway. One day in December of 1980, Jean was driving to her friends house in Minnesota late one evening when she ran into a patch of ice on the road and skidded into a ditch. The accident itself wasn’t bad and there were no injuries or damages, but the car was now very firmly wedged in a ditch, leaving Jean with the choice of either wait in until morning and hope someone passes by, or walk the rest of the way in the -30 °C weather. She chose to walk and managed to make it to her friends house at around 1am, but she was so exhausted from walking several miles in freezing conditions that she fainted on the driveway. Her friend came out at around 7am and found her laying face down on the drive, frozen solid. He took her to the hospital and upon first examination the doctors thought she was already dead, her pulse couldn’t be detected and her skin was frozen so badly they couldn’t even get a needle through it.
After few hours of being in hospital she woke up and asked for a drink of water, and the next day she was able to move her arms slightly. It took a few months for her to be able to walk properly again but in the end she made a full recovery and didn’t even loose so much as a finger tip. The reason this should be impossible is because when living tissue freezes, it expands which ruptures the walls of cells and kills them. It doesn’t matter how well frozen tissue is thawed out because its already dead at the point of freezing and can’t be repaired, and Jean Hilliard was completely frozen down to the lowest layers of tissue in her arms and legs, but lost nothing.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi – Survived two atomic bombs
During the second world war, the last of the major Axis powers to surrender was the empire of Japan who it seemed planned to hang on until the very end. In an attempt to bring an end to the war, the United States developed the atomic bomb, and on August 6, 1945 they dropped one on the city of Hiroshima. Also in the city at the time was a man named Tsutomu Yamaguchi who was on the last few days of a three month long business trip, and at around 8:15am he became a victim of the first nuclear bomb ever to be dropped on a population center.
He was about 3km from the blast and was shielded enough by the cities buildings to avoid being killed in the initial explosion wave, but the sound ruptured his ear drums and he was temporarily blinded by the flash. After he got over the initial shock, he managed to find two of his co-workers and they spent the night in a bomb shelter. The next day he waded through the ruins of the city and arrived at the train station which was completely untouched, and settled in alongside many other victims of the explosion. When he arrived in his home city of Nagasaki he went to check on his family who were unharmed, and then went back into work a couple of days later on the 9th for a meeting with his boss.
While describing what happened to his boss, the second atomic bomb named “Fat man” was dropped in the center of the city, but this time the hilly landscape and thick walls of the building he was in protected him from the initial blast, but he wasn’t untouched by the radiation. His wife and child were away from home when it hit and managed to find a train tunnel to hide in, escaping the blast and avoiding most of the initial radiation wave. Yamaguchi wasn’t so lucky and after being close to both major blasts started to show signs of radiation sickness. His hair fell out and he was throwing up for a whole week, but somehow managed to make a full recovery without any kind of proper treatment, he died at the age of 93 in his home city of Nagasaki in 2010.