Bodies and body parts rained down on the roofs of houses in the Czechoslovak village of Srpska Kamenica. Locals searched for survivors among the bodies. A German forester heard moans and faint cries for help. He followed them. He found 22-year-old flight attendant Vesna Vulovic in the snow. She was badly injured but alive, which was unbelievable given that she had fallen from an altitude of 10,000 kilometres together with a JAT DC-9. All 22 passengers and 6 crew members died, but the blonde flight attendant landed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person who survived a parachute-less fall from the highest altitude. Fate more or less inexplicably spared her, as well as a select few others who, by all rights, should have been dead, but survived.
Vesna Vulović had only been a flight attendant for eight months when she was mistakenly put on the list to work on the Copenhagen-Zagreb flight. Her namesake should have been on the flight, but she was called by mistake, but she did not complain because at least she got the chance to see Copenhagen and enjoy the Sheraton Hotel.
But she already had a bad feeling inside him, and her colleague kept talking about his children as if he knew he would never see them again, she later recalled. However, the boarding on 26 January 1972 was nothing special and the flight was uneventful in quite decent weather conditions until the plane suddenly fell to the ground.
They have never clearly confirmed what happened that day. One explanation is that the plane was mistakenly shot down by Czechoslovak air defence, but its proponents have not been able to explain why it fell from the sky onto a hill on the Czechoslovak-German border, and why it should have been flying so low, only a few hundred metres above the ground, in mid-flight, to be within range of conventional anti-aircraft munitions.
The other theory, that someone brought a bomb on board and the passengers were victims of an explosion, is no more solid. The unidentified bomber is said to have activated the bomb at an altitude of 10 kilometres so that everyone would really be dead, although it is not clear why he would have wanted to blow up the plane in the first place, unless we believe the version of this theory that says that the plane was blown up by the Ustasha.
A third explanation claims that Czechoslovak military exercises were being conducted in the area by Warsaw Pact forces at the time and that all overflights were banned. The JAT plane was probably shot down by a surface-to-air missile by mistake because it was seen on radar and thought to be part of a military exercise. It is not clear why the pilot did not know about the ban or why, if he did, he was over the restricted area.
The fourth theory is that the Czechoslovak Defence Forces are again involved. Their mig would mistake a civilian aircraft for an enemy one and shoot it down peacefully in flight. Today, Czech military experts calmly reject this theory.
Vesna Vulović never found out why she fell from the sky, but it seems that she was sitting in the tail of the plane, strapped into her seat, just before the fall. When she was thrown into the air, she flew through it towards the ground, along with her seat, which reportedly saved her life. She flew into the snow so awkwardly that she landed on the serving table and injured her spine.
The German woodcutter who found her was a medic during the war and did what he could for her while waiting for help, but the doctors prepared her parents for the worst. Her heart may still be beating, but it won’t be for much longer, they were told when Vesna was brought to the hospital.
Her skull fractured and she was bleeding profusely. She broke both her legs and crushed three vertebrae, paralysing her from the waist down. Then her heart gave out. She was clinically dead. For three days, doctors fought for her life and saved it.
When she had recovered a little, they told her what had happened. She could read her story in the newspapers, but she did not recognise it. She remembered everything that had happened an hour before the accident, but not the accident and the events immediately after.
But she didn’t have time for memories then either. Months of work and operations to fix her legs and strengthen her back to get her back on her feet were ahead of her. In September 1972, she was back at work. She got a job behind the counter, not because she was afraid of flying, but so that passengers would not recognise her.
Since then, she has lived more or less normally, but never happily. “It is much easier to die. It was harder for me to survive than it was for those who died,” she said in an interview.
Moving lightning conductor
And it wasn’t easy for Ranger Roy Sullivan either. At 36 years old, he got his first taste of what it’s like to be struck by lightning. A thunderstorm was raging, and from his fire tower he watched the nature reserve around him, of which he was a ranger. It might have been romantic, too, if the tower hadn’t been so new that they hadn’t even had a chance to ground it yet, but he counted in horror how many times lightning had struck nearby. When he got to seven or eight, he had had enough. He fled from the tower so that the lightning would not mistake it for a lightning conduit.
She found it on the floor. He did not become one of the 10% to 30% of people killed by lightning, although he was a ranger in a Virginia park where there are 35 to 45 lightning storms a year and you are more likely to be hit by one. He suffered only a few burns and a small scar on his right leg, and was left without a toenail.
The experience would have been unpleasant enough if it had been isolated, but Roy Sullivan was clearly a moving lightning conduit, although he only realised this much later, in July 1969. It was a storm again, only this time he was driving down the road. Who knows why he had the windows open on his semi-truck, but the electricity bouncing off the tree went straight through his window and scalded him too. He was left without eyebrows and eyelashes, and he could have said goodbye to his watch.
Sullivan was so wrong to think that tyres would keep him safe in the car. Well, he might have been if he had closed the windows. Then the electricity from the lightning would probably have spread around him, but it went through him, although not all of it. The whole truck went into the ditch when Sullivan lost consciousness and control of the car. Fortunately, he survived the accident without any scratches.
The following year, lightning visited him at home. He was just working in the garden when the sky darkened. He didn’t feel like going inside, but he was outside when it unexpectedly struck a nearby transformer and some of its electricity hit his shoulder. He was knocked to the ground but suffered no other injuries.
Now everyone jokes that he is a “human lightning rod”, but in 1972 he was not joking at all. He was in the mountains, looking after the camp. “It was raining lightly, but there were no shots, at least not until that one. Its impact was the loudest I’ve ever heard. Fire started to rise in the station, and when it stopped buzzing in my ears I heard something whine. It was my hair. They were on fire,” he later described how lightning crossed his path for the fourth time.
He quickly extinguished the fire on his head and in the hut, then drove himself to hospital to be treated. He was now a local landmark, but also a new resident of the Guinness Book of World Records, which said he was the only person to survive four lightning strikes.
He did not report his next three encounters with them to the record keepers, so it is not certain whether they actually happened or not, but Roy Sullivan reported that he met his fifth lightning bolt on 7 August 1973, when he was back in his semi-truck.
He saw the storm coming, but he tried to escape it because he was really fed up with it constantly hitting him. He was faster than it, but he stopped safely to look around. He got out. “I literally saw her come out of the cloud and come towards me,” he later claimed. She knocked him to the ground and “took off” his shoe.
A sixth lightning strike, which cauterised him in 1976 while he was checking a hiking trail, caused serious burns to his abdomen. He had had enough of everything, of himself, of gunshots and of nature, and five months later he retired and moved to another place with his fourth wife.
He has fitted his new home with lightning conductors. Among other things, he buried thick copper wire deep in the ground, but unfortunately, when he had his seventh encounter with lightning, on 25 June 1977, he was not at home, but fishing. This time he suffered burns to his chest and abdomen, and also lost hearing in one ear.
As he rushed towards his car, half-conscious, to get back to the hospital, he saw a bear on top of it. “Some people are allergic to flowers, I’m allergic to lightning,” he said in an interview with a local newspaper.
He survived seven gunshot wounds, but did not survive one shot to the head. Officially, he committed suicide in 1983 at the age of 71, but people later said he had been murdered. Suspiciously, his wife did not hear the shot, even though she was sleeping in the same room where he was shot. There was also some evidence that there was a pillow between the gun and his head.
The local police insisted that it was a suicide and the theory of murder was clung to by those close to the victim because they could not accept the news of the suicide. But it is possible that Sullivan did commit suicide, because depression and post-traumatic stress disorder are among the problems that survivors of lightning strikes may face, and there are reports of memory loss and personality change.
Killer Lightning
Much more fatal was the lightning that struck a plane flying from Lima to Pucallpa on 24 December 1971. Some 40 minutes after take-off, the 86 passengers saw that the sky had clouded over and the wind had picked up. Raindrops began to whip the plane, followed by lightning. They always hit planes and usually do no damage, but this time it was the one that struck the right wing of the plane that sealed the fate of 92 passengers and crew members.
The fire rose from it, causing the aircraft to slide nose-down. It disintegrated before it hit the ground, right there in the middle of the jungle, hundreds of kilometres away from people.
Seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke only realised she was all alone when she woke up from unconsciousness and realised she was the only survivor of a fall from 3 kilometres. She was almost unharmed and strong enough to spend the next ten days looking for a way out of the ominous jungle and found it, even though no one believed she could survive alone in the jungle.
It was raining in the tropical forest that day, but no lightning. The odds of being struck by lightning are one in 280,000,000. The odds of being struck by lightning seven times are so small as to be unremarkable.
Proton beam through the brain
But the chances of someone being hit by a proton beam trapped in a particle accelerator were also extremely small, and yet it happened. It was at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Protvino, Russia, where the proton synchrotron, then the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, was built in 1967.
But on 13 July 1978, something was wrong with him. Thirty-six-year-old Soviet physicist Anatoli Bugorski decided to see what was bothering him. He found a part that didn’t seem to be working properly, but he looked at it a little too closely. Against safety regulations, he stuck his head right into the particle accelerator, and it ended up where it should never have been: in the path of a proton beam.
I saw a light more powerful than a thousand suns, Bugorski said later, but also that he felt no pain, even though a thin proton beam had pierced his skull. When it entered his head, it was 200,000 rads strong, and when it exited it was 300,000 rads strong, because it had been strengthened by the collision with his brain.
Anatoli Bugorski was theoretically dead. Radiation of 500 to 600 rads can kill a person, the theory goes, but no one else has ever been irradiated with proton beams moving at the speed of sound to know whether they would have survived or not, and according to Bugorski, there were no more volunteers for the venture.
Accidentally, the left half of his face was so stuck that he was almost unrecognisable. Death seemed inevitable, but he was sent to Moscow to leave his body to science: the doctors wanted to monitor his deterioration, which they predicted would end in death some two or three weeks later.
The opportunity was unrepeatable, and for the next few days they watched closely as Bugorski’s skin peeled back behind his left ear and along his left nostril, where the beam entered and exited. Because the beam was proton beam, it was thin and travelled consistently straight, so the damage to the brain was small, but still remarkable.
Bugorski’s brain tissue continued to fry for another two years. All the nerves on the left side of his head were destroyed, leaving the left side of his face paralysed and ageless. So he had a face, one half of which was always 36 years old, the other half of which had aged normally over the years. When he frowned, only the healthy half of his face was gone.
Yet despite his brain injuries, Anatoli Bugorski not only survived, but was able to live a normal life. What’s more, he completed his PhD and continued his scientific career. For the first twelve years of his life, he suffered only occasional mild epileptic seizures, but in the last years of his life he suffered six more, but none so severe as to be life-threatening.
He was not allowed to talk to anyone about the experience, which no one in the world had ever had except him, because in the Soviet Union all topics related to nuclear energy were taboo. Twice a year he went to Moscow for a check-up, and that was when he got together with colleagues who, like him, had been victims of nuclear accidents. “As former prisoners, we always knew about each other. There are not many of us and we know our stories. They are generally sad.”
Anatoli has never regretted his life. He considered himself relatively healthy, able to live a relatively normal life. But he was tormented by silence. As he was the only survivor of a proton beam, he was convinced that his condition should have been monitored more seriously, as he was, after all, a volunteer guinea pig, but on a pecuniary allowance, because his pension did not allow him to live a decent life.
Cut in half
But the will to live never left 38-year-old railway worker Truman Duncan. He was at work, riding at the front of a carriage, when he slipped. He fell. Desperately, he tried to pick himself up and reverse faster than the slow moving train, but the wagon was stronger.
His wheel pulled him under and literally cut him in two. The train dragged him for another 23 metres before finally stopping. At that point, the lower part of Duncan’s body was trapped under the wheel, and his upper body, somewhere from the waist up, with a single leg holding on to it with a single muscle, was on the other side.
At first the pain was unbearable, then he could no longer feel it, he later recalled. Although he was literally cut in two, he did not lose consciousness or his senses. It was crystal clear to him that if he did nothing, he would die. He remembered that he could have had his phone in his pocket.
He called the paramedics. “I think I’ve been cut in two,” he told them. “Did someone run you over?” “I was. I think I’m going into shock. Hurry up because I’m going to faint,” he spoke with incredible calm and composure. Then he called home. I was talking to my folks and suddenly got upset. He broke off the connection and “turned to survival”.
He held on tightly to the thought of his wife and three children. Every now and again he had the urge to indulge in the pleasant silence and fate, but every time he realised that this would be the end. He resisted, grabbed hold of the wagon and pulled himself up to try to cheer himself up. His struggle lasted 45 minutes, when the rescuers finally arrived.
Once they were on the road, it seemed impossible that Duncan was still alive. It didn’t seem human to be cut in half and not die, so they were all the more shocked when Duncan was not only conscious, but even talking.
Now they “only” had to lift the wagon, which had cut his body, but at the same time prevented him from bleeding to death. Nevertheless, before being helicoptered to hospital, Duncan had lost half the blood in his body. Doctors had never seen an injury so severe, let alone a man who survived it. The organs did not fall out of Duncan’s abdominal cavity just because a thin membrane prevented them from doing so.
He was in a critical condition after being operated on for three and a half hours to clean the huge wound and remove grass, dirt and gravel. After three weeks in a coma, the second round of Duncan’s struggle began.
Over the next four months, he underwent 23 difficult and painful operations. He had to accept that half of his body was gone, including part of his pelvis and one kidney, but he was not depressed. He wanted to live, and it was his will to live that was decisive for his survival, his doctors later reflected. It not only helped Duncan to recover, but also to return to work.
Lost in the Sahara
Mauro Prosperi, Italy’s Olympic pentathlon champion, knew that many things could happen to him during the insanely difficult 250-kilometre race in the Sahara, so he signed a document specifying where he would be buried. Nevertheless, he did not expect to be lost in the Moroccan desert that year in 1994.
At 39 years old, the tough Marathon des Sables (Sand Marathon) was going well, but on the fourth day, the longest and toughest day of the race for the 80 competitors, things went wrong. “When we left in the morning, it was already quite windy. I had passed four checkpoints when I came to an area of deserted dunes”.
Suddenly, a desert storm erupted. “The wind whipped with terrifying ferocity. I was blinded, I could not breathe. The sand beat against my face as if it were a whirlwind of needles.” Then he found shelter, but he was not allowed to stay in it. He would have been trapped, so he had to keep moving.
When the storm had passed after eight hours, the father of three realised he was alone and lost in the middle of the vast Sahara. Fear, the kind that doesn’t paralyse you, is important. It makes you think and pull yourself together.”
He looked around, but didn’t recognise anything. “I had a compass and a map, so I was sure I could get my bearings perfectly, but it’s much harder without landmarks. I ran for four hours and climbed on the sand, but I still couldn’t see anything.”
Along with his compass, he had a knife, a sleeping bag, a small supply of dry food and half a bottle of water in his running backpack. “When I realised I was lost, the first thing I did was to urinate in the spare bottle, because urine is the cleanest and most drinkable when you are still well hydrated”, the Sicilian policeman later wrote, knowing enough about survival to walk in the desert only in the morning and evening, resting during the daylight.
He only touched the disgusting but precious liquid from his body on the fourth day, before which he drank water, “as slowly as I could”. In order to eat the dehydrated food he had with him, he had to soak it first. He urinated on it.
Then he saw a helicopter above him. He seemed to be saved as he flew on. The rescue crew did not see him. He walked again and came to a Muslim shrine used by the Bedouins as a stopping point on their journeys.
There, he found some shelter from the sun, “cooked” some food with urine and climbed onto the roof of the shrine. He discovered a flock of bats. He did not think about whether they had rabies or not. He grabbed them.
“I cut off their heads and hollowed out their insides with a knife. Then I sucked it out.” He drank their blood. “I ate at least 20 of them, raw. I was sure I was going to die and that it would be a long, agonising death, so I wanted to speed it up.”
He was also discouraged by the fact that he was again flown over by a plane, but again rescuers did not see him. He decided to commit suicide. “I thought that if I died in the shrine, my body would be found sooner or later. But if I die while walking, they will never find my body. I wanted my family to get my body so they could accept my death.”
He wrote a message for his wife with a piece of charcoal and cut his wrists. “I lay down and waited to die, but my blood had thickened so much that it refused to flow. I woke up the next day. I didn’t manage to kill myself. Death didn’t want me yet.”
The defeat gave him new strength. “It has boosted my confidence. I started to see the desert as a place where people can live. I started to see myself as a desert person. I wanted to see my family and friends again. I turned my thoughts to them.”
He remembered that he had to follow the clouds because they would surely lead him to people, and he looked up into the sky and did just that. He left the sanctuary and started walking again. Along the way, he fortified himself with raw snakes and lizards, drank the blood of bats, and ate small plants he found in the dry riverbed for snacks.
He left a trail so that rescuers would know where to look for him. His brother and brother-in-law flew to Morocco from Italy to help find him. When they found his shoelaces, they were convinced he was dead. He had been gone for seven days and fighting for his life for seven days when suddenly he saw an oasis.
He resisted the temptation to get a fair drink. He knew he would cramp up, so he only took measured doses of water. On the ninth day, a young shepherdess spotted him and the nomadic Berber women took him into their care.
“The women took care of me. They were so kind. They sent someone to call the police. They like to stop near the police to be safer,” he later explained.
The police came, blindfolded him like a criminal and took him to the base. “They didn’t know who I was. They thought I might be dangerous. They had guns and at that time I thought they were going to kill me.” The blindfold was only removed when they realised he was a marathon runner who had got lost in Morocco.
They began to celebrate his survival. They told him that he had walked 219 kilometres in the wrong direction and that he had not been found in Morocco, where he should have been, but in Algeria.
He was taken to hospital. There, he was told that he had lost 16 kilograms in ten days and that he weighed only 45 kilograms and that his kidneys were damaged. For the next few months, he had to eat only liquid food. It took him almost two years to fully recover, but that did not stop him from returning four years after the accident and finishing the race in eighth place.
“It was a very difficult and terrifying experience, but at the same time a glorious one,” he recalled of his 1994 run. Why did he return in 1998? “I’m a competitor and I love the desert.”
