20 Greatest Survival Stories From History That Seem Impossible

Just clipping a hangnail makes me faint, so I’m left a bit lightheaded as I read about Aron Ralston. In 2003, he was hiking solo through a Utah slot canyon when a falling boulder pinned his right arm, leaving him with no water and no one knowing where he had gone. After five days, he sawed off his own arm with a dull multi-tool knife and trekked 6 miles out to safety. Total horror movie stuff!

It is hard to believe, but the only way Juliane Koepcke ended up entirely alone in the Amazon, Christmas Eve 1971, was by having her plane literally fall out of the sky, sending her plummeting nearly two miles while still buckled into her chair. And she was the only one of 92 to survive. She then bled her way down a stream for over a week, using gasoline to wash maggots out of her arm.

I’ve seen enough YouTube clips on Everest that just thinking about it makes my knees weak. But Beck Weathers got the worst version of being there. He was a pathologist on the mountain in 1996 when he got caught in a storm, lost his vision, lost consciousness from hypothermia, and was abandoned by his team, twice. He then woke up and, despite barely being able to see, walked back to camp on his own, and later lost his nose, his right hand and forearm, and all five fingers on his left hand. He survived, though!

It would be enough to ruin my entire week (month even) to fall down two porch steps, so Vesna Vulovic’s story sounds practically physically impossible. In 1972, as a flight attendant aboard a plane that exploded midair due to a bomb, she fell over six miles (more than 33,000 feet). She survived, likely because the section of fuselage she was trapped inside landed in thick snow at a favorable angle. She didn’t even remember the fall, though, which is probably her brain being merciful.

Twenty minutes into a ferry ride is already enough for me to begin looking at the sky anxiously, so 438 days out to sea seems impossible. Fisherman José Salvador Alvarenga took to the ocean for what was supposed to be a quick excursion out from Mexico in 2012 but instead made his way around the Pacific for over a year. His companion perished mid-journey, and Alvarenga survived on uncooked seafood and wild birds, plus rainwater and his own pee when supplies ran dry.

This is the one where I get claustrophobic just thinking about it. After his tug boat capsized and went down off the coast of Nigeria in 2013, cook Harrison Okene got stuck upside down somewhere around 100 feet underwater. He was wedged in a tiny pocket of air in a room for approximately 60 hours while it was pitch black, reciting psalms as sharks swam past him. Divers came to find a body and instead found him still breathing.

In 1945 a Colorado rooster called Mike was beheaded by a farmer’s axe but the blade somehow avoided severing the jugular vein and the base of the brain responsible for basic bodily functions. The headless bird managed to survive for another 18 months, fed via an eyedropper until he choked on a kernel of corn. That’s easily the most bizarre thing on this list, and I’ve read them all twice!

Ever have that weird, instinctual terror of being swallowed by some gargantuan sea creature? Well, lobster diver Michael Packard just lived that. After he bumped into something big off Cape Cod in June 2021, Packard realized he was trapped in total darkness inside a whale’s mouth. Once he felt around and noticed there weren’t any teeth, he knew right away what had happened, and soon enough the whale surfaced and spat him out. Thanks, I think.

And then there is the case of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, an engineer visiting Hiroshima on business, who was severely burned by the atomic bomb there in 1945. He returned to his hometown, only to arrive in Nagasaki in time for the second attack. He lived to be 93 years old. Some things are beyond words.

I can’t imagine getting back on any ship after that, but obviously Violet Jessop had more guts than me. As a stewardess, she survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, helping passengers into lifeboats before being rescued herself. Four years later, she was on the Britannic, the sister ship of the Titanic, which also sank after hitting a mine. And once again, she survived, and went on to work on ships for many years.

Skulls are much tougher than they appear. Railroad foreman Phineas Gage packed gunpowder in 1848 when it exploded and propelled a 13-pound iron rod through his cheek and out the top of his head. He survived and apparently talked within minutes before walking over to a nearby cart. He never quite regained his old personality, but did live another dozen years.

I recoil when I get the tiniest shock off a door knob, and this thing shocks me in my cells. Anatoli Bugorski was a Soviet physicist who, in 1978, stuck his head into a working particle accelerator. A beam of protons shot through his head and exited just above his nose. He saw the light of 1,000 suns, but felt no pain. He completed his PhD and supposedly is still alive.

I’m a bit nervous on elevators as it is, and I owe that anxiety to one woman: Betty Lou Oliver. She was working an elevator at the Empire State Building in 1945 when a B-25 bomber crashed into it. She was injured, but carried into a second elevator with damaged cables and fell 75 stories to the basement. Air pressure and tangled cables kept her alive.

In 2012, during a soccer match, 23-year-old Fabrice Muamba had a cardiac arrest. He flatlined, his heart completely stopped. Medics started CPR and administered about 15 defibrillator shocks. It took more than an hour for his heart to beat again, and according to one account, Muamba was dead for 78 minutes. He called his memoir I’m Still Standing, and I have full respect for that flex.

What’s worse than a birthday cake failure? For 16-year-old Makenzie Wethington, it was skydiving for her birthday when her chute got caught up and opened incorrectly, sending her into a death spin. She fell some 3,500 feet before hitting the ground hard, breaking her pelvis and spine in the process. She had to spend five months in rehab before walking independently again. One doctor said it was a miracle!

In 1915, after the Lusitania had been hit by a torpedo, Margaret Gwyer was swimming for her life in the sea. While she was treading water, a whirlpool suddenly sucked her right into one of the ship’s smokestacks before a boiler explosion blasted her back out to the surface. A lifeboat picked her up, but she was so covered in soot that her own husband didn’t recognize her.

Vacations can go wrong for families, but this one tops them all. The Robertsons were sailing near the Galapagos in 1972 when a pod of orcas rammed and sank their wooden boat. Six people fit into a small raft, surviving 38 days on sea turtles for food, and drinking the blood when the water ran out. Lucky they were rescued after their flare gun attracted the attention of a passing fishing vessel!

I’m not good at keeping cool under pressure, but Deborah Kiley sure seems to be. Back in 1982, she was on a yacht that sank in a nasty storm off the U.S. coast, which left five crew members stuck in a tiny rubber dinghy. Two of the men drank seawater, began hallucinating, and slipped into shark-filled water, never to be seen again. Kiley managed to keep her wits about her, covering herself with seaweed for warmth, until a freighter came along and pulled her from the sea.

Since I despair when waiting for a sluggish elevator, I can’t imagine being trapped in the rubble for 7 days. In 2008, a huge earthquake struck China. Ma Yuanjiang, the manager of a power plant, was buried for a week. To survive in the dark, he drank his own urine and ate paper until he was rescued. The will that takes is on a completely different plane from mine.

Two weeks is a long time to hang on to something, much less your life. But that’s what happened when a devastating tsunami struck the Indian Ocean. Construction worker Ari Afrizal was pulled out to sea and managed to stay alive by holding onto his raft for 15 days. All alone in the middle of the ocean, he did nothing but hang on till rescue came.

This content was created with the help of AI.