10 – Juliane Koepcke
- 1971, 93 passengers aboard LANSA flight 508 when lightning struck the plane over the Peruvian rain forests and it came crashing down
- Juliane was blown out of the plane early and landed two miles down the wreckage in a dense thicket, where she only came out with blindness in one eye, a broken collarbone along with cuts and bruises
- She walked down the jungle following the water running downstream until she found a cabin where she waited for the owner to come back
- She then got back to civilisation and continued her studies to become a zoologist
9 – Anatoli Bugorski
- A formerly Soviet researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics working on the largest particle accelerator at the time, the Synchrotron U-70
- It was in 1978 that a malfunction forced Bugorski to lean over a piece of equipment and look inside the proton beam chamber – but failed safety mechanisms did not turn off the beam, and it went straight through his skull at a speed faster than light
- He claims he saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns, with no pain – but his face swelled up and skin began to peel off
- Thankfully he survived without losing any intelligence, but he gets fatigued easily, he can’t hear out his left ear and occasional seizures
8 – Alcides Moreno
- A window cleaner who, in 2007, fell 47 storeys when their cable snapped alongside his brother Edgar, who tragically fell to his death
- Alcides on the other hand was left in a coma with considerable damage to his body, but soon afterwards he awoke and made a full recovery, even walking despite damage to his spinal cord
- One of the doctors quote: “If you’re a believer in miracles, this would be one. I’ve seen it all – or at least I think I have – until something like this happens.”
7 – Ricky Megee
- April 2006, a man who showed up as a skeletal figure near a cattle station in a remote area of Australia
- He claims the last thing he remembered was getting his car stolen and that he was drugged by a hitchhiker, then he awoke to find dingoes scratching at him
- He then lived 71 days off a diet of leeches, frogs, snakes and insects with water from a nearby dam and a makeshift shelter
- By the time he showed up again, he’d lost over half his body weight coming in at 48 kilos
6 – Aron Ralston
- May 2003, an 800-pound boulder falls on Aron’s arm and traps it inside a canyon wall
- If this story sounds familiar, it’s because we saw it in the film 127 hours, in which he spends 5 days trapped in a Utah canyon with little food or water
- He went on to write a book about how he used the boulder to snap his own arm, then cut off the flesh with a pocket knife until he could wander off and get rescued by some hikers passing by