The Most Impossible Survivals in History

The Most Impossible Survivals in History By every law of physics and medicine, these people should be dead. A man jumped from a burning bomber three and a half miles up with no parachute and walked away without a broken bone. A woman's heart stopped and her body dropped colder than a freezer, and doctors brought her back after nine hours. A fisherman drifted alone across the entire Pacific Ocean for four hundred and thirty eight days. And one man survived not one atomic bomb, but two, three days apart. These are the most impossible survivals ever recorded, real people who lived through the things that should have been the end. We tell the true stories of Nicholas Alkemade, William Rankin, Anna Bågenholm, Harrison Okene, José Salvador Alvarenga, Juliane Koepcke, Vesna Vulović, and Tsutomu Yamaguchi. Every one of them should have died. Every one of them lived. 🔔 Subscribe for more of the strange, dark, and unbelievable truths behind the world you thought you knew. 📚 SOURCES & RESEARCH Nicholas Alkemade — RAF rear gunner who jumped from a burning Lancaster bomber at ~18,000 ft over Germany (March 1944) without a parachute; survived after pine trees and deep snow broke his fall, with only a twisted knee and minor burns. German captors verified his unused parachute harness. (Sources: RAF Museum; contemporary RAF records.) William Rankin — US Marine pilot who ejected from his F-8 Crusader at ~47,000 ft (July 1959) with no pressure suit, directly into a thunderstorm; carried up and down by updrafts for ~40 minutes before landing alive. Recounted in his memoir The Man Who Rode the Thunder (1960). (Sources: Rankin's memoir; U.S. Marine Corps aviation records.) Anna Bågenholm — Swedish radiologist trapped under ice ~80 minutes in a skiing accident (1999); core body temperature fell to 13.7°C (56.7°F), the lowest survived accidental hypothermia recorded at the time; revived after ~9 hours of resuscitation with near-full recovery. (Source: case report published in The Lancet, 2000.) Harrison Okene — cook who survived ~60 hours in an air pocket ~30 m underwater in the capsized tugboat Jascon-4 off Nigeria (2013); 11 crewmates died; discovered alive by rescue divers searching for bodies; required ~60 hours of decompression. (Sources: news coverage; the widely circulated DCN Diving rescue footage.) José Salvador Alvarenga — fisherman who drifted ~438 days across the Pacific (Nov 2012 – Jan 2014), from Mexico to the Marshall Islands, surviving on fish, birds, turtles, and rainwater; the drift was later corroborated by investigators. (Source: 438 Days by Jonathan Franklin, 2015; contemporary reporting.) Juliane Koepcke — 17-year-old sole survivor of LANSA Flight 508, which broke apart over Peru (24 Dec 1971); fell ~3,000 m (~10,000 ft) still strapped to her seat, then walked ~10–11 days through the Amazon to safety. (Sources: her memoir When I Fell From the Sky; Werner Herzog's documentary Wings of Hope.) Vesna Vulović — JAT flight attendant and sole survivor of a bombing that destroyed JAT Flight 367 over Czechoslovakia (26 Jan 1972); fell 10,160 m (33,333 ft) without a parachute — the Guinness World Record for the highest fall survived without a parachute. (A 2009 investigation proposed a lower altitude; the official accident report remains the basis of the record.) (Sources: Guinness World Records; official Czechoslovak accident report.) Tsutomu Yamaguchi — Mitsubishi engineer who was ~3 km from ground zero in Hiroshima (6 Aug 1945), returned home to Nagasaki, and was ~3 km from the second blast (9 Aug 1945); the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as a survivor of both atomic bombings (nijū hibakusha). Later a nuclear-disarmament advocate; died 2010, aged 93. (Sources: Japanese government recognition, 2009; historical record.) All stories in this video are based on documented historical and medical records. Details are presented for educational and historical purposes.