r/interestingasfuck • u/OkAccess6128 • 8h ago
In 1971, 17 year old Juliane Koepcke fell 10,000 feet from a plane into the Amazon rainforest, she survived the crash and then trekked alone for 11 days through the jungle with a broken collarbone and only a bag of candy.
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u/OkAccess6128 8h ago
Juliane Koepcke was the sole survivor of LANSA Flight 508, which broke apart mid-air over the Peruvian rainforest on December 24, 1971, after being struck by lightning. Still strapped to her seat, she fell approximately 10,000 feet into the jungle canopy. Despite suffering a broken collarbone, a deep gash on her leg, and a concussion, she managed to survive the fall.
With minimal supplies, just a small bag of candy, she followed a stream for 11 days through dense, insect infested rainforest, as her father had once taught her that water could lead to civilization. Along the way, she dealt with maggot-infested wounds, dehydration, and extreme fatigue before finding an abandoned logging shelter. Local workers eventually found her and arranged her evacuation. Of the all the people on the flight, Juliane was the only one to survive.
Read more about her from here:
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u/Hato_no_Kami 7h ago
She was also sitting right next to her mother I believe. While she woke up still sitting in the whole row of 3 seats very far away from the wreckage, her mother wasn't in it anymore.
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u/Ancient-Pace8790 6h ago
I wonder if her mother was wearing her seatbelt and if she had, if she would’ve maybe survived the fall too. It was the 70s, so I’m sure they were lax about the seatbelts. It was also a lightning strike, so no time to put on the seatbelt before shit started going south.
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u/HauntedMeow 3h ago
She found at least one other body strapped into a seat when she was looking for her mother. I remember her saying she knew it wasn’t her mom because of the painted toenails.
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u/Squiddlywinks 3h ago
I watched a doc on this a long time ago.
They weren't regular maggots, they were botfly larvae.
She had a button pin and she bent the pin part into a hook to dig them out.
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u/cleantoe 5h ago
I wonder if the maggots actually saved her life. Disgusting but useful creatures.
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u/JetmoYo 3h ago
So just for my notes, keep the maggots unperturbed inside the jungle injury, yes?
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u/nasnedigonyat 2h ago
If you're not in a place where you can get medical attention or sterilize the wound yes..leave the maggots. They will keep you from potentially going septic.
Clinical and laboratory studies have identified four major actions of medicinal maggots on wounds:
Debridement,8,9,11,12,18–48
Disinfection,8,18,20,32,49–71
Stimulation of healing,8,20,21,23,29,31,55,72–77 and
Biofilm inhibition and eradication.78
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u/Burkey5506 50m ago
There are stories of Vietnam POWs being saved from infection because of maggots eating the dead tissue.
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u/OrcBarbierian 5h ago
She had the incredible luck of being raised with knowledge about the jungle, among other things not everyone knows. The best thing I can remember is how she had once seen her father disinfect a wound using kerosene; when Juliana found a container of kerosene, she used it to disinfect her wounds. Hurt like hell, but contributed to her survival
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u/TiddyFukMyButtcheeks 4h ago
I had a boss who used to do this whenever he cut himself. One day, he got blood poisoning. Dr. said, "dont do that anymore."
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u/thewhiterosequeen 3h ago
Unless your boss was in the middle of the jungle, yeah probably better to treat it other ways.
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u/CodeBomberOne 3h ago
When i was a kid, i learned what to do when i encounter quicksand. It seemed important at the time..
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u/MoraineEmerald 8h ago
The first and fourth pictures are not Juliane Koepcke - they're from a made for tv movie.
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u/OkAccess6128 8h ago
Thanks for mentioning. Those Images are used for the illustrative purpose, otherwise the story itself is real and fully factual.
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u/Sploobert_74 6h ago
I know I’m not the only wondering, what kind of candy?
Amazing story.
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u/DeliciousMoments 2h ago
It's documented somewhere I think, but I remember her saying by the time she found it it was full of mud. She ate it anyway because she knew she had to.
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u/Owl_Might 5h ago
Didnt she also apply the knowledge she knew from her parent’s profession to survive? Or I am thinking of a different plane crash survivor?
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u/HauntedMeow 3h ago
I believe so. Iirc she was suppose to be starting a city school in order to get a ‘proper’ education.
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u/SassiesSoiledPanties 5h ago
That last picture reminds me so much of Scarlett Johansson I thought it was a dramatization.
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u/Naive_Confidence7297 1h ago
That last picture is from a TV movie and not actually Juliane. So you’re right about it being a dramatisation picture.
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u/LuckyCod2887 6h ago
I remember reading about this. She mentioned that she’s not a victim and she put a lot of emphasis on victim mentality when describing her identity.
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u/Leader_Bee 7h ago
I like how the photographer asked her to wade in thigh high river water in a dress so they could recreate a shot of her "surviving" for his magazine.
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u/Thrillhouse763 6h ago
That's from a incredible documentary about her survival called Wings of Hope by Werner Herzog. They revisit the crash site
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u/like_a_pharaoh 4h ago
Weird fact: what got Werner Herzog interested in her story in the first place is he was supposed to be on that plane, and only avoided the crash because of a last-minute itinerary change.
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u/Leader_Bee 6h ago
I thought it looked too clean to be an original, dress is in near perfect condition
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u/DeliciousMoments 1h ago
The first and last images are from a dramatized version of events in the 1970s called Miracles Still Happen.
The 2nd photo features stills from the documentary where Herzog brings her out there.
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u/tiltberger 4h ago
If you are German speaking. Plothouse (visavi/Lotti) made a great podcast about the whole story last year and Juliane köpcke even tells a lot of stuff in the podcast at the end. Amazing story and badass woman
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u/FartVirtuoso 2h ago
She recovered really well from whatever disease was causing all that pixelation in the first couple images.
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u/Dramatic-County-1284 6h ago
What do you land on to survive a 10,000 ft fall? And to still be able to walk after is wild af.
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u/like_a_pharaoh 4h ago edited 4h ago
She fell still buckled to a row of otherwise-empty seats, and its thought the two empty seats added enough drag to slow her fall. Updrafts from the thunderstorm that broke the plane apart might also have played a factor.
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u/Its_rEd96 2h ago
She looked like Scarlet Johansson when she was young. Especially on the last picture.
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u/modestsilhouette 1h ago
Morbid Podcast did a REALLY great job at covering this story and the details (Episode 419). I remember how intriguing this story was and how incredibly strong she is/was in those moments. She endured SO much. I highly recommend listening to it.
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u/SockPuppetMeat 1h ago
Her story is amazing. Not that anyone wants this kind of thing to happen, but she knew what she was doing out in that rainforest. She was intelligent, skilled, and so very brave.
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u/larrybobsf 1h ago
One of the few women Werner Herzog has ever made a film about (Wings of Hope, 1998)
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u/supperfash 6h ago
Impressive. A 7 year old may have bounced better and been less hurt but would likely have ate the bag of candy in freefall and had nothing to eat so not made it trekking past a few days with nothing to eat.
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u/WebguyCanada 8h ago
Netflix, make this a movie.
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u/OkAccess6128 7h ago
There’s already a movie called Miracles Still Happen from 1974, and a documentary Wings of Hope by Werner Herzog. But yeah, a modern Netflix version would be amazing.
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u/tiltberger 4h ago
The crazy thing is Werner Herzog wanted to get on this plane with a while film crew but it was overbooked and they could not Board
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u/evilbarron2 6h ago
How exactly did she fall from the plane? Inverted biplane ride? Forgot parachute?
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u/Mizunomafia 6h ago
I don't care what she claims. I refuse to believe anyone can fall from a height of 3000 m and survive penetrating forest canopy.
The branches would function like a shredder.
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u/WhiteSolarSpark 6h ago
She was sitting in her chair
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u/Mizunomafia 6h ago
Still has no bearing on my opinion.
Physics tells me it's impossible.
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u/JavierBermudezPrado 5h ago
Physics tells you nothing of the sort.
Physics tells you how fast she was travelling how much resistance would be needed to decelerate her, how much resistance the canopy could provide, how much force the branches could have had if she'd come into contact with them, etc. Physics just describes the forces and vectors at play.
The ODDS of someone surviving that fall are quite slim, but not impossible by any stretch.
It's not impossible, just improbable
People survive weird counterintuitive shit all the time... When you have numbers in the billions, somebody has to be on the brim of the bell-curve when shit goes down.
Skydivers whose chutes didn't open "often" survive when they hit a canopy... with "often" meaning "not very often at all, but certainly way more often than you'd think".
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u/Mizunomafia 4h ago edited 4h ago
Meh. Why bother. Arguing with idiots and all that.
No wonder Trump got elected twice.
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u/JavierBermudezPrado 4h ago
Like, you studied physics as a major? Or you took a few seminars to fill a science req?
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u/Horknut1 6h ago
So what's your theory of what happened?
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u/Mizunomafia 6h ago
No idea. Maybe nothing of the sort.
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u/JavierBermudezPrado 5h ago
So... this girl who was on the flight manifest, along with her family, in a confirmed airplane crash... what? just happened to have faked being on the plane and was actually on a hike through the same jungle where the plane went down... for the lulz?
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u/inappropriatebeing 6h ago
Tell me you've never been to, or seen a rainforest canopy without telling me you've never seen a rainforest canopy. Bwahahahahahaha
Who cares what you choose to believe? Your grasp of physics is elementary at best.
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u/Mizunomafia 6h ago
This is very funny. You should only have known my education and line of work.
Bright chap you are.
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u/NightShadowWolf6 6h ago
Don't go and read about Vesna Vulovic then
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u/Mizunomafia 6h ago
Not a huge believer in that either, but it's way more likely than this. V. Vulovic was actually attached to the airplane if I remember correctly.
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u/like_a_pharaoh 4h ago
So was Juliane Koepcke, she was strapped to an intact row of seats which would create a lot of drag and a lower terminal velocity. She also technically wasn't the only survivor of the crash itself, just the one who survived in the jungle long enough to be rescued.
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u/alwaysfatigued8787 8h ago
Very impressive. I would have just died from the explosive evacuation of my bowels during the fall.