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Survivor of longest fall12/16/2023 ![]() ![]() They struggled to communicate, with Alvarenga trying to draw his situation using stick figures, but help was summoned, and after 11 days of hospitalization, he was cleared to return home to El Salvador. ![]() Alvarenga was devastated to lose his only company, and he spoke to Córdoba's corpse as if he were still alive for six days before burying him at sea.Īlvarenga staved off despair with his vivid imagination, and after 438 days at sea, he spotted land and landed on the Ebon Atoll, where Emi Libokmeto and Russel Laikidrik discovered him staring at their vacation house. However, two months into their ordeal, Córdoba sunk into a depression, stopped accepting food and water, and died soon afterward. The pair caught fish and seabirds by hand, sometimes drying the meat and sometimes consuming it raw, and they worked out a system to collect rainwater. Their boat was 25 feet long and "virtually invisible at sea." Alvarenga's last words to shore before going missing were, "Come now, I am really getting fucked out here." The engine had just failed, and the waves were pushing them further and further into the open water. In 2012, Alvarenga and his 22-year-old companion, Ezequiel Córdoba, got caught in a severe storm while attempting to head back to the coast of Mexico after a fishing trip. Her life's work became the preservation of Panguana, which she has protected and expanded throughout the years. Today, Diller continues her ecological preservation work and still goes on expeditions to Panguana. The resultant documentary, Wings of Hope, was released in 1998.ĭuring her ordeal, Diller promised herself she would dedicate herself to something meaningful. She was ultimately discovered by forest workers, who fed her and "poured gasoline into her open wounds to flush out the maggots."Īfter an Italian dramatization of the story called Miracles Still Happen portrayed her as a "hysterical dingbat," Diller shied from publicly speaking about her experience until she was contacted by Werner Herzog, who had almost boarded the same plane as her and her mother. But after their plane was struck on its wing by lightning, Diller recalled that her mother calmly remarked, "Now it's all over."ĭiller plummeted to the ground, still strapped into her seat, and she regained consciousness on Christmas morning with "a broken collarbone, a sprained knee, and gashes on her right shoulder and left calf, one eye swollen shut and her field of vision in the other narrowed to a slit." For 11 days, she walked through the Amazon. It was 1971, and Juliane and her mother, Maria Koepcke, were traveling from Lima, the capital city of Peru, to Panguana, "a biological research station in the belly of the Amazon," where Juliane occasionally lived with her zoologist parents who established the facility. Diller accepting Germany's Federal Order of Merit for Environmental Work in 2021.)Ī 2021 New York Times profile told her extraordinary story. Vulovic speculated they just didn't want "so much publicity about the accident." She also disagreed when people referred to her as lucky, pointing out that if that were true, she "never would have had this accident." Vulovic died in 2016 at the age of 66. Remarkably, she continued flying, and even tried to get her old gig as a flight attendant back, though the airline declined on the basis of her health. She had no memory of the flight after boarding, though her first memory was seeing her parents in the hospital. Vulovic was able to walk again less than a year after the crash. She was also comatose for part of her recovery. Her injuries included broken legs and vertebrae, a fractured skull, and temporary paralysis. The trees and snow probably helped cushion its fall, and against all odds, Vulovic survived, the only one of the 28 passengers and crew to do so. The other passengers were most likely sucked outside, but Vulovic stayed in the fuselage, "wedged in by a food cart," as it fell onto the ground. When explosives detonated in the plane's luggage compartment, the plane broke apart midair above Czechoslovakia. ![]()
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