Check out these five brutal accident survivors that defied all odds and survived.
It is always a shame when someone leaves this life in an accident. Somehow, we always feel that they went before their time. However, there are those who defy all odds and reemerge like phoenixes. Like the these five accident survivors who just didn’t give up.
On a Yugoslav Airlines flight from Copenhagen to Belgrade on January 26, 1972, a bomb exploded at the altitude of 33,000 feet. 27 passengers and crew fell out of the sky, and died. But one stewardess, Vesna Vulovic survived the whole fall sitting on the tail of the plane.
In 2008, a welder named Matthew Lowe got his overall stuck in a factory machine, which pulled hi entire body through a five inch hole. Amazingly, even though his skin ripped, his arms snapped, his joints dislocated, his bones crushed, and his stomach and bowel ruptured, Lowe survived. After being welded together himself with metal bolts and plates, he returned to the factory and started training as a supervisor to stay away from machinery.
The story of Croatian Frane Selak is just bizarre. This man survived a train derailing in 1962, which killed 17 passengers. Just a year later, he was flying from Zagreb to Rijeka when a plane door opened and sent the plane crashing to the ground. 19 people were killed, but Selak, he landed on a haystack. Then again in 1966, he was on a bus that crashed into a river. Four people died, but amazingly he survived again. As if those were not enough, in both 1970 and 1973, he was driving cars that suddenly caught on fire and exploded. He survived those as well. But after being hit by a bus, and left only with some bruises in 1995, and driving off a cliff and landing on a tree, watching his car explode 300 feet below in 1996, he won the million dollar lottery in 2003.
There’s no one tougher than the Soviets. Anatoli Bugorski was a researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, Bugorski, the largest Soviet particle accelerator, the Synchrotron U-70. In 1978, he stuck his head into the accelerator to fix a malfunction, little did he know that it was still running. Bugorski was hit with a flash brighter than a thousand suns, protons travelling close to the speed of light. He had to get a lot of medical attention of course, but he survived 300,000 rads travelling through his face. It only take 500 rads to kill a person. He even completed his PHD.
In 2009, a railroad switch-man named Truman Duncan fell in front of a moving train and got cut in half. Despite loosing both legs and a kidney, Duncan called for help on his own cell phone, and waited 45 minutes for the paramedics to arrive. It took 23 surgeries to keep him alive though.
