[Dan narrating]
[whimsical music]
Imagine surviving a coma,
only to wake up at your own funeral.
[whimsical music intensities]
- To the astonishment and terror of everyone there,
Essie sits up out of her coffin and smiles.
- She tries to walk towards her own parents.
They flee as though she's a ghost or a zombie.
- Or facing off against an apex predator
and living to tell the tale.
- Suddenly he slammed from the side.
His mask is torn from his face.
- Then very quickly, the shark goes in for another bite.
[person screaming]
- How about free falling 7,000 feet
and landing on the unlikeliest lifesaver?
- Fate has thrown her another curve ball.
She has landed directly on top
of a huge colony of fire ants.
- These fire ants attack and bite and sting Joan
by the thousands, and the pain is relentless.
- These are the stories of near death experiences
so shocking, they're truly unbelievable.
[suspenseful tune continues]
There are many ways to cheat death.
Good luck, great timing,
or something even more unbelievable
that happens to one lovesick man in Russia.
- It's 2023 in Russia,
and a man only known as Arthur is heartbroken
and he's decided to drown his sorrows
in a long, all night pub crawl.
At the end of the night,
he wanders into a stranger's apartment on the 19th floor
and ends up on the balcony.
He then leans back and flips right over the railing.
[suspenseful tune] [loud thud]
- Street cameras capture this.
A very fast blur zipping past the camera
as he plummets towards the street.
Debris shoots skyward as he buries himself
into the top of an SUV, [sirens waling]
and you think to yourself, this is the end.
This guy's done.
- [Narrator] Instead, they find something more surprising.
- Arthur is not only standing by his own willpower,
but he's singing and he ends up singing in the ambulance,
all the way to the emergency room.
- [Narrator] First responders are all shocked.
How did he survive a 200 foot fall?
- There are a surprising number of recorded cases
of very drunken people surviving horrible accidents.
Essentially, their bodies are so loose
they don't brace for impact
and sometimes they actually experience less trauma.
- Incredibly, he only has a concussion
and some spinal compression fractures.
He's extremely lucky that he landed on that car
with enough force to be able to crumple it
to make the SUV absorb the impact.
He survived something
that absolutely would've killed a more sober man.
- Surviving a 19 story fall seems impossible,
yet it's a walk in the park
compared to a high altitude descent
that is truly the stuff of nightmares.
[suspenseful tune]
- It is Christmas Eve, 1971 and Julianne Koka,
a German Peruvian high school student
is flying with her mother in a rickety passenger plane
over the jungles of Peru.
- The plane is packed for two reasons.
One, it's the holidays, but perhaps more importantly,
'cause the airlines other two aircraft have crashed recently
and this is the only one left functioning.
- The first 30 to 40 minutes of the flight
are pretty uneventful,
but when the plane heads into a severe thunderstorm,
things go bad pretty quickly.
[suspenseful tune] [thunder roaring]
- Lightning strikes the wing of the plane,
sparks fly and crack.
Julianne hears her mother, say out loud, "This is the end."
As the engines fail, the plane begins to nose dive,
and for Julianne, everything goes black.
[suspenseful tune continues]
- Suddenly she is falling out of the sky,
still attached to a bank of seats.
The G-forces and the violent spinning
cause her to pass out again.
- [Narrator] Julianne wakes up on the jungle floor, injured,
very confused, but somehow still alive.
- She's suffered a massive concussion.
When she tries to stand, she immediately passes out.
- Not to mention the fact
she has a horrible gaping wound and she's losing blood.
- How she survived the landing is still a mystery,
but one of the theories is
the spinning of the row of seats
acted kind of like a helicopter,
where it provided enough lift just to slow her down.
So when she hit the jungle, she wasn't killed on impact.
- The other theory that's posited is that
the bottom of the seat that she was in
took the majority of the impact,
and as she continued to fall through the canopy
and fall through the leaves and through the branches
that continued to slow down her descent
until she ultimately hit the jungle floor.
- Julianne wanders the crash site,
which is now littered with bodies,
and she notices a corpse with lady shoes.
It could possibly be her mother,
but at this point her thinking is so scattered,
it's just hard for her to really absorb anything.
- [Narrator] Dazed or not, Julianne knows one thing.
She has to find help.
- She remembers something that her father,
a field biologist once told her.
Follow the water.
Even the tiniest streams will lead to bigger streams
and those will lead to rivers,
and that's where the people will be.
- She's trying to take in her surroundings,
but she has no clue where to find water
until she hears a unique call of a bird she knows
called a crested chicken,
and she remembers they live near rivers.
- [Narrator] Her path to the river is long and perilous,
swarming with panthers, snakes,
and other fearsome predators.
But the biggest threat comes from a much smaller creature
now making a home out of the horrific gash in her arm,
maggots.
- If maggots are appearing,
that means that the tissue around the womb has died,
gangrene potentially setting in, and that could be fatal.
- [Narrator] Despite her body breaking down,
Julianne keeps moving,
drawn by the one thing that cuts through the silence.
[birds chirping]
- For three days, she tracks the sound of the bird,
and sure enough it leads her to a stream.
- [Narrator] The stream offers a glimmer of hope,
but with each passing day doubt creeps in.
- A week has passed since her plane crashed,
and occasionally she'll hear a plane hovering above her.
She'll scream for search and rescue,
but the jungle canopy is so thick that they don't hear her.
- [Narrator] Then amid the endless hum of the jungle,
a new sound emerges.
- She hears the sound of running water.
She's found the river,
just like her father told her she would.
She's too weak to swim,
so her only real option is to float down the river on logs
or anything else that will carry her.
- While she's drifting down the river,
there are crocodiles that see her floating.
Luckily they end up leaving her alone
and letting her continue to drift on.
- [Narrator] Eventually she comes across a small riverboat
docked by a cabin, which gives her an idea.
- Julianne remembers as a child,
they had a dog
that also had a wound that became infested with maggots.
Her dad would grab some diesel fuel
to clean all the maggots out.
With the outboard motor fuel, she also does the same
and the maggots immediately rushed to the surface
and leave the wound.
- [Narrator] Exhausted and malnourished,
Julianne passes out in the cabin,
her first shelter since she fell from the sky 10 days ago.
- When Julianne awakes,
she's startled because she sees three lumber workers
standing over her.
They're completely shocked and terrified by her appearance.
She is emaciated, she's filthy,
and her eyes are blood red from the concussion.
They scream and run away.
It turns out there actually is a local legend
about a water demon with big fiery red eyes.
They think that she's coming to get them.
- [Narrator] Julianne convinces them that she's not a demon,
but the survivor of a plane crash,
and they take her to the neighboring town to get help.
- After spending 11 days in the jungle,
Julianne finally reunites with her father,
the voice in her head, which told her,
follow the water and you'll find the people.
- By chance, famed film director Werner Hertzog
was supposed to be on that plane with Julianne,
but he was bumped.
Decades later, he returns with her to the jungle
to retrace this incredible tale of survival.
- Rock climbing is full of risks,
but sometimes the most terrifying part isn't the fall.
Take for instance, the experience of one man
on Japan's Mount Futago in 2022.
[suspenseful tune]
[climbers yelling]
- The climber shutters as a black blur shoots past him.
That blur is a vicious Japanese black bear.
[climber yelling]
There's a myriad of ways he could die. He's got no ropes.
The bear could knock him off this cliff,
some 3000 feet up, or he could slip as he tries to escape.
- There's also the unpleasant prospect
of being mauled and killed by this female,
because Japanese black bear are notoriously aggressive.
- Black bears are an apex predator.
They're a formidable animal,
and to fight off a black bear even on flat ground
is almost an impossible task.
Imagine hanging off of a cliff
and to add to the peril,
a bear can climb a mountain much faster than a person can.
- [Narrator] Just when he thinks it can't get any worse,
an unexpected visitor shows up.
- In the middle of the mayhem,
he notices there's a little bear cub in the distance.
This is by far the worst case scenario
when it comes to bear attacks,
because 70% of people that lose their lives
from bear attacks are from a very angry mother
defending their cubs. [climber yelling]
- Luckily, the climber has a secret weapon.
He happens to know karate, so when the bear lunges at him,
he actually throws some powerful kicks and punches.
One of those kicks lands hard enough
that it rattles her and she retreats.
- When you add up all the factors,
this guy is extremely lucky to survive the situation.
- Completely out of breath and panicked,
the climber finally makes his way back up the mountain
knowing that today he just barely survived
filming his own death on a GoPro.
- Karate might come in handy against angry bears
on a mountain, but it's not going to save you underwater.
[suspenseful tune]
- By 22 years old, Australian, Rodney Fox
is already a spearfishing legend.
In 1963, he's determined to hold onto his local title.
- He is free diving without a tank, taking deep breaths,
and combing the reefs off of Aldinga Beach
in search of exotic fish.
- [Narrator] What Rodney doesn't realize is
that he is also being hunted. [suspenseful tune]
- Suddenly he's slammed from the side.
His spear gun is knocked from his hand.
His mask is torn from his face.
His first thought is that he's been struck by a submarine.
- Rodney isn't sure what's happening,
but what he does know is that he's moving through the water
faster than he's ever moved in his life.
Rodney feels an intense pressure
from his hip to above his shoulder,
and all the air just suddenly expelled from his lungs.
Then very quickly, he realizes that he's in the mouth
of a great white shark. [suspenseful tune continues]
- He's weakened by the loss of blood
and also the lack of air,
so he reaches for his diver's knife
and begins jabbing the shark near his eyes
and near his gills.
Incredibly, he actually feels the shark letting him go.
- [Narrator] Most would try to flee from the shark,
but quick thinking Rodney goes on the offensive.
- Rodney rushes toward the shark
and bear hugs it, wrapping his bloody arms
around its great sand papery belly.
This is similar to a tactic used by seals
when they're attacked by great white sharks.
They crowd close to its midsection
to stay away from its deadly jaws.
- Now the shark wants to get rid of Rodney,
so it shakes him off
and once free, Rodney is going for the surface.
- He looks down as he's kicking his way to the surface
and through the bloody mirk of the water,
he can see the shark is coming at him.
- The shark goes in for another bite,
but to Rodney's surprise, the shark doesn't bite him,
it goes for the bag of fish that he has speared.
- [Narrator] This may sound like a lucky break,
but the bag of fish is still attached to him.
- Rodney's hands are too torn up
to trigger the release on his bag of speared fish
attached to his dive belt.
So when the shark takes off, Rodney is dragged by the bag
back down toward the ocean floor.
By some last minute miracle, the line snaps on its own
and Rodney is free to swim toward the surface.
- Rodney breaks the surface and begins to gulp air
and he sees that a boat is bearing down on him
and it turns out that the blood
that is pouring out of Rodney,
has created essentially a dye marker to locate him.
- [Narrator] As Rodney is pulled onto the boat,
the only thing holding him together is his wetsuit.
- He is in terrible condition.
There's this giant bite mark going from his shoulder,
all the way down to his hip and his organs are hanging out.
Every rib on the left side of his body is cracked
and his lung is punctured.
- It takes almost 500 stitches
to put Rodney back together again,
but he survives and fights his way back to a full recovery.
- Rodney's massive scar
becomes the stuff of spearfishing legend.
Some say the encounter inspired Peter Benchley
when he was writing the book "Jaws".
- Now in his eighties, Fox still chases sharks,
but with a camera and from inside a cage.
- When it comes to escaping death,
most managed to do it before actually being buried.
But shockingly, there are a few exceptions.
- In 1915 in South Carolina,
you had one of those incredibly scorching hot summers.
30-year-old, Essie Dunbar falls into a violent
epileptic seizure, due to all the heat.
She passes out on the ground
and the local county doctor, DK Briggs is called.
When Briggs arrives to the scene,
Essie is completely motionless.
- After several failed attempts to revive her,
DK Briggs announces the sad news to Essie's family,
their beloved daughter is dead.
- The grief stricken Dunbar's send word to Essie's sister,
but she lives in another town,
and unfortunately they have to plan the funeral
for the next day because of the excessive heat.
They can't leave a body lying around.
- Her sister is devastated
and wants to come home for the funeral,
which is gonna be incredibly tight for her to make it.
Remember, the automobile as we know it
still was not in existence,
so it was gonna take her sister quite a while
to make it back to the family home.
- Three ministers actually preached at Essie's funeral
to try to elongate the service,
and yet, this still isn't enough time
for her sister to arrive.
- By the time Essie's sister makes it,
the funeral's over and Essie has been buried.
Essie's sister is inconsolable.
She can't believe she's missed the funeral.
So to finally calm her down,
the family decides they will exhume Essie
so her sister can see her one final time.
It's a little bit extreme that they would even do that,
but unbelievably, the groundskeepers of the cemetery,
they all agree and they decide they will dig the coffin up.
- And when they open the coffin,
a dead body is not what they find.
To the astonishment and terror of everyone in the group,
Essie sits up out of her coffin,
looks at her sister and smiles.
- By some accounts, the preachers actually faint
and fall into the grave.
Essie steps out of the coffin
and tries to walk towards her own parents.
They flee as though she's a ghost or a zombie.
- [Narrator] Essie's rise seems like something
out of a horror movie,
but the real story is far more chilling.
- A seizure is an electrical storm in the brain,
so likely what happened is that during her seizure,
that electrical activity ended up stopping the heart.
So when the county doctor pronounced her dead,
her heart actually was stopped.
This is a phenomenon called ictal asystole.
And on top of that, when people think of seizures,
they think of the whole body violently jerking,
but there are tonic seizures as well
where the whole body is just fully stifF,
so that stiffening could have mimicked rigor mortis
and tricked DK Briggs into believing this patient was dead.
- Luckily, Essie is no zombie and Essie's sister knows that.
Calmer heads prevail and she's invited back home
and makes a full recovery.
- Essie goes on to live a pretty normal and quiet life.
She works on her family's farm until she passes away
in the year 1962.
A local newspaper announces the service as,
"Final funeral for South Carolina woman."
- Unbelievably, this isn't the only time
someone is pronounced dead a little prematurely.
[suspenseful tune]
- In 1754, Ewen McDonald is a Scottish soldier
on leave and he goes out to the pub.
A fight breaks out.
Suddenly someone pulls out a knife
and things go from bad to worse.
- Ewen, who is a trained soldier,
ends up with the knife in his hands
and stuck in the neck of one of the locals, Robert Parker,
who dies from the knife wound.
The locals want justice and they're going to get it.
- Ewen is charged with murder and convicted.
The judge sentences him to death by hanging.
In addition, the judge rules his body be donated
to a nearby medical school.
- That might seem like a strange pronouncement by the judge,
but at this point in time, it is very hard
to find good healthy bodies for anatomical study.
So this is really a gift to the medical students
and they're excited to get this body.
- It's execution day and Ewen is brought up to the gallows.
He's desperately trying to stop this from happening.
He's shoving and pushing
and he tries to knock the hangman off his ladder.
It's all to no avail.
The noose is tightened,
the lever is pulled, and Ewen is hung from the neck
until a medical professional on the scene
officially declares him dead.
- [Narrator] Ewen's body is brought
to the dissection theater
to carry out the second part of his sentence, the autopsy.
- The surgeon is excited to get underway with this job.
He sharpens his tools, gets dressed,
and when he enters the dissection theater,
he is met with the shock of his life.
- Sitting up on the table is a very frightened,
very much alive, Ewen McDonald,
and he is panicking, begging, pleading for help.
- Luckily for him, he's in the right place.
There is a doctor and you think that this doctor
would come to his aid and heal him.
He's still alive. [suspenseful tune]
- [Narrator] But this medical miracle
isn't enough for the doctor to change his plans.
- Instead of saving Ewen,
this surgeon grabs a mallet
and knocks Ewen upside the head,
finishing the hangman's job.
This surgeon is super excited
to get this dissection underway
and when he sees a living Ewen,
he is not gonna let that come between him
and his dissection.
- In perhaps a stunning example of karmic retribution,
years later, the same surgeon would die
from a kick to the head delivered by his own horse.
No word on whether he donated his own body to science.
- We've seen death avoided thanks to freak physics,
a sheer will to live, and even slipping the hangman's noose.
But sometimes, the best way to beat the reaper
is with a little help from Mother Nature.
[suspenseful tune]
- The Empire State Building in New York City
was once the world's tallest building
and there have been numerous instances
of desperate people using the building's height
to jump off and end it all.
1979, one of these despondent people is
29-year-old, Elvita Adams.
- It's a cold, windy night on December 2nd
and Elvita walks the observation deck
on the building's 86th floor.
When she's confident that there's no one close enough
to stop her, she quickly scales the eight foot fence
and jumps off. [suspenseful tune]
- Now, just as she leaps, a massive gust of wind
comes along and pushes her back towards the building.
- [Narrator] Instead of falling 86 stories to the ground,
she falls only one,
landing on a narrow ledge on the 85th floor.
- She's stunned, she's in tremendous pain,
and really not sure what's happened, how she got there.
- Wind moving a body this way
is not something that a small breeze is gonna do,
it takes like 60 to 70 mile per hour wind gust,
and it turns out that the higher you go in altitude,
the faster the wind becomes
because there's less friction with the ground
and all the stuff on the ground.
And in New York City, you have these tall skyscrapers,
and as the wind funnels through them
going from a wide area to a more narrow area,
that increases the wind speed.
- What's really astonishing about this is
the timing of this gust of wind.
It had to be coming from exactly the right angle
at exactly the right time to save Elvita's life.
- A night supervisor named George Rice
spots Elvita on the ledge.
Incredibly, with the help of others,
he's able to get Elvita safely inside the building
without anybody falling.
Elvita is taken to Bellevue Hospital
with a fractured pelvis,
but otherwise, unharmed,
all thanks to that miraculous gust of wind.
- One miracle might make you a believer
in divine intervention,
but our next lucky protagonist
has his guardian angel working overtime.
- It's a pretty cool January day in the year 1962
in Croatia.
You have 32-year-old music teacher, Fran Salak
riding on the train.
Then suddenly and without warning,
Fran hears this sound of just crushing and grinding metal
and sees gravel just shooting past the window.
The train has jumped the track
and is now careening into the icy water that is below them.
- The frigid water rushes into the train
and by the time Fran realizes what's happening,
he's got a broken arm and some brutal hypothermia,
but somehow Fran is able to swim his way to help
and is plucked from the river before it kills him.
Now 17 other passengers are not so lucky.
- [Narrator] But this is not
the angel of death's last swing at Fran,
not by a long shot.
- In 1963, Fran takes his first ever plane ride.
This has be an exciting moment for 'em.
But not long after takeoff, something terrible happens.
- Mid-flight, the door is ripped off the fuselage.
A flight attendant and Fran are sucked out along with it.
- If you're sucked out of a plane,
the odds of your survival are pretty much next to zero.
- 19 people aboard the plane
will die when the plane crashes,
but Fran somehow survives this event
because as he falls to earth, he lands in a haystack.
- [Narrator] After recovering,
Fran welcomes an uneventful life for the next three years
until a routine trip takes an unexpected turn.
- Fran's on a bus that slams into an embankment
and slides into another cold river.
- Once again, he's able to free himself from the bus,
swim away from the wreckage through the SU river
and makes it to safety.
- [Narrator] Fran is done taking chances
with public transportation,
so he saves up and buys himself a car.
- In the early 1970s,
not one but two of Fran's cars catch fire,
nearly killing him each time.
This is not the guy you wanna carpool with.
- [Narrator] A more cautious Fran spends the next 20 years
or so with his feet solidly on the ground,
but even that's not without risk.
- One day he's just walking the streets near his home
and a bus jumps a curb
and then hits him on the sidewalk.
Fran figures, look, death is gonna follow me
no matter where I go, so I may as well do whatever I want.
So he decides to take a mountain vacation,
which requires him driving up a winding,
perilous mountain road.
- [Narrator] You can probably guess how this is going to go.
- Halfway through the trip,
a semi-truck emerges from Fran's blind spot,
hits his car and knocks him off the side of this road,
plummeting 300 feet.
Somehow Fran is able to eject himself from the car
and hang onto a tree before being rescued.
- Now, as reporters dig into the story
of Fran's unlucky streak, he becomes kind of a folk hero
and no big surprise, he really loves the attention.
And Fran's quick to point out that after four divorces,
he's unlucky in love too.
- [Narrator] But the un-luckiest man in the world,
does have a happy ending.
- Well, in 2003, Fran's luck changes for the better.
He wins 900,000 euros in the lottery.
- [Narrator] The lucky streak continues
when a major snack company asks Fran to do a commercial
after his lottery win.
- It's a very lucrative endorsement deal,
but Fran turns it down.
Why?
Because it requires him flying on a plane
and Fran Salak is done with planes, with trains,
with buses, and probably with automobiles.
- [Narrator] Fran, however, is still willing
to take some risks.
- Despite having had four previous divorces,
He decides, you know what?
I'm feeling it right now.
Lemme go ahead and just propose to my girlfriend,
which he does.
I mean, when the opportunity strikes,
you have to take advantage of it, right?
- After living to the ripe age of 87,
Fran gives much of his lucky fortune to friends and family.
- They say, "If you love what you do,
you'll never work a day in your life",
but as one unlucky lobsterman finds out,
it's tough to love your job when it tries to kill you.
[suspenseful tune]
- 40 miles south of Montauk, New York,
lobsterman, John Aldridge is hard at work
on the deck of his work boat, the Anna Mary.
His partner, Anthony Sazinski
and another crew member are snoozing away in the cabin
while they make the long crawl to their traps.
- John is on the deck prepping the big tanks
that are gonna hold the lobsters that they're gonna pull in.
He's filling one with cold water,
which will keep the lobsters alive.
He goes to the second tank
and it's blocked by a couple big chests of ice,
about 200 pounds each.
He thinks for a moment he should wake up his buddy
who's sleeping downstairs,
and he decides to do it on his own.
- [Narrator] This may prove to be one of the worst decisions
of John's life.
- John thrusts his weight against it.
He gives a heave and the handle breaks.
He goes head over heels [water splashing]
into open water.
He is tossed by the prop wash
as he tries to scream to his partner,
but the loud diesel engines just drown him out.
[suspenseful tune]
Alone in the open ocean at night with no life jacket,
no flares, no radio.
John knows there's hardly a chance of survival.
- John is wearing big, bright green boots
that go almost up to his thigh,
and they're so huge,
his friends call him his Herman Munster boots.
And first thing you're supposed to do in this situation
is to kick off your work boots
'cause in most cases they will drag you underwater.
But John notices that they seem to be keeping him afloat,
so he carefully takes off his boots
and turns them upside down, drops them down into the water,
capturing air, and he sticks one under each arm
and now he's improvised a flotation system.
[suspenseful tune continues]
- [Narrator] Hours later, John's friend and partner Anthony
wakes up on the Anna Mary and makes a disturbing discovery.
- He comes up on the deck, nobody's there,
and the boat is just roaring forward on autopilot.
- Anthony sees the deck lid to the lobster hold is open.
He scrambles and ducks his head inside,
worried his friend fell into the tank and drowned,
but the tank is full of water and no John.
When Anthony spots the broken cooler handle,
he realizes John must have rolled out the back of the boat.
Critical question though, is when?
- Anthony immediately puts out a frantic call
to the coast guards
and to the rest of the captains in the area.
They estimate John fell into the water around 11:00 PM
and what they do is create this giant search grid.
- In addition to the Coast Guard,
nearly every private boat in the Montauk area
has stowed their fishing gear and headed out
to see if they can help with the search.
- The biggest problem,
John fell in the water at 3:30 AM not 11:00 PM
so they're all searching 30 miles in the wrong direction.
- [Narrator] Meanwhile, John is doing
whatever he can to stay alive,
but several hours in he's running on empty.
His only hope is to find the buoy of a lobster trap
and use it to stay afloat.
- The ocean has a really big swell that day,
so every time a swell comes along,
it kind of lifts him up
and it gives him a higher vantage point
and at one point he spots a larger lobster buoy
that's floating in the water that's called a high flyer.
He figures, if I can grab onto it,
it'll give me an extra chance of survival.
- [Narrator] As John holds on for dear life,
one persistent search volunteer questions Anthony
in more detail.
- They go over the minute details of the deck
and the condition he found it in and they figure it out.
One of the tanks was full of cold water
and John would not have done that
until they were really close to their traps.
They realize now that John probably went in the water
a lot later than they initially thought.
- [Narrator] With the clock reset, the search narrows
and a Coast Guard helicopter races to find John.
- John Aldridge is clutching onto this buoy for dear life.
He's been in the water for 12 hours.
He's running outta steam. He's thinking maybe this is it.
But then above him, he starts to hear the blades
of a helicopter getting louder and louder and louder,
and he's screaming and he starts waving his green boots
in the air frantically to get its attention.
- The Coast Guard spots this tiny speck in the sea.
It's John Aldridge hugging that big orange lobster float.
When John's brought into the chopper,
the pilot yells to him over the noise,
"You got some will to live.
We've been looking for you for nine hours."
And John yells back,
"Well, I've been looking for you for 12 hours."
- John and Anthony still own the Anna Mary.
They still hunt lobster in the deep ocean
and John still wears his big, ridiculous lifesaving boots.
- For people that love a death defying thrill,
few sensations beat skydiving or paragliding.
The professionals may make it look easy,
but when things go wrong, they go wrong fast.
- Kevin Philip is a professional paraglider
and in 2022, he's soaring thousands of feet
above this beautiful terrain in Spain.
- This is a routine flight for him,
but little does he know,
he's about to be in a fight for his life.
- As he's paragliding along,
a massive updraft causes a lot of turbulence
and starts to twist his chute
and he gets tangled in the cords.
- He's now suddenly in free fall
and he's speeding towards the ground
at about 80 to 100 miles an hour.
- He has an emergency parachute,
but as you can see in the video,
when he tries to deploy it, it doesn't open.
- [Narrator] The closer Kevin gets to the ground,
the less likely the chute will be able to stop him.
- People on the ground, including his own mother,
are watching at its absolute mayhem in the air.
He's spinning around as he's falling.
His main shoot is twisting and spinning around him,
and it just seems like he keeps falling
and falling toward his death. [suspenseful tune]
- In a situation like this, time slows down.
He has seconds at this point to figure something out.
- Somehow he's able to keep his composure
and he ends up dragging his reserve chute back
and untangles it from the main chute.
With less than one second left,
he's able to pop the chute
and it's just enough time to break his fall.
- [Narrator] Incredibly, Kevin, not only cheats death,
he manages to land without any injury.
- [Kevin] Ah, oh my God.
- But what could possibly save you
if your reserve shoot does not deploy?
For one woman, the answer is totally unbelievable.
- It's September, 1999
and 47-year-old adrenaline junkie,
Joan Murray, is standing at the open door
of a Cessna airplane at 14,500 feet
with the wind roaring past her ears.
- When a light illuminates,
she takes the leap that she's taken so many times before.
It's Joan's 36 skydive of the year.
She knows that there's always risks
associated with skydiving,
but that's why she's doing it.
- [Narrator] When Joan gets down to 3000 feet
and pulls her rip cord, she braces herself
for the jolt of her shoot deploying.
- But there is no jolt and her chute doesn't deploy.
- And as she screams past 2000 feet,
she pulls the ripcord on her reserve shoot.
But just like last time, something's not right.
She looks up and sees that the lines of her chute
are all twisted and tangled,
and that causes the chute to not be able to open fully.
There's a little bit of resistance,
but it is not nearly enough
to slow her down for a safe landing.
- [Narrator] With less than 700 feet to the ground
and no sign of slowing,
Joan has only enough time to contemplate
how hard she's going to land. [suspenseful tune]
- If a person drops from a height of 48 feet,
the chances of survival are like 50%.
But at 700 feet, oh, it's about 100% fatal.
[suspenseful tune]
- Her landing is brutal, to say the least.
- By some miracle, Joan wakes up on the ground.
She tastes the blood in her mouth,
but otherwise she can't move.
But there's another thing that's happening that's strange.
She feels these sharp, stinky pains all over her body
and she's wondering, what is this?
Is this nerve damage?
Do I have a spinal injury?
And the pain is relentless.
- What Joan can't realize yet
is that fate has thrown her another curve ball.
After two failed parachutes,
she has landed directly on top of a huge colony
of fire ants.
The ants are stinging Joan and they inject a painful venom.
- [Narrator] While this may seem like insult
to already very severe injury,
the ant bites are actually keeping her alive.
- A massive blunt force impact like Joan just experienced
can stop the heart all on its own,
but these red ants stings have the byproduct
of increasing the adrenaline in the body,
which keeps the heart beating.
These fire ants attack and bite and sting Joan
by the thousands.
- [Narrator] Each bite triggers an adrenaline spike
that keeps her heart beating
until first responders find her
and rush her to the hospital.
- The probability of this is wild.
If Joan had landed just five feet in either direction,
she would've missed the ant colony
and would already be dead.
- She has several shattered bones, 17 missing teeth,
and she requires 20 corrective surgeries.
It takes two years,
but Joan survives to make a full recovery.
- And thanks to a little help from thousands of cranky,
territorial red ants.
Joan goes on to complete one more skydive.
Whether it's being buried alive, stranded at sea,
or stuck with a defective parachute,
these are the tales of dodging death.
So mind-boggling that they are truly unbelievable.