[mysterious music]
We've featured some of the wildest
life-and-death stories ever told,
but these, the most outlandish of them all,
like a frequent flyer whose trip took a serious detour.
- One minute, Vesna's doing her flight attendant duties
at 33,000 feet.
The next minute, a bomb goes off.
The plane is blown into multiple pieces.
Passengers are getting sucked out of the aircraft,
and it begins to take a free fall.
- Or a high-stakes showdown in midair.
- They're going to shoot at each other in hot air balloons
over the city.
- It's pretty much guaranteed that at least one of them,
probably both of them, are going to die.
[gun blasts]
- How about the one where a beloved pet
becomes a deadly projectile?
- The dog is getting closer and closer to this balcony.
- It falls the 13 floors.
[claps] [horn honks]
- These are the most shocking dances with death.
So strange, they are truly unbelievable.
[dramatic music]
In the early 1900s,
one man sets out to change the future of flight
and ends up forever leaving his mark on aviation history.
[tense music]
- Franz Reichelt is an Austrian tailor living in Paris.
He makes dresses for a living,
but his real passion is this new, budding field of flying.
- In 1903, the Wright brothers
take their first heavier-than-air powered flight,
and everyone is aviation crazy, especially the French,
'cause the French also invented the hot air balloon.
- [Kavitha] In 1910, flying is extremely dangerous.
He sees all of these pilots dying in these test flights,
so he wants to do something to help out.
And up until this time, parachuting technology
has really only been used for jumping out of balloons
and very high altitudes.
So there's this push to find new parachute technology,
much lighter weight, for pilots themselves
to be able to jump out at lower altitudes
when they're taking these test flights around the country.
- [Dan] Coincidentally, a French aviation organization
offers a hefty prize
to anyone who can create a smaller chute.
- So, Franz decides to enter this contest
and take his expertise as a tailor, using silk and rods,
and he ends up developing a wingsuit.
- It looks like a Batman suit.
It looks like something out of a futuristic superhero movie.
- [Dan] More peculiar than his design
is his method for testing it.
He puts it on a dummy and tosses it from the window
of his fifth-floor Paris apartment.
Unsatisfied with the results, Franz decides
there's only one way to truly know if it works.
[tense music]
- [Kavitha] He puts on his own wingsuit
and climbs out of his fifth-floor window,
and he breaks his leg.
- But Franz is onto something.
He goes, "Ah-ha-ha-ha,
I didn't give my wingsuit enough time
to gather enough air to create resistance.
I need to go higher."
Luckily, he's in Paris, and at this point in time,
the tallest structure on Earth is the Eiffel Tower.
- He starts petitioning the Paris police to allow him
to throw winged dummies off of the Eiffel Tower
as part of a test for his new suit.
- [Dan] Surprisingly, not only do the French authorities
grant permission, but it becomes big news.
- Franz is so excited to show the world this wingsuit.
He puts out a press release that he has found the solution
of aviation safety.
- [Dan] On the cold morning of February 4th, 1912,
Franz arrives at the Eiffel Tower, sans dummy.
- It's Franz himself, dressed in his wingsuit.
Everyone goes, "Where's the dummy?"
and he goes, "There is no dummy."
- [Dan] From this moment on, Franz Reichelt becomes known as
"The Flying Tailor".
- His friends are pleading with him,
"You're not gonna do this, are you?
You're not gonna actually do this yourself?"
But Franz is convinced the suit will work,
and he's gonna prove it.
- [Austin] Franz is leaning forward on the edge
of the parapet of the Eiffel Tower.
- [Kavitha] He hesitates for about 40 seconds.
He seems to actually have second thoughts
for the first time in this story.
But then Franz sees the crowd below him,
and he waves and he says, "A bientot,"
which means, "I'll see you soon."
And then he jumps.
[uneasy music]
- [Dan] The parachute never fully opens.
Two seconds after jumping, Franz hits the ground and dies,
leaving a six-inch-deep,
Franz-shaped imprint in the ground.
- [Yohuru] This is the genius of madness.
When it works, we celebrate those people
who are willing to push through as heroes,
and when it fails, it's very easy to dismiss them
as being crazy.
- [Dan] While Franz Reichelt's leap ends in tragedy,
60 years later, another fall makes history
with a far more surprising outcome.
[airplane engines roaring]
- This particular day in 1972,
Flight 367 takes off, bound for Copenhagen,
aboard which is a 23-year-old flight attendant
by the name of Vesna Vulovic.
- One minute,
Vesna's doing her flight duties at 33,000 feet.
The next minute, a bomb goes off.
[explosion blasts]
The plane is blown into multiple pieces.
Passengers are getting sucked out of the aircraft,
and it begins to take a free fall.
This took place in the '70s during the Cold War,
and some sources say that this was a briefcase bomb.
- [Dan] It's unclear who is responsible,
but what is certain is Vesna
is not supposed to be on this plane.
She's not even supposed to be a flight attendant.
- She has chronic low blood pressure,
and that should disqualify her
from that kind of an occupation.
- Because you could potentially pass out
when you get to altitude.
- [Dan] But Vesna is so determined to get her dream job,
she figures out a workaround for her medical exam.
- Vesna is quite ingenious.
She really only needs to have normal blood pressure
during the time of screening.
- In order to bypass this screening,
she drinks five or six cups of coffee,
jacks her blood pressure up, jacks her heart rate up,
goes in, passes the test.
- [Dan] And there is another reason
why Vesna should not be on this specific flight.
It's supposed to be her day off.
- It was actually meant to be someone else's shift,
but Vesna decides, "Hey, it's going to Copenhagen.
It's a city I've always wanted to see.
I'll take the shift
even though it's not supposed to be mine."
And it turns out to be a fateful decision.
- [Jason] When the bomb goes off,
[explosion blasts]
Vesna happens to be behind the drink cart,
and as the plane starts taking a free fall,
the cart pins Vesna to the back of the aircraft.
At this point, Vesna loses consciousness,
and she's passed out.
- She free-falls 33,000 feet.
That's six miles, pinned between the food cart
and the fuselage of the plane.
- [Dan] It may be the first time that airplane food
saves someone's life,
but the unlikely circumstances continue.
- Vesna is traveling from 33,000 feet in a dead free fall.
[air whooshing]
So this is gonna take her about three minutes
until she hits the ground.
- And during that time, she's still in the tail section.
This forms a kind of rigid cage around her
that will somewhat protect her,
and the tail section has a surface area
which will slow down the descent to some extent.
It is like the world's worst parachute.
- [Dan] Then, another unbelievable coincidence.
- [Adam] The wreckage lands at such an angle
that she doesn't really absorb all the impact,
and she's alive.
She fell over 33,000 feet without a parachute
in a damaged airplane that had been ripped apart by a bomb,
and is alive.
[dramatic music]
- [Chris] She has a skull fracture, a cerebral hemorrhage,
she has multiple fractured vertebrae,
she has both legs that have been fractured,
and a fractured pelvis as well.
This is actually quite amazing
that this is all that she has injured.
- [Adam] People theorize that, essentially,
her low blood pressure
is what keeps her heart from exploding.
It's like an underfilled water balloon;
had she had normal blood pressure
with that rapid depressurization of the cabin
and the impact with the Earth,
that easily could have made her heart explode in her chest.
- [Dan] While she miraculously survives the impact,
she needs immediate medical attention.
- Somehow, the first person to come along
to check out the wreckage, they hear her screaming.
They see her.
- And it so happens that he is a former World War II medic,
and he's seen a lot of battlefield trauma.
So he's able to take care of Vesna until help arrives
and she's brought to a hospital.
- Vesna is in a coma for a few weeks after the accident.
When she finally awakes, she's partially paralyzed.
- [Jason] 10 months after the accident,
Vesna actually regains her ability to walk,
and for the rest of her life, she's got a limp.
But the fact that she's now walking less than a year later
is unbelievable.
- Vesna's plunge lands her in the history books
with a world record no one is in a hurry to break.
- Of all the dangers you might watch out for
on a quiet walk, this one isn't on anyone's list.
Our tale begins, fittingly,
high up on an apartment building's unluckiest floor.
[mysterious music]
- In Buenos Aires in 1988,
the Montoya family has this apartment on the 13th floor.
Their son is playing with the pet poodle, Cachi.
- And the son throws the ball
towards the open door to the balcony,
and the dog goes bounding after it.
- As it is getting closer and closer to this balcony,
the dog tries to stop.
The dog does not.
- Cachi falls the 13 floors,
which is heartbreaking if you are an animal lover.
- [Matthew] At that very moment,
a 75-year-old woman named Marta Espina,
she's walking around her neighborhood
doing some shopping, and then all of a sudden...
- [claps] Cachi falls directly onto the head of Marta.
They both die.
- [Matthew] The impact constitutes, essentially,
a blunt-force trauma to the head.
[siren wailing]
- [Dan] But the tragic chain of events doesn't end here.
- [Holly] Another woman named Edith is across the street,
happens to see this.
Immediately, her good Samaritan intent kicks in.
She jumps up to run across the street
to check on this woman.
- [Sami] And she...
[horn honks] [tires screeching]
[claps] Gets hit by a bus.
So now you have Cachi the poodle, you have Marta,
you have Edith.
- [Holly] There is a third person, a man who apparently
has just come out the pharmacy with his prescription,
sees all of this play out.
- It's too much for him to take.
He has a heart attack, and he dies there on the spot.
The fourth casualty of Cachi the poodle's game of fetch.
[pensive music]
- The odds of death by poodle are pretty slim,
but nothing like what Shenandoah National Park Ranger
Roy Sullivan is up against.
It all starts during a thunderstorm in 1942.
As Roy takes shelter in a fire tower,
it's hit by lightning.
[thunder crashing]
- And after eight lightning strikes on that tower,
it's now ablaze, and Roy has to escape.
Well, on his way down the tower,
[thunder crashing]
he's struck.
It burns through his shoe, yanks off his toenail,
but he lives through it.
- When you are struck by lightning,
[thunder crashes]
an extremely large amount of electrical current
flows through your body, to the ground.
This is potentially lethal for most people.
- [Dan] The odds of being struck by lightning
are just one in 15,300, pretty low.
But Ranger Roy is about to defy those odds,
again.
[dramatic music]
- He is driving his pickup truck during an electrical storm,
and a tree adjoining his truck is struck.
[thunder crashing]
The lightning rebounds into the cab of his truck,
setting his eyebrows and hair afire.
- [James] But twice is apparently not enough for Roy.
[thunder crashing]
The third time, lightning bounces off of a transformer
and strikes him, but this time it leaves its mark.
It's a Lichtenberg figure, so-called, across his back
in the shape of a lightning bolt.
- [Dan] Roy is now tied with a man named Walter Summerford
as the only known people who have been struck by lightning
three times, for at least two years.
That is, until...
- [James] Roy's struck again!
Fourth time.
This time, it sets his hair on fire,
and he's got to put that out.
He takes a wet cloth, pats it on his head,
and puts his hair out.
- So now Roy,
the most-struck-by-lightning man on Earth,
travels everywhere with a can of water at the ready
just in case he is struck and set upon fire again.
- [Dan] Unfortunately, that can of water
is going to come in handy.
- He's driving down a mountain road.
He sees evidence of a lightning storm on the horizon.
[thunder crashing]
He flees in the other direction.
- He starts driving away as quickly as possible,
can of water at the ready,
appearing to be at a safe distance from the ominous cloud
that he feels is following.
He emerges from his pickup truck,
only to be struck again.
Hair on fire, eyebrows on fire, can of water over the head.
Roy was prepared this time.
- It's the same show all over and over again.
[thunder rumbling]
- [Dan] Incredibly, Roy is struck two more times,
the last after he leaves what already was for him
a dangerous job.
- When Roy finally retires from the park service,
his seventh and final time happens while he is at leisure.
[thunder crashing]
He gets struck while fishing.
- Roy, in short, is a miracle man.
The chance of being struck by lightning
seven different times is one out of 10
to the 28th power.
The chances of being struck and surviving seven times
put the odds even further off the margins.
And it would be considered impossible
but for the fact that it happens to Roy Sullivan.
- [Dan] Even his own wife isn't safe around him.
- It's no surprise that his wife would be dismayed
because when she's hanging clothes one day,
when he's 100-some feet away,
[thunder rumbling]
she herself gets struck by lightning.
[thunder crashing] [wife shouts]
- [Dan] Surprisingly, she doesn't file for divorce.
- The way Roy chooses to deal with this
attraction that he has for things that kill anybody else,
is he decides to own it.
He becomes the Guinness World Record holder
for the number of lightning strikes
that someone can live through.
He gives lectures.
He has the artifacts from when he's been struck.
He essentially becomes the human lightning rod for real.
- His superhuman ability is that he shows us
that the word "impossible"
should be used very sparingly, if at all.
- Turns out lightning does strike twice.
And in Roy's case, five more times after that.
- St. Petersburg, Florida, 1951,
a widow named Mary Reeser is having dinner with her son.
She then tells him it's time for a nap.
What happens next is, well, unbelievable.
[mysterious music]
- Mary Reeser gets home one night to her apartment,
plops down in her overstuffed upholstered easy chair,
pops a couple of sedatives
'cause she's trying to get some rest,
passes out, and goes to sleep.
- 8:00 a.m. the next morning, her landlord, Pansy Carpenter,
smells some smoke.
So she goes, and she touches the doorknob,
and it's too hot to touch.
So she fears, rightfully so, that there's a fire inside.
[knocking]
- The police department is immediately called,
and they show up, and when they open the door,
they see something that they've never seen before.
[tense music]
- Very little is left of the chair,
just some springs and some debris.
There's a pile of ash where Mary was sitting.
One of her feet is completely intact, still in the slipper.
- Stranger still,
nothing else in the apartment has caught fire.
A pile of newspapers, feet away, completely untouched.
Light switches on the wall are melted,
but the outlets on the bottom are still operational
and perfectly intact.
- [Victor] The pictures are on the walls.
The floor, perfectly fine.
The ceiling, no smoke damage.
And yet, Mary Reeser, burned to a crisp, gone.
- [Dan] So what caused Mary Reeser to suddenly go poof?
- For a human body to be fully cremated,
you have to be in a fire that is upwards of 3,000 degrees
for upwards of three hours.
Perhaps she lit a cigarette,
the cigarette lit her clothes on fire, and she burned.
Yet somehow, fire didn't spread to any other apartment.
No one smelled smoke, saw smoke.
- There's just no way that any household fire
would be able to consume a human being that way.
- [Dan] Even more bizarre, Mary's skull is found,
but it's mysteriously smaller.
- In a normal cremation setting,
the human skull is going to crack.
- In her case, the skull shrinks down
to the size of a baseball.
- Now, doesn't that sound suspicious?
- The authorities begin to wonder,
is there some Soviet weapon at play?
So the FBI begins investigating this.
- [Dan] It's so perplexing,
it makes it all the way up to Director J. Edgar Hoover.
- [Matthew] He looks at this case,
and he's so concerned that he actually lets the president,
Harry S. Truman, know about this case going on in Florida.
He employs his top forensic anthropologist at the time,
Wilton Krogman.
- [Dan] Wilton Krogman is a pioneer in the forensics field
and the most qualified man in the country to solve the case.
- He shows up to the scene,
and he has no idea what's going on.
How does a skull shrink in a fire?
That's not a thing that's supposed to happen.
- [Dan] Desperate, the FBI entertains a number
of strange possibilities.
[tense music]
- Now, a lot of people speculate foul play
and that someone had come in and doused Mary
with kerosene and set her alight.
- All the associated things that you would have
inside of an arson case with an accelerant,
all the samples that were collected
and sent to the laboratory,
none of it comes back with any sort of traces
of accelerant in it.
- The next theory the FBI investigates
comes from an anonymous tip.
- An anonymous person calls up
and says that a fireball came in through the window,
lights Mary on fire.
[explosion blasts]
- Gave an official statement, said, "I seen it.
A fireball came in her window and hit it."
[tense music]
Generally speaking, fireballs don't fly through windows.
- What it could be is another unexplained phenomenon
of ball lightning, which is controversial.
It may or may not exist.
I mean, how much credence do we put into anonymous tips?
I mean, right there, we think it's a little bit of BS.
- [Dan] Is it possible the most likely explanation
is also the most unbelievable:
spontaneous human combustion?
- Spontaneous human combustion is an idea that someone
just, all of a sudden, bursts into flames,
and it only impacts the individual,
and it doesn't impact anything else.
- Spontaneous combustion does happen in nature.
With hay bales, you have wet and dry hay.
The wet hay's still alive,
going through its respiration process,
taking in carbon dioxide, pumping out oxygen,
and this creates heat.
So you'll have hay bales that just spontaneously combust.
[flames whooshing]
- [Dan] The question is, could this also happen to humans?
Shockingly, there have been roughly 200 recorded cases
of spontaneous human combustion in history.
- In 1470, there is an Italian knight in Milan
who, after a night of drinking, according to witnesses,
begins to actually belch up flame.
And finally, his entire body combusts,
seemingly from within.
- [Dan] But in Mary's case,
the FBI is unwilling to list spontaneous human combustion
as the official cause of death.
What they come up with isn't any less strange.
- So, the belief is that Mary succumbed
to something known as the wick effect.
In essence, the body is an inside-out candle.
The clothing is the wick that catches flame,
but the combustible hydrocarbons found in human fat
literally served to fuel the fire.
- Because she's an overweight woman that was also a smoker,
the FBI suggests that the cigarette burns her nightgown,
which causes her to go up in flame.
Because she's a heavier woman, that leads to the fire
continuing to burn for a longer period of time.
- [Dan] Not everyone accepts this answer.
- There are lots of problems with this theory.
The first of which is that millions of people
fall asleep with lit cigarettes,
and they don't usually end up cremated.
- So people are thinking,
"Why would you not wake up if you are currently on fire?"
- Even with sedatives, there's still a great likelihood
that a person would start thrashing around.
Spontaneous human combustion,
it's the last place investigators want to go,
but sometimes they're forced to go there
in the absence of any other explanations.
- I think it's a damn strange world. [laughs]
I never take anything off the table
until we're absolutely certain.
[intense music]
- The forensic anthropologist hired by the FBI
has this to say: "Were I living in the Middle Ages,
I'd mutter something about black magic."
- Some leaders face war, famine, or political unrest.
For one 16th-century Austrian mayor,
the real threat is right under his nose.
[pensive music]
- It's the 16th century, and Hans Steininger
is the immensely popular mayor of Braunau am Inn.
Everyone loves him.
He's elected for six consecutive terms,
but that's not what he's famous for.
- Hans is a sight to see.
He has a beard that's 4 1/2 feet long.
Now, when it gets to the end, it forks.
It's so long, it reaches all the way to his feet.
- [Dan] Mayor Hans even has his suits custom-made
to keep his beard neatly rolled up
and tucked into his breast pocket.
Braunau am Inn flourishes under his leadership for decades,
until one day, when things get a little hairy.
- [Hakeem] September 28th, 1576, all mayhem breaks out.
The town of Braunau am Inn catches fire.
It's 1576.
There's no such thing as a fire engine yet.
There's no such thing as a fire department.
Now, the mayor has an emergency that he has to handle.
- Atop a really long staircase, Hans surveys the scene,
and he just sees his entire town in flames.
So, to go save the town and direct the rescue efforts,
he takes off running straight down the stairs.
However, in his haste,
he forgets to tuck his beard into his little beard pocket.
- [Hakeem] Almost immediately, his 4 1/2-foot beard
tangles up in his feet,
and he's just tumbling down these concrete stairs.
- [Austin] Tip over top, over tip, over top,
into the town square.
- [Dan] By the time he reaches the bottom,
his neck is broken.
- This is probably the first time
in the history of the world
a mayor has been killed by his own beard.
- [Dan] But the people of Braunau am Inn
find an unbelievable way to honor the mayor's legacy.
- Hans may have been lost that day, but not his beard.
His beard is snipped off before he's buried
and is kept by his family
and passed down from generation to generation
until finally, in the 20th century, 1919,
the beard is bequeathed to the city.
- And to this day, it is in a 4 1/2-foot-long glass box,
embalmed for everyone to remember Mayor Hans Steininger.
- A beard may have brought one man down,
but centuries later, another man takes a much sharper blow.
[tense music]
- Phineas Gage is a 25-year-old railroad worker
in the town of Cavendish, Vermont.
- Phineas is a professional, hardworking, brilliant citizen.
- His specialty is explosives.
'Cause they need to lay down railroad track,
you have to blow up a lot of rock,
and so he's the guy that sets the charge.
- [Mitch] As part of Phineas's job,
he has a 3 1/2-foot iron bar
that he uses to tamp down the gunpowder.
[hammer tapping]
- [Austin] But it's very, very, very dangerous work
because it's black powder,
and black powder can go off like that. [snaps]
[tense music]
- He strikes the rock just so with his rod, creates a spark.
[explosion blasts] [debris clattering]
- That tamping iron essentially became the bullet.
[tense music]
- [Edward] It shoots upward, and it goes right into his cheek,
[Phineas yells]
passes behind his left eye, and then out the top of his head
through the frontal left lobe.
It flies 80 feet away from the explosion.
[metal clinking]
- Everyone is absolutely certain the man is dead.
To the shock of his crewmates, he stands up,
starts walking around, asking what happened.
He doesn't seem particularly alarmed.
Because the tapered end of the bar exits his skull,
he is spared greater brain damage
than he otherwise would've suffered.
- [Dan] Doctors manage to stop the bleeding,
but they wonder, what are the long-term consequences?
- Phineas was known as an easygoing,
likable guy before his injury.
The person who returns to the railroad crew
is argumentative, abrasive.
- He's irritable, short-tempered, impulsive,
and he's kind of a jerk to everybody around him.
- He's prone to alcoholism and violence,
and we could say definitively, these are two different people.
- Gage becomes kind of a medical curiosity,
and people are wondering how then on Earth he survives,
and also, what is it that has changed his personality?
And it's really, in some ways, the beginning of neuroscience.
- The way the rod goes through his brain,
it pierces an area of the brain
that controls emotional responses.
- [Brian] The frontal lobes.
Frontal lobes are really super important
for behavioral control.
When Phineas severely damages his frontal lobes,
it's like a brake has been taken off of
his behavioral regulator.
And it is not uncommon with patients
that have frontal lobe damage that they act impulsively.
They can act aggressively.
- Prior to this, people thought personality
was sort of like an extension of your soul.
It was some sort of ethereal part of you
that, you know, you had to work on all the time,
as opposed to something that literally came out of synapses
and cells and things in your brain.
- What I find fascinating about the Phineas Gage case
is that 175 years later,
scientists are still studying his case.
He is that important in the history
of our understanding of the human brain.
- [Dan] What eventually becomes of Phineas Gage?
- Because of the changing character
that transpires in Phineas,
he can no longer get along on crew work,
and he actually finds work driving a stagecoach
in South America, in the nation of Chile.
- Phineas Gage continues to turn heads to this day.
His skull and the iron bar that passed through it
are on permanent display
at the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University.
- We're all familiar with the old saying,
"Pride goeth before a fall."
But in the case of one very confident safety expert,
this expression becomes quite literally true.
[pensive music]
- Garry Hoy is a highly regarded Toronto lawyer
who specializes in building safety and compliance.
On top of that, he also has a degree in engineering.
This is a guy that absolutely loves his job.
- July 9th, 1993, and Garry Hoy
is there at the Dominion Tower skyscraper in Toronto
for an office party.
It's a welcome party for young, college soon-to-be grads
applying for apprenticeships at his law firm.
- [Sami] Because he is so passionate about building safety
and about engineering structures,
he wants to showcase the resilience
of the windows of the building.
- His offices are the 24th floor,
and he decides to show them his party trick.
[suspenseful music]
- So he tells everybody to step back,
and they give him room.
He backs up and starts running.
- [Sami] He launches himself at this window.
- And he bounces right off of it,
and he says to everyone, to a round of applause,
cheers, and laughs, "Look how strong that glass is."
- Feeling the high of the crowd's reception
to his party trick, he goes, "I'm gonna do it again."
- [Dan] Garry backs up, and he sprints at full speed
towards the shatterproof window, 24 stories above Toronto.
[window thuds]
- [Chris] The window doesn't shatter.
- However, the glass and its entire frame
separate from the side of the skyscraper.
And now, Garry, to his surprise, is riding
a full, intact pane of skyscraper glass
down to the ground of Toronto.
- [Holly] Unfortunately, he's killed.
But he's right!
His windows are actually as resilient as he always claimed.
He just isn't taking into account the frame,
which is the failure point,
and that was the ultimate demise.
- [Dan] Garry proved that showing off
can have deadly consequences.
But our next story takes that idea even higher,
as two men in 19th-century Paris risk everything for love.
[tense music]
- So we're in Napoleonic France, 1808, in Paris.
We have a famous dancer at an opera house.
A gorgeous lady, Mademoiselle Tirevit,
and two gentlemen are desperately in love with her.
- So one guy, Monsieur Grandpre,
decides to get her an apartment in the city
so that he can visit her there.
But this plan backfires when he realizes
that he's not the only gentleman caller visiting her.
There's a second man named Monsieur Le Pique.
So Monsieur Grandpre challenges Monsieur Le Pique to a duel,
a real, to-the-death duel.
- [Dan] But this isn't going to be a regular duel.
No, they plan something much bigger,
something much more chic.
- They're going to shoot at each other
in hot air balloons over the city.
- [Dan] And not just at each other.
The goal of this high-stakes game
is to shoot down the opponent's balloon.
- So this dancer must be very special
because it's pretty much guaranteed
that at least one of them, probably both of them,
are going to die.
- They schedule this hot air balloon duel for a month out,
and you would think, having a month to reflect on this plan,
somebody would've come to their senses.
- [Greg] But no one's head cools down.
No one thinks to themselves, "Maybe this isn't a great idea."
No, they all go forward with it.
- [Dan] On May 3rd, 1808, it's showtime.
As the crowd gathers in the Tuileries Gardens
just next to the Louvre Museum,
most people think they're watching a simple balloon race
until they see the guns.
- [Kavitha] And this isn't even the strangest
part of this story yet.
Dueling, it's common practice to have a second man with you.
But in this case, you need to find
someone who is such a good friend
that they're willing to get
into this hot air balloon with you,
knowing that they will likely also die.
So that's gotta be a really strong friendship.
- [Dan] As the balloons lift off,
the mostly unsuspecting crowd begins to cheer.
[uneasy music]
Now nearly 2,000 feet above the city of lovers,
the duel begins.
But first, they must follow the code duello.
- This isn't like a Western;
you don't have two guys standing there,
both ready to draw, and they do what they want.
The code duello sets very specific rules
for how a duel is conducted.
- The most important part of this code to note
is that the man who accepts the challenge
gets to shoot first.
So in this case, because Grandpre
extended the challenge to Le Pique,
Le Pique gets the first shot.
- He doesn't have to hit Grandpre;
he only has to hit this large, floating balloon.
[gun blasts]
- But Le Pique, who had a month to practice this,
totally misses.
- That now gives Grandpre the opportunity to fire his shot,
while Le Pique has to just stand there in his little basket
and pray that his opponent is as bad a shot as him.
[tense music] [gun blasts]
His shot rings true,
it blasts a hole through the hot air balloon.
The balloon deflates, just as you can imagine.
Le Pique and his second both fall like rocks from the sky,
and are dead.
- There's a certain romance in dying for love
by bullet in a hot air balloon.
But being the unlucky friend along for the ride,
not quite as poetic.
- Swimming alone in the middle of the ocean
can be a risky endeavor, as one man
in the early 1960s can certainly attest to.
[tense music]
- 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.
- [Dan] What Rodney doesn't realize
is that he is also being hunted.
[Rodney screams] [water splashing]
- [Edward] 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.
[dramatic music]
- [Edward] 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, near his gills.
Incredibly, he actually feels the shark letting him go.
- [Dan] Most would try to flee from the shark,
but quick-thinking Rodney goes on the offensive.
- [Thor] Rodney rushes toward the shark and bear hugs it,
wrapping his bloody arms around its great, sandpaper-y 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 murk 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.
- [Dan] This may sound like a lucky break,
but the bag of fish is still attached to him.
- [Thor] 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 gasps]
- 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.
- [Dan] 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.
- [Edward] Rodney's massive scar
becomes the stuff of spearfishing legend.
Some say the encounter inspired Peter Benchley
when he was writing the book "Jaws."
- 2,000 years before Rodney's unbelievable encounter,
another man is attacked by an animal,
not exactly known for its predatory instincts.
[tense music]
- Aeschylus is a famous Greek playwright.
He is the Shakespeare of ancient Greek tragedies.
He restructures how Greek plays work,
and he makes them more fun and more interesting.
He wins awards and contests all the time.
He is prolific and an absolute genius.
- [Dan] But one sunny afternoon,
something happens that seems like the plot
in one of his own stories.
- So one day, Aeschylus is in the southern coast of Sicily
in a town called Gela, sitting on a rock
gazing upon the ocean,
when all of a sudden a really hard object
hits him on the head.
- It turns out that there's a hungry eagle
that has been fortunate enough
to obtain a nice-sized tortoise, and it's flying about
because it wants to find a nice big rock
so that it can drop it
and have the tortoise shell crack open, and it can feast.
Unfortunately for him, our playwright Aeschylus
suffers from male-pattern baldness.
So from the sky, from the eagle's perspective,
his nice shiny scalp appears to be the perfect rock.
- Aeschylus goes down in history,
not only as the father of tragedies,
but also as the only human being
known to have died from falling tortoise.
[mysterious music]
- Whether it's dog falls, free falls, or freak accidents,
they all have one thing in common:
they're the very best life-or-death stories
ever told on "The UnBelievable".