Could you survive in these surprising survival situations?
Let's talk about that.
♪ (theme music) ♪
- Good Mythical Morning! - I am a survivor.
Um, one time recently, on a weekend, my wife went away with some friends
- of hers, and I had to keep my kids. - Oh.
- Ah. - And I survived.
- (stifling laughter) - And so did they. We both made it.
- It was surprisingly difficult. - Hm.
But we did it. So I'm hoping that that story I just told you will rival
the surprising survival stories that we are going to share with you
- today even though I know it's not. - You can relate to these people...
- ...is what you're saying. - I can relate!
- And I'm wearing camouflage! - We're all survivors.
We talked earlier this year in another episode about surprising survival stories
on islands. These are non-island survival stories.
- We're off the island, now. - (laughing) Yeah, we're moving to...
- ...the mainland, people. - But these are surprising.
They are very surprising. May 26, 2013. A guy named Harrison Okene.
He's a 29-year-old cook working on a tugboat off the coast of Nigeria.
- Pullin' other boats. And cookin'! - He's minding his own business...
...and doing his own business -- taking a crap -- in the loo on the boat.
- He's in the bathroom when he gets... - Okay!
...struck by a huge wave, which causes the boat to sink. And the boat sinks very
suddenly, like 100 feet before anybody has a chance to react.
He begins to see that there is... First of all, he gets out of the bathroom,
and he gets into another little room. He begins to see water coming
underneath the door. He's like, "Uh..." He knows what's going on.
- The boat is turned upside-down. - Can you imagine the panic?
- Crazy! - And so what he does is he thinks
fast, and he gets on top of a mattress.
I usually crawl under a bed when I panic.
- He makes himself a waterbed, Link. - (both gasp)
This guy is... He made a waterbed! And he's on the waterbed...
Doesn't seem like that's gonna help. When you're sinking.
Well, it did help, because he stayed in a four-foot pocket of air for
62 hours. Now, there's a lot of things that went on during that 62 hours.
Number one, al of his other crew mates died. Somewhere early in the process.
What's the air situation? That's what I'm not understanding.
- The air situation. - How's he breathing?
He's breathing the oxygen that's trapped. And because of the pressure at that
depth, you actually get a lot more oxygen in there. So 62 hours.
- Like, the boat's upside down... - Yeah, it's an air pocket.
- Ok, yeah. - It's like when you get into the jacuzzi
- and there's an air pocket... - In your britches?
...and it makes you look like you've got a lot of fat down here. Then you're like,
- (spitting) And it looks like you farted. - (laughing)
- Yeah, yeah. - He's inside the fat pocket...
- ...in a bathing suit. - Why is Rhett pushing on his pants?
- Do you understand the logic now? - Now that you've used that analogy...
- ...I'm locked in. - So he's inside a pair of bathing...
He's inside a pair of swimming trunks in a jacuzzi.
- (laughing) - That's where this is going down.
- I get it. - No. He's in this air pocket.
He's breathing his highly concentrated, highly oxygenated air. His other
crew mates have died. He can hear them being eaten by fish and sharks.
- Ooh. - He has nothing to eat, except one...
...can of Coke. This guy stretches that can of Coke for 62 hours.
It's me finding the Sprite in the ice bath. Its like, "I can survive here now!"
- Well, it's not that funny. - Oh.
- (crew laughing offscreen) - Yeah.
And then, this is what happens after 62 hours.
(rescuer's voice) All right, so you should be walking on the ceiling, yeah?
(Link) Scuba rescuers?
- (inaudible) - What's that? Okay.
- All right, you found one, yeah? - There's someone alive!
- He's alive! He's alive! - He's alive.
Okay, keep him there. Keep him there.
All right. Just keep him there, keep him calm, okay?
- (Link) Whoa! - Mhm.
All right, just reassure him. Pat him on the shoulder.
(Link) "Pat him on the shoulder. Pat him on the shoulder."
- (Rhett) Look, there he is. - (Link) Okay.
(Rhett) There's Harrison. He's like, "Oh, you're not a can of Coke."
- "You're a man." - He looks a little disoriented.
Now, I'm surprised that the diver who rescued him didn't freak out.
But I'm more surprised that he didn't freak out. Like, what did he think was
grabbing his hand under there? Some black-suited creature that
- comes up? - I mean, this guy's been through...
...a lot in that 62 hours. And, you could see, the guy thought he was just grabbing
- a dead body, and then it grabbed back. - Yeah!
- So the diver was freaking out. - That's crazy!
And the reason the diver sounds like a chipmunk is because they
put helium inside their breathing mixture. That's a little tidbit that
- I learned during this process. - Okay.
Anyway, Harrison is now the official spokesman for Coca-Cola.
- That's not true. - And their new 62-hour Coke campaign.
- (Link and crew offscreen laughing) - Okay, I got one.
Mauro Prosperi is a Sicilian policeman and a pentathlete. And he ran...
- That's a lot. - ...in 1994, he ran in the...
...Marathon des Sables, or "say-bull," a 150-mile race across the Sahara Desert
- in Morocco. 150 miles across a desert... - Sign me up!
- ...sounds crazy. It's so dangerous... - It is crazy.
...they make you sign a waiver that says where to send your body
- when you die. - Mm.
I wanna be cremated and put in the Cape Fear River.
All right, here's one of the rules. If a sandstorm comes up while you're
running this 150 miles across the desert, you're supposed to sit down,
cover your head, and wait it out. Unless you wanna win da race!
- (laughing) That's right! - Mauro decides he is going
- to keep running. - Mm. Smart.
Because a sandstorm did hit, and he kept running.
- Mhm. - And running. And running.
- You can't see very well in a sandstorm. - No.
- Six hours later... - Because of the whole Darude part.
- (Link and crew offscreen laughing) - The sandstorm...
- Darude gets in your eyes. - It's "da rudest" of sandstorms.
- (laughing) - Six hours later, storm dies down.
Mauro, of course, is alone in middle of the Saharan Desert.
Completely off course. What's the dude supposed to do?
He just picked a direction and just started walking.
- Okay. - Random direction, starts walking.
- 36 hours later... - Oh, that's a long time.
...he completely runs out of food and water. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and
- spoil this for you. A, he survives. - Ah.
But B, it was 10 days later. Dude survived in the Sahara Desert, totally alone with
nothing but, like, a water bottle for 10 days.
- He's a Sicilian. - First thing he started doing was...
- ...peeing in the water bottle. - Uh-huh.
- And then drinking that. - Oh, wow.
- But that gets old after a while. - That happened early.
There's a diminishing returns type of type of thing on peeing in your own
- water bottle. Trust me. - You mean, it gets worse?
- It gets more yellow. Oh, look at it. - It's more yellow...
...and there's less and less of it every time.
And then it becomes, like, yellow puddin'.
- (laughing) He starts... (laughing) - (crew groaning with disgust offscreen)
- (laughing) - "Mm, all of a sudden I've got...
- ...a puddin' mirage in my water bottle." - (sighs)
He starts eating lizards and scorpions, which I do not recommend.
Very crunchy. Not a lot of water in those. So then he finds and abandoned shrine
- in the desert, camps out there. - Oh!
And he rips the heads off of 20 bats and starts drinking the blood out of 'em.
- Oh. Better than puddin'. - I don't know if I could do that.
Well, you haven't been in this situation, man.
Like, no ideas! I don't... next week, on this show, I do not want to have
- to rip the head off a bat. - Yeah.
- Like, their faces... - Bat-head Eating Challenge.
Their faces are lighting up just above the screen.
Let's start that.
So after a total of 10 days, he comes across a group of Berber nomads, and...
- Very stylish. - They say, "You're not even in...
...Morocco anymore. You ran all the way to Algeria."
- 186 miles off course. - (laughing) Oh, gosh.
- That's a long way for one person to walk. - Don't worry, though. He went ahead...
...and ran the race six more times after that, coming in 12th in 2001.
- Oh, 12th? Well, okay. - Mauro!
- Keep it up, man! Don't give up. - Keep trying.
You don't have to drink your urine every time. You could probably do better.
Okay, this one comes from Juliane Koepcke.
Back on Christmas Eve, 1971, she was 17 years old. She's traveling via
- plane over the Peruvian Rainforest. - Okay.
This is the Amazonian Rainforest. I'm assuming we're in the same region
- of the world. The plane is stuck... - Okay.
...by lightning, and then... The light is flickering, which means that
- maybe we're being struck by lightning. - Nartu Foty.
The plane is struck by lightning. The plane breaks up into several pieces.
She lands on an island. There's a polar bear, and there's this group of
- people called the Others. Oh, wait! - No.
That's something else. She lands... The plane literally does break apart,
and she falls, in her seat, still trapped in the seat -- strapped in the seat --
two miles through the air and hits the canopy of the rainforest. And somehow
the seats that she's attached to -- she's in this middle seat and got...
- ...two seats on each side of her. - Protects her?
It kinda protects her, and (stammering) it stops her fall a little bit and she
ends up kinda hanging upside-down in this seat. Of course, she gets
knocked out, but when she wakes up, all she's got is a broken collarbone
and some scratches. Unbelievable! Falls two miles out of the sky.
- Wow. - Now she's gotta figure out how to...
...get back to civilization. Now, her glasses came off during this.
Can you imagine that? (laughing) Her glasses came off....
- Stupid glasses! - ...during this ordeal.
And she lost one shoe. So she uses her remaining shoe to feel her way
through the jungle. She had a little experience in the jungle. Her parents
were, like, researchers. So she kinda knew, "I gotta watch out for these snakes."
So she had the snake-shoe technique. She's feeling the way through the woods.
Then she gets to a stream and she knows -- this is smart, because she had
learned this, and you should always do this -- head downstream.
She finds a stream, heads downstream. 10 days later, all she's been living
off of is the water that she's drinking from the stream and some sweets
- that she got on the plane. - Did she use her shoe for everything?
Like, I picture her drinking out of the shoe. Using it as a snake thing.
- Well... - Like, as a weapon.
It doesn't say, but I like to think so, Link. Yeah, she drank from her shoe
exclusively and ate sweets from her shoe as well.
- Right. - Anyway, 10 days into this thing,
she finds a boat. Now, she's got an infected arm, full of maggots.
- She's got maggot-arm, people. - Ugh.
And she had seen her dad pour gasoline into a dog's wound before to treat it.
- Okay. - So she pours the gasoline from
this boat into her maggot-arm, and 35 maggots come out.
- Ugh! - That's just a little tidbit.
A little detail for you. Instead of getting on the boat, she said,
"I didn't want to steal the boat," so she waits at the boat. And eventually the guys
whose boat it was come back. They take her to civilization.
This is an incredible ordeal, as you can image. Almost two weeks.
- 17 years old! - It's actually written about.
Her story is cataloged in a book called, "Deep Survival." It's an audiobook that
you can get on Audible by Laurence Gonzales. It covers her story
in a lot more detail. Also a lot of other amazing survival stories.
And it also tells you what you can do to get out of some situations that
- you might find yourself in. - Oh, because we haven't helped you...
...any besides the shoe thing and ripping off bat heads. You should listen to that.
And, you're in luck, because you can get a 30-day trial by using our link,
audible.com/GMM. There are over 180,000 titles in addition to
Laurence's book, so listen to any of those, guys!
- Yes! - Link in the description.
- Thanks for liking and commenting. - You know what time it is.
Hi, my name is [inaudible]. I'm from Syria, and this is my
favorite card, the 10 of Hearts. And it's time to spin...
- (card slides) - ...The Wheel of Mythicality.
Thanks to Audible for sponsoring this episode. Remember to go to
audible.com/GMM for your free 30-day trial!
Click through to Good Mythical More, where we discuss two more surprising
survival stories. Surprise! Survive! Click through.
(union) "Beatboxing Dolphins!"
(making beatbox noises and screeching)
- (Rhett beatboxing) - Sounds like a monkey. But it's a dolphin.
(screeching)
[Captioned by Kevin: GMM Captioning Team]