Luckiest People Who Survived The Impossible Not many can brag about surviving the impossible,
be it thanks to their own strengths and perseverance or pure luck.
Get ready to hear some amazing survival stories which prove that, when everything else fails,
we’ll always have the unbeatable human spirit victorious amidst all adversities.
Check out these incredible stories about the luckiest people who survived the impossible.
10. Tsutomu Yamaguchi Tsutomu Yamaguchi, among some 260
000 people who survived the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II,
became to be known as the only man who survived the horror of both and lived to tell the tale.
At the time, he was working for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and the day the Hiroshima atomic bomb
attack happened was supposed to be the last day of his three-month-long business trip.
Reportedly, he’d been less than 3 kilometrers from ground zero when
the attack happened, on the 6th of August 1045.. “I didn’t know what had happened,” he later told
the British newspaper The Times. “I think I fainted for a while. When I opened my eyes,
everything was dark, and I couldn’t see much. It was like the start of a film at the cinema,
before the picture has begun when the blank frames are just flashing up without any
sound.” He suffered serious injuries. He then returned to his home town,
Nagasaki in order to receive treatment for his wounds. Unfortunately,
he arrived just in time to become witness to the second US atomic bomb to strike Japan.
Despite the radiation-related ailments he suffered throughout his life, he lived to the age of 93.
9. Paul Templer Paul Templer was
working as a tour guide on Zimbabwe's Zambezi River in the 1990s when the hippo emerged from
the water and plucked him out of his canoe. He managed to miraculously escape its powerful jaws,
but not without any consequences – he lost an arm and ended up with severe injuries in the process.
"It happened so very quickly. The first thing I knew I was in a deep,
dank place with this incredible pressure crushing down on my lower back, " he told the BBC.
Although working as a safari guide for years, nothing could have prepared him for this.
Allegedly, he was trying to save a friend who was knocked out of the canoe by this
giant bloodthirsty hippo when the animal grabbed him and pulled him underwater, first,
waist up in the hippo’s mouth. When he finally somehow managed to wiggle his way out its jaws,
the hippo struck again, trying to drag him beneath the water surface again. The battle
lasted for some time, and was not to be over yet. Just when the guides were trying to get
back to land, the hippo returned and swallowed Templar feet first. He described the second
faceoff as “a dog tossing around a rag doll.” The hippo retreated after a while but attack
claimed the life of a guide and Templer’s body was severely injured with over 38 bites.
When Templer was taken to a nearby hospital, surgeons feared he would lose both his legs and
arms. Fortunately, they were able to save his right arm and his injured leg.
After making a full recovery, Templer became a motivational speaker.
8. Frane Selak The (un)luckiest man, depending
on your perspective, Frane Selak, a Croatian who’s said to have survived a train crash, a plane crash
and a car crash. Imagine scenes from your favorite action movies… well, this man has seen it all!
Until a fateful train trip in 1962, this man had led a relatively unremarkable life
as a music teacher, unsuspecting of a series of impossible events that were about to unravel.
Nevertheless, he survived them all, even though during the process he might have lost some friends
who started believing he brings bad luck. Fortunately, after several years,
in the mid-2000s, Selak’s luck evened out and Selak became a lottery winner.
His jackpot was worth around £600,000. With this, he bought a luxurious home,
only to have a change of heart and sell it in 2010. He returned to a humble life with his fifth
wife. Whatever happened along the way, Frane’s story has a happy ending. He spent the last of
his winnings on a hip operation, and on a shrine to the Virgin Mary in thanks for his good fortune.
7. Wenseslao Moguel In 1915, Wenseslao Moguel, a soldier of Pancho
Villa during the Mexican Revolution, was captured and immediately stood in front of a firing squad.
Moguel had only one superpower, but it surely was the only one he needed – he was exceptionally good
at staying alive no matter what. Allegedly he was shot 10 times by the squad, followed by the coup
de grace shot to the head delivered by the squad’s commander. There are different stories on how he
was rescued, whether he crawled away from the execution ground when the time was right or he
was found unconscious by other people who saved him, nevertheless the fact remains that he did
survive despite being badly disfigured. He went on to live a full life with
the nickname El Fusilado (“the executed one”). He died around 1975.
6. Matt Suter That there’s a thin line between whether we
could call some of our “heroes” lucky or unlucky people proved the case of Matt Suter, who survived
a 150 mile-per-hour tornado ride that tossed him 400 meters into the air. It all happened
in 2006 while the 19-year-old was spending some leisure time in his grandma’s trailer,
the tornado hit, wrecking everything in sight. He barely had time to realize what was happening
when he was sucked into the raging darkness above. The record for the longest distance a human being
has ever survived being flung, initially held by a 9-year-old girl, who rode a tornado for
300 meters, was broken by Matt Suter who survived a wild ride 400 meters up in the air. Hopefully,
no one will beat his record. The following stories will definitely reshape
your understanding of the word “impossible”, so make sure to stay tuned. But before we move on,
take a second to hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss out on any of our upcoming content.
5. Roy Sullivan Roy Cleveland Sullivan was
a United States park ranger in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. Between 1942 and 1977,
Sullivan was hit by lightning on seven occasions and survived all of them. For this reason,
he gained the nicknames "Human Lightning Conductor" and "Human Lightning Rod".
Sullivan is recognized by Guinness World Records as the person struck by lightning
more recorded times than any other human being. He survived each jolt, but not unharmed. The
first one only tested the waters and knocked his big toenail off. In 1969, a second strike burned
off his eyebrows and knocked him unconscious. In 1970 another strike left his shoulders seared.
The last jolt sent him to the hospital with chest and stomach burns, but also put him
in the Guinness Book of Records for the ”Most lightning strikes survived”. In the end, When
Sullivan did pass away, it was a self-inflicted bullet, not a bolt, that ended his life.
4. Anatoli Petrovich Bugorsky On July 13, 1978, Russian scientist
Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski became the only person to ever stick his head in a running
particle accelerator. He was a researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino,
and was just checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment on the Soviet particle accelerator,
Synchrotron U-70, when he accidentally put his head directly in the path of
the machine's proton beam. He reported seeing a flash that was “brighter than a thousand suns,”
but did not feel any pain when this occurred. Still, over the next few days his body,
or his face, to be precise, experienced some changes: it started swelling up and peeling off,
which actually just revealed the path that the proton beam had burned through his face
changing it beyond recognition. Even though he received an excessive dose of radiation,
he survived, and even completed his Ph.D! We’re not done yet! The most astonishing thing is that,
when looking at Burgorsky now, you’ll notice that the right half of his face has aged,
while the left half looks as if it was frozen in time 22 years ago. Go figure that!
3. Harrison Okene Harrison Okene, a 29-year-old cook, was the only
survivor of the Jacson-4, which overturned after being battered by heavy swells in May 2013. Eleven
other crew members died as the vessel sank some 20 kilometers off Nigeria's mangrove-lined coast.
When the ship began to sink, Harrison Okene managed to find a small pocket of air in
the engineers office. He had been underwater for almost 60 hours when he heard a hammering on the
deck. A team of South African divers scouring the waters on a presumed body recovery operation were
shocked to hear faint hammering in reply. Okene was strapped into diving equipment,
then led to a diving bell which took him to the surface, where he spent two
days in a decompression chamber. It was a pure stroke of luck that he survived for so long at
such depth so it’s no wonder that the news about how it all happened soon went viral.
2. Eric Nerhus 41-year-old Eric Nerhus was just casually diving
for abalone selfish off the coast of Australia with his son and a group of friends, when all
of a sudden everything went dark and after a few seconds he realized that he was actually having a
pretty close encounter with a great white shark. Eric’s head, a shoulder and an arm were inside
the shark’s mouth and 3000 teeth were biting down on his body. But Eric certainly wasn’t to become
anyone’s victim, not even the most dangerous sea animal. What he did next is actually one of the
most amazing and extraordinary things – he didn’t surrender and he started poking the shark’s eye
with one free hand. Luckily, he managed to fight his way out of the shark’s jaws and escape. He
was pulled from the water by his son, and flown to a hospital with serious injuries to his head,
body and left arm. 1. Mauro Prosperi
The story of Mauro Prosperi is yet another story of raw survival, almost impossible to
believe. In 1994, Mauro decided to compete in The Marathon De Sables, considered one of
the toughest athletic events on Earth. The first three days went just fine,
but the fourth day an unexpected sandstorm happens that changes the further path of our
protagonist . Even though he lost sight of the other athletes, he kept moving forward,
only – in the wrong direction, ultimately running several hundred kilometers into Algeria.
After 36 hours of wandering, he ran out of food and water supplies, so he had to do the
unimaginable in order to survive, he ate bats and drank his own urine. At some point he tried
to commit suicide by cutting his veins, but unsuccessfully, since the lack of water caused
his blood to thicken and clotted the wound. So he did the only thing that was left there to be done:
he kept on living and he kept on walking across the desert. After nine days in the
desert he came across nomadic shepherds who took him to a military camp in Algeria.
His odyssey ended in a hospital, with a total of 15 kg lost and an amount of 299 km in the
legs. He will later retell the story of this extraordinary journey in an autobiographical book,
“10 days beyond life“. This certainly reshapes your definition of “impossible”, right?
Which of the stories were you most shocked by? Let me know in the comment
section down below and don’t forget to subscribe for more awesome content!