A man sails through the air, tumbling down
towards earth after being pulled out of an airplane.
As he plummets, his life flashes before his eyes,
and he knows he’s as good as dead.
Diving faster and faster, he watches the ground rush up to meet him.
Moments away from death, he closes his eyes
bracing for the impact, but it never comes.
The next thing he remembers is waking up in the hospital.
Glad to be alive, he thinks about his two previous near-death experiences,
but little does he know this isn’t the last time
the dark spectre of death will reach out to touch him.
No, this is the story of the world’s
luckiest unlucky man, and the 7 different times
he cheated death.
Now that I have today’s sponsor, Morning Brew, I’m
actually excited to wake up in the morning.
Before, I would wake up after an anxiety dream,
finish off the last dregs of coffee from the previous night, and try to get the news,
but it was always so jumbled that I could never see the forest for the trees!
Now, thanks to Morning Brew, a daily newsletter delivered right to my inbox,
I can stay up to date on finance, business,
and geopolitics in short, witty bursts of information, before everyone else!
Thanks to Morning Brew, I learned that fossilized remains of what we thought
were T-Rex bones, could actually represent 3 completely different species!
It’s the paleontological equivalent of doing a DNA test and finding out you’re actually adopted.
I also learned that NASA’s Mega Moon rocket,
which will be used in the Artemis I mission to establish an outpost orbiting
the moon, has been rolled out from Kennedy Space Centre
for some testing before its launch day is set!
We’re going beyond the moon people! Morning Brew is free and signing up
takes less than 15 seconds, so there’s no reason not to subscribe to their newsletter.
Click the link in our description below to subscribe to Morning Brew today!
For Croatian music teacher Frane Selak, hoisted
to stardom by Youtube channel “This & That Visuals”
who chronicled his numerous near-death experiences, nearly
dying was just another day to day reality.
He’s been dubbed by media across the globe
as “The Luckest Unlucky Man on Earth”,
but for a man who nearly died not once,
not twice, but 7 whole times, he might think of himself as the unluckiest
lucky person on earth. Have you ever had a near-death experience?
I certainly haven’t.
The closest I’ve ever come to an express train to the afterlife
is when I accidentally drank decaf that one time.
Selak’s life began with a defiance of death
on a fishing trip his parents took near Dubrovnik, Croatia.
His mother was 7 months pregnant, and went into labour prematurely, giving birth to him
right there and then. His father swiftly grabbed a fishing knife and sliced
the umbilical cord before dunking his newborn son
in the sea to wash off all the afterbirth.
Back in 1929, incubators were still finicky technology, so later in his life, Selak joked
that his first stroke of luck was avoiding
the brain damage typical to premature babies at the time.
He started his time on this world fighting to stay afloat,
but nothing could prepare him for what life had in store.
Selak’s first stroke with death in his adult life came about 30 years later, in 1957.
According to an interview with Croatian newspaper Jutarnji List, while working as a professor of music,
he got into a bus crash during a school trip to the Bosnian town of Odžak.
He said “Thank God we left the children in Odžak, so only the driver and I were on the bus”.
Selak said that the driver, Ahmet, never drove
“without half a bottle of rakija in his system”.
So Selak, and an inebriated Ahmet, on a bus thankfully devoid of children,
drove south toward the town of Modriča for a night of partying.
According to Selak, Ahmet made no mistakes— That is, aside
from driving under the influence— and as they cruised toward a right turn, Ahmet
cranked the wheel, but the bus kept true, sending them diving straight into the river Bosna.
Luckily, the part of the river they’d landed in wasn’t
too deep, and they emerged from the sinking bus with nothing more than some cuts, bruises,
and the now shorn off steering wheel still clasped in Ahmet’s hands.
5 years later in 1962, Selak was riding the train from the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo to Dubrovnik.
A landslide knocked a boulder onto the tracks, derailing the train as it passed.
The train sailed off the tracks, plunging into the river Neretva,
threatening to drown everyone on board. Selak was traveling with his friend’s mother.
As the train crashed into the icy waters, Selak heroically managed
to break a windowpane, dragging the woman out of the railcar.
He swam to the surface where nearby residents living in Jablanica took his hand
and pulled them to safety. A year after the train
incident, Selak’s mother came down with an illness.
He had to take a plane from Zagreb to Rijeka to visit, but it was already fully booked.
He managed to convince the crew to give him a space after he explained it was for a medical emergency.
It was the first flight he took in his entire life.
They seated him near the back of the plane where he got to know a beautiful flight attendant
named Rozika. As the flight began, he unclipped his seat belt, and strolled over to talk to her.
As they were chatting they heard a terrible THUD, and suddenly, Selak woke up in the hospital.
Doctors told him that as the plane took off,
it crashed into a mountainside, killing 19 people onboard except for him
and Rozika who were sucked out of the aircraft after the rear door blew out.
Rozika, miraculously crashed into a tree, cushioning her fall, and saving her life.
Selak, similarly, landed in a haystack near
the village of Čabar, surviving a fall of over 800 meters.
7 years later, in 1970, while driving in his small Lada brand sedan, it caught fire and exploded.
Selak, with the reflexes expected of a man who’d deked death multiple
times, leaped from the vehicle before he too became engulfed in flames.
Then, not 3 years later, Selak ate
another mouthful of fire as a malfunctioning fuel pump leaked oil into the engine
shooting flames into the driver’s seat through the air vents.
His hair was singed away, but his life continued.
Selak was given a 20 year reprieve from fighting for his life,
but in 1995, while walking in the city of Zagreb he was hit by a bus,
though he didn’t suffer any major injuries. But that’s not all!
Just a single year later, Selak was driving along a mountain road
when a UN Security Force truck nearly collided with him.
He just managed to avoid a head on collision by swerving into a guardrail.
The fence gave way, sending his car down a ravine, about 100 metres
below. Selak, at the very last second possible, leaped out the window of his car,
catching himself on a tree and saving himself from the deathly plunge.
He claimed he was able to jump from the car
so quickly because, after the two car fires, he refused to wear a seatbelt.
Little PSA though, wear a seatbelt please.
They will save your life. And finally, after a lifetime of narrowly escaping death, and days
after his 73rd birthday in 2002, Selak’s luck finally
hit a fever pitch as he played the lottery.
He had won 6.5 million kuna, worth about 1.8 million dollars accounting for inflation!
Selak was, by all accounts, a generous man, and gave away
most of his winnings to friends and family.
Selak did mention to Jutarnji that he didn’t like the “This &
That Visuals” cartoon that broke the story to a wider audience.
He said that the cartoon, visually, was lazy, saying “Americans have no clue.
They gave me a mustache and got all my accidents mixed up.”
He also felt like the media was profiting off of his stories.
However, Selak has been subject to accusations that his near-death
experiences are pure fiction, so if he was lying, does this critique hold up?
How ethical is it to tell someone else’s story, true
or otherwise, and then accept revenue for it on platforms like YouTube?
On the other hand, is it ethical to tell a false, or exaggerated story?
Maybe?
But memory is fallible, and humans tell little lies all the time to seem cool.
Could believing a possibly false story about a man’s fantastic death-defying life be harmful?
It’s complicated because misinformation has real world negative impacts, but Selak’s story provided
opportunities to people that would otherwise not be available to them,
including us. But is his story true?
Well, let’s get into it:
A blog post via John Bills on the website “An
Illustrated History of Slavic Misery” from 2016 writes that “the story is so wonderful
that whether it is true or not is irrelevant,
but the likelihood is that a lot of the story is exaggeration (or total fabrication).” Starting in 1957
with the bus crash, we find that many of these stories are difficult to corroborate.
Around 3,700 people are killed every day in motor vehicle accidents
in the United States alone, and most incidents can’t make the news.
Even if it was reported, it would likely be
in a local Croatian language newspaper from 1957.
That being said, there isn’t any real proof this event took place.
Next, there’s the train derailment in 1962,
which is much more likely to be recorded in the international press.
However any permutation of the search terms “Sarajevo Dubrovnik Derailment”, leads us back to articles
about Selak’s claims, or a Tripadvisor page referencing a train accident in 2017.
Not only that, but on Wikipedia’s list
of train derailments in 1961 to 1963,
none take place in Croatia, directly contradicting Selak’s claims.
Of course, Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source,
but there are no mentions of any train accidents in Croatia whatsoever,
save for the Zagreb Tram accident in 1954,
the Zagreb train disaster in 1974, and the Rudine derailment in 2009,
so it’s unlikely Selak’s story is true.
Next comes the plane crash, 1963.
Another blog post on a forum specifically made for skeptics,
one user asks “what airline, what country, what flight number was the incident?”.
“Planecrashinfo.com” which maintains a database of airline accidents by year, shows
no mention of any Croatian air accidents between 1962-1963,
the only 2 plane accidents in 62’ that resulted in 20 people’s
deaths were in Burma and France.
That said, many people have survived falling from planes without parachutes
from heights far higher than what Selak alleged to survive.
The highest a person has survived parachuteless, was Vesna Vulović, 1972,
who fell over 10,000 meters after a bomb went off on the plane she was on.
Bizarrely enough, this list also includes Bear Grylls, y’know, the guy who does
choose your own adventure shows on Netflix where you can make him drink his own pee?
That guy fell 5,000 meters, landed directly on his back, and survived.
So it’s plausible that a person could be sucked out of a plane and survive
depending on where they land. Next we come to the two car fires.
Like we mentioned earlier, car accidents happen all the time.
Selak mentions that he was driving a Lada, a car made by
Soviet state owned automobile company VAZ for both of his car fires.
The Lada was initially billed as an “economy” car.
Basically, a cheap, easy to repair private vehicle for the discerning Soviet citizen.
The first Lada, the VAZ-2101, was released in 1970,
so if Selak was driving a Lada, it would have been that one.
I can’t find any real source for this particular
model bursting into flames, nor any mention of recalls.
This could be due to possible Soviet censorship back when the USSR was a thing.
That said, Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear
said that the Lada “could survive a nuclear blast.
It's amazingly tough.
It can stand up to hammer blows but not water.”
But there is one other mention of the Lada and bursting into flames.
This is a modified version of a Lada made into a flamethrower, not a design flaw,
but it serves us to know that there aren’t common stories of Lada’s
breaking down into flames like Selak claims. Next we come to his brush with a bus in 1995.
While it isn’t mentioned in Selak’s Croatian language
interview, it is mentioned in a Total Croatia News article.
However, when Youtube channel “This & That Visuals” broke Selak’s story to the wider world,
they excluded the 1957 bus crash, and included a different bus crash
after his plane incident some time between 1963 and 1970,
but it was off of an icy bridge into a river.
It seems like the video swapped the 1957 crash with this one,
but there isn’t any corroborating information. Point being, the truth is extremely muddled,
and the only information provided for this claim is,
and I quote, “1995 - hit by a bus.
He survives.” Gotta love context, eh?
Next comes the UN truck. There’s still a great number of traffic accidents that occur day by day,
but maybe we can find info about it due to the United Nations connection.
That being said, there was a truck accident in Croatia
in 1996 that led to the death of one US soldier,
but it was not a UN truck, nor was there any mention of a man leaping from his vehicle
onto a tree to save his life, which, like you’d think would be newsworthy.
So again, this claim appears to be either unverifiable, or false.
And now we come to the big one, the season finale, the lottery win!
In an interview from The Telegraph from 2010, Selak says that he won the lottery
the first time he ever bought a ticket,
however in an earlier interview from 2003,
he tells them that he’d “played the same lottery numbers
every week for several years”. The particular lottery that Selak played isn’t mentioned in
any of the articles made about him, so corroborating this is tricky.
However, in a photo of Selak via the Telegraph, we can see the logo of Hrvatska Lutrija,
the national lottery of Croatia, so we can assume that that was the particular lottery.
That being said, there isn’t a list of former winners,
at least, none that I can find, so we’re still stuck.
However, according to Facebook user Zeljko-Jayco Selak who claims to be Frane Selak’s
son, said in response to the near-death escape claims,
that “none of that happened to MY FATHER,
except a couple of minor car accidents!”
He does confirm the lotto win though, saying “After winning that jackpot,
my dad, who dreamed of fame all his life, had found—and paid!
a local journalist to write about ‘amazing life, full of close encounters with death’”.
If this is indeed Frane’s son, then it seems reasonable
to believe him, but, of course, much like
he says that “Some foreign correspondents in Croatia,
copied the story, without CHECKING ANY EVIDENCES OR PROVES” the only way to really confirm
this would be to learn how to speak Croatian,
and if you’ve been able to tell from this episode I haven’t really been doing that.
But one thing is for sure, as Zelkjo-Jayco
says, “Old man make you, journalists, all fools!”
Whether Frane Selak was telling the whole truth,
or if he was making it up for fame, he passed away
in 2016 at age 86, so we’ll never get the chance
to ask him. Much like the truth of the story,
the ethics of storytelling in a digital age is a question we may never get an answer to.
With the democratization of information, anyone can go ahead and make content that people want to see,
but what happens when that content is based on misinformation,
or when it makes money off of someone who won’t or can’t be compensated?
It’s up to content creators to provide accuracy and nuance to the best of their abilities,
and that includes remaining skeptical of things that fascinate and shock us.
Sharing something without spending any time to evaluate its
credibility is how we lose faith in reality.
Holding ourselves accountable for the information we disseminate is the first step.
We’re not perfect, and sometimes we have to shorten things for time, condense complex subjects into simpler
terms, mispronounce words, or miss things by accident. One thing is for certain though,
when it comes to near death experiences, 7 might just be the lucky number.