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Should Have Been 100% Fatal: 39 Times Humans Survived Dangerous Situations
It’s never easy to come to terms with your own mortality. In fact, many people decide to completely ignore the fact that they won’t live forever. After all, there's not much we can do about it! But if you happen to have an experience where you come close to losing your life, you’ll never ever take it for granted again.
Threads users have recently been sharing stories of people who miraculously survived life-threatening situations, so we’ve gathered some of the craziest ones below. We’ll warn you right now, pandas, that some of these tales are not easy to read. But we hope they’ll remind you just how resilient humans are and inspire you to live every day to the fullest! Click here & follow us for more lists, facts, and stories.
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#1
John Thompson. 18 year old kid lost both arms in a farm machinery accident, walked home, and then dialed 911 with a pencil in his mouth. Both arms were reattached.
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#2
Mary Vincent. 15 years old. Hitched a ride with a stranger. He cut off her arms at the elbow and threw her over a 30 ft cliff. She packed mud in her arms, somehow crawled her way up, and stumbled down the road with her arms up so she wouldn’t bleed out.
#3
In 1999, bank executive and skydiver Joan Murray survived a 14,500-foot fall, hitting the ground at 80 mph after her parachute malfunctioned, landing directly on a mound of fire ants. The over 200 fire ant stings forced a massive adrenaline rush, keeping her heart beating.
#4
I knocked over my granny’s favourite wee porcelain fisherman and snapped his fishing rod. Managed to get it glued together before she throttled me.
#5
This woman. She cut herself open with a kitchen knife, delivered her baby, was stiched back after evisceration by a local nurse with an ordinary sewing needle and cotton thread, then was drove to the nearest hospital, eight hours away. Both her and the baby survived.
#7
1971, a 17 year old girl named Julianne Koepcke fell 3,000 ft strapped to an airplane seat into the Amazon jungle and survived. She walked out after 11 days by following a stream civilization.
#8
Timothy Ray Brown. Timothy Ray Brown was cured of both HIV AND LEUKEMIA, by receiving donor tissue from a person with genetic resistance. This has led to more successes, with a recent 7th saved with non resistant donor stem cells.
#10
The Colombian siblings who survived 40 days in the Amazon jungle after a plane crash. The youngest was 2 years old. The eldest was 13, if I'm not mistaken.
#12
The first person to survive rabies (without a rabies shot), Jeanna Giese, in 2004. She was 15.
#14
José Salvador Alvarenga spent 14 months drifting on a small boat in the Pacific Ocean, finally arriving on Marshall Islands from Mexico.
#15
As a paramedic, the thing that immediately comes to mind for me is the one adult woman who survived the Miami condo collapse in 2021. iirc among her injuries was a shattered pelvis, lacerated liver, and ruptured bladder (I’m sure there were more). Any ONE of those injuries can [end] you very quickly on their own, and she survived having all three at the same time. It blows my mind.
#16
Jim LeBlanc. The only human being to have been exposed to a vacuum and survive. The saliva on his tongue started to boil before he was rescued.
#19
Thad Phillips. Was kidnapped and had both his legs snapped by his assailant because he liked “the sound” of cracking bones. Crawled down the stairs and called 911. Also all the women who are held captive and assaulted for years before getting rescued. I can’t even imagine!
#20
Chris Lemons- saturation diver. Survived 35 minutes without air at the bottom of the North Sea (300 ft deep) after losing comms and getting cut from his umbilical air supply. Hollywood made a movie about it (in addition to th documentary) with Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu.
#23
Clint Malarchuk was an NHL Goaltender who got a skate to the neck, cutting his jugular during a game against St Louis. Blood was squirting 6 feet in front of him. Luckily, the team Equipment Manager was an ex Vietnam medic and pinched his Jugular off until he got to the hospital saving his life. If he would have been on the other end of the ice he would have bleed out. He also survived a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head. His story is insane
#24
Michael Moylan was shot in the head by his wife while sleeping & not only did he survive but he didn’t know he was shot until he got to a hospital & they found the bullet. He asked his wife to drive him to the hospital because he had a bad headache.
#26
Ann Fowler Hodges was the first known individual documented to have survived being hit by a meteorite. No case since has been documented where the victim survived.
#28
The guys from the Uruguayan Flight 571 crash. Truly incredible story. The movie Society of the Snow on Netflix is worth a watch.
#29
A man in india climbed a pole and grabbed a transformer in an attempt to end his life. He was knocked off and fell but survived. Turns out, his skin has a high electrical resistance which makes him incredibly unique. He performs now, routinely running 10-20x the current needed a [end] a human through his body.
#30
I just saw one today, a child fell through the ice and was submerged for 177 minutes, was 7 degrees when pulled out of the ice. Neuro damage, of course but kid is walking n talking 3 months later.
#31
Nikola Tesla liked to stick his head in strong electromagnetic fields and, for several months in 1895-96, did so regularly with the X-ray discharge from a Crookes tube. He maintained that it made him smarter. But in fact he became increasingly deranged and delusional after 1896, and basically never worked productively again. One of Tesla's many, many deranged ideas was to secretly bombard classes of "defective" children with strong high frequency EMF to "quicken" their minds. This was in 1912.
#32
Also Joe Simpson who survived the rope being cut by his climbing partner (Touching the Void)
#33
Henry Hall, the Eddystone Lighthouse keeper, during a fire accidentally ingested 200g of liquified lead and survived for six days, he was so well that the doctor thought he faked it, but they found the solidified lead inside of him during the autopsy (the slab is now in a museum).
#34
In July 1978, Soviet physicist Anatoli Bugorski survived an impossible accident when his head was struck by a high-energy proton beam in a particle accelerator. While repairing the U-70 synchrotron, safety systems failed, causing a 76 GeV beam to pass through his skull, leaving him with permanent facial paralysis, deafness, and occasional seizures, but allowing him to live a normal life.
#35
A child from Texas was diagnosed with DIPG and is the only one that I’ve read about surviving it.
#37
Jeanne Calment reached 122 years old when she was an active smoker even beyond 100 years old...normally smokers have a shorter lifespan yet she's the oldest documented person ever lived...
#38
Loren Schauers, an American man, had a hemicorporectomy in 2019 after a traumatic forklift accident.
#39
Wenceslao Moguel Herrera. He was “executed” by fring squad of nine rifleman and lastly shot in the head by an officer. He refused to die, and kept living.
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