When Luck Defies Death: The Astonishing Stories of the World’s Luckiest Survivors
Life hangs by a thread. For most of us, that thread is never tested. But for a select few, it has been stretched to its absolute limit, frayed by disaster, yet somehow refused to break. These are the stories of individuals who walked away from accidents so catastrophic that their survival defies logic, science, and all reasonable expectation. They are living proof that sometimes, in the face of certain death, luck plays the winning hand.
Here are the tales of some of the luckiest people to ever survive an accident.
The Woman Who Fell 33,000 Feet and Lived
On January 26, 1972, Vesna Vulović, a 22-year-old flight attendant, was aboard JAT Flight 367. She wasn’t even supposed to be on that flight; a scheduling mix-up had put her on the roster instead of another Vesna. Mid-air, over Czechoslovakia, a bomb detonated in the luggage compartment, tearing the plane apart at an altitude of 33,330 feet.
As the wreckage plummeted to earth, Vulović was pinned by a food cart inside a section of the fuselage, which cushioned her from the initial blast and then crash-landed at an angle on a snowy, wooded mountainside. She was the sole survivor of the 28 people on board.
Found by a villager who had been a medic in WWII, she had a fractured skull, three broken vertebrae, two broken legs, and was in a coma for nearly a month. Miraculously, she made a near-full recovery, her paralysis temporary. Vesna Vulović holds the Guinness World Record for the highest fall survived without a parachute. She had no memory of the fall itself, later stating, “The one who found me… said I was in the middle part of the plane. I was with my head down and my colleague on top of me. A big pillow of my blood was under my head.”
The Man Who Survived Two Atomic Bombs
Surviving one nuclear blast is a statistical impossibility. Surviving two is the stuff of myth, yet it was the reality for Tsutomu Yamaguchi.
On August 6, 1945, Yamaguchi, a 29-year-old engineer, was in Hiroshima on a business trip. As he stepped off a tram, he saw a bomber in the sky and then a flash of light—the “pika-don.” The Little Boy atomic bomb detonated less than two miles away. He was thrown into the air, his eardrums ruptured and his upper body severely burned. He spent the night in a bomb shelter before making his way back to his hometown.
His hometown was Nagasaki.
On August 9, he was in his office, describing the horrors of Hiroshima to his skeptical boss, when an even brighter flash filled the room. The “Fat Man” bomb had detonated. Again, he was about two miles from ground zero. While his office was destroyed, Yamaguchi survived with only minor new injuries. He went on to live to the age of 93, becoming a vocal advocate for nuclear disarmament and the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as a survivor of both atomic bombings.
The Survivor at the Bottom of the Sea
In May 2013, Harrison Okene was a cook aboard the Jascon-4 tugboat when it capsized in heavy seas off the coast of Nigeria and sank 100 feet to the ocean floor. As the boat filled with water, the 11 other crew members drowned. Okene, however, was swept into a small bathroom that, by a sheer fluke of physics, formed a 4-foot-square air pocket.
He was trapped in total darkness, in freezing water, listening to the sounds of sea creatures eating the bodies of his friends. Dressed only in his boxer shorts, he survived by sipping on a bottle of Coke, building a small platform out of a wooden panel to keep his body out of the water, and praying.
After nearly three days, when all hope seemed lost, he heard a tapping sound. A rescue and recovery dive team was searching the wreck, assuming they were only looking for bodies. One of the divers was stunned when a hand reached out and grabbed his. Okene had survived for 60 hours in an underwater tomb. His rescue was just as perilous, as he had to spend another 60 hours in a decompression chamber to safely return to the surface.
The World’s Luckiest Unluckiest Man
While the others on this list are known for one spectacular escape, Croatian music teacher Frane Selak became famous for a lifetime of cheating death. His incredible streak includes:
- 1962: A train he was on derailed and plunged into a frozen river. 17 people died, but Selak swam to shore with a broken arm and hypothermia.
- 1963: During his first and only plane ride, a door blew open and he was sucked out of the aircraft. He landed in a haystack while the plane crashed, killing 19 others.
- 1966: A bus he was riding skidded off the road and into a river. Four people drowned, but Selak again swam to safety with minor injuries.
- 1970 & 1973: His car caught fire on two separate occasions. Both times, he managed to escape just before the fuel tank exploded.
- 1995: He was hit by a bus in Zagreb but sustained only minor injuries.
- 1996: While driving on a mountain road, he swerved to avoid a head-on collision with a truck, crashed through a guardrail, and was ejected from his car as it plummeted 300 feet down a cliff. He landed in a tree, watching his car explode below.
As if to cap off his unbelievable life, in 2003, two days after his 73rd birthday, Frane Selak won the lottery, worth about $1.1 million.
These stories defy our understanding of probability. They are reminders that even in the darkest moments, when the odds are stacked impossibly high, the human spirit—aided by a healthy dose of inexplicable luck—can endure. They are testaments not just to survival, but to the incredible, unpredictable, and sometimes miraculous nature of life itself.
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