Bizarre accidents that didn´t kill
1) Struck by Lightening Seven Times
Between 1942 and 1977, a forest ranger from the US was struck seven times by lightening, and survived them all. Although he has been knocked unconscious, had his hair set on fire, and been admitted to hospital with burns to his chest and stomach, Roy Sullivan seemed to be the invincible man, right up until 1983 when he took his own life with a pistol.
2) Cut in half by a train
While working at his job on the railroad, American switchman Truman Duncan was knocked from his perch at the front of the train and dragged under the moving carriages. He was severed in two, but the weight of the train held his arteries and other blood vessels closed for long enough for him to call emergency services on his mobile phone, wait forty minutes for them arrive and survive the trip to hospital. He is still alive, albeit without both legs, and a kidney.
3) Cut his own arm off to free himself from a fallen boulder
After being trapped under a large rock for five days, desperate to the point of drinking his own urine, Aron Ralston took his pocket knife out and cut through his own arm to free himself. He first had to break both bones before using the Swiss Army Knife to hack through the soft tissue before walking for another 30 hours to find help. He is still alive, and continues to hike in remote areas.
4) The luckiest, or unluckiest guy alive
Frane Selak, from Croatia, has survived a train crash that killed seventeen people, a plane whose door suddenly blew off, sucking nineteen passengers out to their death, a bus crash that killed four others, his car spontaneously catching fire, being hit by a bus when out walking, and finally, in a stroke of GOOD luck, winning a million US dollars in a Croatian lottery.
5) Crawled for three days after a 60 metre fall into a crevasse
Mountaineers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates tumbled over the lip of an ice crevasse in their attempt to scale Siula Grande. As Simpson was weighing Yates down, Yates was forced to cut the rope, and Simpson fell more than 60 metres, breaking both legs. Amazingly, he survived, crawled out of the crevasse, then three days more to get back to base camp as his astonished climber-buddies.
6) A plane exploding at 33,000 feet
After a terrorist attack in 1972, a DC-9 passenger airliner exploded when a bomb was detonated, disintegrating at more than thirty thousand feet and crashing into a mountainside. Lucky Vesna Vulovic, the only survivor, was a flight attendant on the ill-fated plane and somehow survived by ending up sitting on the tail of the plane and watching, stunned, as the wind whipped past her and the mountain loomed into view. Despite several injuries and operations, she is still alive today, and has switched careers from aviation to property, renting apartments in Venice and other cities.
