[Dan reading on-screen text]
[upbeat music]
- Imagine this ordeal.
You are trapped in an upside down ship
at the bottom of the ocean
for three days
- Every breath he takes puts him a step closer
to being unable to breathe.
- How about free falling 33,000 feet without a parachute?
- She's alive.
She fell over 33,000 feet in a damaged airplane
that had been ripped apart by a bomb and is alive.
- Or having to crawl through 200 miles
of wilderness after being mauled by a grizzly.
- This engenders in him a need for revenge.
He wants to live to kill these two people.
- These are the survival stories, so surprising.
They're truly unbelievable.
[upbeat music]
- Being lost in the desert is usually a death sentence,
so an ultra marathon Mauro Prosperi
finds himself in this very situation
he's forced to ask himself just how far am I willing
to go to survive?
- There's an event that's
thought of as one of the most,
if not the most grueling
running events in the world
and it's called the Marathon des Sables
and it's about 155 miles over the course of six days
through the desert in Southern Morocco.
- This is the most dangerous race on planet earth.
You are running sometimes more than 26 miles a day
where temperatures can get up to 120 degrees.
In order to do the race, you actually have to sign paperwork
that tells the race committee
where to send your body if you don't make it.
- It's been described as racing through hell for a week
and people pay $5,000 for the privilege,
- [Dan] But don't expect luxury to come
with that price.
Participants receive only two liters
of water per day at each checkpoint.
- Because of the high temperature
reaching almost 120 degrees, the need for water
and the need for food is exponentially higher
than it would be be with your average person
just doing day-to-day tasks.
- [Dan] By day four runners are in the home stretch
in seventh place, Mauro's having the race of his life
until there's a sudden turn in the weather
- When this sandstorm hits the sand is actually boiling hot.
So you've got all of these razor sharp little sand granules
that Mauro's now breathing in
- Because he is a marathoner, a competitor
and kind of a badass Prosperi decides to continue
to soldier forward, not realizing
that they have paused the race due to this sandstorm.
When the dust clears
and visibility returns, he has wandered severely off course
- [Dan] When night falls on day four,
all the runners have checked in with race officials
except Mauro Prosperi.
He camps alone that night
planning to backtrack at first light,
but there's one problem.
- This sandstorm has now erased
all of the markers on the trail.
At this point, Mauro is now climbing up
to the tallest sand dune that he can possibly find
so he can get a better point of reference.
- He's on top of the dune for most of the day
when suddenly a rescue helicopter flies over.
- So Mauro does exactly what he's been briefed to do.
He pulls out his little flare
and he fires it up at the helicopter,
but unfortunately it's in broad daylight
and these pen gun flares give out a very small signal
so the helicopter doesn't see it.
- [Dan] Mauro spends a long second night
alone in the desert.
By morning, he's reached a terrifying conclusion.
He'll have to rescue himself.
- He walks for most of the day, he's tired, he's hungry,
and worst of all, he drinks last of his water.
- He gets so thirsty that his tongue begins to swell
and he reaches into his pack where he's got some wet wipes
and he's sucking on the wet wipes for the moisture.
He's so dehydrated that when he sees a structure,
he thinks it's a mirage and he gets there
and it's not a mirage, it's a Bedouin shrine.
He's been in the sun for six days now, so he sets up camp.
- At this point. Mauro is so desperate
to get some fluids in his body
that he ends up drinking his own urine.
And for those of us that have been trained in survival,
we know that drinking your own urine is a big negative.
- Drinking your own urine
does you more harm than good
because even though urine is
mostly water, this is toxins
that your body has filtered
through the kidneys to get rid of.
You're also introducing some salts
and in the long run it will make you more thirsty.
- [Dan] As dehydration sets in,
Mauro takes extreme measures and goes a little batty.
- He climbs up on the roof thinking he might be able
to signal someone, and there he finds a colony of bats,
so still desperately thirsty.
He uses his pocket knife
to cut off their heads and drink their blood.
- At this point, Mauro is no different
than a desert animal.
He's gone from a marathon runner to a predator.
This is something he couldn't have imagined doing
just a few days earlier,
but yet his survival instinct has kicked in
- The bat blood has delayed death for now.
Then on day seven while escaping the midday heat,
there's finally a glimmer of hope.
- Suddenly he hears a plane coming,
so he has already written SOS
and help into the sand with his feet,
and he builds a signal fire.
- But almost as soon as he gets the fire lit,
another sandstorm hits,
- And again, another rescue attempt fails,
and this proves to be his breaking point.
- He figures that he'll die on his own terms.
He writes a message to his family in charcoal,
his wife will get his policeman's pension.
He takes out his knife, he slits his own wrists
and he lays down in the sand ready to die.
- But to Mauro's great surprise, he wakes up
and he's still alive.
- [Dan] Fate, science, or just plain luck
saved Mauro Prosperi that day, so he decides to push on.
- He's walking through this desert all day,
120 degree Fahrenheit temperatures.
I can only imagine that every single step at this point
takes every ounce of strength that Mauro has.
- [Dan] It's now day eight in the desert,
three of them without water.
Then something miraculous appears on the horizon.
- He finds a puddle
that's left over from a dried up riverbed.
He lays down next to the puddle
and he tries to drink some water,
but he vomits it up immediately.
His throat is so dry that he can't even swallow.
He lays by that water
and just sips it bit by bit all day
and all night trying to get his body used to
taking in a little bit of water at a time.
- [Dan] The next day, Prosperi leaves the oasis
and spies what to him is a beautiful sight.
- He sees goat droppings in the sand.
- If there's goat droppings, there's gotta be goat herders
and if there's goat herders, there's gotta be food,
water, survival, rescue.
So Mauro gets rejuvenated with this sense of hope
and he starts identifying footprints
and he ends up finding this little girl
and he cries out to the little girl
and she sees this European man absolutely torn to pieces.
So she does what any little girl would do.
She takes off in the opposite direction.
To Mauro's good fortune the little girl notifies her family,
and after wandering through the Sahara for nine days,
Mauro is finally saved.
- [Dan] In the nine days he was missing
Mauro wandered more than
180 miles off course
through some of the planet's
most dangerous terrain.
- He's brought to an Algerian hospital
where doctors take care of him.
He's lost 33 pounds
and he needs four gallons of fluid
to replace what he's lost.
- [Dan] It takes Mauro two years
to recover from the damage his body endures
during his improbable fight for survival.
Once healthy, he does something even more unbelievable
- Just to show he bears no ill will towards this desert
that almost killed him
in 1998, Mauro returns to compete in the race again,
and then does it six more times after that,
a glutton for punishment.
- Flight attendant Vesna Vulovic's story of survival
is so close to impossible that many call it a miracle.
- This particular day in 1972,
flight 367 takes off bound
for Copenhagen aboard which is a
23-year-old flight attendant by the name of Vesna Vulovic.
- One minute Vesna's doing her flight attendant duties
at 33,000 feet.
The next minute a bomb goes off.
[thunderous explosion] [screaming]
The plane is blown into multiple pieces.
[metal creaking and cracking]
Passengers are getting sucked out of the aircraft
and it begins to take a free fall.
This took place in the 70s during the Cold War,
and some sources say that this was a briefcase bomb.
- [Dan] It's unclear who is responsible,
but what is certain is Vesna is not supposed to be
on this plane.
She's not even supposed to be a flight attendant.
- She has chronic low blood pressure
and that should disqualify her
from that kind of an occupation.
- Because you could potentially pass out
when you get to altitude.
- But Vesna is so determined to get her dream job.
She figures out a workaround for her medical exam.
- Vesna is quite ingenious.
She really only needs to have normal blood pressure
during the time of screening.
- In order to bypass this screening,
she drinks five or six cups of coffee,
jacks her blood pressure up,
jacks her heart rate up, goes in, passes the test.
- [Dan] And there is another reason
why Vesna should not be on this specific flight.
It's supposed to be her day off.
- Apparently there's a lot of Vesnas around at the time
because there's a different Vesna that was slated
to do the flight attendant duties on that day,
but she didn't show up.
- It was actually meant to be someone else's shift,
but Vesna decides, hey, it's going to Copenhagen.
It's a city I've always wanted to see.
I'll take the shift even though it's not supposed
to be mine, and it turns out to be a fateful decision.
- When the bomb goes off,
[thunderous explosion]
Vesna happens to be behind the drink cart
and as the plane starts taking a free fall,
the cart pins Vesna to the back of the aircraft.
At this point, Vesna loses consciousness
and she's passed out.
- She free falls 33,000 feet.
That's six miles pinned between the food cart
and the fuselage of the plane.
- [Dan] It may be the first time
that airplane food saves someone's life,
but the unlikely circumstances continue.
- As a halo jumper in special operations
I'm jumping from typically 13,000 feet,
so I get about 60 seconds of free fall.
Vesna is traveling from 33,000 feet in a dead free fall.
So this is gonna take her about three minutes
until she hits the ground
- And during that time, she's still in the tail section.
This forms a kind of rigid cage around her
that will somewhat protect her,
and the tail section has a surface area
which will slow down the descent to some extent,
it is like the world's worst parachute.
- [Dan] Then another unbelievable coincidence.
- The wreckage lands at such an angle
that she doesn't really absorb
all the impact and she's alive.
She fell over 33,000 feet without a parachute
in a damaged airplane that had been ripped apart
by a bomb and is alive.
- However, her list of injuries is extensive.
She has a skull fracture, a cerebral hemorrhage.
She has multiple fractured vertebrae.
She has both legs that have been fractured
and a fractured pelvis as well.
This is actually quite amazing that this is all
that she has injured.
- The fact that she has low blood pressure
ultimately becomes one of the factors in saving her life.
- Because her blood pressure is so low,
she doesn't bleed out as fast as somebody
who had normal blood pressure.
- People theorize that essentially
her low blood pressure
is what keeps her heart from exploding.
It's like an underfilled water balloon.
Had she had normal blood pressure
with that rapid depressurization of the cabin
and the impact with the earth,
that easily could have made her heart explode in her chest.
- [Dan] While she miraculously survives the impact,
she needs immediate medical attention.
- Somehow the first person to come along
to check out the wreckage, they hear her screaming,
they see her.
- And it so happens that he is a former World War II medic
and he's seen a lot of battlefield trauma.
So he's able to take care of Vesna until help arrives
and she's brought to a hospital.
- Vesna is in a coma for a few weeks
after the accident when she finally awakes,
she's partially paralyzed.
- Ten months after the accident,
Vesna actually regains her ability to walk
and for the rest of her life, she's got a limp.
But the fact that she's now walking less than a year later
is unbelievable.
- The Guinness Book of World Records
awards Vesna the highest fall without a parachute.
You can't really train for that.
I'm guessing like if you don't get it the first time,
you don't get it.
- [Dan] Even more astonishing,
Vesna wants to keep flying.
That doesn't stop the airline from grounding her.
- The airline gives her a desk job
because she stands as a reminder that planes
and people can fall out of the sky.
- We've all heard the story of Jonah and the whale,
even Pinocchio and the whale,
but what about the story of Paul Templer and the hippo?
- So there's a river guide named Paul Templer
who's taking a group of tourists
down the Zambezi River in Africa.
He spots a group of hippos bathing in the river,
but hippos are no joke.
About 500 fatalities a year are caused by hippos.
- Hippos can weigh four tons.
They have jaws that open 180 degrees
and they have teeth that are a foot and a half long,
so they're extremely vicious when they feel threatened.
- [Dan] These particular hippos aren't at all happy.
When the group gets a little too close.
- The hippo overturns one of the canoes
and one of the guides is catapulted out into the water.
- Paul goes back to save his fellow tour guide,
but suddenly everything goes black.
[screaming]
- His legs are kicking in the air.
He's inhaling the smell of of putrid rotten egg.
The hippo's breath.
In a panic, he grabs onto one of the hippo's tusks
and wrenches himself out.
He surfaces and swims for shore,
but this time he's hit from below.
- This time he grabs him sideways.
So Paul's legs are hanging out
one side of the hippo's mouth and his head and shoulder
are hanging out of the other side of his mouth
and the hippo swings him around like a ragdoll,
and then finally he just shakes him loose.
[siren wails]
When Paul reaches the hospital, he's got 38 bites.
The hippo has punctured his face, his neck,
his spinal column, and his lung,
and has shredded his left arm from the elbow down
and has to be amputated.
- Although Templer loses his arm,
he does keep his sense of humor.
He titles the book, he writes about his hippo encounter,
"What's Left of Me."
The hero of our next story doesn't have
quite the same upbeat attitude.
- In 1823, Hugh Glass
and 15 other men
are going up the Missouri River.
The fur trade is huge money for them,
but North America is a very
treacherous place to be.
We've got warring Native Americans,
you've got these dangerous animals,
- [Dan] And on this unfortunate August Day
Glass will come face-to-face
with one of these terrifying threats.
- Hugh Glass is out in front exploring
and he sees these two bear cubs.
But he's not thinking, oh, how cute.
He's thinking There's a terrifying giant mama bear
and she is very close to where he stands right then.
- He hears a noise
[deep growling]
[ferocious growl] [screaming]
and all of a sudden finds himself out of nowhere
getting mauled by this massive grizzly bear.
The bear all 400 pounds of her pins Hugh down
and rips open his trachea, his windpipe.
So at this point, his screams sound even more horrifying.
[screaming]
- Everyone hears this horror show.
They come running to Glass or what's left of him.
- His scalp is missing, his windpipe is exposed,
his leg is torn up.
There's blood everywhere.
They assume that he is not of the living.
[dramatic music]
[choking]
- But Hugh Glass is somehow still alive.
- So the expedition leader, Andrew Henry, asks
for two volunteers to stay with Glass, wait until he dies,
and then bury him.
After that, they can catch up to the expedition.
- Enticed by the promise of cash two men volunteer.
- Two famous frontiersmen
by the name of Fitzgerald and Bridger
step up to the job and stay with Hugh.
- [Dan] But what was supposed to be a 24 hour chore
drags on and on.
- Five days later, Hugh Glass is not dead. They get scared.
- Fitzgerald and Bridger are worried they'll be attacked.
They take Glass's weapons, ammo,
and supplies, and they leave him.
The guy's practically in pieces.
How much longer can he live?
- Bridger and Fitzgerald expect the answer to be
not much longer, but Glass has other plans.
- So Hugh Glass regains consciousness
and he doesn't have his gun.
His ammunition, he's defenseless.
- This engenders in him a need for revenge.
He wants to live to kill these two people,
and that gives him the strength to do
what it takes to survive.
[screaming]
- [Dan] That means tending to his injuries.
Glass reaps the bandages that seal his exposed trachea,
then examines his badly broken leg.
- So, one of the utterly amazing things that Glass does is
that he sets his own fracture,
which we call a reduction.
[crunching] [screaming]
Every time I reduce fractures in patients,
I thank all the gods that there are,
that we have pain medication.
It really, really hurts.
- [Dan] Then Glass heads out on his hands and knees.
- He's crawling toward Fort Kiowa
which is 200 miles away in South Dakota.
That's the nearest settlement.
He crawls on for about two weeks, and during that time,
the fracture in his leg is beginning to heal
and that allows him to actually stand up.
- After this six-week journey, Hugh arrives to Fort Kiowa.
He's got one thing on his mind and that's revenge.
However, none of the trappers are there anymore.
So Hugh takes six months to recover,
and then he catches up to Bridger
down at the Bighorn River.
"Why'd you leave me?
Why'd you take my supplies?"
Bridger tells you that it was all Fitzgerald's idea.
Bridger is the youngest of the frontiersmen at the time,
rumored to be just a teenager.
So Hugh decides to have mercy on Bridger lets him live
and goes off and search for Fitzgerald.
- [Dan] But as luck would have it,
Fitzgerald is now in the army
and an officer prevents Hugh's shot at revenge.
Both men survive.
- The story of Hugh Glass inspires the movie
" The Revenant, " with Leonardo DiCaprio,
and it becomes this ultimate story of survival and revenge.
- The Hollywood version, it's a great movie by the way,
takes some creative liberties, focusing less on the mercy
and more on the revenge.
Coming up, a survival story
that's deep, really deep.
- Life is full of annoying little things, isn't it?
Like rush hour traffic or losing your wifi connection.
But what if something that feels like
an inconvenience ends up saving your life?
- Harrison Okene is a 25-year-old cook
and he's aboard this ship called the Jascon-4.
It's about 18 miles west of the coast of Nigeria,
out in the Gulf of Guinea.
Harrison and his crew mates have this policy,
whenever you go to bed,
you gotta lock yourself in the cabin
because there's issues with piracy there off
the coast of Nigeria,
and all over the coast of Africa for that matter.
[thunder rumbling]
- So everyone's locked inside the room,
it's a security precaution.
But Harrison, he wakes up in the middle of the night,
he decides to leave his room
and use the restroom.
As in the restroom,
he feels something hit the side of the boat.
[wave crashes]
- And all of a sudden this rogue wave smashes
against the Jascon-4.
And we're talking a wave 20, 30 plus feet tall.
- [Dan] Within seconds,
the Jascon-4 is knocked sideways
and seawater quickly floods the ship.
While his crew mates are drowning
in their locked quarters,
Harrison has a fighting chance.
- A wall of water forces Harrison down a hallway
into a small tiny room that is adjacent
to an officer's quarters.
At this point, the boat is completely upside down,
so the ceiling is now the floor.
He's fortunate enough to find an air pocket.
- [Dan] Harrison finds safety for the moment,
but let's not celebrate just yet.
- The boat is starting to sink.
Now he's down a hundred feet below sea level,
stuck at the bottom of the ocean in his air pocket.
If that's not bad enough, the cold water is 50 degrees.
You have no wetsuit,
you're not gonna survive in it very long.
- [Dan] Though Harrison doesn't know it,
rescue operations are underway,
but it will take hours before divers reach the ship.
- For open circuit dive operations
for a depth of about a hundred feet,
you are looking at a maximum bottom time of about 10
to 15 minutes tops.
So you can only imagine that these divers,
they don't have a whole lot of time
to search the ship, number one.
Number two, it's gonna be very dark down there.
And number three, they probably didn't have any time
to familiarize with how the ship was structured.
- Divers go down, they start hammering on the side
of the hull of the ship, hoping to hear survivors.
And Harrison hears it.
He's shouting, banging back against the hull.
[indistinct scream]
The divers work their way around the ship,
listening as they go, they hear nothing.
They give up, convinced there are no survivors,
and they return to the surface.
- Once the sounds of the hammering stop,
Harrison realizes that he's in extreme danger.
- Every breath he takes
puts him a step closer
to being unable to breathe
because he inhales oxygen, he exhales carbon dioxide,
so the oxygen density in his air pocket is going down
every moment with every breath that he takes.
- [Dan] And if the lack of oxygen doesn't kill him,
the cold will.
He knows he has to move or die.
- He just so happens to have some rope with him.
So Harrison starts to get bold.
- He decides to tie a rope to himself
and to his current location.
He decides to swim off in total darkness
to go find a larger pocket of air.
- So Harrison is taking these little sorties outside
of the room,
swimming roughly 25 meters would take him
in between 20 and 30 seconds.
He knows he's only got so much time
before he's gotta go back to the room.
- Just at the moment when he's about to run out of oxygen
and head back, he decides to swim a little bit further,
and that's where he pops up in the engineer's room
where there's a bigger pocket of air.
- The fact that Harrison actually finds
the engineering room
that has an additional air pocket is an absolute miracle.
- Using a hammer that he's found,
he pulls off some of the wood paneling from the walls,
and using an air mattress that he's found,
he creates a makeshift platform
so he could at very least keep his upper body outside
of the water, slowing the possibility of hypothermia.
- [Dan] At this moment,
Harrison has been trapped for more than 24 hours.
While staving off hypothermia may seem like a small victory,
he's still not out of the woods.
- If you can believe it,
then things actually go from super bad to super worse.
The sharks have come
and he can hear them swimming around the boat
and eating the bodies of his crew mates,
and he knows that if they find him, he's next.
- [Dan] As a terrified Harrison listens to sharks,
divers return to collect bodies.
- There are six divers that get tasked with the job.
Once they enter the vessel,
they finally find the cabin area
and they're able to start extracting
the deceased crew members.
- [Dan] After two days and 14 hours
in almost complete darkness,
Harrison sees a mysterious glow in the water.
- The divers are going in and out of the wreckage,
and as they're coming in on one last pass,
it's Harrison.
- [Diver] What's your name? - Harrison.
- You could only imagine what it's like
to be diving a hundred feet below recovering bodies
and all of a sudden a body comes and recovers you.
But Harrison's not getting out of this just yet.
- Now that they've found Harrison alive,
they have to be careful to not kill him
in trying to save him.
- [Dan] Harrison has been 100 feet below sea level
for nearly three days,
so he'll have to be brought to the surface, slow and steady.
- When the body tissues have absorbed all that nitrogen,
once they start to relieve the pressure
and those bubbles form
and they come out of the tissues, they can go anywhere.
If they go to your heart, they could stop your heart motion.
If they go to your brain, they can cause a stroke.
Major, major problems if you don't handle this correctly.
- The solution for Harrison comes
when they bring him this pressurized suit
and then slowly ascend so that he can adapt
to the changing pressures and not suffer any catastrophes.
And one of the strangest facts
of this whole experience,
when they get him to the surface,
he's been at the bottom of the ocean for 62 hours.
He thinks he's only been down there for 12 hours.
He's essentially lost two days in his mind.
Somehow, time has become compressed for him.
- After this whole ordeal,
instead of being terrified to return to the ocean again,
Harrison decides to become a commercial diver.
- And the man who presents Harrison Okene
with his diploma upon graduation,
none other than the diver who rescued him.
- What's more terrifying than death itself?
Perhaps not dying, but being buried anyway.
While it sounds like something out of a gothic novel,
it's happened more often than we'd like to imagine.
[dramatic music]
- In the 18th and 19th centuries,
there's this huge fear
of being buried alive.
- [Dan] Yes, some of this fear comes
from works of fiction,
and those are inspired by very real cases,
and it's a real enough possibility
for doctors to test for,
well, death.
- They devised a number of tests for physicians
and morticians to ensure that a person is actually dead
before they're to be buried.
They are generally unpleasant experiences.
- We're talking pliers on nipples,
rinsing out the mouth with urine, and tobacco smoke enemas.
I don't really know why regular enemas weren't enough,
but the tobacco smoke enemas are where we landed on this.
And yes, this apparently is where the phrase,
"Blowing smoke up one's ass," comes from.
- The thinking is that if they create something
that is unpleasant enough
and they subject a potentially dead person
to said experience,
the people who are not actually dead
will respond to that treatment
and then declare themselves as not being dead,
and those who are dead won't mind.
- [Dan] Thankfully, these tests are phased out
in the early 20th century, so we'll never know.
Could they have prevented the fate of one Angelo Hayes?
- So it's 1937, we're in France,
and Angelo Hayes, young guy,
loves to ride his motorcycle
and he does not like wearing a helmet.
- And one day he's riding his motorcycle very fast,
loses control of it,
and he crashes headfirst into a brick wall.
Hayes has so much head trauma and it's so gruesome,
they won't even let his family see the body.
They think it will be so distressing.
- He suffers extensive facial injuries,
and these injuries are so bad
that his face is unrecognizable.
He has no signs of life.
He's declared dead at the scene
and he is sent directly to the morgue.
- So three days after the accident,
his family buries him in their very small village
of St Quinten de Chalais and he would still be there
had it not been for a life insurance company
that gets a little suspicious.
- [Dan] Two weeks before Angelo's accident,
his family takes out a life insurance policy worth
the equivalent of 200,000 in today's dollars,
a big policy for a 19-year-old in 1937.
- It all seems a little bit suspicious,
especially seeing as it was taken out just weeks before.
The insurance company sends two investigators
and they actually exhume his body.
They open up the casket
and it turns out this man is not dead.
- He's not conscious, but he has a heartbeat,
albeit very slow,
and he also has a very reduced respiratory rate.
- [Dan] Surviving the motorcycle crash
is a miracle on its own,
but being buried alive
and not succumbing to such horrific injuries,
even after three days, how is this possible?
- He's in a coma and when you're in a coma,
your metabolic rate is so low
that you don't need much air to survive.
So they promptly take him to a hospital
and he makes a full recovery.
- So being declared dead obviously has a profound effect
on Angelo and he ends up inventing
a whole other type of coffin just in case this happens
to somebody else.
- It includes a food locker, an oxygen supply,
and a radio transmitter,
so a person who is buried alive can call for help.
The funny thing is for all the effort that he expended
on designing this thing,
there's no evidence that anyone ever bought a single unit.
- [Dan] I guess that after being buried alive
for three days, Angelo wasn't taking any chances.
- Imagine a human frozen solid as a rock,
who is then brought back to life.
It's a storyline straight from the movies,
but is it actually possible?
I'd have said no,
until I heard our next unbelievable story.
- It is 1980 and a 19-year-old named Jean Hilliard
is driving back home
after a night out with friends in Minnesota
and her car skids off the road
and goes through a snowbank.
- This is well before the advent of cell phones.
She's in the middle of nowhere,
but she knows that her friend Wally Nelson,
lives not very far from where she has crashed her car.
- And she decides that the best course of action is to walk,
but there's one problem.
It's minus 22 out
and she's not exactly well-equipped for the weather.
She's wearing cowboy boots and a light jacket
- [Dan] That might be okay for a summer stroll,
but not for temperatures cold enough
to cause frostbite within minutes,
- She might think that her friend's house
is just a few minutes down the road, but that's by car.
She's walking for over an hour.
- Her body now is trying to minimize her heat loss
and protect her as much as possible.
It'll prioritize the critical organs needed for survival
and direct her blood flow toward the heart,
the brain, and the lungs.
But after a while, even that is not enough,
and these vital organs will start to shut down.
- She makes it to her friend Wally's front yard,
but before she can reach the porch, she passes out.
- Wally discovers her the next morning
when he's coming out to go to work.
So it's about six hours
that Jean has been out in this subfreezing temperature.
- Her friend Wally sees this human shaped ice block
in front of his house and he's horrified to see
that it's his friend Jean with her eyes frozen open.
- First, he thinks she's dead,
but then he notices bubbles coming out of her nostril
and so maybe there's hope.
- He gets her to the hospital.
The paramedics there don't even need a stretcher
to carry her in.
She's literally stiff as a board
and the doctors can't even start an IV on her.
She's so solid that the IV needles break
when they try to insert them.
- The frostbite is so severe, her toes are jet black.
- Her body temperature is so low
that it doesn't register on a thermometer
and her heartbeat has slowed down to eight beats a minute.
They expect her to die and they use heating pads
to try and thaw her out even if it's just for her dead body
to get back to her parents for burial.
- Eventually, Jean's body warms up and she returns to life.
What's more amazing, she speaks.
- And the first thing that's
on her mind is being worried
that her dad might be pissed off
that his Ford LTD is in a ditch somewhere.
- [Dan] Her survival astounds
the scientific community.
- Jean Hilliard comes back from the precipice,
from the edge of freezing to death,
and because of her,
medical professionals now state
that they will not pronounce anyone dead
until they are warm and dead,
that as long as the body is frozen, there is still hope.
- Six hours and frozen stiff, impressive for a human,
but that's nothing for one strange animal
recently unearthed in the Arctic.
- Researchers are out collecting samples
in the Siberian Permafrost
and they find a little tiny frozen creature.
But even though it's microscopic, it's very complex.
It has a brain, it has a reproductive system,
it has a gut.
- [Dan] It is the bdelloid rotifer,
and the one scientists discover reveals
an unbelievable survival mechanism.
- These kinds of rotifers have the ability to survive
for very long periods of time in a dormant state,
but this one breaks all the records.
The scientists carbonate this particular bdelloid rotifer
and find that it is 24,000 years old.
- [Dan] Most astonishing of all, it's not dead.
It's resting, and scientists are able to wake it up.
- Once they're discovered
and brought out of that freezing condition,
all you have to do is add water.
And in a few hours, these things start moving again.
- This bdelloid rotifer was alive during the age
of wooly mammoths and saber tooth tigers.
- No one really understands how they do this.
It is crazy, but possibly someday
when this is better understood,
this can be applied to humans as well.
- [Dan] This begs the question,
could there be other mysterious creatures living
in the permafrost, waiting to come back to life?
- Permafrost is the perfect place
to preserve ancient viruses.
- In fact, the melting of the permafrost has been linked
to anthrax outbreaks in reindeer populations in Siberia.
The permafrost is melting,
and that permafrost contains zombie viruses
that have been dormant for ages
and could potentially pose a serious risk to humans.
- Now, that's scary to think about,
but if these stories have anything to teach us,
it's that humans and non-humans
can survive seemingly impossible circumstances,
no matter how unbelievable they may seem.
[upbeat music fades]