Top 3 CRAZY ways people escaped DEATH | Part 2

today we're going to look at three of the most incredible survival stories of all time but before we get into today's stories if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format then you come to the right channel because that's all we do and we upload three four even five times every week so if that's of interest to you please invite the like button over to your house for oreos and milk but replace all of their oreos cream filling with play-doh also please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads alright let's get into today's stories [Music] in 1994 39 year old maro prosperi took part in the brutal marathon de sables which is a six-day endurance race covering 155 miles through the sahara desert the competition was known as one of the toughest in the world but prosperi was a former olympic athlete and he kept himself in unbelievable physical shape he was also a police officer back in italy which kept him even more active so he felt ready the competition's desert terrain was so dangerous that participants had to indicate where they wanted their bodies sent if they did not survive the race in preparation for the race prosperi would run 25 miles a day for weeks leading up to it and he would give himself less and less water as he was running to get accustomed to dehydration but despite how much he was training and his incredible athletic resume that showed he's someone that can probably do this his wife was very concerned but he would tell her you know the worst thing that's going to happen to me is i'll get a little sunburned the race kicked off at its starting point in morocco on april 10th and initially it was going very smoothly prosperi was always at the front of the pack and he was always the first italian to finish that day's stage and so when he would finish he would go to his tent and he'd put an italian flag on the outside to show the other italians doing the race where they could find him to come inside and chat and he would say that part of the race was really fun then things went wrong on the fourth day during the longest and most difficult phase of the race when he set out that morning it was already very windy and he found himself in the section between these two big sand dunes and the pacesetters had already gone way ahead so he's totally alone and then out of nowhere this massive sandstorm kicks up and completely blinds him he can't go anywhere because he can't see where he's going and so he manages to kind of feel his way to this rock where he gets down behind this rock and he thinks to himself i'll just wait it out and then continue on but the sandstorm raged for eight hours and when it was finally done it was totally dark outside so prosperity couldn't see anything so he decides you know what i'm gonna have to sleep on the dunes and tomorrow morning i'll have to get up and keep going and his biggest concern at this point was not that he was in a survival situation it was man i was in fourth place in this race and now with this huge setback i'm probably gonna finish last and so when he went to sleep that night all he was thinking about is man i gotta get up and go as fast as i can so i don't finish last tomorrow but when the sun came up the next morning prosperi looked around and he realized he had a much bigger problem the sandstorm had been so strong it had completely altered the landscape the dunes had all moved around he had no points of reference and so even though he had a map and he had a compass he had no way to orient himself so he had no idea what direction to go anybody that competed in this race really needed to be self-sufficient and so prosperi had a knife he had plenty of dehydrated food he had a sleeping bag but he had very little water he had about a half bottle of water because at each of the checkpoints during the day the race officials would give you all of this water and the idea was you would drink it all by the time you got to your next checkpoint and he had not made it to the next checkpoint and so was very low on water as he's looking around realizing this is a really bad situation he thinks to himself you know other runners must have had this same thing happen to them they probably had to hunker down yesterday during the sandstorm and they're they're just waking up now they're looking around i'm bound to find someone we'll link up and we will get to the end of this race and we'll be just fine and so he runs to the top of a sand dune and looks around expecting to see someone and he doesn't there's no one in all directions it's just completely barren desert and so he leaves that sand dune goes up another one and does the same thing he's looking around and there's nobody there and over the course of several hours he was just running to the peaks of these different sand dunes expecting to see someone not seeing anyone becoming more panicked and expending more energy and finally by the late afternoon when he's sweating profusely and the sun is bearing down on him and he still hasn't seen anyone he realizes he's gonna die if he keeps doing this and he needs to be smart about this and so at this point he went into survival mode and he decided that the only times he's going to move are going to be at night and in the early morning hours because those are the times when the sun is not up and it's still pretty cool and he can conserve energy that way he also began peeing into bottles and began conserving his urine to drink later when he did run out of water and so over the next two days he conserved his energy but he was just kind of drifting through the desert and he wasn't really getting anywhere he didn't know if he was making progress because he had nothing to go to he wasn't seeing anyone and he was starting to realize his situation is getting worse and worse by the minute and then in an incredible stroke of luck he comes across this muslim shrine in the middle of nowhere that bedouins would use as they traveled across the desert and he ran inside hoping that there'd be a person in there and there was a person in there but they were dead inside of a coffin but he was happy that he now had shelter over his head and this felt like progress he began taking stock of his new surroundings and when he was inside the shrine looking up into the ceiling he saw it was lined with hundreds of bats and at this point he's really hungry he's really thirsty and so he climbed up into the rafters and began grabbing handfuls of bats and drinking their blood after drinking the blood of 20 bats he used some of the wood that was inside of the shrine and he built a fire outside and that would be his way to signal planes and helicopters going overhead that he assumed would be out looking for him and so he sets the fire and he comes back inside expecting you know over the next couple of days someone's bound to find him but nobody does and four days go by and three separate times a plane or helicopter flew directly over him he's got his fire going he's out there flagging him down but nobody saw him and so at the end of those four days he's now been out in the desert roaming around for nearly a week and he's starting to realize that this is the end he's not going to survive this no one knows where he is no one's seen him so far he's running out of supplies this is it and so knowing he was staring down a long painful death either by dehydration or starvation he decided he was going to expedite it and he would say later that he did not feel sad about this it just was a logical choice he was making he figured this way if he died inside of the shrine the shrine was more likely to be found than if he had died somewhere out in the desert where sand would cover him up and so he said it was more likely people would find the shrine and therefore find him and so there'd be closure for his family and so prosperity took a piece of charcoal from the fire wrote a message to his wife and then cut his wrists and laid down expecting never to wake up again but the next morning he woke up and he had barely bled because his blood was too thick he literally could not bleed to death he took this as a sign that he was supposed to live and he suddenly felt motivated to survive he decided to leave the shrine and follow the advice that one of the race organizers had given all of them at the start which was if you get lost follow the clouds you can see just beyond the horizon at dawn there you will find civilization so prosperi hopped up and began heading towards what he believed were those clouds he walked for days in the desert grabbing snakes and lizards off the ground and eating them raw he said his inner caveman came out like his primal desire to live and he had no problems eating the things he was eating prosperi grew so dehydrated he couldn't even urinate anymore so he began drinking the liquid inside of succulents that grew inside of dried up river beds and he also began sucking out the moisture in his wet wipes that were in his backpack on the ninth day prosperi saw a little shepherd girl off in the distance and she saw him and she was scared of him and she turned and ran away and at first prosperity is devastated because he has no strength to chase after her but she had actually gone down to her tribe and told them about this strange man wandering the desert and they came running up over the dunes and they brought him in and they gave him food and drink and they sent someone to get police after police picked him up and brought him back to their headquarters he discovered he had walked over 181 miles from where he had gotten lost on the course all the way to algeria his family and race organizers had gone out looking for him after he went missing but all they ever found was his shoelace and so they assumed he was dead it would take him two years to fully recover from this ordeal but after he did he went on to run eight more desert races in 2012 35 year old jose alvarenga was an extremely experienced fisherman having spent years and years commercially fishing in november of that year jose volunteered to do a 30 hour deep sea fishing shift for his company off the coast of his hometown in mexico he hoped he'd be able to catch some sharks marlins and sailfish three of the more lucrative fish you can catch unfortunately the guy jose usually went deep sea fishing with was not able to go at the last minute but jose still really wanted to go out and do the shift and so he took the only other fisherman in their company that was willing to go or that could go and it was a 23 year old extremely inexperienced brand new fisherman named ezekiel cordoba and while jose knew he was not going to be a huge asset out on the seas he figured you know it's a short trip and we're not that far off from shore so you know what he's fine i'll take him on november 17th the pair set out on their 24 foot fiberglass skiff with a small motor on board were various fishing tools a radio and a large ice box to hold all the fish they were going to catch once they reached the area they were going to be fishing their trip immediately started paying off and within just a couple of hours they had already almost completely overloaded the icebox their luck was so good that when they saw a storm coming in they decided to wait and continue to catch as many fish as they possibly could before heading in at the very last minute but the storm that was rolling in was like the storm of the century and by the time they did turn around to head into shore it was too late they got caught up in this wicked storm where the rain was so intense they literally could not see too short they tried to use their compass and other instruments to navigate to shore but between the winds and the waves and the fact that their boat was so heavy from the nearly thousand pounds of fish they had caught they were just really unable to get anywhere near shore when the storm just continued to rage and they were just kind of floundering in the water they decided they needed to dump their catch so they dumped all one thousand plus pounds of fish back into the water but even then with a more agile boat the storm was so severe they just could not navigate effectively and so jose turned off the engine and told ezekiel that their best chance here was to just wait it out and once it was done they would head back into shore but that storm continued to rage for five days the torrential rain never stopped the waves were huge the winds were awful and before long they were getting pulled out to sea and had no idea where they were now they had only planned to be out for 30 hours so they did not have much in the way of supplies and so after a few days they had run out of food and they had run out of water but luckily because it was raining so much they were able to drink the rain water but the real immediate problem they were facing is over the course of those five days the storm was just battering their boat and by the time the storm cleared their boat was ruined their motor had been torn off and was just gone their electronics were busted and all of their fishing gear was either damaged or gone there was enough charge in the radio for jose to call back to his boss on the mainland and send a mayday message but the radio died before they got a return message so they weren't able to confirm if anybody on land was going to come looking for them left with minimal supplies no radio no motor jose and ezekiel just had to hope somebody on the mainland heard their message and they slowly began to adjust to life at sea jose was able to leap into the water and catch turtles fish seabirds and jellyfish with his bare hands and so that's what they ate and then the two of them would try to catch rain water whenever they could but the majority of the time they had to drink their own urine and turtle blood despite their initial optimism that their boss had probably heard their mayday message and would be sending people out to get them as days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months they realized that probably no one was coming to find them now their only hope was a plane spotted them flying overhead or perhaps they could drift into a shipping lane and a boat could spot them but without any way of navigating their boat they really were just leaving it up to luck despite their dire situation jose stayed really positive and he focused on catching food and catching water and he tracked the time really diligently by tracking the phases of the moon ezekiel however just did not have a significant role on the boat because he just wasn't skilled enough and so he found himself sitting in the boat most of the time doing a whole lot of nothing and he fell into a deep depression he was not accustomed to being out on the water the way jose was jose had been raised on the water he practically only ate seafood and a lot of it he ate raw so in a way jose was kind of at home ezekiel was not and then by the fourth month ezekiel just could no longer stomach the food they were eating he would just get sick every single time and so he just kind of gave up and he stopped eating and even though jose urged him to eat would get him food he didn't eat it and eventually he starved to death even though ezekiel was not a huge asset in terms of helping them survive he did provide jose an enormous amount of comfort it was like you had your partner in crime here and then once he died jose was alone for the first time in nearly half a year and he fell into a very dark depression and for six days he did not touch ezekiel's body he just sat there and stared at him and even contemplated taking his own life but on the seventh day he doesn't know what it was but he had the sudden urge to want to survive and so he gave ezekiel a kind of makeshift funeral he said a few words and then disposed of his body in the ocean and then after that jose became laser focused on just surviving and survive he would for another nine months all by himself on the middle of the ocean just floating around drinking turtle's blood and drinking his own pee but after those nine months he would finally see the thing he had been dreaming about land he had managed to drift all the way to the marshall islands so he leapt out of his boat he swam to shore and there was a hut right on the beach he knocked on the hut and a couple came to the door and they were totally shocked to see this guy i mean he didn't look too good and they couldn't believe his story they couldn't believe that he had survived for so long in the water but they quickly brought him inside they gave him some food and drink and they contacted authorities and he was saved his parents and young daughter when they found out he was alive they were overjoyed they along with everybody else believed he had perished they had sent out a search party for them and they found pieces of their boat that had broken off in the storm and so they assumed you know they must have sank then in a strange turn of events shortly after he got home people began accusing him of lying about what happened people said he looked too good to have been out on the open ocean for 14 months he should have been emaciated and at the very least he should have had scurvy but doctors would say he ate so many turtles and sea birds that he was pretty well fed and turtles and seabirds contain a high level of vitamin c that would have protected him from scurvy other skeptics said it would have been impossible for his skiff to float these 6 000 miles to the marshall islands where he ultimately found land but then a study done at the university of hawaii confirmed there was a current that would have pulled him from the coast of mexico straight into the marshall islands and then lastly ezekiel cordoba's family accused jose of killing ezekiel and eating his body for sustenance that's the only way he was able to survive but ezekiel roundly rejected that and took multiple lie detector tests that proved he did not do that today jose lives in a small town in el salvador completely surrounded by land and he says he doesn't go anywhere near the water in 1971 julianne kepka was a bright-eyed german teenager who had just graduated high school on christmas eve of 1971 she and her mother were at the airport in lima peru waiting for a flight to pacopa to visit her father who was a zoologist working in the amazon she and her mother and everybody else waiting for this flight were really annoyed because the flight was seven hours late due to bad weather finally it arrived and julianne her mother and everybody else who had been waiting boarded lance flight 508 and immediately after takeoff they started hitting some pretty bad turbulence because of the bad weather but julianne really liked flying so she didn't mind her mother on the other hand was white-knuckling the armrests but after 10 minutes or so as they were getting nearer to cruising altitude the turbulence was not getting any better in fact it was getting much worse and julianne was starting to get worried herself and then when the plane started shaking so violently that all of the overhead bins opened up and luggage and wrapped presents and christmas cakes started pouring out julianne now began white knuckling the armrest as she's sitting there she looks out the window and she sees all this lightning right outside their window and it was clear they were literally flying through a lightning storm and so julianne and her mother are just looking at each other unable to speak because they're so scared and they're listening to the other passengers screaming and yelling and everyone's starting to panic and then the plane starts really shaking up and down like it's being lifted 50 feet and dropping 50 feet over and over and then all of a sudden there's this bright flash inside of the cabin and then the lights go out and then they look out the left side and they see smoke and flames coming out of the engine that sits on the wing and then the plane felt like it was just falling from the sky before it dipped into an aggressive nose dive and just started bombing straight down toward the ground it turned out that big flash in the cabin was lightning striking the engine julianne would say despite this unbelievable chaos the worst moment imaginable her mother grabbed her by the hand and said this is it it's all over and that was the last thing her mother ever said to her after that all julianne can remember is the sound of other passengers screaming and crying and the awful grinding sounds that the engines were making and as she's listening to these horrible sounds getting ready to die all of a sudden the noise just stops and she's outside of the plane she's still strapped into her seat but now she's in free fall away from the plane and she remembers thinking how unbelievably lonely she was and then she looked down and she saw the canopy of the jungle fast approaching and she knew she was about to die and then she passed out she remembers nothing of the actual impact but she would later find out the plane broke up two miles up so she was in free fall for two miles in that seat before hitting the ground she woke up the next day looking upwards towards the jungle canopy and the first thing she said out loud was i survived and she's looking around and she yells for her mother but there's no one around her no one yells back and that's when she realizes i'm all alone and probably everybody including my mother is dead she had somehow managed to not only survive but only have a broken collarbone and some deep cuts in her leg she could hear planes overhead that were most likely looking for the crash site and potentially survivors but she couldn't see them because the canopy was so thick so they couldn't see her she was wearing a very short sleeveless mini dress and flip-flops but in fact she had lost one of her flip-flops but elected to keep the other one on because she had lost her glasses in the crash and she was incredibly nearsighted and so she would use this one flip-flop to test the ground ahead of her before committing with her bare foot before the crash she had spent a year and a half at her parents research station out in the amazon and in that time she'd picked up very valuable survival skills for being in the rain forest so the first thing she did was stand up and go looking for a stream because her father had told her wherever there's a stream that stream will oftentimes lead to civilization and so she began walking and sure enough she found a stream and instead of just walking next to the stream she got in it and began walking directly in the middle of the stream because her parents had told her that you're less likely to get attacked by a predator if you're standing in the water versus standing on land she only walked a little ways before she came across the crash site there was no bodies it was just debris and all she could find that was useful was a small bag of candy so she took the bag of candy and continued walking down the stream and for several days she trudged along and she would say during the day it was incredibly hot and miserable and at night it was very cold and since she only had this small dress on it was particularly miserable but she said the scariest part of the whole ordeal was at night when you're trying to sleep it's totally pitch black and you're in the middle of the amazon and there's predators all around you she said it was horrifying on the fourth day of being in the jungle as she walked down the stream she heard the sound of a landing king vulture a sound that she recognized from her time spent at her parents amazon reserve and the sound of this vulture was just around the corner so she couldn't see it but she knew these huge vultures only showed up if there's a ton of dead meat and so she knew as soon as she rounded that corner she was going to come face to face with the bodies from the crash potentially even her mother but she kept moving forward she turned the corner and sure enough there were bodies the vulture took off and what she was left looking at was a bench with three passengers on it still buckled in and all three of their heads had been rammed underneath the earth they had clearly landed headfirst immediately she had an intense sense of panic because she had never seen a dead body before and she thought one of them was her mother but when she went over to examine this particular corpse she saw her toenails were painted pink and her mother never painted her toenails and so she had this intense sense of relief that it wasn't her mother but at the same time felt very ashamed of that thought there was nothing on the three bodies or near them that could help her survive and so she said her goodbyes and she continued walking down the stream by the tenth day of this ordeal she could barely stand straight because of a broken collarbone and the pain in her leg and so she began drifting down the river in one of the deeper sections and then she thought she was hallucinating when she saw this big boat docked up against the side of the river but when she went up to it and touched it it was real she went up on shore she looked inside there was no one in the boat but it looked like a boat that was used and there was a path that led back into the jungle and so she followed the path and it led to this hut and no one was in there but outside was a jug of gasoline and she had this wound in her arm that was full of maggots and she remembered her father using gasoline to get maggots out of a wound in their dog and so she took the gasoline and dumped it in her arm and she said it was excruciatingly painful but she was able to pull out 30 maggots and felt very proud of that accomplishment after that she fell asleep inside of the hut and just hoped that whoever lived here eventually showed up and sure enough the next day she woke up and she heard two men talking outside that were walking towards her and she said the sound of their voice was like the sound of an angel and when the two men came up the path and saw her they were obviously very shocked and they initially thought she was like this water goddess from a local legend that involved a half mermaid half woman that was light-skinned and she would tell them in spanish that she's not a water goddess that in fact she's a girl and she had just survived a plane crash and she really needed their help it was getting late that day so they couldn't bring her out of the jungle right away so they helped treat her wounds they gave her some food and water and the next day they brought her back to civilization the day after her rescue she was reunited with her father and apparently he was so overcome with emotion because he believed she was dead that for several hours he just couldn't speak julianne was the sole survivor of the 91 people who boarded lance of flight 508 her mother actually survived the crash but then died several days later because she couldn't move this is something that haunts julianne and her family because they think about how horrible those last few moments for her mother must have been julianne ultimately recovered from all of her physical injuries but to this day deals with significant emotional trauma so that's gonna do it guys if you found the secret in today's episode let us know in the comments what it is and where you found it so give us the time stamp and if you're the first to do that we'll pin you at the top of the comments section if you enjoyed today's video and you haven't done this already please invite the like button over to your house for oreos and milk but replace all of their oreos cream filling with play-doh also please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly three four even five video uploads if you want to get in touch with me you can direct message me on instagram or on twitter my username for both platforms is the same it's john ballen416 i also have a ton of content over on tiktok where my username is mr ballen if you have a story suggestion please submit it to our subreddit just called mr ballin it's linked in the description below so whether i see you on twitter instagram tick tock reddit youtube or some combination just know that i really appreciate your support and until next time that's gonna do it see ya

Channel: MrBallen

Views: 2,059,484

Rating: 4.9550405 out of 5

Keywords: survive, plane crash, tragedy, accident, survivor, survival story, survival stories, survival, amazon, amazon jungle, lost at sea, storm, storm of the century, ship wrecked, bats, turtles, candy, strange, dark, mysterious, scary story, scary, true, true story, miracle, miraculous, unbelievable, mrballen story, mrballen stories, bedtime stories, campfire stories, sahara desert, sahara, endurance race, marathon des sables, marathon, italy, germany, peru, Mexico, fisherman, rainforest, maggots, all alone

Id: U36jtuJVBjQ

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020