26Peter Siebold
Peter Siebold is the only person to have survived a deadly spaceship disaster. He is their Director of Flight Operations at Scaled Composites, an American aerospace company. In 2014, Siebold and his copilot were piloting VSS Enterprise when the spacecraft came apart mid-air and killed his copilot. Peter Siebold survived a fall from 50,000 ft, 30,000 of which was in freefall, at a speed of Mach 1.
27. In 1816, 147 shipwrecked French crew of Méduse were stuck adrift on a makeshift raft when their captain cut the rope towing them. It took only 3 days for them to resort to cannibalism and only 15 survived to be rescued after 13 days. The aristocrat captain hadn’t sailed in 20 years and it was 100% avoidable.
28. The Ovitz family was not only the largest family of dwarfs ever recorded but also the largest family (12 people ranging from a 15-month-old baby to a 58-year-old woman) to enter Auschwitz and survive intact.
29. A skydiver named Joan Murray survived an 80 mph skydiving fall thanks to landing on a mound of fire ants, whose bites gave her a rush of adrenaline that kept her heart beating.
30. When HMS Guardian struck an iceberg in 1789, the ship’s captain decided to stay on it with 62 people. About 259 left the ship on lifeboats. The captain was able to save the ship and sail back to land. It took 9 weeks, but everyone on the ship made it. Of the 259 that left, only 15 survived.
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31Jean-Pascal Danneels
A 34-year-old French veterinary surgeon named Jean-Pascal Danneels was a passenger on an airliner that crashed into the Atlantic and disintegrated more than a mile offshore from Côte d'Ivoire. He survived the impact, swam for four hours in darkness to the shore, and lived.
32. Rod Ansell became the inspiration for the character of Crocodile Dundee after he famously survived for 56 days stranded in the Australian bush in 1977 when his boat sank leaving him with no water and few supplies. In 1999, he was killed in a shootout by policemen.
33. Adam Mattocks is the only aviator to bail out of a B-52 cockpit without an ejector seat and survive. His B-52, carrying two 3.8-megaton H-bombs, crashed in North Carolina in 1961. Upon reaching an Air Force base to explain his story, Mattocks, an African-American, was arrested for stealing a parachute.
34. Alexander Selkirk was a Royal Navy officer who became a source of inspiration for the fictional character Robinson Crusoe. He once survived 4 years on an island where every night he was attacked by rats. He solved this problem by domesticating feral cats. One day he fell off a cliff hunting goat and landed on his prey, sparing him a broken back.
35. In 1945, Albert Stevens was a victim of an experiment and survived the highest known accumulated radiation dose in any human. He was injected 131kBq of plutonium without his knowledge or consent. This is equivalent to 64 Sv (Sieverts) over 21 years.
36Bongkrekic Acid Poisoning
In 2020, 9 members of the same family in China died after eating stale corn-based noodles, which gave them bongkrekic acid poisoning. Three kids of the family however survived just because they refused to eat the noodles.
37. A 17th Century man named John “Half-Hanged” Smith evaded hanging 3 times. Once when he was hanged, he survived after hanging in the noose for 15 minutes.
38. A French chemist named Michel Bertrand drank 5 grams of arsenic trioxide (a very poisonous substance) mixed with activated charcoal, just to demonstrate the adsorptive properties of activated charcoal. He survived.
39. The first American soldier to land on the beach during the invasion of Normandy was Leonard “Max” Schroeder. Though he was shot twice, he not only survived but lived to be 90 years old.
40. Ali Maow Maalin was the last human known to be naturally infected by the smallpox virus. He survived the infection, only to later die of Malaria while helping to quash the resurgence of polio in Somalia.
