Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave, which makes this the traditional arrangement for short stuff.
That's right, A tale of survival of a young German woman.
Yeah. I don't know why, but Julianne Kopka started making the Rounds like a year ago, and since then everybody's written on her story because it's an amazing story. But I couldn't figure out what it was that set it off. I heard about her on like some Quora thread that was suggested to me, and I don't know if that's the one that kicked it off or not. But she's made the rounds and.
She may have just opened up for business.
No, no, I don't think so, because she released a memoir and but that was back in twenty eleven, so I don't know what happened. But she suddenly became part of the zeitgeist. And I understand why for two reasons. One, Zeitgeist is a German word, and she was a German national by birth. And secondly, the story is just so frankly amazing that everybody should know it.
Yeah, for sure, there's a great verner Herzog documentary about it. That's a pretty quick watch for such a harrowing story, but as all things for in our Herzog, I highly recommended.
It's called Wings of Hope or yeah, Wings of Hope.
It's really good.
So she was a young woman that was raised in the jungle. Her dad was a zoologist and her mom was an ornithologist, and she was raised in the jungles of Peru because they were researchers in the Amazon, and she sort of grew up with this, I mean, I think kind of idyllic life of you know, being this nature girl living in the jungle.
She said.
She went to the school of the jungle and it was a really unique upbringing for a young German woman.
Yeah, I mean her parents were like hardcore. They were in Germany. They met in Germany. They were like, where's a place that's just so biodiverse, it's not really on the map. And they went there and they founded a research station called Panguana And that place is still there today. It's a large nature preserve now. But her parents founded that and she was raised there starting in her tweens, I believe, and then eventually moved on to private school
in Lima. But yeah, in between that time, like she learned all of the animals, she learned what sounds they made, she learned how to avoid who She basically just learned how to survive in the jungle, which really set her up nicely for one of the most significant events in her young life that came later.
Yeah, it was a very sad event. Christmas Eve nineteen seventy one. She was a seventeen year old. She was on a flight with her mom and looking to go celebrate Christmas with dad, and this flight turned really scary. There's a very bad storm and one of the sort of one of the few times where you can point to an actual plane being struck by lightning in the air hasn't happened that much. I think this one's regarded as kind of the worst of all the times that's happened.
And with about twenty minutes to go in the flight, this plane is hit and all of a sudden plumbing toward the ground with ninety two people on board.
Yeah, what's said is apparently her mom was not a fan of flying, she found it unnatural. And before it got hit by lightning, it had started to hit some horrible turbulence, like luggage was falling down on people from overhead, and her mom said, she's like, I hope this goes okay. So when the plane did start to break up, apparently Julianne heard her mom say, now it's all over. So that's pretty horrible, right, this is not just a regular
plane crest. They were at ten thousand feet and the plane broke up so thoroughly that Julianne said that essentially she didn't leave the plane. The plane left me. She was still strapped to the bench seat that she had been sitting next to her mother in, but all of a sudden it was just her mother and the other passenger. I guess we're just sucked right out of their seats. And she found herself totally alone, ten thousand feet in the air, headed straight down toward earth.
Yeah, just hurtling toward the ground. She said that, and this is the only thing that saved our life, basically, was this really thick jungle canopy.
And she said she.
Remembers literally remembers being in the air, falling toward the ground and seeing that the tree tops looked like heads of broccoli. Next thing you know, she wakes up on the ground. She's alive. She got a broken collar bone, she's concussed, cut up pretty badly, got kind of you know, beat in the face obviously, so one eye was swollen shut. So she's in bad shape, kind of going in and out of consciousness.
But eventually he wakes up.
She had pretty poor eyesight and was missing her glasses, which was no good, and she would soon learn that she was the only survivor out of the ninety two passengers and crew.
Yeah, I say we take a break and come back, because as bad is falling out of the sky two miles down and surviving alone in the Amazon is it actually just went from bad to worse for her at this point, So you said, Flight five awaits considered the worst lightning strike disaster in aviation history. Ninety one of the ninety two people on board died, including her mother. At this time, though when she'd landed miraculously survived falling two miles down to earth from midair, she didn't know this,
so she started looking immediately for her mother. She spent the first day of looking for her mom, looking for anybody really, but in particular her mom, and she didn't find anything. I don't know what day it was, I think perhaps the fourth day of walking around in the Amazon. I guess we can say she walked by herself in the Amazon, surviving for eleven days. Day four, she came around the bend and found a really grizzly piece of wreckage that I can't imagine seeing this.
Yeah, this was two men and a woman who landed headfirst so forcefully that they were buried three feet into the ground.
And this is the part I don't quite get.
She checked the feet to see if it was her mother, and saw that the toenails were painted, so she knew it wasn't. But and I'm not nickpicking, she was clearly traumatized. But I thought her mom got ripped apart or ripped out of the seat next to her on the bench, and so she wouldn't be strapped into another bench.
But I guess that's a nippicky.
Yeah. I know, I had the exact same thought, and I chalked it up to trauma too, or just maybe hope or something like that.
I don't know, sure, Yeah.
But yeah, yeah, I mean three people exactly, But I mean imagine seeing three people still strapped to their bench seat, all headfirst into the ground with their legs sticking up. That's just I just can't imagine that stuff like that actually happens sometimes in the world. And this poor girl saw that on day four of wandering around the Amazon, totally lost. But like we said, she was just about as prepared for this experience as a person can be
from her upbringing. And she remembered after a while, like, Okay, what did I learn as a kid about living in the jungle. And one of the things that came to her was her father telling her, if you're ever lost in the jungle, find water and just follow it one way or the other, because eventually you're going to find humans living around that water.
Totally And that's a smart rule of thumb period, if you're ever you know, lost in the woods or something, and at the very least you have some water. And she lived on that water because she didn't have much food. She had a little bit of candy. It was a wet season there, so there wasn't like low hanging fruit literally that she could get a hold of. It was obviously because it was wet season. It was super hot, superhumid, but she did get some water from that river, which kept her alive.
And like you.
Said, for eleven days, she tried that creek, then stream, then it became bigger into a river. Eventually she was basically at the point where she had given up hope and she was, you know, kind of succumbing to the idea that she might die. And she saw a boat on the river bank and thought it was a mirage, but she went over and touched it to make sure it was real. Followed a path from that boat to a shack, where she found some forest workers who immediately
were like, you know great. They gave her some fruit and started taking care of her and taking care of her wounds right away.
Yeah. I think when she came in the shack, their famous quote was what the what? Yeah, this was gross. I can't remember which article. I think it might have been for the New York Times. Article by a guy named Franz Litz, and he said that they poured gasoline on her wounds that had maggots sprouting from it like asparagus tips. I mean, she was in bad shape. Chuck, just put yourself in this girl's mind for a second. You don't need glasses, do you just like some reading glasses?
Maybe? Yeah, reading glasses?
So you've never needed glasses.
Except to read.
One of the worst things that can happen to you if you wear glasses and are significantly nearsighted, in particular, is to lose those classes. This girl wandered around the Amazon for eleven days nearsighted without her glasses, and that was one of the east of her concerns at that time. I just when I think about that, it just sends a chill down my spine because it's so awful to not be able to see like that.
Yeah, I imagine.
So she, you know, she survived, she got flown to safety, she got reunited with her father. The real obviously huge tragedy here for her personally and her for her father was they lost their mother and wife. And so you know, she comes back home, you know, obviously elated to be saved, but instantly mourning her mom's loss.
She avoided the media.
And that's why I think she maybe didn't you know, was open for business more recently, because she very famously avoided the media, except for Bernard Hertzog, who was supposed to be on that flight because he was scouting stuff for a either movie or documentary. I couldn't tell which and he reached out. You know, he's very moved by
the story. Obviously because his close connection and reached out to her, and again because of his Eastern European heritage, they might have bonded or at least she trusted him, and that's when he made wings of hope.
Man, it's just nuts. So yeah, in that documentary, apparently he got her to go back to the wreckage site and there's still yeah, man, plenty of wreckage just sitting there in the jungle from that plane crash. Because it crushed in such a remote area, there's just no way they were ever going to remove it.
Yeah, it was tough stuff. She also talked to some of the people who saved her. It's really amazing.
Yeah, I've got to see that.
Then it's not long. You can watch it on YouTube.
Okay.
Cool.
There was something else that I thought was really great about her. She apparently made one of those deals with God or the universe or whatever and said, like, if I make it through this, I promised to dedicate myself to nature and humanity, And after she was saved, she made good on it. She's she's been She's used a lot of her spotlight to help drum up. I guess contributions and donations to preserve the Amazon, particular to preserve Peguana.
That the preserve appropriately enough. It started out I think, around four hundred and forty five acres, and it's grown to four thousand plus because of her, just through private fundraising.
I wonder if God was like, oh, I thought you were going to say, like in service of me, but that's cool, like that that's good too, or.
But first God said, how are you alive? So yeah. One of the other sweet things I think about this is she returned to Peguana. She got her own doctorate in biology. She focused on bats and worked with her dad, and then her dad died in two thousands, so she took over the Panguana Biosphere Preserve in research station, and as far as I know, still runs the show there and she considers it her sanctuary, just like it was for her parents.
Amazing.
I wonder if she has shirts that says not that biosphere.
Amazing Tales Survival. I'll tell you that much, buddy.
And does that mean short stuff? Is it?
I would say so?
Sure.
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