She Fell From The Sky: The Sole Survivor of Flight 508

When Juliane Koepcke boarded flight 508 with her mother on Christmas Eve, 1971, she knew the airline they were flying had a horrible reputation. She never imagined that she'd be the only person of the 92 on board to survive the flight.

Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Patrons have access to ad-free listening and bonus content. And members of our High Council on Patreon have access to our after show called Footnotes.

Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror.

We have a monthly newsletter now! Be sure to sign up for updates and more.

SOURCES

https://www.icao.int/safety/Documents/ICAO_SR_2022.pdf

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/aviation-safety-united-states/index.html

https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19660427-0

Herzog, Werner. Wings of Hope. By Herzog, Wener. 1999
Koepcke, Juliane. When I Fell From the Sky. Titletown Publishing, LLC, 2011

TRANSCRIPT

January 3rd, 1972. Three forest workers, Beltran Paredes, Carlos Vasquez, and Nestor Amasifuen walk deep into the Peruvian rainforest. Above them the sky is a dark gray, casting a deep shadow through the already shaded jungle. This part of the rainforest is so dense and thick that the canopy blocks out most of the sun even on a good day. 

They almost stayed home. The rain was supposed to be  bad and they wondered if they should just come out tomorrow. But something in Carlos told him they should go. And so here they were, heading towards their station, deep in one of the most isolated places on planet earth.

As the three men walk forward, they hear something in the distance. (SFX rustle) They slow down and scan the forest. Most of what they would find in this part of the amazon would be harmless, monkeys, sloths, anteaters. But on the off chance they were being stalked by a Jaguar they wanted to be ready. 

 They follow the noise when underneath the makeshift tent where they’re supposed to be stationed, Carlos sees something that makes his eyes go wide. The others follow his gaze, expecting to see a predator. They could have never guessed what was walking towards them.

It was a girl, but one that looked unlike anyone he had ever seen in the area. She was about 17 years old with platinum blonde hair and big, red  eyes. She was covered in mud and had a bad wound on her leg. Gasoline dripped down her arm. Who was this girl? There were no white people in this part of Peru, only a few scattered locals with tan skin and dark hair. Beltran couldn’t believe his eyes, and for a moment, he wondered if he should kneel before her. He had heard legends of who this woman must be. Yacumama, the Peruvian Jungle’s water goddess. Often portrayed as a snake, it was said that if a pregnant woman looked at Yacumama, she’d come back to take the child. She was to be feared. 

But before he can kneel down to show his respect, in perfect Spanish, the girl says to them “I’m the girl who was in the LANSA crash. My name is Juliana” (Yoo-Lee-Ah-na)

This stops the men right in their tracks. If she had told them her name was Yacumama the serpent water goddess, they would have probably believed her more. 

The  men had heard about the LANSA crash, a plane from Lima heading to Pucallpa that crashed during a thunderstorm.

“Have they found my mom?” The girl says. And the men all look at each other with sorrowful eyes. No one had found her mother. They hadn’t even recovered a single piece of the plane since it crashed over a week ago.  The search had been called off, they said there was no way anyone could have survived since The plane had been torn to pieces mid flight. They had a lot to tell her, but more importantly, there was a lot she needed to tell them. 

Intro- the Whole intro. 

Welcome back to heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn moore. 

This is a community for people with a dark curiosity. My kinds of people, and I’m so glad I’ve found you all and you’ve chosen to gather here. You know how I can tell you’re my kinds of people. Because of how many messages I get where the top line will be something like “i saw this and thought of you” and then it’ll be the darkest, most disturbing thing you’ve ever read. Multiple people saw a story about a wild boar that killed his owner and sent it to me. “Saw this and thought of you <3” you guys are unhinged I love it. 

Let’s talk about flying for a second, because that’s a big part of today’s episode. Some of you are probably not afraid of flying at all, and for good reason. We’re currently in a golden age of airline safety. In 2021, there were 1.93 accidents per million departures globally, and in 2022 there were even less than that. And only 8 percent of those accidents had any fatalities. those numbers become even more safe if you’re flying within the united states. The last fatal commercial airline crash in the US was in 2009, and safety regulations were put in place immediately afterwards to make sure it never happened again. Pilots were given shorter shifts and more time to rest in between flights. And since those were implemented, history hasn’t repeated itself

And yet, every time I step foot on a plane I immediately start to panic. Flying has always been a horrible fear of mine even though there’s no evidence that really backs that fear up. We have a much higher chance of crashing our car on the way to the airport than we do of being in a plane crash. 

Because of this, morbidly, I like to read about plane crashes. It’s like pouring salt into the wound. It’s the same reason we watch scary movies or tik toks about the north sea. We like to be scared, we’re little freaks, i don’t know. 

But today I want to tell you a story that is so much more than just a plane crash story. Yes, one of the most terrifying things I could ever imagine happened to Juliane Koepcke, but her calmness and resilience in the aftermath led to her survival. At 17 years old, she was braver than i’ll ever be.

Juliane’s story is one of hope, of how far the human spirit can push, of miraculous survival. And Today, I want to tell you that story. 

But before we dive in, I want to say thank you. There are lots of ways to listen to the show. You might be listening to the free ad-supported version. You might be listening ad-free because you’re a Patreon subscriber. Or you could be listening ad-free through our new Heart Starts Pounding Premium subscription on Apple Podcasts. You could even be listening against your will because your significant other plays the podcast really loudly while they get ready for bed. I don’t know–but regardless of how you’re listening–thank you. You are the reason this show exists. I would not be able to tell you about what terrible thing I’ve been hyper fixating on without you all, so thank you.

And if you didn’t have the chance to check out our February bonus episode on the scariest stories from the internet this month, you might want to check that out. I talk about the viral Grimes Crimes story about a foster family who sewed their children into animal costumes, as well as the trailer for the new Nickelodeon tell all documentary, Quiet on Set. I was especially interested in talking about that one as someone who used to work on a nickelodeon show, so dont miss that, streaming now on patreon and our apple subscription

Ok, we’re going to take a quick break, and when we get back, we’re going to start from the beginning. And as always, listener discretion is advised. 

BREAK 1

Juliane Koepcke arrived at the Lima airport with her mother, early in the morning on December 24th, 1971. They were trying to make it back to their remote town in Peru in time to see her father for Christmas. Juliane had just graduated high school in Lima and was eager to see him.

Their hopes sank once they got to the airport, though. It was packed. The day before, many flights had been canceled, and now hundreds of passengers looking for another ride home for the holidays were crowding the terminal. 

Juliana doesn’t hear it over the cacophony of shouts, but there’s another native German speaker sternly talking to a ticketing agent in heavily accented spanish. His flight was canceled the day before, and now he’s desperately trying to get onto Juliane’s flight with his crew. They’re filming a movie in the jungle in Pucallpa, and he needs to get to set, is there any way he can get on that flight? The agent just shakes her head, no. It’s a full flight, and even then, it may just get canceled today.

By tomorrow, this man will understand how this moment saved his life. He’ll hear the news of the crash and a deep, existential chill will rumble through his body. It’s a feeling most of us haven’t felt, the overwhelming feeling of our own mortality. It will change his life, forever. But In this current moment, as he’s being shut down by the ticketing agent, he’s pretty pissed off.

Juliane isn’t paying attention to that, she’s paying attention to two American boys that are her age. She knows a little bit of english and she tries to keep up with them. They’re just like Juliane, they’re in Peru because their parents are linguists who are studying the language of the indigenous people living in the Peruvian Rainforest. Juliane is in Peru because her parents are biologists that couldn’t find work in Germany after the war. They opted, instead, to travel to Peru where the ecology and biodiversity still had so much to be explored. 

Her mother, specifically, was an Ornithologist, she studied birds. And everything she knew about birds made her that much more afraid to fly. She didn’t understand it. Birds had hollow bones, they had to be light to fly. How could a massive metal tube stay in the air?

After hours of waiting, at around 11am, their flight is finally called. Juliane, her mother and the boys she was talking to all grab their things and board. She remembered as she was boarding, finding out that their flight had a name, Mateo Pumacahua, named after the famed rebel who helped liberate Peru from the Spanish in the early 1800’s. Pumacahua met an unfortunate end, however, when he was captured in 1815 to be hanged and quartered. One of his arms was severed from his body upon his death.

“I hope the same thing doesn’t happen to us” one of the american boys joked.

Once they were on the plane, Juliane sat in her seat, 19 F. Her mother sat next to her, and a peruvian man sat in the aisle seat and fell asleep immediately. This kind of plane, a Lockheed L-188 Electra was really nice and comfortable, especially for the time. It was a plane that prioritized flyers comfort by trying to limit vibrations and noise, two things  that were nearly unbearable in the early days of flying.  Lockheed was better known for making military aircraft, the Electra was one of their first forays into commercial airliners, and it was, let’s just say, a rocky start.

So the plane that Juliane and her mother boarded was the second generation of the Electra. The first generation was pulled from production after a few devastating accidents occurred. 

On February 3, 1959,  American Airlines Flight 320 crashed into the East River in New York City, resulting in 65 fatalities. This was due to pilot error rather than a fault with the aircraft. It was theorized that the pilot started landing too early, and crashed into the river about 5000 feet before it got to the runway.

But then, on September 29, 1959, and March 17, 1960, electra planes fell apart in the sky because of something known as “whirl-mode”. It’s a little complicated, but in laymens terms, Whirl Mode happened when the electra planes vibrated at a certain frequency in their cruising altitude of 15,000 feet. This vibration would continue to amplify until you felt the worst turbulence you could imagine. It then caused the plane to break into pieces.

After the whirl mode disasters, the Electras saw an extensive redesign that strengthened the wings and did more to keep the vibration of the engine to a minimum. Yes, after these mass casualty events, Lockheed continued to sell planes. To put it in today's terms, Electras were the Boeing aircrafts of their day. 

Those issues seemed to end with the first generation Electras, but some still believed that turbulence was not good for this type of plane. They were better suited for desert climates where they could show off their long haul abilities without being encumbered by bumpy skies. 

This particular flight that Juliane and her mother were on was heading through part of the Andes, though. And if there’s one thing the andes were known for when it came to flying in the 70’s, it was turbulence. 

As Juliane describes it, the first half hour of the flight was fine. Everyone was in good spirits, excited that they made the last plane out to be able to celebrate Christmas with their families. Christmas gifts were stuffed in the overhead compartments, under seats, spilling into the aisles. The plane resembled santa's sleigh. Sandwiches were served to the passengers and then flight attendants came around to pick up trash. By that point, the hour long flight was already half way over.

When All of a sudden, without any warning, the outside darkens all around the plane. They’ve somehow made it into an angry storm cloud, and Juliane can see lighting flashing all around her. The plane begins to shake, caught off guard by the violent storm. Gifts start flying everywhere, and the man in the aisle who had slept through the entire flight at this point is jolted awake. People start to shriek in fear. The once bubbly and excited energy of the flight had now devolved into chaos. 

Juliena can see her mother is getting stressed out but is trying to keep calm to not upset her daughter. She looks out of the window to see what’s happening, When all of a sudden, there’s a flash right next to the wing, so bright it was like a camera went off directly into her eyes. Everything goes quiet and She hears her mother say in a calm voice, “now, it is all over”

What Juliane remembers next felt like a dream. A roar of an engine.  screams fading away into silence. Then the feeling of the plane nose diving. And finally, freefall. 

She doesn’t know how it happened, but Juliane has a quick memory of still being strapped to her seat but the plane around her is gone. She’s spinning towards the earth. In this memory, there’s no one next to her, the seats of her mother and the Peruvian man are empty. She’s facing the earth, she can see the tops of trees crammed together so tight she can’t see the forest floor. Wind rushes in her ears like a train speeding by her.

She closes her eyes and everything is gone. What’s left is a dream, one where she is filthy, covered in mud. She has a thought that she should get up and go take a bath, but she’s unable to. 

When she opens her eyes again, Juliana is laying on the forest floor underneath her airplane seat. Her seatbelt has been unbuckled as if she had been awake at some point, and she’s covered in mud. For a moment, she thinks she can get up, and she gets to her feet long enough to see that there’s no one else around her, the people from the airplane are all gone. The airplane is all gone. It’s just her and the seats of row 19 alone in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. 

And with that, she blacks out and falls back onto the forest floor.

More, after the break

BREAK 2

As Juliena lay unconscious on the jungle floor, airline executives in Lima were also on the verge of passing out.

Air traffic control had watched as the Electra plane Juliane was on disappeared from their radar. Initially, they prayed that it had made an emergency landing somewhere, but they knew a bad storm rolled in unexpectedly, and anyone who had worked for the airline Lansa in the past, knew deep down the the aircraft was not sitting safely on a different tarmac

For Lansa, this was the final straw on a camel's back that should have been broken years ago. This was Lansa’s third devastating crash since the airline started operating in 1963, not even 10 years prior. 

On April 27th, 1966, Lansa flight 501 heading from Lima to Cusco crashed into a mountain, killing all 49 people on board. The accident was chalked up to Pilot error. They said that the plane was too heavy to gain altitude fast enough to clear the nearby mountain range. The plane was another Lockheed plane, and after the official report came out and it was deemed not the fault of the aircraft, Lockheed probably breathed a huge sigh of relief. PHEW! Not us this time, guys. 

But Then, on August 9th, 1970 a Lansa flight leaving Lima tried to make an emergency landing when one of its 4 engines caught fire during takeoff. The flight was cleared to make an emergency landing, when it entered a 45 degree bank and crashed into a hilly terrain. 99 people died, including an entire study abroad program from New York. The co pilot was the sole survivor.

That disaster was, at the time, the deadliest aviation accident in Peruvian history and significantly eroded public confidence in LANSA. And the plane in question. OOOO! A Lockheed L-188 Electra. 

So on Christmas eve, a little over a year from their last devastating crash, Lansa executives were panicking. Not out of anxiety over what happened to those passengers, but because they knew they were out of a job. 

Back on the forrest floor, deep within the Peruvian jungle, miles away from any civilization, Juliane is waking up again. She checks her watch and notices it’s still ticking, but she’s having trouble reading what time it says. That’s either from the concussion, or because she lost her glasses in the fall. 

From her perspective, she thinks it’s been about a day and a half since the crash. She was in and out of consciousness for a while, but she remembers the sun going down and coming back out again. Only now is she able to get up and assess the damage. She feels her face and can tell that her eyes are swollen. Her concussion must be bad. On her, She has one surviving sandal, and her sleeveless dress is mostly intact save for the busted zipper. Her arm hurts as she reaches to feel the zipper, most likely from a broken collarbone. Instead of the zipper, she feels a deep, fleshy wound about the size of a dime. As she pulls her hand back she closes her eyes, afraid to assess the damage, but to her surprise, it hardly bleeds. Down on her calf there’s another deep cut, but it also hardly bleeds. 

She’s in pain, but what hurts the most is when she looks back to her seat, and sees that where her mother once sat is now a muddy, empty chair. Where did her mother land? If she survived the fall, surely others did as well. looking around, her vision is blurry but she can still tell there's no one, just thick jungle in every direction, identical on all sides. 

One of the most miraculous things in this moment, is that Juliane doesn’t panic. She has a very stoic reaction to all of this. She knows she was just in a plane crash, and that now she must do what she can to get out and find her mother. One step at a time, no need to get overwhelmed.

First, she starts walking around because she wants to see if she can find any people. But that proves difficult. The plane didn’t crash, it wasn’t going to all be in one location. Instead, it broke apart midair and landed over 15 square kilometers. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Juliane calls out, “hello, is anyone there?” but nothing but the sound of insects and frogs ever return her cries. 

She does, however, find a bag of sweets, and takes everything that hasn’t been waterlogged. There’s no way to tell how long this will be her food supply for. 

Just then,  a low drone sound can be heard over the treetops that breaks up the jungle din. It must be the rescue planes looking for survivors. But the canopy is so thick here, hardly any sunlight gets through. There’s no way a plane would ever find her. The only way she’s making it out of this forest is if she walks out herself. How would she know which way to go, though? Every direction looked the exact same yet one could lead her to civilization, and the other could lead her miles deeper into the thick jungle.

The drone of the planes fade away into the distance, but there’s another sound that gives her hope. The ticking coming from her wrist. Her watch is not waterproof. It was a delicate gift she received from her grandmother years ago. And yet, it has survived a two mile fall from the sky and is still ticking. And so is she. There is no one else around to guide her through the forest. But this watch survived as a reminder of the family she must return to, and together they were going to make it out of these woods. 

Music

Juliane’s father had heard about the crash at this point, everyone in Peru had but at first he’s not worried for his wife and daughter. He had specifically told them to never fly Lansa after he had heard all about the crashes they kept having. But then, a special announcement interrupts the radio broadcast. They’re going to read the names of each person who was on the flight. He almost turns the broadcast off, there’s no reason to listen, he thinks. In a monotone voice, the broadcaster coldly reads the list, and there, buried in the middle are the names of his wife and child. 

music

Meanwhile, Juliane has started her long walk out of the forest. It’s not long before she can hear something else in the Jungle, the small babble of a brook. 

Through the blinding headache and foggy thoughts, Julilane is able to remember a story her father once told her. About a man who got lost in a forest and was able to follow a small stream to a larger river, and then follow that river to a small town. 

So That whole first day, all she does is walk along the small brook, sweets still in hand. For water, she would drink rain drops off of leaves. By nightfall, she hadn’t made much progress, she was still deep within the thick jungle. But she had to rest. Unable to make a fire or shelter, she just lies down on the forest floor and sleeps.

When she awakes, she checks her watch. It’s later in the day than she thought, her body must need a lot of sleep for her concussion. There’s no time to rest though, and she gets up and continues walking in the shallow stream

She thinks of how lucky she was to have lost her glasses. The stream is incredibly meandering and  If she could see perfectly, she’d probably try to take shortcuts through the forest. But since she couldn’t see that far ahead, she doesn’t risk getting lost in the forest. She stays on her path.

She also can’t see all of the threats that lie deep in that part of the jungle. At one point, she does come across a bird eating spider and fears that it’ll jump out and bite her, but she’s able to pass it. She also hears the large flapping wings of a king vulture and watches its blurry shape fly towards where she just came from. It must smell the dead, she thinks. 

At one point on her trek she looks out ahead and can see a fuzzy outline of something metallic and cylindrical. It’s one of the turbines from the plane, and it’s charred. It must have been the one that got hit by lightning. If this turbine had just held up she wouldn’t be in this mess. Juliane doesn’t feel anger looking at it though, just curiosity. Each step she takes she’s trying to learn more about what happened and piece together the accident. This turbine is a big clue, but it’s what she sees next that really shows her just how bad the accident was.

It’s people. Three people in a row of seats, upside down and about 3 feet in the dirt. Just their legs stick out of the mud. Juliana has a horrible thought, is one of those my mother? But as she gets closer she sees that the woman in the row has painted toe nails, and her mother did not. Juliane breathes a sigh of relief. She still has a smidgen of hope that her mother is out there, but she’s getting an overwhelming sense that she may be the only survivor. But she can’t think about that now, she has to walk. 

The days start getting mixed up for her, the concussion makes it hard to keep track of things, but she thinks that around December 27th is when she ate her last piece of candy. To compensate for the lack of food, she tries to drink as much water from the stream as she can. She knows from living near the rainforest that jungle stream water is cleaner than a stream you would find near a town because there’s no people around to contaminate it. The water is muddy and brown, but she knows that even that is better than clear water where people live. 

By maybe the 6th day, she estimates, the stream she’s following feeds into a rushing river. Ok, she’s making progress! But it’s also around this point that she realizes she hasn’t heard a plane in quite some time. The search must have been called off, she thinks. It doesn’t matter. Here is a river. And where there is a river, her father used to say, people cannot be far. 

Juliana gets into the water and tries to walk along the bank, but it’s too dangerous. There’s stingrays in the river, and they rest in the shallow parts. If she were to step on one, it would plunge its venomous stinger into her foot. It’s safer in the deeper part of the river, but there are piranhas. Juliane knows from her parents that Piranhas only tend to attack in standing water, not rivers, so she decides to risk it and swims down stream in the deeper part of the river. She’s able to gain a good bit of ground that day because of it.

But that night, she has another set back when she goes to feel the wound on her back. There’s something moving inside of it. A fly must have laid eggs there, because now it’s infested with maggots. 

This is not good, Juliane realizes. She knows that with maggots there’s a threat of blood poisoning if they burrow too deep. All she has on her is a little ring that she uses to try and scoop them out, but it doesn’t work. She’d need to find alcohol or kerosine, something she could pour into the wound to kill the parasites, but where would she get those out here? She keeps on her journey, letting the current of the river carry her most days so she doesn’t exert too much strength. 

Juliane can feel how much weaker she’s gotten. It’s been days at this point since her last bit of food. The hunger has subsided and now it’s just a full body fatigue. Has the new year passed yet? There’s no way for her to really tell what day it is, but it might be 1972 by this point. 

She has plenty of time to think to herself while she drifts along the river. If the planes have stopped, do they think everyone is dead? Is anyone looking for her at all? Is her father trying to move on with his life?

What she didn’t know is that the plane was causing quite a stir in all of Peru. There was a news blackout on information regarding the crash because SO many people were calling in with false tips. People thought they saw a plane circling the jungle for 10 minutes  before going down. That wasn’t true, the plane went down on its flight path. People thought they heard the plane explode. That also wasn’t true, that was most likely a land slide during the storm that made that noise. 

But most importantly, Juliane’s father wasn’t giving up. He wrote letters to her aunt about how invested he was in the search efforts, even over a week after the plane disappeared. He had been tracking all of the theories people had and writing them down, hoping to make sense of what happened. 

Juliana doesn’t know any of this as she’s floating down the river. She’s finally gotten to a part of the jungle where the sun hits the river, and she can feel her back peeling and blistering from the burns, but she doesn’t have the energy to do anything about it. She’s so tired, she almost falls asleep, but then she hears squawking. 

Her eyes shoot open, she knows what squawking means. Baby Crocodiles. And she knows what baby crocodiles mean. Big, angry, protective mama crocodiles. There, in front of her, are a few baby caimans, which are like small crocodiles. She jumps up and sees the mom looking right at her, angrily from the shore, not too far away. But Juliana knows about these creatures from her parents. She knows they’re more afraid of her than she is of them, so she calmly backs up into the water and floats on. 

It is the knowledge that her parents have passed onto her that has kept her alive until this point. She knows that she shouldnt eat the frogs, even though she wants to. But she knows that if she has to, the venom in the frogs of this area isn’t enough to kill her. She knows which animals are actual threats and which ones she shouldn’t be afraid of. 

But finally, one day, she hits a point where none of that matters. She’s so tired she cant really move on. She hasn’t eaten in almost a week, and the fatigue is getting to her. She pulls herself over to the shore to rest for a while, closing her eyes. There’s a fleeting thought of, maybe this is it. Maybe this is where I die. She briefly opens her eyes again, and she sees a miracle

An empty, docked boat

With the teeny bit of strength she can muster, she swims over to it and sees that it’s been used recently, and the rope tying it to the shore leads to a path that’s been cut out of the jungle. There must be people down there! The boats owner surely lives down that path. It takes hours, but Juliana is able to stumble into the jungle where she finds a small makeshift hut that someone has thrown together.

There, she sees boat supplies, which includes gasoline. Taking a deep breath, she unscrews the lid of the container, and pours gasoline all down her back, trying to kill as many maggots as she can. The pain is terrible, but using her ring she’s able to dig out around 30 maggots. It wouldn't be until later that she was told that hardly made a dent on what was in her wound. 

She waited for the owner to come, but no one showed up. So she sat, and waited and waited, and it got darker and dark and still, no one came. Eventually she wrapped herself in a tarp and fell asleep.

The next day, same thing, no one came. She wondered if she should look for people, but she knew she didn’t have the strength to do so. Her body was in full starvation mode and she had to conserve every last drop of energy she had. 

The sun started going down that day, and she thought she’d have to make it another night without any food, would she even be able to? When finally, she heard rustling in the jungle and saw three men walking towards her. At first, they recoil from her in fear, but when she tells them in spanish that she survived the Lansa crash, they look bewildered

They had heard all about the crash. It had been on every tv and radio station non stop for the last week and a half. That day, the day they found her, was January 3rd, 1972. 10 days after the crash

She desperately asks them if there are other survivors. Has anyone found her mother? They just look at her with sad eyes. No, senorita, they say. No one has been found. No parts of the plane have even been found. As far as they know, she is the only survivor. 

It wouldn’t be discovered until later, but there was evidence that more people survived the initial crash, and died in the jungle while waiting for help. Some of the bodies didn’t have much decomposition for being dead in the jungle for 10 days, suggesting they had died days after the crash. Juliane’s mother was one of those people. 

The men gave Juliane fresh clothes and some food, but she could hardly eat without becoming immediately full. She figured her stomach had shrank.

As they take her to go to a doctor, Juliane can’t help but wonder why people cower away from her in terror. She over hears a woman scream those eyes, I can’t look at those eyes. When she got to the doctor and could finally look in a mirror, she’d see that all of the blood vessels had burst in her eyes from her concussion. Everything, the whites, the irises, was a dark crimson red. No wonder the three local men were so afraid of her when they found her, she looked like a monster.

Her father arrives when she is at the doctor. Word of Juliane’s miraculous survival has spread far and wide throughout Peru, and her father ran to find her the moment he heard. When he bursts through the door of the room she’s in, the only thing he can bring himself to ask is, “how are you doing?” she looked at him and calmly answered, “good”. 

The two share a big hug. No tears, no more words, just holding the person they never knew if they’d see again. At the end of the embrace he sits next to his daughter looking at her wounds, the dirt under her nails, her bloodshot eyes. The two don't say another word to each other, they don’t have to.

Juliana would go on to help authorities find the wreckage in the forest. It’s believed they would have completely abandoned the mission to find the plane had she not been able to guide them. When they got to the area where most of the luggage and people were, they noticed that christmas presents and clothes were strewn about the trees, acting like a giant, standing memorial for those who were lost.

The body of Juliane’s mother was found, and her father identified her, not by her face though, she was not in a good enough condition to be recognized, but by her legs and feet. For a while after, he worried that he had gotten it wrong. That perhaps the woman in his wife’s coffin was someone else.

Juliane would eventually learn more about what happened that day and who the people on the plane with her were. She learned that one girl on the plane wasn’t supposed to be, but she had taken her friends ticket when she had fallen ill. One man couldn’t make the flight so he gave his ticket to his girlfriend, There was a mother with her 5 year old child, two sisters who wanted to fly together. A woman, Mary Lopez, who was to be married soon. One family lost three daughters. 

Juliane felt guilty about surviving when so many others had died, but she also learned a little about why that may have happened. During storms in the andes, there tends to be really intense updrafts, which may have slowed her down. She also remembers spinning around wildly, almost like a helicopter seed falling from a tree. And think about how those seeds fall, they gently drift towards the ground from the tree. The spinning motion keeps them in the air much longer. If Juliane was spinning fast enough and the updraft was strong enough, it could have created a similar effect of having a parachute. 

Juliana also landed in a particularly dense part of the jungle, full of thick vines and tree canopies. There would have been a lot of debris for her to hit to slow her fall more. Ironically, the spot she fell was only a 2 days walk from another village, but the way she chose to go took her 10 days. 

Years later, Juliane would be reached out to by a man who wanted to help her get her story out there. It was the german man from the airport, the one who was trying to get his film crew on her plane that day but was told they didn’t have enough space. That man was Werner Herzog, the documentarian. He couldn’t imagine what she went through, but he has also spent the majority of his life thinking about that flight. Perhaps that was something they had in common. 

Together, they took a flight to go visit the sight of the crash. Juliana appears in the documentary unaffected, almost unemotional. It’s similar to how I described her emotional state during her journey out of the rainforest. She never once lets the emotions take over her, she’s calm and calculated.

She spent a lot of her life wondering if something was wrong with her. Why she never had any big weepy moments when she knew it was the healthy thing to do. She and her father didn’t even cry at her mothers funeral. Why was she so unfeeling.

Now she understands that that was a coping mechanism. Her ability to push down her feelings and be calm and calculative in the jungle is the reason she survived and it was how her body was going to protect itself later in her life. 

Juliane is still alive today. She took after her parents and earned a doctorate in biology. She even went on to marry an entomologist who specializes in parasitic wasps.

Juliane has dedicated her career to studying the flora and fauna of the Amazon rainforest. Many would think that she’d try to stay as far away as she could from the jungle that almost took her life, but according the Juliane, she would have never survived without it. It cushioned her fall, it led her to safety, and she wanted to do what she could to give back. 

And that’s the part that’s stuck with me the most, of this whole story. Her ability to find little bits of good that help her keep going. It’s really beautiful and I hope that part of her story inspires all of you, like it did me.