The Uruguayan Rugby Aircrash Disaster of 1972 | Episode 92

We've done episodes where people have lost their teeth. We've done episodes where they have them melted out of their heads or frisbeeed out by debris, or punched out by bulls, or even blown out of their skulls by lightning. But we've never done an episode where the most horrifying thing that happens is you maybe get something stuck in them. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll take off on one of the least enviable flights in history, which is saying a lot. We'll see just what stagger ringly awful places hunger can take an underfed mind, even when the only menu option is freeze dried human buttock, and will end up on one of the most excruciating and difficult mountain hikes ever conducted wearing little more than a tennis outfit. And if you were listening on Patreon, you would see which popular sport tops the list for most spinal and testicular injuries, you'd hear every mouth watering detail of the most filling and calorically dense menu item to be found anywhere on the planet, and you would learn how the story of a survivor of a lifeboat full of man on man noomnom inspired one of the greatest pieces of American literature ever scribed. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. It's been a minute, but I am happy to report that we are heading back to South America, especially as summer starts to peter out here in Toronto and the weather is already becoming colder, wetter, and grayer. There's only so much cold water swimming I can take, so I think this trip is a great idea for As you'll remember, South America sits south of the equator. It's right there in the name, and September below the equator is the beginning of spring. You're welcome, So let's review a quick thing or two before we go. A lot of people don't think much about the layout here on this side of the ocean. For example, a lot of people think that Mexico is part of South America. Around thirteen thousand to fifteen thousand years ago, when the continent was freshly coated in new tenants from across the Bearing Strait, where the early Clovis peoples were trudging through the snow hunting mammoths and mastodons. Early humans in what would become South America were coastal fishing and enjoying fruity tropical drinks. If you asked one hundred people to draw the America's top to bottom, ninety seven of them are going to draw them in a vertical line. But if you look on a map, South America sits way the hell east of North America like it's gonna chest bump Africa. The continents barely line up at all, and they've gone by many names. The Guna people of Panama and Colombia call it Abia Yala, the land of full maturity. This was back while Europeans just thought of it as Terra incognita or unknown land. Columbus and his boys called it Las Indias, convinced that they were in Asia. I mean, they were a little off, but they never let that go. Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian navigator in explorer who argued that Columbus was lazy and mistaken, and that this new land was a distinct fourth part of the world alongside Europe, Asia and Africa. Columbus just said, hey, shut up, a look at the redskinned people and the boreal forests. But Americo clapped back with descriptions of the geography and the native peoples. He even went on to compare star constellations just to say, hey, you dumb. Bottom line is Columbus got a holiday celebrated only in one of twenty two countries. It's actually thirty five if you count the Caribbean as part of the Americas, which is accurate. Amerigo, on the other hand, got twenty nine percent of the world's land mass named after him. The only reason that we don't now call it America or Amerigo is because they latinized his name. But welcome to America has a different ring to it. There's a lot of people who do not realize when you talk North America, you get Mexico, Canada, and the United States, but when you visit South America you get a lot more for your buck. And I tried to make an acronym to help you remember all the countries in South America, but the best I could come up with was literally c see vadge pubes, so I'm just gonna say them instead. Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Diana, and Surinam. And that acronym gets even messier if you try lumping Central America in with it. To date, we've only been to Venezuela, Brazil, and Colombia twice. So far we've seen people trampled to death by angry bulls, oiled alive by flaming oil, had cartoonish holes burned through them through volcanic projectiles, and we even got radiated there this one time, not lethally, thankfully. It's really hard to rebuild an audience from scratch after you murder the previous one. Today, though, we will start our adventure in Uruguay, but by the time we're done, we're going to spend a little time in Chile and Argentina too, so that's nice. Before we depart, I'm going to ask you to pack your favorite Spanish rugby chant music sheets, a warm sweater, maybe throw some warm socks into the mix, and maybe fill every pocket you have with snacks. We are heading to Uruguay. That's the name that was given to it in the long long ago by its original Gurani inhabitants. It means the river of birds or the river of painted birds. They're not really sure. They call it the land of many things, the land of mate, the land of asado. Those are basically a kind of a green tea and barbecue if you're new, and it's a beauty full place. It's tree lined mix of Art Deco and colonial cobblestone. Cities are no slouch, but it's the forest, wildlife and beaches that really draw the crowds. They call it the land of beaches. Uruguay is well known for their Atlantic Coast beach resorts and it's gaucho culture. Gaucho well, it's what Americans would call cowboy culture. This is a country with a long history of rural cattle ranching that just became its own lifestyle. It's a whole thing and like I said, you might want to load up on the tea and barbecue. You never know where your next stack might come from. It's all I'm saying. But the real reason we're here isn't just a fill up on local fare before we split. We are here for Rugby to paint a picture of Uruguay. In the early nineteen seventies, it was a small country, well not that small, just over two and a half million, so, I don't know, not too big, not too small. Since the two thousand, Uruguay's official slogan has been Uruguay Natural, but back in the nineteen seventies they just said it's called Uruguay. For the longest time, Uruguay was called the Switzerland of South America because it was stable, with a strong middle class and a generous welfare system. But by the early nineteen seventies that reputation had been chipping away. Unemployment was up, inflation was up and rising. People found themselves tightening their belts, which led to political unrest. And then you had just waiting to complicate matters, these left wing gorilla groups running around for the people of Montevideo, that's the capital. The whole situation devolved into a bunch of kidnappings and robberies and street battles and police and military all running around. So to say that life there was a real pill really oversimplifies a complicated situation. But sports was a pretty good diversion, so hey, what's that on the other channel? Uruguayans were immensely proud of their football history. They had two World Cup victories and it's more than that. Montavideo was the host and winner of the very first FIFA World Cup back in nineteen thirty and it was a bit of a weird match. So Argentina and Uruguay apparently play with different balls. Literally, Argentina shows up ball, Hey, what's with the medicine balls over here? We play with a lighter ball. And they couldn't agree or coin flip or paper rock scissor their way out of it. So it was decided to play the first half with Argentina's whiffle ball and the second half with Uruguay's lead padded exercise ball. Argentina with their pillow ball, led the first half two to one. After halftime, they thudded Uruguay's ball onto the field and they hoofed it three times through that net to win four to two. Three men were carried off the field in the second half with foot injuries, and this did something else. It started the World Cup with a real symbolic show of fairness. To soccer fans, the World Cup is not just some tournament. It's the ultimate sporting event and undeniably there is nothing else in the world of terrestrial athletics that comes close to it. In twenty twenty six, Jordan and Uzbekistan will be entering the World Cup for the first time, and that will mean that since nineteen thirty eighty two countries from around the world will have competed in this event, which holds the undivided attention of literal billions. The last one had about five billion people watching. It pits nations against each other in a way nothing else in the world of sports or politics has ever come close to touching. And then they went ahead and won it again. In nineteen fifty Brazil was the host nation and they were heavily favored. They had just destroyed Sweden seven to one and murdered Spain six to one. The Marikanya was the brand new megastadium built just for the tournament two hundred thousand people squished into it, making it the largest crowd ever for a football match. Now, Brazil still had the blood of their opponents dripping off their paws, and they scored just two minutes into the second half, and they were in high spirits until Uruguay came back and bagged one twenty minutes later. That was okay, though, because of the way it works, even if the match tied, Although Uruguay World Cup t shirts and merch were going into a landfill, Brazil needed to tie, where Uruguay needed an outright win to win the World Cup. Then in the seventy ninth minute, they got it, and the stadium was stunned. Stupid. Brazil's shoes were still bloody from jumping up and down in victory on the bodies of the last team that they played, and officials had already etched Bras into the side of the cup. It's like the prey just leapt up and crane kicked the predator in the face. And it wasn't just Brazil, it was the whole world that collectively spit out their beer at the same time. To this day, the nineteen fifty World Cup remains one of the great upsets in the history of sports, and the event became known as the Mara canazo. It means the stab wound. Anyways, this is not turning into a sports podcast, or maybe it is. We've done sports related disasters before and today our pastime of choice will be rugby. Like we said, most people don't know that much about rugby. Story has it they were playing a game of soccer in Warwickshire in eighteen twenty three when one of the players just picked up the ball and ran with it. Bom rugby and British immigrants brought it to Uruguay in the late eighteen hundreds. Rugby is like soccer, but tackling is allowed, and there's no pads or helmets or breaks, and for the most part, it's say wee weird and brutal and endless dog pile of men spiking their blood pressure fighting for possession of a ball. If soccer is the beautiful game, rugby is an endurance contest with risk of injury. They call it a hooligan's game that's played by gentlemen. Rugby has a dedicated following centered on school based clubs. We'll be following the Old Christians club out of Stella Marris College in Montevideo. Most of the players were university students, just kids between eighteen and twenty five. I'm not going to introduce you to the entire team at this point because you're never gonna remember everybody's name, so let me just say this about them. You gotta be pretty bonded to play a game like rugby, and the players of the Old Christians Club were a tight nip group of friends. They regularly played other Montevideo clubs, especially Old Boys and Carrasco, and this kind of domestic competition was their day to day, but their calendar was dotted with the occasional match against clubs from Argentina or Chili or Paraguay. Sometimes they'd fly off to some other country or play host for these kind of matches. They called them friendlies, and Argentina, well, they regularly cleaned their clocks back then, but only because they were better and had more money, and they were stronger and better organized and better equipped, and their coaches and support staff and back office officials all hug them more. We'll forget Argentina today we are playing Old Boys of Chile in Santiago, and yeah, I'm pretty sure we could take these guys Old Christians wasn't the richest school in the world, but at least we don't have to take a forty hour bus ride to the match. I once watched a rickety old yellow school bus that had driven from Michigan all the way to visit the plains of Abraham and Quebec. When the doors opened, the first student collapsed flat against the stairs, and a conga line of exhausted kids limply fell and roll out, using him like a slide. And that is exactly how we would have exited a forty hour bus ride through the treacherous mountain roads all the way to Santiago. Instead, we will be squeezing into a tightly packed Fairchild FH two twenty seven D. If you're not familiar with it, just try to picture a Dutch Fokker F twenty seven friendship. There you go. There will be forty five other souls on board today. That's forty passengers and five crew. The Fairchild we are flying on today actually belongs to the Uruguayan Air Force, and that wasn't entirely weird because chartered military flights often helped fill the gap in commercial airlines availability they would transport government delegations, but also things like civilian groups and sports teams, and we're technically both. We are joining the Old Christians Club rugby squad along with friends and family, flying from Montevideo to Santiago, Chile, with a stopover in Vendoza, ar Argentina to refuel to help us cross the Andes. And maybe we could grab something to eat while we're there. I don't know, just saying. As it turns out, we will be taking off later than originally planned because whether over the Andes was known to be unstable, which is always worrisome when you are on a clock. Crossing directly over the Andes is what almost all flights between Argentina, Uruguay and Chile have to do. The Andes form a natural barrier separating the fertile plains of the continent's interior from the Pacific coast. The other option was detouring thousands of kilometers south towards Tierra del Fuego or north towards Peru or Bolivia. The trip is about thirteen hundred kilometers or eight hundred miles, and takes just under four hours. The detour balloons that to over five thousand kilometers or thirty one hundred miles and can take as long as twelve hours. Thank you, but no, the pilots had already completed all of their pre flight calculations and chose a directish route through the Planshon Pass. What the Planshon Pass or Passal del Planchall Valgara sits right on the border between Chile and Argentina, and it's set deep in the Andes. And I'm sorry some of you may be asking, andyes, what Okay, it's Andes, not Andes. And in case you don't know, they are the longest continental mountain range on the planet. They stretch about eight thousand kilometers or five thousand miles along the western edge of South America, all the way from western Venezuela near the Caribbean coast, all the way to the southern tip of Patagonia in Argentina. And the whole thing tapers off at Tierra del Fuego near Cape Horn, blurping beneath the waves, and it continues south towards the Sandwich Islands on its way to Antarctica on land. To try to make it easier to picture in your head, it's one million, six hundred and forty thousand, four hundred and twenty Dodge caravans long and walking it as an option would take between ten months and two years, depending on the weather and the border situations and how many times you have to have your knees or ankles surgically replaced. To drive, it would reasonably take about two to three weeks, and in my car just adds six weeks for repairs. A lot of mountains in the Andes rise above twenty thousand feet or six thousand meters. The fair Child had a max ceiling of around twenty five thousand feet or seven thousand, six hundred meters, so that's cool, But with a full load of passengers and our collective asses to boot plus fuel, it would be lucky to clear twenty two thousand feet or sixty seven hundred meters, and it would struggle and strain and sound like my car while it did it, which is not great for anyone's nerves. Plus, there are peaks that reach us high as a Congagoa, which is twenty two thousand, eight hundred and thirty seven feet or six six thousand, nine hundred and sixty one meters. We are talking about the tallest mountains in the Western Hemisphere, and snow blankets the upper slopes of these things year round, so it behooves the pilots to pick an easier route through the Plant Show Pass. Its elevation is only about eight thousand feet or two thousand, four hundred and fifty meters. It is literally, and thankfully, one of the lowest and widest natural corridors across the Andes. That said, for pilots, in nineteen seventy two, the Andes were among the most dangerous routes in the world. The weather could be violent and unpredictable, and a clear sky could vanish into cloud and snow in minutes. Fierce winds whipped through the passes, and turbulence near ridges could drop and aircraft hundreds of feet in seconds. Plus Today, we're going to be flying without any kind of modern GPS. Pilots had to estimate the position by air speed and direction and elapsed time. Radio beacons offered some guidance, but coverage in the mountains would give AT and T and T Mobile a run for their money for the bottom of the list. Our flight today takes place October twelfth, nineteen seventy two, after crossing the Rio della Plata. We land in Mendoza. It's the same day still and we are right at the foot of the Andes. And it turns out the weather went bad and this is going to prevent us from immediately continuing on to Santiago, so we're going to be forced to spend the night here in Mendoza, just to wait it out. At least, the views are astounding, and as long as we're here, if you find a vending machine or anything like that, why not just pick up a snack or two, you know, just for fun no reason. On the next day, Friday, October thirteenth, it looked much better and we are off. I forgot to say. Our flight today was commanded by Colonel Julio Caesar Ferratis. At fifty years old, he was one of the Uruguayan Air Force's most experienced pilots. Crossing the Andes maybe one of the most challenging things a pilot can do, but he'd done it dozens of times and he knew the route, so we're in good hands. And beside him sat copilot Lieutenant Colonel Dante Lagurarra. He's less experienced than Captain Feradus, obviously, but he is still a hell of a better pilot than you or I. The rest of the crew included a flight engineer, a radio operator, and a single steward. By the afternoon, as we're finally climbing into the Indies, passengers are singing Rugby songs, playing cards, you know, just being loud and running Rugby plays in the aisle. That kind of a thing. The spirits were high, and the atmosphere was more like being on a charter bus than a flight, especially a military flight. You know, laughing, dancing, throwing the ball around. Everyone was having a great time and none of them were paying any notice. As the weather started to close in and around them and the clouds began to swallow the mountains, ability dropped to zero, which, yeah, it happens. So the pilots had to operate by instruments alone. And kids, you know when you say what am I ever going to need math for? Well, this is one of those moments. Without GPS or radar, they had to estimate their position by stopwatch and compass to figure out how long it should take to cross the ridge line. For all intents, they were flying blind in the clouds with no real instruments and no ground sensing radar or anything like that, just a calculator, a notepad, and a protractor, and of course a blindfold of snow out the window. By three point thirty they were confident that they had passed the pass and were in the clear to turn north and start descending towards Santiago. They'd done this before and everything was going great, dot dot dot, until very quickly and unexpectedly, a dark, looming mass began to appear through the whiteness before them, filling the window from edge to edge. They were heading into a mountain wall. Erratus and Lagerara pushed the engines while pulling back on the controls as hard as they could to climb as fast as they could for the passengers. This was immediately alarming, as the plane shuttered violently. The aircraft lurched nose up to clear the ridge. They needed as much power as possible, and for a moment it felt like they were going to be okay. They couldn't make themselves lighter, so they just needed a little more power until at three thirty four that afternoon, at an altitude of about thirty five hundred and seventy meters or eleven thou seven hundred and ten feet, the right wing of the aircraft collided into a jagged, rocky and snow sweat buttress of the ridge of Sero Salar that jutted unexpectedly into their flight path. The wing tore off at the fuselage, spraying fuel and shattering windows with explosive force, which, yeah, a little late, but it did make them lighter. And all that tearing metal wanted to go somewhere, and passengers on the right side of the plane were crushed or killed as jagged aluminum and snow blasted into the fuselage. These passengers were killed instantly by catastrophic debris intrusions. One passenger said it was as though the mountain reached out and tore the plane to pieces. The roar was like metal screaming, and people disappeared beside me. Everything inside, passengers, seats, luggage, all slammed sideways as the aircraft yached violently to the left, and now that wing struck another outcropping and tore free. Passengers screamed, bodies slammed against walls, seats collapsed against each other, and with no wings, the plane became really more of a spear, not flying, just tumbling uncontrollably forward. Now spirits were a little down, but this was not the worst part. The real horror unveiled itself as the entire tail of the plane ripped free with a ferocious crack. The screams of passengers and crew in that section vanished. They were all sucked away into the void behind them, seats and all, and the remaining fuselage, which by now would have looked like a wingless, taless hollow cylinder belly, flopped onto the mountain and skidded at nearly three hundred and fifty kilometers or two hundred and fifteen miles an hour down a glacier face like an outer control missile with no brakes. For almost a kilometer. The noise was an unending shriek of tearing metal and screaming, until the nose of the craft finally ground to a halt. Wedged in the snow now, Isaac Newton, fan of the show, points out that just because the plane came to arrest, all the stuff inside the seats, the luggage, the people, all of that continued moving forward, resulting in a people being crushed between the collapsing seats and pressed mercilessly into the bulkhead. Twelve people were killed instantly, including Captain ferradas others lay critically injured. Nando Parada was unconscious with a skull fracture, so he wasn't aware that his mother had died in the crash, while his sister Susannah lay mortally wounded. Enrique Plato had been stapled into the wreckage by his leg and he did not enjoy the experience. However, sadly, within hours he would also pass away. The scene was chaos, blood smeared, the walls, seats were twisted, the aisle was a garage sail and, much like our Congo Crocodile aircraft disaster episode, bodies were piled against the crush bulkhead by the cockpit. Now that the loud part was all over, the silence told them exactly how screwed they were. There was nothing but moaning and the howling wind. The fuselage came to a breast in a glaciated valley on the eastern slopes of a range laying on the Argentine side of the Andes on the border region near Chile, at an altitude of about thirty six or thirty seven hundred meters, just over twelve thousand feet. Of the forty five people we boarded with, only thirty three remained alive, and the fuselage became their only shelter, and it was tilted nose down and wide open at the back. They used what they had to try to block the opening against the freezing wind. And here's the thing. They lived in Uruguay. They'd been sitting on a perfectly comfortable and warm plane and they had planned on landing in nice, toasty Chile, so no one was exactly dressed for the high andes. They were wearing rugby jerseys and thin jackets at best, that kind of thing. In an instant, the nice and comfy interior of the cabin temperature had plunged to minus five celsius or twenty three fahrenheit. But the wind wind chill can quickly freeze exposed skin, which there was a lot of. And although I cannot calculate the shocking drop in temperature, as all of those inside the cabin were blasted with the mountain air at speed, it could have felt as cold as minus forty during the crash. In the long story tradition of the only person with experience applying band aids becoming their de facto doctor. A medical student named Canessa found himself drafted into the role. He did everything from cleaning cuts and setting broken bones to comforting the dying as best as he could. And people were dying. Eduardo, a balb had broken both of his legs. Enriquet Platero did what he could with a punctured lung. People had compound fractures and internal bleeding and concussions. You'd name it. With no medical supplies and not a proper full medical degree in sight, infection and shock took them within days. But wait, there's more. A quick inventory had shown that of all the things on board, the only edible things were a few chocolate bars and biscuits, a little bit of candy, and a bottle of wine. Although we haven't talked about it, they sure did and they knew they were going to be there for a while, so it was decided that meals would be rationed out. They would get a square of chocolate the size of a fingernail and a sip of wine each. They also took turns painstakingly melting snow for a simple glug of water and checking on the injured. Susanna and Nando Parada were brother and sister, and she laid in agony for days, and there was nothing they could do except give her the rare set of water while Nando lay comatose beside her with a head injury. But after three days he awoke just in time to watch her pass away, and did I already mention that his mother had died in the crash. In those first few days, the survivors passed the time searching for wreckage or working on their makeshift snow barrier to help protect them from the elements, anything to stop them from thinking about food. Then imagine sitting in your grief, night after night, surrounded by death, watching the sunset and the temperatures plunging even deeper, down to minus thirty seve elsius or minus twenty two fahrenheit. This is as grueling an unimaginably difficult a psychological slog as we have ever described in the history of this show, and the only, the only absolute highlight of their days, The one thing that actually made their hearts race with joy was the sound of another plane passing overhead. Everyone who could would rush outside at the first sound, like children greeting Santa. They tried to signal them by waving their clothes and using shiny pieces of metal, but nothing. They were surrounded by snow in the wreckage of a plane also painted white, And this excitement to crushing disappointment went on for eight straight days, and of all of the aircraft that blew past them, not one of them gave even the slightest indication that they had been seen. No circling overhead, not even a tip of the wings. Nothing. The only thing that could help them was that they found a small transistor radio. Except this isn't actually the kind of thing that could have helped them at all. It wasn't a two way radio, and they had to preserve what limited battery life had had. But as they occasionally tried to use it, they could pick up the occasional signal even here in the mountains. Eight days into their ordeal, stuck on the side of that mountain, today, for the first time they heard a human voice. It was a Chilean radio announcer. They were ecstatic, and he went on to confirm that yes, there was a search for flight five seventy one. Their hearts positively exploded with glee and hope. That was until they let him finish the rest of his sentence. There was a search. Officials believed that there was no chance of finding them alive, and their search had been called off. You can only try to imagine how deeply disturbed and quiet they became, and how deeply upsetting and painful it must feel to switch between such extreme emotions that quickly. But by the time we are finished today's story, these are not ordinary individuals we're staying with. And there are old sayings about endings become new beginnings, and the death of hope for rescue became the fuel that fed their newfound drive for a more do it your self style rescue. This meant some pretty difficult decisions. They had to figure out how to cope with the cold and the isolation and their hunger now that every resource was just about gone. They were into their second week after the crash, and they were beginning to look skeletal as a ballpark. They say the human body at rest needs about two thousand calories a day at altitude, and in freezing temperatures, your body easily wants to double that. And the twenty nine people now still alive were surviving on not even two hundred calories a day. As it was, the remaining chocolate had been broken down into shards the size of a fingernail, and the wine was passed around in time SIPs. And people will eat some pretty strange stuff just to stop the pain of hunger. They ate leather from suitcases, and cotton soaked in cologne, even toothpaste. Of course, it barely worked, and none of it provided any actual nutrition. Feeling hungry became their full time preoccupation. They draampt about food. They described it in dripping visual, vivid detail, just to torture themselves while their muscles were wasting away and their bodies shrank every minute of every day. Food food, food. Now Here is where this story becomes a little troublesome. Lined up in the snow outside the fuselage were the bodies of their friends and families. If not for the terrible injuries, some of them could have looked like they were just sleeping. They lay there, frozen, preserved in the dry cold, and the survivors passed them every day as they went about their chores. They were kind of impossible to and then Canessa, their doctor, became the first among them to articulate a terrible fact. If they did not eat, they would die, and soon you ever have to deliver really bad news, You know that pregnant pause right before you say something incredibly difficult, Well imagine how he felt before doubling down and suggesting the bodies outside were the only things standing between them and death. One delirious survivor thought he might have meant stacking them up like wood to make a better barrier against the wind and snow outside the plane, or maybe try using them as to boggins to ride their way out of there. But of course he meant something much more egregious. They had to consume human flesh. Now. Most of the survivors were devout Catholics, and eating the body of Christ in the form of a cracker is one thing, but actual, real life cannibalism. It'd be one thing if it was just a taboo, but they felt it was a mortal sin, like feeding themselves today, just so that they could end up roasting in hell for all of eternity. Afterwards, some of them insisted right away it was just better to starve. However, like we said, hunger can do rare and unimaginable things to the mind, and there was a cruel logic to the idea their friends were already dead, and if it was them, would they not want their friends to live? You can only imagine how cruel and awful the debate became. Eventually, they turned to scripture, not literally, I mean they were too weak to open a book or flip a page. No, they turned to the idea of the Eucharist, you know, the aforementioned ritual of consuming Christ's body and blood, so to speak, in the metaphor Christ offered his flesh to sustain mankind. The extension of the logic was could the dead not offer theirs in the same spirit of salvation? And they became complicated when one survivor told the group that if he died, they could eat him. He gave them that right, and he forgave them in advance, and slowly a reluctant consensus began to grow. If they were going to live, they would have to do the unthinkable. When the decision was finally made, they forced Canessa to make the first cuts because it was his idea, or at least he was the first to voice it, and he was also their de facto residence surgeon. In reality, he just lost an impossible game of not it Canessa took responsibility and did something no one could barely force themselves to imagine. He took broken glass from the wreckage and carved thin strips of muscle from the buttocks and thighs. This is where the flesh was thickest. It was then warmed and dried in the sun before it was then cut into smaller pieces and handed out. Some prayed aloud before even touching it. Some wept, others gagged. Taking that first bite was crossing an unbearable line. This wasn't about eating a meal. This was about swallowing a medicine that they knew they would die without. No one joked, no one argued for a bigger share. They were taking part in a dead serious, solemn pact for survival, and part of that meant if one of them died, the others would live by their sacrifice. Psychologically, the whole thing changed them. The hunger pain stopped, and they now had energy to move, which gave them the ability to care for the injured and the mental capacity to consider their escape options. And very slowly they came to accept what they had done. You know, the one thing I haven't been doing in this episode kind of on purpose. It's counting off the days that would have been hugely depressing. But here we are. You have to understand how little really happens while you're sitting staring at nothing, hoping for something to appear that simply won't like my car from the shop, but one hundred times worse. So when I tell you that on the night of October twenty ninth, now the seventeenth day after the crash, that another disaster struck, you're probably stuck on seventeenth day and not paying enough attention to realize I just said secondary disaster. On the night of the twenty ninth, a sudden avalanche roared down the slope, crashing mercilessly into the fuselage and burying it in snow, and those inside were pinned gasping in darkness. Snow packed the cabin so tightly that some couldn't even move their arms. They had to claw their way upwards through the snow, desperate for air, convinced that they were going to die of suffocation to add the list of freezing and starving, and of course the plane crash itself. It took them hours to dig ventilation holes and then free themselves, and they have been through a lot to this point, plus overnight, and this is the worst part. Their tight knit group of trauma bonded survivors had shrank by eight. They even lost their team captain, Marcello Perez del Castillo, and this was another powerful psychological blow. So up till now, their biggest issue was the starving and the freezing and the internal injuries. Like we said, but the one thing that they had going for them was leg room. They had thousands of miles of vast open nothing to call their own, and now and for days after, they were half buried, living in the dark, crammed into a snowy mass, working to poke holes for air and light. So when you consider the least comfortable pillow you've ever used, compare that to samsonite luggage or a human knee. It was very little wonder why they started calling their home the tomb. And in spite of it all, they sang rugby songs, and they prayed, and they told each other's stories to keep their spirits alive. They even started crafting makeshift sunglasses from sun visors. They figured out how to stitch insulation into a kind of a sleeping bag, and they continued to plot how to climb out of the valley because they felt in their hearts there was no rescue without you. So you were listening to a podcast and they roped you into a taking a short flight to watch a rugby match. But now you live in the mountains and your roommates are dying by the dozens, and you are simply not dressed for the occasion. Would you know what to do? So you survived a plane crash and no one has any idea, and the nearest Sinus civilization is hundreds of miles away. There are no buildings, no roads, just white peaks in every direction is cutting through your clothes like a knife, and the air is so thin that your lungs ache, and you not make things so good. So let's see what we can do to give you your best chances of surviving alone stranded in the mountains. The first thing, how about we don't panic because panic burns energy, which you're going to want later on. Give yourself the once over and make sure you're not dragging any limbs or squirting blood out of anywhere. A strip of cloth can become a band aid, and a seat belt with an armrest can become a fairly good splint. I should say this is one of those scenarios where if you love problem solving, you might almost enjoy yourself for the rest of us as long as we're mobile. I don't know what time it is, but we're already on o'clock before the sunsets and the mountains try to popsicle us. So we're gonna want to find a safe spot to hunker down using the fuselage. A shelter isn't a bad start, Just anywhere that's out of the open wind or any obvious avalon zones. At twelve thousand feet, hypothermia can set in within minutes. So let's run through some practical acts for warmth. If you've ever slept outside, you know the ground has the unlimited ability to suck the heat from your body. Think of the ground is a kind of a reverse fry pan that steals heat rather than infusing it. So you want to find a way to stay insulated from below, justly on backpacks or luggage or branches or clothing or literally anything that's available. The ground steals more heat than the surrounding air. In a pinch, even compact snow can work, but obviously that's not great. And if you're plane exploded or bounced off the side of the mountain, you can always dig out a shallow trench to lay in. It'll help block wind and trap body heat better than just sitting like a pig on a platter. That said, the air is also trying to kill you, so you're gonna want to use jackets or tarps or even snow to wall yourself in or make a snow break. And snow is a great insulators, so if you can dig a small hollow that you can fit in, you could potentially iglue yourself through the night. They say that most of your body heat escapes from your scalp and your breath, so wrapping your head and neck in a sleeve or a shirt or anything you can like a scarf will help. And if you can keep all that warm breath inside your clothes, all the better. And in order to stay warm, you're gonna want to do gentle little exercises to keep your core warm and your blood flowing. You know, sit up or two, little shadow boxing, but don't overdo it. You'll end up using up valuable energy and then you're gonna begin to sweat, and then you're gonna freeze to death because of it. If you don't have a fellow survivor to huddle or cuddle with, then even if you did, take whatever you can find, ball up some paper, some itchy itchy insulation, literally anything but snow, and fill the empty spaces in your pants or your coat. It'll help trap the warm air that's escaping off your body, which otherwise is just going to go to waste. And you'll want to tighten off your cuffs and your collars to help preserve the effect. And if you had a garbage bag, I would tell you to crawl into that as a vapor barrier to create a little bit of a bivvy or a sleeping bag effect. Now, if you had the ability to make fire where you were, fantastic, but you're going to want to build it in a place near rocks or kind of a snow wall or anything that helps redirect as much of that escaping heat which is going out in all directions right back at you. And if stones or rocks are available, you want to put those by the fire and let them heat up, and then figure out a way to wrap them up so you don't burn yourself while you put them near your chest or your thighs to help warm the blood flowing to your vital organs. Then just focus on slowing and calming your breathing to reduce stress, because did you know stress can actually affect your temperature, and picturing yourself warmer than you actually are has been shown to help reduce panic and improve your outline. Again, your single biggest goal here is preventing heat loss, because once that's gone, it's really hard to get back. Now, getting stuck in the high mountains can present some pretty unique problems, even on cloudy days. If you don't improvise some kind of eyewear with slits instead of goggles, you can sunburn your eyes. In fact, this is probably the only place where you're likely to sunburn these out of your exposed skin during the day and then contract frostbite that night, so keep your covered. In the andes, the survivors used broken metal panels to melt snow in the sun, and that water kept them alive long after the food was gone. Obviously, boiling any water you capture kill's pathogens. But pathogens are the least of your worries in the immediate term, and we talked an awful lot about hunger. The body can survive more than three weeks without food, of course, not very well. So gather what food you have, add it all up, and then ration it and then your time. Here's a trick. You want to pick a time to eat every day and then stick to it no matter what. If you start snacking all willy nilly every time you get hungry, that is a logistical nightmare, and you're probably gonna use up all of your available food much quicker when those hunger pains set in. People have eaten anything. I mean, you can eat the buttons off your clothing, but keeping something in your stomach is not the same as eating, and your hunger is at least half a mental game. So give yourself stuff to do, keeping watch, patching your shelter, collecting water. If you don't have a time piece with you, you can try tracking the sun. You can scratch marks on a piece of metal or wood and use it like a sun dial. And just as important, you're gonna want to give yourself goals for when you get home. Having goals like that increases the will to live, because survival it's not really about heroics. It's about doing the small little things that help you stay on this side of the dirt or or ice or rocks. I mean, you get my point. Stay dry, stay warm, stay positive, and remember you don't have to feel brave. You just have to keep this up until help or spring your rives. Remember Perado, having lost both his sister and his mom on the same trip, he became a driving force for getting the hell out of there. They had eaten people. Were they really just going to stay there, continuing their horrifying diet until they were all dead? Nope, If they survived, they honored the sacrifice. But if they died, history would remember them as just being a bunch of pimples, no better than the crew of the Essex, which is another story to recap. Between the crash, the cold, the injuries, the hunger, and now the avalanche, their group had shrunk from forty five to seventeen, and now in order to survive, they needed to cross the andes On. So they had to do two things. First, they'd have to pick a direction. Then they had to figure out how to survive an impossible trek out of a high mountain valley surrounded by towering peaks. Oh and it's worth noting that none of them had any mountaineering experience, and they would be doing this in sneakers and T shirts. They knew the cold alone would most likely kill them, but like I say, sometimes people just need something to do with the last fifteen minutes of their life. So they sent some small scouting parties to try to climb the surrounding ridges, donned in plane wreckage to protect themselves from the elements. Three men ascended for hours, only to find that their path had all been hammed in with peaks and they were forced to stumble all the way back to the fuselage. All of this was trial and error. The site where the plane went down wasn't really a recognized valley with a formal name back in nineteen seventy two, and there were no geographic or topographic maps to be had. So these boys, Parado and Canessa, dressed about warm enough for a tennis game in makeshift snoware trekked out of a snow filled valley and climbed eight one hundred and ninety three meters that's twenty seven hundred and fifty feet, sucking in paper thin air up a slope as steep as sixty degrees for more than seventy two hours. Picture climbing an icy ladder with no ice axes or crampons or boots for that matter, for three days. And that was just the first one see when they reached the summit, And don't ask me how they did it, They just did it. Their long, hard effort was rewarded with a visual panorama of unimaginable proportions. They had hoped and expected to see the green valleys of Chile, or a lowland slope, or some obvious path to civilization, but what they saw were mountains, serrated and distant and endless. All the way to the horizon. They were going to have to cross multiple mountains, some as high as forty six hundred meters or fifteen thousand feet. By early December, their numbers had dropped to sixteen, so this attempt had to succeed. The plan was simple, but awful. Climb out of the valley, head west and just keep going until they reached Chile or died. And three men had been chosen for this final assault, Fernando Parada, Roberto Canessa, and Tintin Vezintin. Whether taking the track or staying behind in the wreckage and waiting was worse was debatable, and on December the twelfth, nineteen seventy two, exactly two months after the crash, these three men left camp for the final time. And it was as brutal as you can imagine. They might as well have been climbing straight up. The air was so thin and the snow collapsed beneath their feet. At night, they crawled inside a makeshift sleeping bag made of garbage and huddle for warmth. And once they topped that first summit, they reevaluated and sent Tintin back to camp. They just weren't gonna have enough supplies for three people. Parado and Canessa continued alone, trudging west into the sun for guidance, rationing each bite of dried meat, crossing glaciers and ridges, and huddling into their garbage bag for ten days. Like we said, Parado, he felt like he had nothing to lose. At a point when Canessa lost all strength and told him he just wanted to die, Parato just wouldn't let him. They both wanted to die, but they just couldn't do that to each other. And on that tenth day, for the first time in sixty days, they saw something color. They saw color and it was green. They were as excited as two ninety pound skeletons could possibly be. And as they finally passed below the snow line and found vegetation and some degree of warmth in a stream they could actually drink from, then they saw something really weird cattle. If they had any strength at all, they would have attacked the things like beavers. And that's when they noticed a farmer herding livestock on the other side of a river that was too wide and too violent for them to cross, and too loud to be heard over. The farmer was a man named Sergio Catalan, and of course they didn't know he was a Chilean farmer because they didn't know where they were. Parado wrote a note, wrapped it around a rock, and then summoned all the strength in his body to hurl it across the river, and it read, I come from a plane that fell in the mountains. I'm your Aguayan. We have been walking for ten days. We have fourteen friends still alive in the airplane. We need help. Please come and tell us where we are. The farmer understood, so he threw them some bread and a nice tight spiral. Did a bunch of sign language to tell them he had their backs, before disappearing on his donkey down the slope. Parado and Canessa camp near the river, and the next day Catalan returned with more food and reassurance that help was on the way. Back At camp, it had now been twelve days since their companions departed. They were emaciated and frost bitten, and fighting off thoughts that their friends had clearly died one day into their journey. You can only imagine the feelings that washed over them as the distant whoop, whoop whoop of helicopter blades entered the valley. They knew only a miracle could have delivered their friends to safety, and now it was going to be their turn. It had taken till mid afternoon before the pilots spotted their debris sticking through the snow and finally landed, and what they found shocked them. The survivors emerging from the wreckage were emaciated beyond recognition, waving feebly and tattered clothes, with sunken faces and hollow eyes like zombies. They barely weighed one hundred pounds. Now, flying in the Andes was dangerous even for million military helicopters. The thin mountain air reduces lift, so they were only going to be able to carry out six survivors at a time. The rest were forced to wait until the following day and had to huddle in the fuselage for one last terrible night, and on December the twenty third, after an unimaginable seventy two days alone in the mountains, the survivors were evacuated to hospitals in Santiago. They were treated for frostbite and malnutrition and dehydration, while crowds and reporters cheered and fought for a photograph. For the families who raced to the scene, many wept uncontrollably as they were reunited with sons and brothers suddenly from the dead, while the families of the twenty nine who had not made it had their hopes crushed all over again as they realized their loved ones were not part of this miracle. Paparazzi and reporters wanted a lot more than photos. They wanted answer how had they been able to survive ten weeks in the harshest environment on earth with no food? And it didn't take long for the headlines about miracles to start to be replaced with headlines about man on man nomnom Frenzied reporters absolutely besieged the hospital, looking for details and running crazy, sensationalized stories. The survivors tried to calmly explain what happened in a press conference, that it was done not with disrespect, but as an act of loyalty and humble necessity. Ironically, now that it was their turn to be eaten alive by the press, something unexpected happened the families of the dead. They didn't condemn them. They approached them with understanding and spoke about it, rather than revenge killing them in their hospital beds. In time, the Catholic Church in Uruguay publicly stated that the act was not sinful. They agreed with their interpretation of the Eucharist and said that it was done out of necessity and in the spirit of self preservation. Nine times out of ten they would have been labeled as monsters and lived shunned existences filled with guilt and shame and new names and plastic surgery. Instead, they came to be recognized as men who had endured the impossible. By the time they got back to Uruguay, they were welcomed by thousands of supporters. Their survival became an unusual source of national unity and pride. Not as good as a World Cup, but pretty good. So what happened well for one head math is never as good as actual math math. Poor weather forced them to use dead reckoning instead of instruments, and the pilots misjudged their position. White out conditions left them with no visual references, and strong mountain winds and turbulence only complicated things. They timed their crossing and by three point thirty they were confident that they had cleared the mountains, but it turns out they were still so east of the path and their flight math was off. By about twelve minutes, they were sixty kilometers or thirty seven miles from the plant Shoon Pass, and again unaware they were surrounded by mountains higher than their flight path. They even contacted Santiago Air traffic Control to let them know that they had cleared the mountains and were on their way, except obviously they hadn't, and they were descending into some of the most treacherous terrain on the planet, and this would screw them up later when rescue planes were looking in the wrong place, the point being they were irreversibly screwed and what happened became unavoidable, and GPS not being a thing yet certainly didn't help. The crazy Chilean terrain didn't help. Poor radio fixes didn't help. And I even heard it speculated that having the rugby team on board kind of forced them hand and made them sloppy because they wanted to land faster, because the team was on a schedule, or because they were being annoying. But I put zero stock in that. In official terms, chalked up to a controlled flight into terrain caused by navigational error in poor weather. Instead of descending into a beautiful Chilean valley, they were headed into a mountain wall. The five rugby players and one steward who disappeared when the tail broke off were never found. Many of the survivors struggled with trauma and nightmares and feelings of guilt. Some would talk about it openly, but others avoided speaking about it for years. And obviously it wasn't just the crash. Although they all agreed, no one would have made it off the mountain alive without consuming human flesh. The whole idea freaked them out for the rest of their lives. The valley they crashed into didn't have a name before the accident, like we said, but today it is called de las Lagrimas, the Valley of Tears. And some of you may have heard of this story before. A journalist named Piers Paul Reid wrote an incredibly extensive book in nineteen seventy four called a Lie. It went on to become an international bestseller, and in nineteen ninety three, a big ass Hollywood movie of the same name was released. Survivors even advised the production, making sure the crash and survival scenes were accurate. Years later, de facto attending physician Roberto Canessa continued studying medicine, even though he should have had enough of it to last a lifetime, and he went on to become a renowned pediatric cardiologist, dedicating his life to saving children. Where Nando Pirato became a world traveling motivational speaker, inspiring others with tales of resilience and leadership. He once encapsulated the experience in a single line. He said, we were not heroes. We were ordinary people, given no choice but to keep going, to keep walking, and somehow that was enough. I won't be following up on the stories of all sixteen survivors here. This would have to be a much longer podcast to do it right. But I can tell you something remarkable about them. They actually returned to the crash site in pilgrimages. They left mementos and the memorial cross to honor those who had died. Twenty nine lives were lost, yet by their sacrifice, sixteen survived for seventy two days in one of the most impossible environments on the planet. I don't believe I've ever used the term miraculous before, but in the history of this show, of all the resilient or serendipitous or impossible things that we have ever seen, I feel very strongly and comfortable in saying that the story of the Uruguayan Rugby air crash disaster of nineteen seventy two is the closest thing to a bonafide miracle that we have ever seen. I did this episode as a thank you for a very special listener who asked to remain nameless and over extended themselves to help me out of a jam. Fifty to sixty hours of painstaking work is maybe the best way that I know how to say thank you and show the depth of my appreciation, and it makes me happy to be able to do this for them. I've heard people describe this tale as extraordinary, but that's not nearly good enough a word to explain what happened. It is remembered, even fifty years later as the miracle of the Andes. They literally study it in psychology and in medicine and even in business leadership courses. You have any idea how deep you have to dig to refuse to surrender, in spite of having your quality a life, scrape the barrel as hard as this, and to be able to do it when the whole world seemingly abandoned you. And even more than that, can you understand how profound the details of your story have to be to completely overshadow and make people forget about all of the cannibalism. I understand why people who don't believe in a higher power would look at this story and say someone was watching over them. They'd probably argue he watched a bunch of them die. But if God didn't have anything to do with those boys climbing out of that valley alive, I just don't know what he does with his time. If you spend less than seventy two days this year buried by snow or trapped in the belly of a vehicle, and you're happy and you know it. The song says you should clap your hands. But if you really want to celebrate but don't want to spend more than seven calories doing it. Have you heard my rant about my Patreon being a good place for introverts or shut ins? This show survives by the whims of my supporters, and the vast majority of Patreon supporters sign up, make a simple monthly donation to keep the show they love going, and then they just back away through some shrubs and I never hear from them again. I love all of my followers, paid free, whatever, and you can learn more at patreon dot com slash few Funeral eight followers are obviously better, but it's all love and support and my appreciation is bottomless. And if you have a hankering for ad free episodes, extra content, all that good stuff. And again, I'm really truly sorry about those ads. They're really out of my control. Long story short. Patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo is the best way to get rid of them, and it's also responsible for me having been able to do this show as much as I have over the last five years. It literally buys me time to do the show instead of other work. No Patreon and I'm down to three to six episodes a year, but failing that, you can always just visit, buy me a coffee dot com slash Doomsday, and show your support with a one time donation. And I would like to offer a quick and really heartfelt shout out to Maloriemar Edward Wedding, the incomparable TJ Silky Socks, Hey Silk, Sean Rommel, and joe Lynn Williams for helping support the show on Patreon. You can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcasts, or just fire us an email to doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. I always thank all my Patreon listeners, new and old, for their support and encouragement, but I also say if you could spare the money and had to choose, I ask you to consider making a donation to Global Menic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmenic dot CA. On the next episode, it will be a nice change of scenery to get out of the mountains spend some time exploring the lush, verdant forests of one of the most beautiful places in the world. However, fair warning, we will be getting a very very close up view. It's the Cave Creek Platform disaster of nineteen ninety five. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.