The Unbelieveable with Dan Aykroyd (2023-…): Season 1, Episode 10 - Surviving the Impossible - full transcript

- Imagine this ordeal.

You are trapped in
an upside down ship

at the bottom of the ocean

for three days

- Every breath he takes
puts him a step closer

to being unable to breathe.

- How about free falling 33,000
feet without a parachute?

- She's alive.

She fell over 33,000 feet
in a damaged airplane

that had been ripped apart
by a bomb and is alive.

- Or having to crawl
through 200 miles



of wilderness after being
mauled by a grizzly.

- This engenders in
him a need for revenge.

He wants to live to
kill these two people.

- These are the survival
stories, so surprising.

They're truly unbelievable.

- Being lost in the desert is
usually a death sentence,

so an ultra marathon
Mauro Prosperi

finds himself in
this very situation

he's forced to ask himself
just how far am I willing

to go to survive?

- There's an event that's

thought of as one of the most,

if not the most grueling

running events in the world



and it's called the
Marathon des Sables

and it's about 155 miles
over the course of six days

through the desert
in Southern Morocco.

- This is the most dangerous
race on planet earth.

You are running sometimes
more than 26 miles a day

where temperatures can
get up to 120 degrees.

In order to do the race, you
actually have to sign paperwork

that tells the race committee

where to send your body
if you don't make it.

- It's been described as
racing through hell for a week

and people pay $5,000
for the privilege,

But don't
expect luxury to come

with that price.

Participants receive
only two liters

of water per day
at each checkpoint.

- Because of the
high temperature

reaching almost 120
degrees, the need for water

and the need for food
is exponentially higher

than it would be be
with your average person

just doing day-to-day tasks.

By day four runners
are in the home stretch

in seventh place, Mauro's
having the race of his life

until there's a sudden
turn in the weather

- When this sandstorm hits the
sand is actually boiling hot.

So you've got all of these
razor sharp little sand granules

that Mauro's now breathing in

- Because he is a
marathoner, a competitor

and kind of a badass
Prosperi decides to continue

to soldier forward,
not realizing

that they have paused the
race due to this sandstorm.

When the dust clears

and visibility returns, he has
wandered severely off course

When night
falls on day four,

all the runners have checked
in with race officials

except Mauro Prosperi.

He camps alone that night

planning to backtrack
at first light,

but there's one problem.

- This sandstorm has now erased

all of the markers on the trail.

At this point, Mauro
is now climbing up

to the tallest sand dune
that he can possibly find

so he can get a better
point of reference.

- He's on top of the
dune for most of the day

when suddenly a rescue
helicopter flies over.

- So Mauro does exactly what
he's been briefed to do.

He pulls out his little flare

and he fires it up
at the helicopter,

but unfortunately
it's in broad daylight

and these pen gun flares
give out a very small signal

so the helicopter
doesn't see it.

Mauro spends
a long second night

alone in the desert.

By morning, he's reached
a terrifying conclusion.

He'll have to rescue himself.

- He walks for most of the
day, he's tired, he's hungry,

and worst of all, he
drinks last of his water.

- He gets so thirsty that
his tongue begins to swell

and he reaches into his pack
where he's got some wet wipes

and he's sucking on the
wet wipes for the moisture.

He's so dehydrated that
when he sees a structure,

he thinks it's a mirage
and he gets there

and it's not a mirage,
it's a Bedouin shrine.

He's been in the sun for six
days now, so he sets up camp.

- At this point.
Mauro is so desperate

to get some fluids in his body

that he ends up
drinking his own urine.

And for those of us that have
been trained in survival,

we know that drinking your
own urine is a big negative.

- Drinking your own urine

does you more harm than good

because even though urine is

mostly water, this is toxins

that your body has filtered

through the kidneys
to get rid of.

You're also
introducing some salts

and in the long run it
will make you more thirsty.

As dehydration sets in,

Mauro takes extreme measures
and goes a little batty.

- He climbs up on the roof
thinking he might be able

to signal someone, and there
he finds a colony of bats,

so still desperately thirsty.

He uses his pocket knife

to cut off their heads
and drink their blood.

- At this point,
Mauro is no different

than a desert animal.

He's gone from a marathon
runner to a predator.

This is something he
couldn't have imagined doing

just a few days earlier,

but yet his survival
instinct has kicked in

- The bat blood has
delayed death for now.

Then on day seven while
escaping the midday heat,

there's finally a
glimmer of hope.

- Suddenly he hears
a plane coming,

so he has already written SOS

and help into the
sand with his feet,

and he builds a signal fire.

- But almost as soon as
he gets the fire lit,

another sandstorm hits,

- And again, another
rescue attempt fails,

and this proves to be
his breaking point.

- He figures that he'll
die on his own terms.

He writes a message to
his family in charcoal,

his wife will get his
policeman's pension.

He takes out his knife,
he slits his own wrists

and he lays down in
the sand ready to die.

- But to Mauro's great
surprise, he wakes up

and he's still alive.

Fate, science,
or just plain luck

saved Mauro Prosperi that
day, so he decides to push on.

- He's walking through
this desert all day,

120 degree Fahrenheit
temperatures.

I can only imagine that every
single step at this point

takes every ounce of
strength that Mauro has.

It's now day
eight in the desert,

three of them without water.

Then something miraculous
appears on the horizon.

- He finds a puddle

that's left over from
a dried up riverbed.

He lays down next to the puddle

and he tries to
drink some water,

but he vomits it up immediately.

His throat is so dry that
he can't even swallow.

He lays by that water

and just sips it
bit by bit all day

and all night trying
to get his body used to

taking in a little bit
of water at a time.

The next day,
Prosperi leaves the oasis

and spies what to him
is a beautiful sight.

- He sees goat
droppings in the sand.

- If there's goat droppings,
there's gotta be goat herders

and if there's goat herders,
there's gotta be food,

water, survival, rescue.

So Mauro gets rejuvenated
with this sense of hope

and he starts
identifying footprints

and he ends up finding
this little girl

and he cries out
to the little girl

and she sees this European
man absolutely torn to pieces.

So she does what any
little girl would do.

She takes off in the
opposite direction.

To Mauro's good fortune the
little girl notifies her family,

and after wandering through
the Sahara for nine days,

Mauro is finally saved.

In the nine
days he was missing

Mauro wandered more than

180 miles off course

through some of the planet's

most dangerous terrain.

- He's brought to
an Algerian hospital

where doctors take care of him.

He's lost 33 pounds

and he needs four
gallons of fluid

to replace what he's lost.

It takes Mauro two years

to recover from the
damage his body endures

during his improbable
fight for survival.

Once healthy, he does something
even more unbelievable

- Just to show he bears no
ill will towards this desert

that almost killed him

in 1998, Mauro returns to
compete in the race again,

and then does it six
more times after that,

a glutton for punishment.

- Flight attendant Vesna
Vulovic's story of survival

is so close to impossible
that many call it a miracle.

- This particular day in 1972,

flight 367 takes off bound

for Copenhagen aboard which is a

23-year-old flight attendant
by the name of Vesna Vulovic.

- One minute Vesna's doing
her flight attendant duties

at 33,000 feet.

The next minute a bomb goes off.

The plane is blown
into multiple pieces.

Passengers are getting
sucked out of the aircraft

and it begins to
take a free fall.

This took place in the
70s during the Cold War,

and some sources say that
this was a briefcase bomb.

It's unclear
who is responsible,

but what is certain is
Vesna is not supposed to be

on this plane.

She's not even supposed
to be a flight attendant.

- She has chronic
low blood pressure

and that should disqualify her

from that kind of an occupation.

- Because you could
potentially pass out

when you get to altitude.

- But Vesna is so determined
to get her dream job.

She figures out a workaround
for her medical exam.

- Vesna is quite ingenious.

She really only needs to
have normal blood pressure

during the time of screening.

- In order to bypass
this screening,

she drinks five or
six cups of coffee,

jacks her blood pressure up,

jacks her heart rate up,
goes in, passes the test.

And there
is another reason

why Vesna should not be
on this specific flight.

It's supposed to be her day off.

- Apparently there's a lot
of Vesnas around at the time

because there's a different
Vesna that was slated

to do the flight attendant
duties on that day,

but she didn't show up.

- It was actually meant to
be someone else's shift,

but Vesna decides, hey,
it's going to Copenhagen.

It's a city I've
always wanted to see.

I'll take the shift even
though it's not supposed

to be mine, and it turns out
to be a fateful decision.

- When the bomb goes off,

Vesna happens to be
behind the drink cart

and as the plane starts
taking a free fall,

the cart pins Vesna to
the back of the aircraft.

At this point, Vesna
loses consciousness

and she's passed out.

- She free falls 33,000 feet.

That's six miles pinned
between the food cart

and the fuselage of the plane.

It may be the first time

that airplane food
saves someone's life,

but the unlikely
circumstances continue.

- As a halo jumper
in special operations

I'm jumping from
typically 13,000 feet,

so I get about 60
seconds of free fall.

Vesna is traveling from 33,000
feet in a dead free fall.

So this is gonna take
her about three minutes

until she hits the ground

- And during that time, she's
still in the tail section.

This forms a kind of
rigid cage around her

that will somewhat protect her,

and the tail section
has a surface area

which will slow down the
descent to some extent,

it is like the world's
worst parachute.

Then another
unbelievable coincidence.

- The wreckage lands
at such an angle

that she doesn't really absorb

all the impact and she's alive.

She fell over 33,000
feet without a parachute

in a damaged airplane
that had been ripped apart

by a bomb and is alive.

- However, her list of
injuries is extensive.

She has a skull fracture,
a cerebral hemorrhage.

She has multiple
fractured vertebrae.

She has both legs that
have been fractured

and a fractured pelvis as well.

This is actually quite
amazing that this is all

that she has injured.

- The fact that she
has low blood pressure

ultimately becomes one of the
factors in saving her life.

- Because her blood
pressure is so low,

she doesn't bleed out
as fast as somebody

who had normal blood pressure.

- People theorize that
essentially

her low blood pressure

is what keeps her
heart from exploding.

It's like an underfilled
water balloon.

Had she had
normal blood pressure

with that rapid
depressurization of the cabin

and the impact with the earth,

that easily could have made
her heart explode in her chest.

While she miraculously
survives the impact,

she needs immediate
medical attention.

- Somehow the first
person to come along

to check out the wreckage,
they hear her screaming,

they see her.

- And it so happens that he
is a former World War II medic

and he's seen a lot
of battlefield trauma.

So he's able to take care
of Vesna until help arrives

and she's brought to a hospital.

- Vesna is in a
coma for a few weeks

after the accident when
she finally awakes,

she's partially paralyzed.

- Ten months after the accident,

Vesna actually regains
her ability to walk

and for the rest of her
life, she's got a limp.

But the fact that she's now
walking less than a year later

is unbelievable.

- The Guinness Book
of World Records

awards Vesna the highest
fall without a parachute.

You can't really train for that.

I'm guessing like if you
don't get it the first time,

you don't get it.

Even more astonishing,

Vesna wants to keep flying.

That doesn't stop the
airline from grounding her.

- The airline gives
her a desk job

because she stands as
a reminder that planes

because she stands as
a reminder that planes

and people can fall
out of the sky.

- We've all heard the story
of Jonah and the whale,

even Pinocchio and the whale,

but what about the story of
Paul Templer and the hippo?

- So there's a river
guide named Paul Templer

who's taking a group of tourists

down the Zambezi
River in Africa.

He spots a group of hippos
bathing in the river,

but hippos are no joke.

About 500 fatalities a
year are caused by hippos.

- Hippos can weigh four tons.

They have jaws that
open 180 degrees

and they have teeth that
are a foot and a half long,

so they're extremely vicious
when they feel threatened.

These particular
hippos aren't at all happy.

When the group gets
a little too close.

- The hippo overturns
one of the canoes

and one of the guides is
catapulted out into the water.

- Paul goes back to save
his fellow tour guide,

but suddenly
everything goes black.

- His legs are
kicking in the air.

He's inhaling the smell
of of putrid rotten egg.

The hippo's breath.

In a panic, he grabs onto
one of the hippo's tusks

and wrenches himself out.

He surfaces and swims for shore,

but this time he's
hit from below.

- This time he
grabs him sideways.

So Paul's legs are hanging out

one side of the hippo's mouth
and his head and shoulder

are hanging out of the
other side of his mouth

and the hippo swings him
around like a ragdoll,

and then finally he
just shakes him loose.

When Paul reaches the
hospital, he's got 38 bites.

The hippo has punctured
his face, his neck,

his spinal column, and his lung,

and has shredded his left
arm from the elbow down

and has to be amputated.

- Although Templer
loses his arm,

he does keep his sense of humor.

He titles the book, he writes
about his hippo encounter,

"What's Left of Me."

The hero of our next
story doesn't have

quite the same upbeat attitude.

- In 1823, Hugh Glass

and 15 other men

are going up the Missouri River.

The fur trade is
huge money for them,

but North America is a very

treacherous place to be.

We've got warring
Native Americans,

you've got these
dangerous animals,

And on this
unfortunate August Day

Glass will come face-to-face

with one of these
terrifying threats.

- Hugh Glass is out
in front exploring

and he sees these two bear cubs.

But he's not thinking,
how cute.

He's thinking There's a
terrifying giant mama bear

and she is very close to
where he stands right then.

- He hears a noise

and all of a sudden finds
himself out of nowhere

getting mauled by this
massive grizzly bear.

The bear all 400 pounds
of her pins Hugh down

and rips open his
trachea, his windpipe.

So at this point, his screams
sound even more horrifying.

- Everyone hears
this horror show.

They come running to Glass
or what's left of him.

- His scalp is missing,
his windpipe is exposed,

his leg is torn up.

There's blood everywhere.

They assume that he
is not of the living.

- But Hugh Glass is
somehow still alive.

- So the expedition
leader, Andrew Henry, asks

for two volunteers to stay
with Glass, wait until he dies,

and then bury him.

After that, they can catch
up to the expedition.

- Enticed by the promise
of cash two men volunteer.

- Two famous frontiersmen

by the name of
Fitzgerald and Bridger

step up to the job
and stay with Hugh.

But what was supposed
to be a 24 hour chore

drags on and on.

- Five days later, Hugh Glass
is not dead. They get scared.

- Fitzgerald and Bridger are
worried they'll be attacked.

They take Glass's weapons, ammo,

and supplies, and
they leave him.

The guy's practically in pieces.

How much longer can he live?

- Bridger and Fitzgerald
expect the answer to be

not much longer, but
Glass has other plans.

- So Hugh Glass
regains consciousness

and he doesn't have his gun.

His ammunition,
he's defenseless.

- This engenders in
him a need for revenge.

He wants to live to
kill these two people,

and that gives him
the strength to do

what it takes to survive.

That means
tending to his injuries.

Glass reaps the bandages that
seal his exposed trachea,

then examines his
badly broken leg.

- So, one of the utterly amazing
things that Glass does is

that he sets his own fracture,

which we call a reduction.

Every time I reduce
fractures in patients,

I thank all the
gods that there are,

that we have pain medication.

It really, really hurts.

Then Glass heads
out on his hands and knees.

- He's crawling
toward Fort Kiowa

which is 200 miles
away in South Dakota.

That's the nearest settlement.

He crawls on for about two
weeks, and during that time,

the fracture in his leg
is beginning to heal

and that allows him
to actually stand up.

- After this six-week journey,
Hugh arrives to Fort Kiowa.

He's got one thing on his
mind and that's revenge.

However, none of the
trappers are there anymore.

So Hugh takes six
months to recover,

and then he catches
up to Bridger

down at the Bighorn River.

"Why'd you leave me?

Why'd you take my supplies?"

Bridger tells you that it
was all Fitzgerald's idea.

Bridger is the youngest of
the frontiersmen at the time,

rumored to be just a teenager.

So Hugh decides to have mercy
on Bridger lets him live

and goes off and
search for Fitzgerald.

But as luck
would have it,

Fitzgerald is now in the army

and an officer prevents
Hugh's shot at revenge.

Both men survive.

- The story of Hugh
Glass inspires the movie

"The Revenant,"
with Leonardo DiCaprio,

and it becomes this ultimate
story of survival and revenge.

- The Hollywood version, it's
a great movie by the way,

takes some creative liberties,
focusing less on the mercy

and more on the revenge.

Coming up, a survival story

that's deep, really deep.

- Life is full of annoying
little things, isn't it?

Like rush hour traffic or
losing your wifi connection.

But what if something
that feels like

an inconvenience ends
up saving your life?

- Harrison Okene is
a 25-year-old cook

and he's aboard this
ship called the Jascon-4.

It's about 18 miles west
of the coast of Nigeria,

out in the Gulf of Guinea.

Harrison and his crew
mates have this policy,

whenever you go to bed,

you gotta lock
yourself in the cabin

because there's issues
with piracy there off

the coast of Nigeria,

and all over the coast of
Africa for that matter.

- So everyone's locked
inside the room,

it's a security precaution.

But Harrison, he wakes up
in the middle of the night,

he decides to leave his room

and use the restroom.

As in the restroom,

he feels something hit
the side of the boat.

- And all of a sudden
this rogue wave smashes

against the Jascon-4.

And we're talking a wave
20, 30 plus feet tall.

Within seconds,

the Jascon-4 is knocked sideways

and seawater quickly
floods the ship.

While his crew mates
are drowning

in their locked quarters,

Harrison has a fighting chance.

- A wall of water forces
Harrison down a hallway

into a small tiny
room that is adjacent

to an officer's quarters.

At this point, the boat
is completely upside down,

so the ceiling is now the floor.

He's fortunate enough
to find an air pocket.

Harrison
finds safety for the moment,

but let's not
celebrate just yet.

- The boat is starting to sink.

Now he's down a hundred
feet below sea level,

stuck at the bottom of the
ocean in his air pocket.

If that's not bad enough,
the cold water is 50 degrees.

You have no wetsuit,

you're not gonna
survive in it very long.

Though
Harrison doesn't know it,

rescue operations are underway,

but it will take hours
before divers reach the ship.

- For open circuit
dive operations

for a depth of about
a hundred feet,

you are looking at a maximum
bottom time of about 10

to 15 minutes tops.

So you can only imagine
that these divers,

they don't have a
whole lot of time

to search the ship, number one.

Number two, it's gonna
be very dark down there.

And number three, they
probably didn't have any time

to familiarize with how
the ship was structured.

- Divers go down, they
start hammering on the side

of the hull of the ship,
hoping to hear survivors.

And Harrison hears it.

He's shouting, banging
back against the hull.

The divers work their
way around the ship,

listening as they go,
they hear nothing.

They give up, convinced
there are no survivors,

and they return to the surface.

- Once the sounds of
the hammering stop,

Harrison realizes that
he's in extreme danger.

- Every breath he takes

puts him a step closer

to being unable to breathe

because he inhales oxygen,
he exhales carbon dioxide,

so the oxygen density in
his air pocket is going down

every moment with every
breath that he takes.

And if the lack
of oxygen doesn't kill him,

the cold will.

He knows he has to move or die.

- He just so happens to
have some rope with him.

So Harrison starts to get bold.

- He decides to tie
a rope to himself

and to his current location.

He decides to swim
off in total darkness

to go find a larger
pocket of air.

- So Harrison is taking
these little sorties outside

of the room,

swimming roughly 25
meters would take him

in between 20 and 30 seconds.

He knows he's only
got so much time

before he's gotta
go back to the room.

- Just at the moment when he's
about to run out of oxygen

and head back, he decides to
swim a little bit further,

and that's where he pops
up in the engineer's room

where there's a
bigger pocket of air.

- The fact that
Harrison actually finds

the engineering room

that has an additional air
pocket is an absolute miracle.

- Using a hammer
that he's found,

he pulls off some of the
wood paneling from the walls,

and using an air
mattress that he's found,

he creates a makeshift platform

so he could at very least
keep his upper body outside

of the water, slowing the
possibility of hypothermia.

At this moment,

Harrison has been trapped
for more than 24 hours.

While staving off hypothermia
may seem like a small victory,

he's still not out of the woods.

- If you can believe it,

then things actually go from
super bad to super worse.

The sharks have come

and he can hear them
swimming around the boat

and eating the bodies
of his crew mates,

and he knows that if
they find him, he's next.

As a terrified
Harrison listens to sharks,

divers return to collect bodies.

- There are six divers that
get tasked with the job.

Once they enter the vessel,

they finally find the cabin area

and they're able
to start extracting

the deceased crew members.

After
two days and 14 hours

in almost complete darkness,

Harrison sees a mysterious
glow in the water.

- The divers are going in
and out of the wreckage,

and as they're coming in on
one last pass,

it's Harrison.

- What's your name?
- Harrison.

- You could only
imagine what it's like

to be diving a hundred feet
below recovering bodies

and all of a sudden a body
comes and recovers you.

But Harrison's not getting
out of this just yet.

- Now that they've
found Harrison alive,

they have to be
careful to not kill him

in trying to save him.

Harrison has
been 100 feet below sea level

for nearly three days,

so he'll have to be brought to
the surface, slow and steady.

- When the body tissues have
absorbed all that nitrogen,

once they start to
relieve the pressure

and those bubbles form

and they come out of the
tissues, they can go anywhere.

If they go to your heart, they
could stop your heart motion.

If they go to your brain,
they can cause a stroke.

Major, major problems if you
don't handle this correctly.

- The solution
for Harrison comes

when they bring him
this pressurized suit

and then slowly ascend
so that he can adapt

to the changing pressures and
not suffer any catastrophes.

And one of the strangest facts

of this whole experience,

when they get him
to the surface,

he's been at the bottom
of the ocean for 62 hours.

He thinks he's only been
down there for 12 hours.

He's essentially lost
two days in his mind.

Somehow, time has become
compressed for him.

- After this whole ordeal,

instead of being terrified
to return to the ocean again,

Harrison decides to
become a commercial diver.

- And the man who
presents Harrison Okene

with his diploma
upon graduation,

none other than the
diver who rescued him.

- What's more terrifying
than death itself?

Perhaps not dying, but
being buried anyway.

While it sounds like something
out of a gothic novel,

it's happened more often
than we'd like to imagine.

- In the 18th and 19th
centuries,

there's this huge fear

of being buried alive.

Yes,
some of this fear comes

from works of fiction,

and those are inspired
by very real cases,

and it's a real
enough possibility

for doctors to test for,

well, death.

- They devised a number
of tests for physicians

and morticians to ensure that
a person is actually dead

before they're to be buried.

They are generally
unpleasant experiences.

- We're talking
pliers on nipples,

rinsing out the mouth with
urine, and tobacco smoke enemas.

I don't really know why
regular enemas weren't enough,

but the tobacco smoke enemas
are where we landed on this.

And yes, this apparently
is where the phrase,

"Blowing smoke up
one's ass," comes from.

- The thinking is that
if they create something

that is unpleasant enough

and they subject a
potentially dead person

to said experience,

the people who are
not actually dead

will respond to that treatment

and then declare themselves
as not being dead,

and those who are
dead won't mind.

Thankfully,
these tests are phased out

in the early 20th century,
so we'll never know.

Could they have prevented
the fate of one Angelo Hayes?

- So it's 1937, we're in France,

and Angelo Hayes, young guy,

loves to ride his motorcycle

and he does not like
wearing a helmet.

- And one day he's riding
his motorcycle very fast,

loses control of it,

and he crashes headfirst
into a brick wall.

Hayes has so much head
trauma and it's so gruesome,

they won't even let his
family see the body.

They think it will
be so distressing.

- He suffers extensive
facial injuries,

and these injuries are so bad

that his face is unrecognizable.

He has no signs of life.

He's declared dead at the scene

and he is sent
directly to the morgue.

- So three days
after the accident,

his family buries him in
their very small village

of St Quinten de Chalais
and he would still be there

had it not been for a
life insurance company

that gets a little suspicious.

Two weeks
before Angelo's accident,

his family takes out a
life insurance policy worth

the equivalent of 200,000
in today's dollars,

a big policy for a
19-year-old in 1937.

- It all seems a
little bit suspicious,

especially seeing as it was
taken out just weeks before.

The insurance company
sends two investigators

and they actually
exhume his body.

They open up the casket

and it turns out
this man is not dead.

- He's not conscious,
but he has a heartbeat,

albeit very slow,

and he also has a very
reduced respiratory rate.

Surviving
the motorcycle crash

is a miracle on its own,

but being buried alive

and not succumbing to
such horrific injuries,

even after three days,
how is this possible?

- He's in a coma and
when you're in a coma,

your metabolic rate is so low

that you don't need
much air to survive.

So they promptly take
him to a hospital

and he makes a full recovery.

- So being declared dead
obviously has a profound effect

on Angelo and he
ends up inventing

a whole other type of coffin
just in case this happens

to somebody else.

- It includes a food
locker, an oxygen supply,

and a radio transmitter,

so a person who is buried
alive can call for help.

The funny thing is for all
the effort that he expended

on designing this thing,

there's no evidence that anyone
ever bought a single unit.

There's no evidence that anyone
ever bought a single unit.

I guess that
after being buried alive

for three days, Angelo
wasn't taking any chances.

- Imagine a human
frozen solid as a rock,

who is then brought
back to life.

It's a storyline
straight from the movies,

but is it actually possible?

I'd have said no,

until I heard our next
unbelievable story.

- It is 1980 and a 19-year-old
named Jean Hilliard

is driving back home

after a night out with
friends in Minnesota

and her car skids off the road

and goes through a snowbank.

- This is well before the
advent of cell phones.

She's in the middle of nowhere,

but she knows that her
friend Wally Nelson,

lives not very far from where
she has crashed her car.

- And she decides that the best
course of action is to walk,

but there's one problem.

It's minus 22 out

and she's not exactly
well-equipped for the weather.

She's wearing cowboy
boots and a light jacket

That might be
okay for a summer stroll,

but not for
temperatures cold enough

to cause frostbite
within minutes,

- She might think that
her friend's house

is just a few minutes down
the road, but that's by car.

She's walking for over an hour.

- Her body now is trying
to minimize her heat loss

and protect her as
much as possible.

It'll prioritize the critical
organs needed for survival

and direct her blood
flow toward the heart,

the brain, and the lungs.

But after a while, even
that is not enough,

and these vital organs
will start to shut down.

- She makes it to her
friend Wally's front yard,

but before she can reach
the porch, she passes out.

- Wally discovers
her the next morning

when he's coming
out to go to work.

So it's about six hours

that Jean has been out in
this subfreezing temperature.

- Her friend Wally sees
this human shaped ice block

in front of his house
and he's horrified to see

that it's his friend Jean
with her eyes frozen open.

- First, he thinks she's dead,

but then he notices bubbles
coming out of her nostril

and so maybe there's hope.

- He gets her to the hospital.

The paramedics there don't
even need a stretcher

to carry her in.

She's literally stiff as a board

and the doctors can't
even start an IV on her.

She's so solid that
the IV needles break

when they try to insert them.

- The frostbite is so severe,
her toes are jet black.

- Her body temperature is so low

that it doesn't register
on a thermometer

and her heartbeat has slowed
down to eight beats a minute.

They expect her to die
and they use heating pads

to try and thaw her out even
if it's just for her dead body

to get back to her
parents for burial.

- Eventually, Jean's body warms
up and she returns to life.

What's more amazing, she speaks.

- And the first thing that's

on her mind is being worried

that her dad might be pissed off

that his Ford LTD is
in a ditch somewhere.

Her survival astounds

the scientific community.

- Jean Hilliard comes
back from the precipice,

from the edge of
freezing to death,

and because of her,

medical professionals now state

that they will not
pronounce anyone dead

until they are warm and dead,

that as long as the body is
frozen, there is still hope.

- Six hours and frozen stiff,
impressive for a human,

but that's nothing
for one strange animal

recently unearthed
in the Arctic.

- Researchers are out
collecting samples

in the Siberian Permafrost

and they find a little
tiny frozen creature.

But even though it's
microscopic, it's very complex.

It has a brain, it
has a reproductive system,

it has a gut.

It is
the bdelloid rotifer,

and the one scientists
discover reveals

an unbelievable
survival mechanism.

- These kinds of rotifers
have the ability to survive

for very long periods of
time in a dormant state,

but this one breaks
all the records.

The scientists carbonate this
particular bdelloid rotifer

and find that it is
24,000 years old.

Most astonishing
of all, it's not dead.

It's resting, and scientists
are able to wake it up.

- Once they're discovered

and brought out of that
freezing condition,

all you have to do is add water.

And in a few hours, these
things start moving again.

- This bdelloid rotifer
was alive during the age

of wooly mammoths and
saber tooth tigers.

- No one really understands
how they do this.

It is crazy, but
possibly someday

when this is better understood,

this can be applied
to humans as well.

This begs the question,

could there be other
mysterious creatures living

in the permafrost, waiting
to come back to life?

- Permafrost is
the perfect place

to preserve ancient viruses.

- In fact, the melting of the
permafrost has been linked

to anthrax outbreaks in
reindeer populations in Siberia.

The permafrost is melting,

and that permafrost
contains zombie viruses

that have been dormant for ages

and could potentially pose
a serious risk to humans.

- Now, that's scary
to think about,

but if these stories have
anything to teach us,

it's that humans and non-humans

can survive seemingly
impossible circumstances,

no matter how unbelievable
they may seem.