Original subtitles

- 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.

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