On Christmas Eve, 1971, a seventeen-year-old girl fell roughly three kilometres into the Peruvian Amazon, still strapped to a row of airline seats. Juliane Koepcke was the only survivor of LANSA Flight 508, an airliner that broke apart during a thunderstorm. Injured and alone, she spent roughly ten days following rivers through the rainforest. Her escape can be explained by knowledge and determination. But how she survived the fall itself remains an open question. ─────────────────────────────── **IN THIS EPISODE** — The Christmas Eve flight that ended in disaster over Peru — Ten days alone in the Amazon, following water to safety — How aircraft seats and a rainforest canopy might have softened a three-kilometre fall — The physics of survival, and what the evidence cannot establish **SOURCES** — Juliane Koepcke, *When I Fell from the Sky* (2011) — BBC Outlook, interview with Juliane Koepcke (2012) — Werner Herzog, *Wings of Hope* (1998) ─────────────────────────────── Narration in this episode is AI-assisted. Research, writing, and editorial decisions are human. Reality Is Strange — real phenomena, verified, and stranger than they should be.

How Did Juliane Koepcke Survive a 3-Kilometre Fall?

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