On Christmas Eve nineteen seventy-one, seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke was the sole survivor when LANSA Flight five-oh-eight broke apart in mid-air over the Peruvian Amazon after a lightning strike. She fell nearly ten thousand feet strapped to her seat and landed in the rainforest. Ninety-one other people died. She then spent eleven days alone in the Amazon jungle, following streams downstream, treating her own infected wounds, surviving on what she could find, until loggers discovered her on January third, nineteen seventy-two.

In this episode of 5 Minute Strange, we cover the full eleven days of Juliane Koepcke's survival — the knowledge her biologist parents had given her that kept her alive, the discovery that her mother had also survived the fall but died in the jungle waiting for rescue, and the life Koepcke has lived since, studying the very rainforest that kept her alive. Werner Herzog, who had been booked on the same flight and changed his plans at the last minute, later made a documentary retracing her route.

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