5 Insane Falls You Won't Believe People Survived

Well ... that wasn't what we were expecting. That surprisingly not-mutilated-beyond-recognition woman is South African Christine McKenzie. She was a veteran skydiver who was on her 112th jump when everything that could possibly go wrong did, save for maybe getting sucked into the jet engine of a passing airliner.

As she was whipping through the air from a height of 11,000 feet, she pulled her ripcord to open the parachute. To her horror, the main chute failed. But, hey, any skydiver knows that's a possibility. That's why you have a reserve chute for backup. So, she released it, and yep, it too failed.

At that point, the sight of the power lines rushing up toward her had to have seemed like part of a cruel prank intended to kill her in the most cartoonish way possible. Yet it was the lines that saved her life. They broke her fall (without electrocuting her in the process) enough that she found herself still alive after flopping to the ground below.

As her jump buddies landed and made their way to her crash site, they feared they would be scraping her charred pancake of a body off the ground. Instead, they were shocked to discover her talking and complaining about her broken bones. She was even cracking jokes while waiting for the rescue helicopter to the hospital. Incredibly, McKenzie suffered only mild bruises and a cracked pelvis.

And speaking of people who should not be alive after encounters with power lines ...

So, as the unidentified man jumped from the top of the 400-foot-tall tower, his friend filming it for future YouTubing, one immediately notices that his parachute is taking a really long time to open.

Yeah, he just straight up hit the ground at full speed. Again: This is from 400 feet. That's 100 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty.

Somehow, this gentleman only broke his vertebrae, pelvis and legs, and didn't shatter into a million Russian base jumper pieces. How? The snow, apparently, was enough to cushion him (you can see the crater he created above). Well, hell, if that's all it takes, why bother with a chute at all? You're not getting soft on us, are you, Russia?

During World War II, Air Force Sergeant Alan Magee flew in the B-17 Flying Fortress that ran missions under the call sign "Snap! Crackle! Pop!" That name turned out to be a bit of ominous foreshadowing. One day when the apparently cereal-hungry sergeant was doing bombing runs over Saint-Nazaire, France, one wing of his plane started making all three of those sounds.

That's because a German fighter had managed to get close enough to shoot the wing off of "Snap! Crackle! Pop!" and in the process, also shot Magee in the arm. Even though the plane was in a deadly spin from that whole lack of a wing thing, Magee was able to escape via a swift eject. However, while descending to earth, he discovered that he was having an even worse day than he thought. His parachute was damaged in the German strafing attack. He was in free fall, and there was no water, snow drifts or bouncy power lines waiting below. Rushing up at him was just a big-ass building.

Fortunately for him, relatively speaking, that building was a local train station that had a huge glass ceiling that he promptly crashed through. Magee was injured, but was somehow still alive when the Germans took him into custody. He spent the rest of the war interned in a POW camp.

For many years, it was rumored that he survived the fall because a bomb exploded directly underneath him and its shock wave slowed his plunge. However, in 2006 MythBusters tested out the theory and declared it BUSTED, and that's good enough for us. It is, after all, one of the few times when busting the myth makes it more amazing: All that saved Magee was a split-second pause in his descent caused by crashing through a pane of glass like a goddamned Hollywood stuntman.

Well, unless you want it to cut you in half like a giant supersonic samurai sword. Judkins looked over his shoulder to see through the giant flames that were quickly engulfing his plane, knowing he'd have to jump out with enough force to clear the 20-foot-tall tail. He threw himself from the plane and sensed that his legs were in fact still attached to his body, allowing a sigh of relief hardly heard as the wind whipped at his face at 15,000 feet.

Thinking he should slow his fall, he pulled at his parachute, only to find, as you can guess, that it didn't deploy correctly. After a few minutes of terrifying struggle to get it to open, all while falling to his almost certain death, he smacked hard into the ocean.

It was then, while in the water, that his parachute finally fully deployed. Naturally, it opened underwater, and the current started to drag him under. With a broken back, ankles and pelvis, and a collapsed lung, plus kidneys and intestines in critical failure, he was somehow able to summon the willpower to cut the cords with a knife he had strapped to his body. He survived with just moments to spare.

With his injuries, swimming was out of the question, but he was able to keep afloat. Rough seas prevented rescue craft from landing, but they were able to drop emergency life rafts, which in his state he was too weak to reach. Finally, a plane was able to drop a raft trailing a 200-foot cord that he was able to grab, pulling the raft to him. Because his limbs basically couldn't function anymore, though, the best he could do was manage to get a good grip on the side of the raft as he waited two and half hours before a ship could come get him.

But survive he did, as the newspaper headline says. In fact, the first link in this entry is to an interview with Judkins that took place almost 50 years later.

Yes, it helped that he was flying over that ice-encrusted, snow-blanketed winter wonderland known as the Soviet Union, and he smacked down on an angled, snow-covered slope. But being unconscious actually helps people survive free falls, as the body is relaxed when it hits the ground (you can enjoy the same benefits by being "drunk, on drugs, suicidal or crazy, according to top experts in the field"). Nearby Soviet ground forces rushed to pick up what was left of him and were shocked to find Chisov injured but still alive. In three months he was back in the air.

Then, during the same war, a British pilot named Nicholas Alkemade went through an arguably more impressive version of the same thing. German fighters turned his bomber into a flaming inferno, and the fire destroyed his parachute. He realized that he faced either jumping into the black void or burning to death in his flying metal coffin. Picking door number 1, Alkemade did a backward somersault out of his cockpit and, of course, promptly passed out due to immediate lack of oxygen. He never got the chance to pull his ripcord.

There was no gentle slope waiting for him below, but there was a forest full of pine trees. Instead of getting impaled on a tree limb, he passed through layers of branches that slapped him all the way down, slowing his fall bit by bit. Once he made it all the way through the trees, he landed in a huge snowdrift that cushioned his fall further.

Alkemade awoke in the snow and discovered that his injuries were nothing more than a cut over his eye and a sprained ankle. The Germans quickly captured him, but became suspicious when they heard his story, thinking that they were really in custody of an Allied spy. After all, what kind of superman can fall from the sky and survive without even deploying his parachute?

Further Nazi investigation discovered his plane and confirmed his story. The Germans were so impressed that Alkemade had jumped without his chute that they gave him a certificate, and he became something of a celebrity while living out the war in a POW camp.

Eric Yosomono writes for GaijinAss.com and has a Facebook page here. Show him some love and LIKE him!

For more amazing tales of survival, check out The 6 Most Insane True Tales of Survival and The 5 Most Badass Tales of Wartime Survival.