Original subtitles

[mysterious music]

We've featured some of the wildest

life-and-death stories ever told,

but these, the most outlandish of them all,

like a frequent flyer whose trip took a serious detour.

- 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.

- Or a high-stakes showdown in midair.

- They're going to shoot at each other in hot air balloons

over the city.

- It's pretty much guaranteed that at least one of them,

probably both of them, are going to die.

[gun blasts]

- How about the one where a beloved pet

becomes a deadly projectile?

- The dog is getting closer and closer to this balcony.

- It falls the 13 floors.

[claps] [horn honks]

- These are the most shocking dances with death.

So strange, they are truly unbelievable.

[dramatic music]

In the early 1900s,

one man sets out to change the future of flight

and ends up forever leaving his mark on aviation history.

[tense music]

- Franz Reichelt is an Austrian tailor living in Paris.

He makes dresses for a living,

but his real passion is this new, budding field of flying.

- In 1903, the Wright brothers

take their first heavier-than-air powered flight,

and everyone is aviation crazy, especially the French,

'cause the French also invented the hot air balloon.

- [Kavitha] In 1910, flying is extremely dangerous.

He sees all of these pilots dying in these test flights,

so he wants to do something to help out.

And up until this time, parachuting technology

has really only been used for jumping out of balloons

and very high altitudes.

So there's this push to find new parachute technology,

much lighter weight, for pilots themselves

to be able to jump out at lower altitudes

when they're taking these test flights around the country.

- [Dan] Coincidentally, a French aviation organization

offers a hefty prize

to anyone who can create a smaller chute.

- So, Franz decides to enter this contest

and take his expertise as a tailor, using silk and rods,

and he ends up developing a wingsuit.

- It looks like a Batman suit.

It looks like something out of a futuristic superhero movie.

- [Dan] More peculiar than his design

is his method for testing it.

He puts it on a dummy and tosses it from the window

of his fifth-floor Paris apartment.

Unsatisfied with the results, Franz decides

there's only one way to truly know if it works.

[tense music]

- [Kavitha] He puts on his own wingsuit

and climbs out of his fifth-floor window,

and he breaks his leg.

- But Franz is onto something.

He goes, "Ah-ha-ha-ha,

I didn't give my wingsuit enough time

to gather enough air to create resistance.

I need to go higher."

Luckily, he's in Paris, and at this point in time,

the tallest structure on Earth is the Eiffel Tower.

- He starts petitioning the Paris police to allow him

to throw winged dummies off of the Eiffel Tower

as part of a test for his new suit.

- [Dan] Surprisingly, not only do the French authorities

grant permission, but it becomes big news.

- Franz is so excited to show the world this wingsuit.

He puts out a press release that he has found the solution

of aviation safety.

- [Dan] On the cold morning of February 4th, 1912,

Franz arrives at the Eiffel Tower, sans dummy.

- It's Franz himself, dressed in his wingsuit.

Everyone goes, "Where's the dummy?"

and he goes, "There is no dummy."

- [Dan] From this moment on, Franz Reichelt becomes known as

"The Flying Tailor".

- His friends are pleading with him,

"You're not gonna do this, are you?

You're not gonna actually do this yourself?"

But Franz is convinced the suit will work,

and he's gonna prove it.

- [Austin] Franz is leaning forward on the edge

of the parapet of the Eiffel Tower.

- [Kavitha] He hesitates for about 40 seconds.

He seems to actually have second thoughts

for the first time in this story.

But then Franz sees the crowd below him,

and he waves and he says, "A bientot,"

which means, "I'll see you soon."

And then he jumps.

[uneasy music]

- [Dan] The parachute never fully opens.

Two seconds after jumping, Franz hits the ground and dies,

leaving a six-inch-deep,

Franz-shaped imprint in the ground.

- [Yohuru] This is the genius of madness.

When it works, we celebrate those people

who are willing to push through as heroes,

and when it fails, it's very easy to dismiss them

as being crazy.

- [Dan] While Franz Reichelt's leap ends in tragedy,

60 years later, another fall makes history

with a far more surprising outcome.

[airplane engines roaring]

- 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 duties at 33,000 feet.

The next minute, a bomb goes off.

[explosion blasts]

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.

- [Dan] 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.

- [Dan] 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.

- [Dan] And there is another reason

why Vesna should not be on this specific flight.

It's supposed to be her day off.

- 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.

- [Jason] When the bomb goes off,

[explosion blasts]

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.

- [Dan] It may be the first time that airplane food

saves someone's life,

but the unlikely circumstances continue.

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

[air whooshing]

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.

- [Dan] Then, another unbelievable coincidence.

- [Adam] 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.

[dramatic music]

- [Chris] 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.

- [Adam] 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.

- [Dan] 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.

- [Jason] 10 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.

- Vesna's plunge lands her in the history books

with a world record no one is in a hurry to break.

- Of all the dangers you might watch out for

on a quiet walk, this one isn't on anyone's list.

Our tale begins, fittingly,

high up on an apartment building's unluckiest floor.

[mysterious music]

- In Buenos Aires in 1988,

the Montoya family has this apartment on the 13th floor.

Their son is playing with the pet poodle, Cachi.

- And the son throws the ball

towards the open door to the balcony,

and the dog goes bounding after it.

- As it is getting closer and closer to this balcony,

the dog tries to stop.

The dog does not.

- Cachi falls the 13 floors,

which is heartbreaking if you are an animal lover.

- [Matthew] At that very moment,

a 75-year-old woman named Marta Espina,

she's walking around her neighborhood

doing some shopping, and then all of a sudden...

- [claps] Cachi falls directly onto the head of Marta.

They both die.

- [Matthew] The impact constitutes, essentially,

a blunt-force trauma to the head.

[siren wailing]

- [Dan] But the tragic chain of events doesn't end here.

- [Holly] Another woman named Edith is across the street,

happens to see this.

Immediately, her good Samaritan intent kicks in.

She jumps up to run across the street

to check on this woman.

- [Sami] And she...

[horn honks] [tires screeching]

[claps] Gets hit by a bus.

So now you have Cachi the poodle, you have Marta,

you have Edith.

- [Holly] There is a third person, a man who apparently

has just come out the pharmacy with his prescription,

sees all of this play out.

- It's too much for him to take.

He has a heart attack, and he dies there on the spot.

The fourth casualty of Cachi the poodle's game of fetch.

[pensive music]

- The odds of death by poodle are pretty slim,

but nothing like what Shenandoah National Park Ranger

Roy Sullivan is up against.

It all starts during a thunderstorm in 1942.

As Roy takes shelter in a fire tower,

it's hit by lightning.

[thunder crashing]

- And after eight lightning strikes on that tower,

it's now ablaze, and Roy has to escape.

Well, on his way down the tower,

[thunder crashing]

he's struck.

It burns through his shoe, yanks off his toenail,

but he lives through it.

- When you are struck by lightning,

[thunder crashes]

an extremely large amount of electrical current

flows through your body, to the ground.

This is potentially lethal for most people.

- [Dan] The odds of being struck by lightning

are just one in 15,300, pretty low.

But Ranger Roy is about to defy those odds,

again.

[dramatic music]

- He is driving his pickup truck during an electrical storm,

and a tree adjoining his truck is struck.

[thunder crashing]

The lightning rebounds into the cab of his truck,

setting his eyebrows and hair afire.

- [James] But twice is apparently not enough for Roy.

[thunder crashing]

The third time, lightning bounces off of a transformer

and strikes him, but this time it leaves its mark.

It's a Lichtenberg figure, so-called, across his back

in the shape of a lightning bolt.

- [Dan] Roy is now tied with a man named Walter Summerford

as the only known people who have been struck by lightning

three times, for at least two years.

That is, until...

- [James] Roy's struck again!

Fourth time.

This time, it sets his hair on fire,

and he's got to put that out.

He takes a wet cloth, pats it on his head,

and puts his hair out.

- So now Roy,

the most-struck-by-lightning man on Earth,

travels everywhere with a can of water at the ready

just in case he is struck and set upon fire again.

- [Dan] Unfortunately, that can of water

is going to come in handy.

- He's driving down a mountain road.

He sees evidence of a lightning storm on the horizon.

[thunder crashing]

He flees in the other direction.

- He starts driving away as quickly as possible,

can of water at the ready,

appearing to be at a safe distance from the ominous cloud

that he feels is following.

He emerges from his pickup truck,

only to be struck again.

Hair on fire, eyebrows on fire, can of water over the head.

Roy was prepared this time.

- It's the same show all over and over again.

[thunder rumbling]

- [Dan] Incredibly, Roy is struck two more times,

the last after he leaves what already was for him

a dangerous job.

- When Roy finally retires from the park service,

his seventh and final time happens while he is at leisure.

[thunder crashing]

He gets struck while fishing.

- Roy, in short, is a miracle man.

The chance of being struck by lightning

seven different times is one out of 10

to the 28th power.

The chances of being struck and surviving seven times

put the odds even further off the margins.

And it would be considered impossible

but for the fact that it happens to Roy Sullivan.

- [Dan] Even his own wife isn't safe around him.

- It's no surprise that his wife would be dismayed

because when she's hanging clothes one day,

when he's 100-some feet away,

[thunder rumbling]

she herself gets struck by lightning.

[thunder crashing] [wife shouts]

- [Dan] Surprisingly, she doesn't file for divorce.

- The way Roy chooses to deal with this

attraction that he has for things that kill anybody else,

is he decides to own it.

He becomes the Guinness World Record holder

for the number of lightning strikes

that someone can live through.

He gives lectures.

He has the artifacts from when he's been struck.

He essentially becomes the human lightning rod for real.

- His superhuman ability is that he shows us

that the word "impossible"

should be used very sparingly, if at all.

- Turns out lightning does strike twice.

And in Roy's case, five more times after that.

- St. Petersburg, Florida, 1951,

a widow named Mary Reeser is having dinner with her son.

She then tells him it's time for a nap.

What happens next is, well, unbelievable.

[mysterious music]

- Mary Reeser gets home one night to her apartment,

plops down in her overstuffed upholstered easy chair,

pops a couple of sedatives

'cause she's trying to get some rest,

passes out, and goes to sleep.

- 8:00 a.m. the next morning, her landlord, Pansy Carpenter,

smells some smoke.

So she goes, and she touches the doorknob,

and it's too hot to touch.

So she fears, rightfully so, that there's a fire inside.

[knocking]

- The police department is immediately called,

and they show up, and when they open the door,

they see something that they've never seen before.

[tense music]

- Very little is left of the chair,

just some springs and some debris.

There's a pile of ash where Mary was sitting.

One of her feet is completely intact, still in the slipper.

- Stranger still,

nothing else in the apartment has caught fire.

A pile of newspapers, feet away, completely untouched.

Light switches on the wall are melted,

but the outlets on the bottom are still operational

and perfectly intact.

- [Victor] The pictures are on the walls.

The floor, perfectly fine.

The ceiling, no smoke damage.

And yet, Mary Reeser, burned to a crisp, gone.

- [Dan] So what caused Mary Reeser to suddenly go poof?

- For a human body to be fully cremated,

you have to be in a fire that is upwards of 3,000 degrees

for upwards of three hours.

Perhaps she lit a cigarette,

the cigarette lit her clothes on fire, and she burned.

Yet somehow, fire didn't spread to any other apartment.

No one smelled smoke, saw smoke.

- There's just no way that any household fire

would be able to consume a human being that way.

- [Dan] Even more bizarre, Mary's skull is found,

but it's mysteriously smaller.

- In a normal cremation setting,

the human skull is going to crack.

- In her case, the skull shrinks down

to the size of a baseball.

- Now, doesn't that sound suspicious?

- The authorities begin to wonder,

is there some Soviet weapon at play?

So the FBI begins investigating this.

- [Dan] It's so perplexing,

it makes it all the way up to Director J. Edgar Hoover.

- [Matthew] He looks at this case,

and he's so concerned that he actually lets the president,

Harry S. Truman, know about this case going on in Florida.

He employs his top forensic anthropologist at the time,

Wilton Krogman.

- [Dan] Wilton Krogman is a pioneer in the forensics field

and the most qualified man in the country to solve the case.

- He shows up to the scene,

and he has no idea what's going on.

How does a skull shrink in a fire?

That's not a thing that's supposed to happen.

- [Dan] Desperate, the FBI entertains a number

of strange possibilities.

[tense music]

- Now, a lot of people speculate foul play

and that someone had come in and doused Mary

with kerosene and set her alight.

- All the associated things that you would have

inside of an arson case with an accelerant,

all the samples that were collected

and sent to the laboratory,

none of it comes back with any sort of traces

of accelerant in it.

- The next theory the FBI investigates

comes from an anonymous tip.

- An anonymous person calls up

and says that a fireball came in through the window,

lights Mary on fire.

[explosion blasts]

- Gave an official statement, said, "I seen it.

A fireball came in her window and hit it."

[tense music]

Generally speaking, fireballs don't fly through windows.

- What it could be is another unexplained phenomenon

of ball lightning, which is controversial.

It may or may not exist.

I mean, how much credence do we put into anonymous tips?

I mean, right there, we think it's a little bit of BS.

- [Dan] Is it possible the most likely explanation

is also the most unbelievable:

spontaneous human combustion?

- Spontaneous human combustion is an idea that someone

just, all of a sudden, bursts into flames,

and it only impacts the individual,

and it doesn't impact anything else.

- Spontaneous combustion does happen in nature.

With hay bales, you have wet and dry hay.

The wet hay's still alive,

going through its respiration process,

taking in carbon dioxide, pumping out oxygen,

and this creates heat.

So you'll have hay bales that just spontaneously combust.

[flames whooshing]

- [Dan] The question is, could this also happen to humans?

Shockingly, there have been roughly 200 recorded cases

of spontaneous human combustion in history.

- In 1470, there is an Italian knight in Milan

who, after a night of drinking, according to witnesses,

begins to actually belch up flame.

And finally, his entire body combusts,

seemingly from within.

- [Dan] But in Mary's case,

the FBI is unwilling to list spontaneous human combustion

as the official cause of death.

What they come up with isn't any less strange.

- So, the belief is that Mary succumbed

to something known as the wick effect.

In essence, the body is an inside-out candle.

The clothing is the wick that catches flame,

but the combustible hydrocarbons found in human fat

literally served to fuel the fire.

- Because she's an overweight woman that was also a smoker,

the FBI suggests that the cigarette burns her nightgown,

which causes her to go up in flame.

Because she's a heavier woman, that leads to the fire

continuing to burn for a longer period of time.

- [Dan] Not everyone accepts this answer.

- There are lots of problems with this theory.

The first of which is that millions of people

fall asleep with lit cigarettes,

and they don't usually end up cremated.

- So people are thinking,

"Why would you not wake up if you are currently on fire?"

- Even with sedatives, there's still a great likelihood

that a person would start thrashing around.

Spontaneous human combustion,

it's the last place investigators want to go,

but sometimes they're forced to go there

in the absence of any other explanations.

- I think it's a damn strange world. [laughs]

I never take anything off the table

until we're absolutely certain.

[intense music]

- The forensic anthropologist hired by the FBI

has this to say: "Were I living in the Middle Ages,

I'd mutter something about black magic."

- Some leaders face war, famine, or political unrest.

For one 16th-century Austrian mayor,

the real threat is right under his nose.

[pensive music]

- It's the 16th century, and Hans Steininger

is the immensely popular mayor of Braunau am Inn.

Everyone loves him.

He's elected for six consecutive terms,

but that's not what he's famous for.

- Hans is a sight to see.

He has a beard that's 4 1/2 feet long.

Now, when it gets to the end, it forks.

It's so long, it reaches all the way to his feet.

- [Dan] Mayor Hans even has his suits custom-made

to keep his beard neatly rolled up

and tucked into his breast pocket.

Braunau am Inn flourishes under his leadership for decades,

until one day, when things get a little hairy.

- [Hakeem] September 28th, 1576, all mayhem breaks out.

The town of Braunau am Inn catches fire.

It's 1576.

There's no such thing as a fire engine yet.

There's no such thing as a fire department.

Now, the mayor has an emergency that he has to handle.

- Atop a really long staircase, Hans surveys the scene,

and he just sees his entire town in flames.

So, to go save the town and direct the rescue efforts,

he takes off running straight down the stairs.

However, in his haste,

he forgets to tuck his beard into his little beard pocket.

- [Hakeem] Almost immediately, his 4 1/2-foot beard

tangles up in his feet,

and he's just tumbling down these concrete stairs.

- [Austin] Tip over top, over tip, over top,

into the town square.

- [Dan] By the time he reaches the bottom,

his neck is broken.

- This is probably the first time

in the history of the world

a mayor has been killed by his own beard.

- [Dan] But the people of Braunau am Inn

find an unbelievable way to honor the mayor's legacy.

- Hans may have been lost that day, but not his beard.

His beard is snipped off before he's buried

and is kept by his family

and passed down from generation to generation

until finally, in the 20th century, 1919,

the beard is bequeathed to the city.

- And to this day, it is in a 4 1/2-foot-long glass box,

embalmed for everyone to remember Mayor Hans Steininger.

- A beard may have brought one man down,

but centuries later, another man takes a much sharper blow.

[tense music]

- Phineas Gage is a 25-year-old railroad worker

in the town of Cavendish, Vermont.

- Phineas is a professional, hardworking, brilliant citizen.

- His specialty is explosives.

'Cause they need to lay down railroad track,

you have to blow up a lot of rock,

and so he's the guy that sets the charge.

- [Mitch] As part of Phineas's job,

he has a 3 1/2-foot iron bar

that he uses to tamp down the gunpowder.

[hammer tapping]

- [Austin] But it's very, very, very dangerous work

because it's black powder,

and black powder can go off like that. [snaps]

[tense music]

- He strikes the rock just so with his rod, creates a spark.

[explosion blasts] [debris clattering]

- That tamping iron essentially became the bullet.

[tense music]

- [Edward] It shoots upward, and it goes right into his cheek,

[Phineas yells]

passes behind his left eye, and then out the top of his head

through the frontal left lobe.

It flies 80 feet away from the explosion.

[metal clinking]

- Everyone is absolutely certain the man is dead.

To the shock of his crewmates, he stands up,

starts walking around, asking what happened.

He doesn't seem particularly alarmed.

Because the tapered end of the bar exits his skull,

he is spared greater brain damage

than he otherwise would've suffered.

- [Dan] Doctors manage to stop the bleeding,

but they wonder, what are the long-term consequences?

- Phineas was known as an easygoing,

likable guy before his injury.

The person who returns to the railroad crew

is argumentative, abrasive.

- He's irritable, short-tempered, impulsive,

and he's kind of a jerk to everybody around him.

- He's prone to alcoholism and violence,

and we could say definitively, these are two different people.

- Gage becomes kind of a medical curiosity,

and people are wondering how then on Earth he survives,

and also, what is it that has changed his personality?

And it's really, in some ways, the beginning of neuroscience.

- The way the rod goes through his brain,

it pierces an area of the brain

that controls emotional responses.

- [Brian] The frontal lobes.

Frontal lobes are really super important

for behavioral control.

When Phineas severely damages his frontal lobes,

it's like a brake has been taken off of

his behavioral regulator.

And it is not uncommon with patients

that have frontal lobe damage that they act impulsively.

They can act aggressively.

- Prior to this, people thought personality

was sort of like an extension of your soul.

It was some sort of ethereal part of you

that, you know, you had to work on all the time,

as opposed to something that literally came out of synapses

and cells and things in your brain.

- What I find fascinating about the Phineas Gage case

is that 175 years later,

scientists are still studying his case.

He is that important in the history

of our understanding of the human brain.

- [Dan] What eventually becomes of Phineas Gage?

- Because of the changing character

that transpires in Phineas,

he can no longer get along on crew work,

and he actually finds work driving a stagecoach

in South America, in the nation of Chile.

- Phineas Gage continues to turn heads to this day.

His skull and the iron bar that passed through it

are on permanent display

at the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University.

- We're all familiar with the old saying,

"Pride goeth before a fall."

But in the case of one very confident safety expert,

this expression becomes quite literally true.

[pensive music]

- Garry Hoy is a highly regarded Toronto lawyer

who specializes in building safety and compliance.

On top of that, he also has a degree in engineering.

This is a guy that absolutely loves his job.

- July 9th, 1993, and Garry Hoy

is there at the Dominion Tower skyscraper in Toronto

for an office party.

It's a welcome party for young, college soon-to-be grads

applying for apprenticeships at his law firm.

- [Sami] Because he is so passionate about building safety

and about engineering structures,

he wants to showcase the resilience

of the windows of the building.

- His offices are the 24th floor,

and he decides to show them his party trick.

[suspenseful music]

- So he tells everybody to step back,

and they give him room.

He backs up and starts running.

- [Sami] He launches himself at this window.

- And he bounces right off of it,

and he says to everyone, to a round of applause,

cheers, and laughs, "Look how strong that glass is."

- Feeling the high of the crowd's reception

to his party trick, he goes, "I'm gonna do it again."

- [Dan] Garry backs up, and he sprints at full speed

towards the shatterproof window, 24 stories above Toronto.

[window thuds]

- [Chris] The window doesn't shatter.

- However, the glass and its entire frame

separate from the side of the skyscraper.

And now, Garry, to his surprise, is riding

a full, intact pane of skyscraper glass

down to the ground of Toronto.

- [Holly] Unfortunately, he's killed.

But he's right!

His windows are actually as resilient as he always claimed.

He just isn't taking into account the frame,

which is the failure point,

and that was the ultimate demise.

- [Dan] Garry proved that showing off

can have deadly consequences.

But our next story takes that idea even higher,

as two men in 19th-century Paris risk everything for love.

[tense music]

- So we're in Napoleonic France, 1808, in Paris.

We have a famous dancer at an opera house.

A gorgeous lady, Mademoiselle Tirevit,

and two gentlemen are desperately in love with her.

- So one guy, Monsieur Grandpre,

decides to get her an apartment in the city

so that he can visit her there.

But this plan backfires when he realizes

that he's not the only gentleman caller visiting her.

There's a second man named Monsieur Le Pique.

So Monsieur Grandpre challenges Monsieur Le Pique to a duel,

a real, to-the-death duel.

- [Dan] But this isn't going to be a regular duel.

No, they plan something much bigger,

something much more chic.

- They're going to shoot at each other

in hot air balloons over the city.

- [Dan] And not just at each other.

The goal of this high-stakes game

is to shoot down the opponent's balloon.

- So this dancer must be very special

because it's pretty much guaranteed

that at least one of them, probably both of them,

are going to die.

- They schedule this hot air balloon duel for a month out,

and you would think, having a month to reflect on this plan,

somebody would've come to their senses.

- [Greg] But no one's head cools down.

No one thinks to themselves, "Maybe this isn't a great idea."

No, they all go forward with it.

- [Dan] On May 3rd, 1808, it's showtime.

As the crowd gathers in the Tuileries Gardens

just next to the Louvre Museum,

most people think they're watching a simple balloon race

until they see the guns.

- [Kavitha] And this isn't even the strangest

part of this story yet.

Dueling, it's common practice to have a second man with you.

But in this case, you need to find

someone who is such a good friend

that they're willing to get

into this hot air balloon with you,

knowing that they will likely also die.

So that's gotta be a really strong friendship.

- [Dan] As the balloons lift off,

the mostly unsuspecting crowd begins to cheer.

[uneasy music]

Now nearly 2,000 feet above the city of lovers,

the duel begins.

But first, they must follow the code duello.

- This isn't like a Western;

you don't have two guys standing there,

both ready to draw, and they do what they want.

The code duello sets very specific rules

for how a duel is conducted.

- The most important part of this code to note

is that the man who accepts the challenge

gets to shoot first.

So in this case, because Grandpre

extended the challenge to Le Pique,

Le Pique gets the first shot.

- He doesn't have to hit Grandpre;

he only has to hit this large, floating balloon.

[gun blasts]

- But Le Pique, who had a month to practice this,

totally misses.

- That now gives Grandpre the opportunity to fire his shot,

while Le Pique has to just stand there in his little basket

and pray that his opponent is as bad a shot as him.

[tense music] [gun blasts]

His shot rings true,

it blasts a hole through the hot air balloon.

The balloon deflates, just as you can imagine.

Le Pique and his second both fall like rocks from the sky,

and are dead.

- There's a certain romance in dying for love

by bullet in a hot air balloon.

But being the unlucky friend along for the ride,

not quite as poetic.

- Swimming alone in the middle of the ocean

can be a risky endeavor, as one man

in the early 1960s can certainly attest to.

[tense music]

- By 22 years old, Australian Rodney Fox

is already a spearfishing legend.

In 1963, he's determined to hold onto his local title.

- He is free diving without a tank, taking deep breaths,

and combing the reefs off of Aldinga Beach

in search of exotic fish.

- [Dan] What Rodney doesn't realize

is that he is also being hunted.

[Rodney screams] [water splashing]

- [Edward] Suddenly, he's slammed from the side.

His spear gun is knocked from his hand.

His mask is torn from his face.

His first thought is that he's been struck by a submarine.

- Rodney isn't sure what's happening,

but what he does know is that he's moving through the water

faster than he's ever moved in his life.

Rodney feels an intense pressure

from his hip to above his shoulder,

and all the air just suddenly expelled from his lungs.

Then very quickly, he realizes

that he's in the mouth of a great white shark.

[dramatic music]

- [Edward] He's weakened by the loss of blood

and also the lack of air.

So he reaches for his diver's knife

and begins jabbing the shark near his eyes, near his gills.

Incredibly, he actually feels the shark letting him go.

- [Dan] Most would try to flee from the shark,

but quick-thinking Rodney goes on the offensive.

- [Thor] Rodney rushes toward the shark and bear hugs it,

wrapping his bloody arms around its great, sandpaper-y belly.

This is similar to a tactic used by seals.

When they're attacked by great white sharks,

they crowd close to its midsection

to stay away from its deadly jaws.

- Now the shark wants to get rid of Rodney,

so it shakes him off.

And once free, Rodney is going for the surface.

- He looks down as he's kicking his way to the surface,

and through the bloody murk of the water,

he can see the shark is coming at him.

- The shark goes in for another bite.

But to Rodney's surprise, the shark doesn't bite him.

It goes for the bag of fish that he has speared.

- [Dan] This may sound like a lucky break,

but the bag of fish is still attached to him.

- [Thor] So when the shark takes off,

Rodney is dragged by the bag

back down toward the ocean floor.

By some last-minute miracle, the line snaps on its own,

and Rodney is free to swim toward the surface.

[Rodney gasps]

- Rodney breaks the surface and begins to gulp air,

and he sees that a boat is bearing down on him.

And it turns out that the blood that is pouring out of Rodney

has created essentially a dye marker to locate him.

- [Dan] As Rodney is pulled onto the boat,

the only thing holding him together is his wetsuit.

- He is in terrible condition.

There's this giant bite mark going from his shoulder

all the way down to his hip, and his organs are hanging out.

Every rib on the left side of his body is cracked,

and his lung is punctured.

- It takes almost 500 stitches

to put Rodney back together again.

But he survives

and fights his way back to a full recovery.

- [Edward] Rodney's massive scar

becomes the stuff of spearfishing legend.

Some say the encounter inspired Peter Benchley

when he was writing the book "Jaws."

- 2,000 years before Rodney's unbelievable encounter,

another man is attacked by an animal,

not exactly known for its predatory instincts.

[tense music]

- Aeschylus is a famous Greek playwright.

He is the Shakespeare of ancient Greek tragedies.

He restructures how Greek plays work,

and he makes them more fun and more interesting.

He wins awards and contests all the time.

He is prolific and an absolute genius.

- [Dan] But one sunny afternoon,

something happens that seems like the plot

in one of his own stories.

- So one day, Aeschylus is in the southern coast of Sicily

in a town called Gela, sitting on a rock

gazing upon the ocean,

when all of a sudden a really hard object

hits him on the head.

- It turns out that there's a hungry eagle

that has been fortunate enough

to obtain a nice-sized tortoise, and it's flying about

because it wants to find a nice big rock

so that it can drop it

and have the tortoise shell crack open, and it can feast.

Unfortunately for him, our playwright Aeschylus

suffers from male-pattern baldness.

So from the sky, from the eagle's perspective,

his nice shiny scalp appears to be the perfect rock.

- Aeschylus goes down in history,

not only as the father of tragedies,

but also as the only human being

known to have died from falling tortoise.

[mysterious music]

- Whether it's dog falls, free falls, or freak accidents,

they all have one thing in common:

they're the very best life-or-death stories

ever told on "The UnBelievable".