1.Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant and the sole survivor of the 1972 crash of JAT Flight 367, holds the Guinness world record for surviving the longest fall (33,000 feet) without a parachute.
2.Dr. Juliane Diller was only 17 when she fell almost two miles into the rainforest following the break-up of the airplane she was traveling in with her mother on Christmas Eve. She was the sole survivor.
3.Salvador Alvarenga, a 36-year-old fisherman, survived 14 months lost at sea and washed ashore nearly 7,000 miles from where he had originally set sail.
4.When Aron Ralston's arm was crushed by a boulder while he was climbing alone in Utah in 2003, he went to extraordinary lengths to free himself.
5.After a plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the frigid and remote Andes mountains, the survivors were forced to make terrible decisions in order to return home.
6.Bahia Bakari is another lone survivor of an airplane crash. She was traveling with her mother to visit family when their plane — Yemenia Flight 626 — crash landed in the Indian Ocean, killing everyone on board but her.
7.When Anatoli Bugorski stuck his head inside the Soviet Union's largest particle accelerator and got struck by a proton beam, his doctors prepared to "observe his death." But he didn't die.
8.Dick Williams was a 21-year-old tennis star with a promising athletic career in front of him when he decided to move to the United States from Switzerland in order to attend Harvard. So...he booked a ticket on the Titanic.
9.In 2014, Peter Siebold somehow survived the disintegration of the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo and a subsequent fall of more than 50,000 feet. His copilot, Michael Alsbury, perished in the accident.
10.Short of death itself, if it was something bad that could happen to a World War II soldier, it happened to Louis Zamperini. His plane crashed into the Pacific, he survived on nearly nothing for 47 grueling days in a life raft, and he was taken as a prisoner of war immediately afterward.
11.Ludger Sylbaris was one of the few survivors of the apocalyptic eruption of Mt. Pelée, a volcano just north of Saint-Pierre in Martinique, because he happened to be in solitary confinement for drunk and disorderly conduct at the time.
12.Harrison Okene, a 29-year-old tugboat cook, survived underwater in a tiny air pocket for almost three days in 2013 after his ship capsized and sank, killing the other 11 crew members.
13.And finally: Alexander Selkirk, the marooned privateer and inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, spent four years and four months alone on a deserted island after he tried and failed to lead a mutiny against a ship's captain he disliked.