The Uruguayan Rugby Aircrash Disaster of 1972 | Episode 94 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
We've done episodes where people have lost their teeth. We've
done episodes where they have them melted out of their
heads or frisbeeed out by debris, or punched out by bulls,
or even blown out of their skulls by lightning. But
we've never done an episode where the most horrifying thing
that happens is you maybe get something stuck in them. Hello,

(00:33):
and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we
are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre,
and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters
from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode,
we'll take off on one of the least enviable flights

(00:55):
in history, which is saying a lot. We'll see just
what stagger ringly awful places hunger can take an underfed mind,
even when the only menu option is freeze dried human buttock,
and will end up on one of the most excruciating
and difficult mountain hikes ever conducted wearing little more than
a tennis outfit. And if you were listening on Patreon,

(01:18):
you would see which popular sport tops the list for
most spinal and testicular injuries, you'd hear every mouth watering
detail of the most filling and calorically dense menu item
to be found anywhere on the planet, and you would
learn how the story of a survivor of a lifeboat
full of man on man noomnom inspired one of the

(01:40):
greatest pieces of American literature ever scribed. This is not
the show you play around kids, or while eating, or
even in mixed company. But as long as you find
yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that
could potentially save your life, our work is done. So
with all that said, shoot kids out of the room,

(02:01):
put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin.
It's been a minute, but I am happy to report
that we are heading back to South America, especially as
summer starts to peter out here in Toronto and the
weather is already becoming colder, wetter, and grayer. There's only

(02:24):
so much cold water swimming I can take, so I
think this trip is a great idea for As you'll remember,
South America sits south of the equator. It's right there
in the name, and September below the equator is the
beginning of spring. You're welcome, So let's review a quick
thing or two before we go. A lot of people

(02:45):
don't think much about the layout here on this side
of the ocean. For example, a lot of people think
that Mexico is part of South America. Around thirteen thousand
to fifteen thousand years ago, when the continent was freshly
coated in new tenants from across the Bearing Strait, where
the early Clovis peoples were trudging through the snow hunting
mammoths and mastodons. Early humans in what would become South

(03:10):
America were coastal fishing and enjoying fruity tropical drinks. If
you asked one hundred people to draw the America's top
to bottom, ninety seven of them are going to draw
them in a vertical line. But if you look on
a map, South America sits way the hell east of
North America like it's gonna chest bump Africa. The continents

(03:30):
barely line up at all, and they've gone by many names.
The Guna people of Panama and Colombia call it Abia Yala,
the land of full maturity. This was back while Europeans
just thought of it as Terra incognita or unknown land.
Columbus and his boys called it Las Indias, convinced that
they were in Asia. I mean, they were a little off,

(03:54):
but they never let that go. Amerigo Vespucci was an
Italian navigator in explorer who argued that Columbus was lazy
and mistaken, and that this new land was a distinct
fourth part of the world alongside Europe, Asia and Africa.
Columbus just said, hey, shut up, a look at the
redskinned people and the boreal forests. But Americo clapped back

(04:22):
with descriptions of the geography and the native peoples. He
even went on to compare star constellations just to say, hey,
you dumb. Bottom line is Columbus got a holiday celebrated
only in one of twenty two countries. It's actually thirty
five if you count the Caribbean as part of the Americas,

(04:43):
which is accurate. Amerigo, on the other hand, got twenty
nine percent of the world's land mass named after him.
The only reason that we don't now call it America
or Amerigo is because they latinized his name. But welcome
to America has a different ring to it. There's a
lot of people who do not realize when you talk

(05:06):
North America, you get Mexico, Canada, and the United States,
but when you visit South America you get a lot
more for your buck. And I tried to make an
acronym to help you remember all the countries in South America,
but the best I could come up with was literally
c see vadge pubes, so I'm just gonna say them instead. Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Diana,

(05:36):
and Surinam. And that acronym gets even messier if you
try lumping Central America in with it. To date, we've
only been to Venezuela, Brazil, and Colombia twice. So far
we've seen people trampled to death by angry bulls, oiled
alive by flaming oil, had cartoonish holes burned through them

(05:56):
through volcanic projectiles, and we even got radiated there this
one time, not lethally, thankfully. It's really hard to rebuild
an audience from scratch after you murder the previous one. Today, though,
we will start our adventure in Uruguay, but by the
time we're done, we're going to spend a little time
in Chile and Argentina too, so that's nice. Before we depart,

(06:21):
I'm going to ask you to pack your favorite Spanish
rugby chant music sheets, a warm sweater, maybe throw some
warm socks into the mix, and maybe fill every pocket
you have with snacks. We are heading to Uruguay. That's
the name that was given to it in the long
long ago by its original Gurani inhabitants. It means the

(06:43):
river of birds or the river of painted birds. They're
not really sure. They call it the land of many things,
the land of mate, the land of asado. Those are
basically a kind of a green tea and barbecue if
you're new, and it's a beauty full place. It's tree
lined mix of Art Deco and colonial cobblestone. Cities are

(07:05):
no slouch, but it's the forest, wildlife and beaches that
really draw the crowds. They call it the land of beaches.
Uruguay is well known for their Atlantic Coast beach resorts
and it's gaucho culture. Gaucho well, it's what Americans would
call cowboy culture. This is a country with a long

(07:26):
history of rural cattle ranching that just became its own lifestyle.
It's a whole thing and like I said, you might
want to load up on the tea and barbecue. You
never know where your next stack might come from. It's
all I'm saying. But the real reason we're here isn't
just a fill up on local fare before we split.
We are here for Rugby to paint a picture of Uruguay.

(07:49):
In the early nineteen seventies, it was a small country,
well not that small, just over two and a half million, so,
I don't know, not too big, not too small. Since
the two thousand, Uruguay's official slogan has been Uruguay Natural,
but back in the nineteen seventies they just said it's
called Uruguay. For the longest time, Uruguay was called the

(08:11):
Switzerland of South America because it was stable, with a
strong middle class and a generous welfare system. But by
the early nineteen seventies that reputation had been chipping away.
Unemployment was up, inflation was up and rising. People found
themselves tightening their belts, which led to political unrest. And
then you had just waiting to complicate matters, these left

(08:34):
wing gorilla groups running around for the people of Montevideo,
that's the capital. The whole situation devolved into a bunch
of kidnappings and robberies and street battles and police and
military all running around. So to say that life there
was a real pill really oversimplifies a complicated situation. But

(08:56):
sports was a pretty good diversion, so hey, what's that
on the other channel? Uruguayans were immensely proud of their
football history. They had two World Cup victories and it's
more than that. Montavideo was the host and winner of
the very first FIFA World Cup back in nineteen thirty

(09:16):
and it was a bit of a weird match. So
Argentina and Uruguay apparently play with different balls. Literally, Argentina
shows up ball, Hey, what's with the medicine balls over here?
We play with a lighter ball. And they couldn't agree
or coin flip or paper rock scissor their way out
of it. So it was decided to play the first

(09:37):
half with Argentina's whiffle ball and the second half with
Uruguay's lead padded exercise ball. Argentina with their pillow ball,
led the first half two to one. After halftime, they
thudded Uruguay's ball onto the field and they hoofed it
three times through that net to win four to two.
Three men were carried off the field in the second

(09:59):
half with foot injuries, and this did something else. It
started the World Cup with a real symbolic show of fairness.
To soccer fans, the World Cup is not just some tournament.
It's the ultimate sporting event and undeniably there is nothing
else in the world of terrestrial athletics that comes close

(10:20):
to it. In twenty twenty six, Jordan and Uzbekistan will
be entering the World Cup for the first time, and
that will mean that since nineteen thirty eighty two countries
from around the world will have competed in this event,
which holds the undivided attention of literal billions. The last
one had about five billion people watching. It pits nations

(10:43):
against each other in a way nothing else in the
world of sports or politics has ever come close to touching.
And then they went ahead and won it again. In
nineteen fifty Brazil was the host nation and they were
heavily favored. They had just destroyed Sweden seven to one
and murdered Spain six to one. The Marikanya was the

(11:06):
brand new megastadium built just for the tournament two hundred
thousand people squished into it, making it the largest crowd
ever for a football match. Now, Brazil still had the
blood of their opponents dripping off their paws, and they
scored just two minutes into the second half, and they
were in high spirits until Uruguay came back and bagged

(11:28):
one twenty minutes later. That was okay, though, because of
the way it works, even if the match tied, Although
Uruguay World Cup t shirts and merch were going into
a landfill, Brazil needed to tie, where Uruguay needed an
outright win to win the World Cup. Then in the
seventy ninth minute, they got it, and the stadium was stunned. Stupid.

(11:51):
Brazil's shoes were still bloody from jumping up and down
in victory on the bodies of the last team that
they played, and officials had already etched Bras into the
side of the cup. It's like the prey just leapt
up and crane kicked the predator in the face. And
it wasn't just Brazil, it was the whole world that
collectively spit out their beer at the same time. To

(12:11):
this day, the nineteen fifty World Cup remains one of
the great upsets in the history of sports, and the
event became known as the Mara canazo. It means the
stab wound. Anyways, this is not turning into a sports podcast,
or maybe it is. We've done sports related disasters before
and today our pastime of choice will be rugby. Like

(12:34):
we said, most people don't know that much about rugby.
Story has it they were playing a game of soccer
in Warwickshire in eighteen twenty three when one of the
players just picked up the ball and ran with it.
Bom rugby and British immigrants brought it to Uruguay in
the late eighteen hundreds. Rugby is like soccer, but tackling

(12:54):
is allowed, and there's no pads or helmets or breaks,
and for the most part, it's say wee weird and
brutal and endless dog pile of men spiking their blood
pressure fighting for possession of a ball. If soccer is
the beautiful game, rugby is an endurance contest with risk
of injury. They call it a hooligan's game that's played

(13:15):
by gentlemen. Rugby has a dedicated following centered on school
based clubs. We'll be following the Old Christians club out
of Stella Marris College in Montevideo. Most of the players
were university students, just kids between eighteen and twenty five.
I'm not going to introduce you to the entire team

(13:36):
at this point because you're never gonna remember everybody's name,
so let me just say this about them. You gotta
be pretty bonded to play a game like rugby, and
the players of the Old Christians Club were a tight
nip group of friends. They regularly played other Montevideo clubs,
especially Old Boys and Carrasco, and this kind of domestic
competition was their day to day, but their calendar was

(13:59):
dotted with the occasional match against clubs from Argentina or
Chili or Paraguay. Sometimes they'd fly off to some other
country or play host for these kind of matches. They
called them friendlies, and Argentina, well, they regularly cleaned their
clocks back then, but only because they were better and
had more money, and they were stronger and better organized

(14:21):
and better equipped, and their coaches and support staff and
back office officials all hug them more. We'll forget Argentina
today we are playing Old Boys of Chile in Santiago,
and yeah, I'm pretty sure we could take these guys
Old Christians wasn't the richest school in the world, but
at least we don't have to take a forty hour

(14:43):
bus ride to the match. I once watched a rickety
old yellow school bus that had driven from Michigan all
the way to visit the plains of Abraham and Quebec.
When the doors opened, the first student collapsed flat against
the stairs, and a conga line of exhausted kids limply
fell and roll out, using him like a slide. And
that is exactly how we would have exited a forty

(15:04):
hour bus ride through the treacherous mountain roads all the
way to Santiago. Instead, we will be squeezing into a
tightly packed Fairchild FH two twenty seven D. If you're
not familiar with it, just try to picture a Dutch
Fokker F twenty seven friendship. There you go. There will
be forty five other souls on board today. That's forty

(15:27):
passengers and five crew. The Fairchild we are flying on
today actually belongs to the Uruguayan Air Force, and that
wasn't entirely weird because chartered military flights often helped fill
the gap in commercial airlines availability they would transport government delegations,
but also things like civilian groups and sports teams, and

(15:48):
we're technically both. We are joining the Old Christians Club
rugby squad along with friends and family, flying from Montevideo
to Santiago, Chile, with a stopover in Vendoza, ar Argentina
to refuel to help us cross the Andes. And maybe
we could grab something to eat while we're there. I
don't know, just saying. As it turns out, we will

(16:10):
be taking off later than originally planned because whether over
the Andes was known to be unstable, which is always
worrisome when you are on a clock. Crossing directly over
the Andes is what almost all flights between Argentina, Uruguay
and Chile have to do. The Andes form a natural
barrier separating the fertile plains of the continent's interior from

(16:34):
the Pacific coast. The other option was detouring thousands of
kilometers south towards Tierra del Fuego or north towards Peru
or Bolivia. The trip is about thirteen hundred kilometers or
eight hundred miles, and takes just under four hours. The
detour balloons that to over five thousand kilometers or thirty

(16:54):
one hundred miles and can take as long as twelve hours.
Thank you, but no, the pilots had already completed all
of their pre flight calculations and chose a directish route
through the Planshon Pass. What the Planshon Pass or Passal
del Planchall Valgara sits right on the border between Chile

(17:16):
and Argentina, and it's set deep in the Andes. And
I'm sorry some of you may be asking, andyes, what Okay,
it's Andes, not Andes. And in case you don't know,
they are the longest continental mountain range on the planet.
They stretch about eight thousand kilometers or five thousand miles
along the western edge of South America, all the way

(17:38):
from western Venezuela near the Caribbean coast, all the way
to the southern tip of Patagonia in Argentina. And the
whole thing tapers off at Tierra del Fuego near Cape Horn,
blurping beneath the waves, and it continues south towards the
Sandwich Islands on its way to Antarctica on land. To
try to make it easier to picture in your head,

(18:00):
it's one million, six hundred and forty thousand, four hundred
and twenty Dodge caravans long and walking it as an
option would take between ten months and two years, depending
on the weather and the border situations and how many
times you have to have your knees or ankles surgically replaced.
To drive, it would reasonably take about two to three weeks,

(18:20):
and in my car just adds six weeks for repairs.
A lot of mountains in the Andes rise above twenty
thousand feet or six thousand meters. The fair Child had
a max ceiling of around twenty five thousand feet or
seven thousand, six hundred meters, so that's cool, But with
a full load of passengers and our collective asses to
boot plus fuel, it would be lucky to clear twenty

(18:43):
two thousand feet or sixty seven hundred meters, and it
would struggle and strain and sound like my car while
it did it, which is not great for anyone's nerves. Plus,
there are peaks that reach us high as a Congagoa,
which is twenty two thousand, eight hundred and thirty seven
feet or six six thousand, nine hundred and sixty one meters.
We are talking about the tallest mountains in the Western Hemisphere,

(19:06):
and snow blankets the upper slopes of these things year round,
so it behooves the pilots to pick an easier route
through the Plant Show Pass. Its elevation is only about
eight thousand feet or two thousand, four hundred and fifty meters.
It is literally, and thankfully, one of the lowest and
widest natural corridors across the Andes. That said, for pilots,

(19:29):
in nineteen seventy two, the Andes were among the most
dangerous routes in the world. The weather could be violent
and unpredictable, and a clear sky could vanish into cloud
and snow in minutes. Fierce winds whipped through the passes,
and turbulence near ridges could drop and aircraft hundreds of
feet in seconds. Plus Today, we're going to be flying

(19:50):
without any kind of modern GPS. Pilots had to estimate
the position by air speed and direction and elapsed time.
Radio beacons offered some guidance, but coverage in the mountains
would give AT and T and T Mobile a run
for their money for the bottom of the list. Our
flight today takes place October twelfth, nineteen seventy two, after

(20:13):
crossing the Rio della Plata. We land in Mendoza. It's
the same day still and we are right at the
foot of the Andes. And it turns out the weather
went bad and this is going to prevent us from
immediately continuing on to Santiago, so we're going to be
forced to spend the night here in Mendoza, just to
wait it out. At least, the views are astounding, and

(20:34):
as long as we're here, if you find a vending
machine or anything like that, why not just pick up
a snack or two, you know, just for fun no reason.
On the next day, Friday, October thirteenth, it looked much
better and we are off. I forgot to say. Our
flight today was commanded by Colonel Julio Caesar Ferratis. At

(20:55):
fifty years old, he was one of the Uruguayan Air
Force's most experienced pilots. Crossing the Andes maybe one of
the most challenging things a pilot can do, but he'd
done it dozens of times and he knew the route,
so we're in good hands. And beside him sat copilot
Lieutenant Colonel Dante Lagurarra. He's less experienced than Captain Feradus, obviously,

(21:18):
but he is still a hell of a better pilot
than you or I. The rest of the crew included
a flight engineer, a radio operator, and a single steward.
By the afternoon, as we're finally climbing into the Indies,
passengers are singing Rugby songs, playing cards, you know, just
being loud and running Rugby plays in the aisle. That
kind of a thing. The spirits were high, and the

(21:41):
atmosphere was more like being on a charter bus than
a flight, especially a military flight. You know, laughing, dancing,
throwing the ball around. Everyone was having a great time
and none of them were paying any notice. As the
weather started to close in and around them and the
clouds began to swallow the mountains, ability dropped to zero, which, yeah,

(22:02):
it happens. So the pilots had to operate by instruments alone.
And kids, you know when you say what am I
ever going to need math for? Well, this is one
of those moments. Without GPS or radar, they had to
estimate their position by stopwatch and compass to figure out
how long it should take to cross the ridge line.
For all intents, they were flying blind in the clouds

(22:24):
with no real instruments and no ground sensing radar or
anything like that, just a calculator, a notepad, and a protractor,
and of course a blindfold of snow out the window.
By three point thirty they were confident that they had
passed the pass and were in the clear to turn
north and start descending towards Santiago. They'd done this before
and everything was going great, dot dot dot, until very

(22:48):
quickly and unexpectedly, a dark, looming mass began to appear
through the whiteness before them, filling the window from edge
to edge. They were heading into a mountain wall. Erratus
and Lagerara pushed the engines while pulling back on the
controls as hard as they could to climb as fast
as they could for the passengers. This was immediately alarming,

(23:10):
as the plane shuttered violently. The aircraft lurched nose up
to clear the ridge. They needed as much power as possible,
and for a moment it felt like they were going
to be okay. They couldn't make themselves lighter, so they
just needed a little more power until at three thirty
four that afternoon, at an altitude of about thirty five

(23:31):
hundred and seventy meters or eleven thou seven hundred and
ten feet, the right wing of the aircraft collided into
a jagged, rocky and snow sweat buttress of the ridge
of Sero Salar that jutted unexpectedly into their flight path.
The wing tore off at the fuselage, spraying fuel and
shattering windows with explosive force, which, yeah, a little late,

(23:53):
but it did make them lighter. And all that tearing
metal wanted to go somewhere, and passengers on the right
side of the plane were crushed or killed as jagged
aluminum and snow blasted into the fuselage. These passengers were
killed instantly by catastrophic debris intrusions. One passenger said it
was as though the mountain reached out and tore the

(24:14):
plane to pieces. The roar was like metal screaming, and
people disappeared beside me. Everything inside, passengers, seats, luggage, all
slammed sideways as the aircraft yached violently to the left,
and now that wing struck another outcropping and tore free.
Passengers screamed, bodies slammed against walls, seats collapsed against each other,

(24:37):
and with no wings, the plane became really more of
a spear, not flying, just tumbling uncontrollably forward. Now spirits
were a little down, but this was not the worst part.
The real horror unveiled itself as the entire tail of
the plane ripped free with a ferocious crack. The screams
of passengers and crew in that section vanished. They were

(25:00):
all sucked away into the void behind them, seats and all,
and the remaining fuselage, which by now would have looked
like a wingless, taless hollow cylinder belly, flopped onto the
mountain and skidded at nearly three hundred and fifty kilometers
or two hundred and fifteen miles an hour down a
glacier face like an outer control missile with no brakes.
For almost a kilometer. The noise was an unending shriek

(25:24):
of tearing metal and screaming, until the nose of the
craft finally ground to a halt. Wedged in the snow now,
Isaac Newton, fan of the show, points out that just
because the plane came to arrest, all the stuff inside
the seats, the luggage, the people, all of that continued
moving forward, resulting in a people being crushed between the

(25:44):
collapsing seats and pressed mercilessly into the bulkhead. Twelve people
were killed instantly, including Captain ferradas others lay critically injured.
Nando Parada was unconscious with a skull fracture, so he
wasn't aware that his mother had died in the crash,
while his sister Susannah lay mortally wounded. Enrique Plato had

(26:06):
been stapled into the wreckage by his leg and he
did not enjoy the experience. However, sadly, within hours he
would also pass away. The scene was chaos, blood smeared,
the walls, seats were twisted, the aisle was a garage
sail and, much like our Congo Crocodile aircraft disaster episode,

(26:28):
bodies were piled against the crush bulkhead by the cockpit.
Now that the loud part was all over, the silence
told them exactly how screwed they were. There was nothing
but moaning and the howling wind. The fuselage came to
a breast in a glaciated valley on the eastern slopes
of a range laying on the Argentine side of the

(26:49):
Andes on the border region near Chile, at an altitude
of about thirty six or thirty seven hundred meters, just
over twelve thousand feet. Of the forty five people we
boarded with, only thirty three remained alive, and the fuselage
became their only shelter, and it was tilted nose down
and wide open at the back. They used what they

(27:11):
had to try to block the opening against the freezing wind.
And here's the thing. They lived in Uruguay. They'd been
sitting on a perfectly comfortable and warm plane and they
had planned on landing in nice, toasty Chile, so no
one was exactly dressed for the high andes. They were
wearing rugby jerseys and thin jackets at best, that kind

(27:35):
of thing. In an instant, the nice and comfy interior
of the cabin temperature had plunged to minus five celsius
or twenty three fahrenheit. But the wind wind chill can
quickly freeze exposed skin, which there was a lot of.
And although I cannot calculate the shocking drop in temperature,
as all of those inside the cabin were blasted with

(27:55):
the mountain air at speed, it could have felt as
cold as minus forty during the crash. In the long
story tradition of the only person with experience applying band
aids becoming their de facto doctor. A medical student named
Canessa found himself drafted into the role. He did everything
from cleaning cuts and setting broken bones to comforting the

(28:18):
dying as best as he could. And people were dying. Eduardo,
a balb had broken both of his legs. Enriquet Platero
did what he could with a punctured lung. People had
compound fractures and internal bleeding and concussions. You'd name it.
With no medical supplies and not a proper full medical
degree in sight, infection and shock took them within days.

(28:42):
But wait, there's more. A quick inventory had shown that
of all the things on board, the only edible things
were a few chocolate bars and biscuits, a little bit
of candy, and a bottle of wine. Although we haven't
talked about it, they sure did and they knew they
were going to be there for a while, so it
was decided that meals would be rationed out. They would

(29:03):
get a square of chocolate the size of a fingernail
and a sip of wine each. They also took turns
painstakingly melting snow for a simple glug of water and
checking on the injured. Susanna and Nando Parada were brother
and sister, and she laid in agony for days, and
there was nothing they could do except give her the

(29:23):
rare set of water while Nando lay comatose beside her
with a head injury. But after three days he awoke
just in time to watch her pass away, and did
I already mention that his mother had died in the crash.
In those first few days, the survivors passed the time
searching for wreckage or working on their makeshift snow barrier

(29:43):
to help protect them from the elements, anything to stop
them from thinking about food. Then imagine sitting in your grief,
night after night, surrounded by death, watching the sunset and
the temperatures plunging even deeper, down to minus thirty seve
elsius or minus twenty two fahrenheit. This is as grueling

(30:05):
an unimaginably difficult a psychological slog as we have ever
described in the history of this show, and the only,
the only absolute highlight of their days, The one thing
that actually made their hearts race with joy was the
sound of another plane passing overhead. Everyone who could would

(30:26):
rush outside at the first sound, like children greeting Santa.
They tried to signal them by waving their clothes and
using shiny pieces of metal, but nothing. They were surrounded
by snow in the wreckage of a plane also painted white,
And this excitement to crushing disappointment went on for eight
straight days, and of all of the aircraft that blew

(30:47):
past them, not one of them gave even the slightest
indication that they had been seen. No circling overhead, not
even a tip of the wings. Nothing. The only thing
that could help them was that they found a small
transistor radio. Except this isn't actually the kind of thing
that could have helped them at all. It wasn't a
two way radio, and they had to preserve what limited

(31:07):
battery life had had. But as they occasionally tried to
use it, they could pick up the occasional signal even
here in the mountains. Eight days into their ordeal, stuck
on the side of that mountain, today, for the first
time they heard a human voice. It was a Chilean
radio announcer. They were ecstatic, and he went on to
confirm that yes, there was a search for flight five

(31:30):
seventy one. Their hearts positively exploded with glee and hope.
That was until they let him finish the rest of
his sentence. There was a search. Officials believed that there
was no chance of finding them alive, and their search
had been called off. You can only try to imagine

(31:51):
how deeply disturbed and quiet they became, and how deeply
upsetting and painful it must feel to switch between such
extreme emotions that quickly. But by the time we are
finished today's story, these are not ordinary individuals we're staying with.
And there are old sayings about endings become new beginnings,

(32:11):
and the death of hope for rescue became the fuel
that fed their newfound drive for a more do it
your self style rescue. This meant some pretty difficult decisions.
They had to figure out how to cope with the
cold and the isolation and their hunger now that every
resource was just about gone. They were into their second
week after the crash, and they were beginning to look

(32:34):
skeletal as a ballpark. They say the human body at
rest needs about two thousand calories a day at altitude,
and in freezing temperatures, your body easily wants to double that.
And the twenty nine people now still alive were surviving
on not even two hundred calories a day. As it was,
the remaining chocolate had been broken down into shards the

(32:56):
size of a fingernail, and the wine was passed around
in time SIPs. And people will eat some pretty strange
stuff just to stop the pain of hunger. They ate
leather from suitcases, and cotton soaked in cologne, even toothpaste.
Of course, it barely worked, and none of it provided
any actual nutrition. Feeling hungry became their full time preoccupation.

(33:20):
They draampt about food. They described it in dripping visual,
vivid detail, just to torture themselves while their muscles were
wasting away and their bodies shrank every minute of every day.
Food food, food. Now Here is where this story becomes
a little troublesome. Lined up in the snow outside the

(33:42):
fuselage were the bodies of their friends and families. If
not for the terrible injuries, some of them could have
looked like they were just sleeping. They lay there, frozen,
preserved in the dry cold, and the survivors passed them
every day as they went about their chores. They were
kind of impossible to and then Canessa, their doctor, became

(34:04):
the first among them to articulate a terrible fact. If
they did not eat, they would die, and soon you
ever have to deliver really bad news, You know that
pregnant pause right before you say something incredibly difficult, Well
imagine how he felt before doubling down and suggesting the
bodies outside were the only things standing between them and death.

(34:29):
One delirious survivor thought he might have meant stacking them
up like wood to make a better barrier against the
wind and snow outside the plane, or maybe try using
them as to boggins to ride their way out of there.
But of course he meant something much more egregious. They
had to consume human flesh. Now. Most of the survivors

(34:50):
were devout Catholics, and eating the body of Christ in
the form of a cracker is one thing, but actual,
real life cannibalism. It'd be one thing if it was
just a taboo, but they felt it was a mortal sin,
like feeding themselves today, just so that they could end
up roasting in hell for all of eternity. Afterwards, some

(35:11):
of them insisted right away it was just better to starve. However,
like we said, hunger can do rare and unimaginable things
to the mind, and there was a cruel logic to
the idea their friends were already dead, and if it
was them, would they not want their friends to live?
You can only imagine how cruel and awful the debate became. Eventually,

(35:35):
they turned to scripture, not literally, I mean they were
too weak to open a book or flip a page. No,
they turned to the idea of the Eucharist, you know,
the aforementioned ritual of consuming Christ's body and blood, so
to speak, in the metaphor Christ offered his flesh to
sustain mankind. The extension of the logic was could the

(35:56):
dead not offer theirs in the same spirit of salvation?
And they became complicated when one survivor told the group
that if he died, they could eat him. He gave
them that right, and he forgave them in advance, and
slowly a reluctant consensus began to grow. If they were
going to live, they would have to do the unthinkable.

(36:20):
When the decision was finally made, they forced Canessa to
make the first cuts because it was his idea, or
at least he was the first to voice it, and
he was also their de facto residence surgeon. In reality,
he just lost an impossible game of not it Canessa
took responsibility and did something no one could barely force

(36:43):
themselves to imagine. He took broken glass from the wreckage
and carved thin strips of muscle from the buttocks and thighs.
This is where the flesh was thickest. It was then
warmed and dried in the sun before it was then
cut into smaller pieces and handed out. Some prayed aloud
before even touching it. Some wept, others gagged. Taking that

(37:07):
first bite was crossing an unbearable line. This wasn't about
eating a meal. This was about swallowing a medicine that
they knew they would die without. No one joked, no
one argued for a bigger share. They were taking part
in a dead serious, solemn pact for survival, and part

(37:28):
of that meant if one of them died, the others
would live by their sacrifice. Psychologically, the whole thing changed them.
The hunger pain stopped, and they now had energy to move,
which gave them the ability to care for the injured
and the mental capacity to consider their escape options. And
very slowly they came to accept what they had done.

(37:52):
You know, the one thing I haven't been doing in
this episode kind of on purpose. It's counting off the
days that would have been hugely depressing. But here we are.
You have to understand how little really happens while you're
sitting staring at nothing, hoping for something to appear that
simply won't like my car from the shop, but one

(38:12):
hundred times worse. So when I tell you that on
the night of October twenty ninth, now the seventeenth day
after the crash, that another disaster struck, you're probably stuck
on seventeenth day and not paying enough attention to realize
I just said secondary disaster. On the night of the

(38:32):
twenty ninth, a sudden avalanche roared down the slope, crashing
mercilessly into the fuselage and burying it in snow, and
those inside were pinned gasping in darkness. Snow packed the
cabin so tightly that some couldn't even move their arms.
They had to claw their way upwards through the snow,
desperate for air, convinced that they were going to die

(38:54):
of suffocation to add the list of freezing and starving,
and of course the plane crash itself. It took them
hours to dig ventilation holes and then free themselves, and
they have been through a lot to this point, plus overnight,
and this is the worst part. Their tight knit group
of trauma bonded survivors had shrank by eight. They even

(39:18):
lost their team captain, Marcello Perez del Castillo, and this
was another powerful psychological blow. So up till now, their
biggest issue was the starving and the freezing and the
internal injuries. Like we said, but the one thing that
they had going for them was leg room. They had

(39:38):
thousands of miles of vast open nothing to call their own,
and now and for days after, they were half buried,
living in the dark, crammed into a snowy mass, working
to poke holes for air and light. So when you
consider the least comfortable pillow you've ever used, compare that
to samsonite luggage or a human knee. It was very

(40:01):
little wonder why they started calling their home the tomb.
And in spite of it all, they sang rugby songs,
and they prayed, and they told each other's stories to
keep their spirits alive. They even started crafting makeshift sunglasses
from sun visors. They figured out how to stitch insulation
into a kind of a sleeping bag, and they continued

(40:21):
to plot how to climb out of the valley because
they felt in their hearts there was no rescue without you.
So you were listening to a podcast and they roped
you into a taking a short flight to watch a
rugby match. But now you live in the mountains and
your roommates are dying by the dozens, and you are
simply not dressed for the occasion. Would you know what

(40:43):
to do? So you survived a plane crash and no
one has any idea, and the nearest Sinus civilization is
hundreds of miles away. There are no buildings, no roads,
just white peaks in every direction is cutting through your
clothes like a knife, and the air is so thin

(41:03):
that your lungs ache, and you not make things so good.
So let's see what we can do to give you
your best chances of surviving alone stranded in the mountains.
The first thing, how about we don't panic because panic
burns energy, which you're going to want later on. Give
yourself the once over and make sure you're not dragging
any limbs or squirting blood out of anywhere. A strip

(41:26):
of cloth can become a band aid, and a seat
belt with an armrest can become a fairly good splint.
I should say this is one of those scenarios where
if you love problem solving, you might almost enjoy yourself
for the rest of us as long as we're mobile.
I don't know what time it is, but we're already
on o'clock before the sunsets and the mountains try to

(41:47):
popsicle us. So we're gonna want to find a safe
spot to hunker down using the fuselage. A shelter isn't
a bad start, Just anywhere that's out of the open
wind or any obvious avalon zones. At twelve thousand feet,
hypothermia can set in within minutes. So let's run through
some practical acts for warmth. If you've ever slept outside,

(42:10):
you know the ground has the unlimited ability to suck
the heat from your body. Think of the ground is
a kind of a reverse fry pan that steals heat
rather than infusing it. So you want to find a
way to stay insulated from below, justly on backpacks or
luggage or branches or clothing or literally anything that's available.
The ground steals more heat than the surrounding air. In

(42:33):
a pinch, even compact snow can work, but obviously that's
not great. And if you're plane exploded or bounced off
the side of the mountain, you can always dig out
a shallow trench to lay in. It'll help block wind
and trap body heat better than just sitting like a
pig on a platter. That said, the air is also
trying to kill you, so you're gonna want to use

(42:53):
jackets or tarps or even snow to wall yourself in
or make a snow break. And snow is a great insulators,
so if you can dig a small hollow that you
can fit in, you could potentially iglue yourself through the night.
They say that most of your body heat escapes from
your scalp and your breath, so wrapping your head and
neck in a sleeve or a shirt or anything you

(43:16):
can like a scarf will help. And if you can
keep all that warm breath inside your clothes, all the better.
And in order to stay warm, you're gonna want to
do gentle little exercises to keep your core warm and
your blood flowing. You know, sit up or two, little
shadow boxing, but don't overdo it. You'll end up using
up valuable energy and then you're gonna begin to sweat,

(43:38):
and then you're gonna freeze to death because of it.
If you don't have a fellow survivor to huddle or
cuddle with, then even if you did, take whatever you
can find, ball up some paper, some itchy itchy insulation,
literally anything but snow, and fill the empty spaces in
your pants or your coat. It'll help trap the warm
air that's escaping off your body, which otherwise is just

(44:01):
going to go to waste. And you'll want to tighten
off your cuffs and your collars to help preserve the effect.
And if you had a garbage bag, I would tell
you to crawl into that as a vapor barrier to
create a little bit of a bivvy or a sleeping
bag effect. Now, if you had the ability to make
fire where you were, fantastic, but you're going to want

(44:22):
to build it in a place near rocks or kind
of a snow wall or anything that helps redirect as
much of that escaping heat which is going out in
all directions right back at you. And if stones or
rocks are available, you want to put those by the
fire and let them heat up, and then figure out
a way to wrap them up so you don't burn
yourself while you put them near your chest or your

(44:42):
thighs to help warm the blood flowing to your vital organs.
Then just focus on slowing and calming your breathing to
reduce stress, because did you know stress can actually affect
your temperature, and picturing yourself warmer than you actually are
has been shown to help reduce panic and improve your outline. Again,
your single biggest goal here is preventing heat loss, because

(45:05):
once that's gone, it's really hard to get back. Now,
getting stuck in the high mountains can present some pretty
unique problems, even on cloudy days. If you don't improvise
some kind of eyewear with slits instead of goggles, you
can sunburn your eyes. In fact, this is probably the
only place where you're likely to sunburn these out of

(45:25):
your exposed skin during the day and then contract frostbite
that night, so keep your covered. In the andes, the
survivors used broken metal panels to melt snow in the sun,
and that water kept them alive long after the food
was gone. Obviously, boiling any water you capture kill's pathogens.
But pathogens are the least of your worries in the

(45:46):
immediate term, and we talked an awful lot about hunger.
The body can survive more than three weeks without food,
of course, not very well. So gather what food you have,
add it all up, and then ration it and then
your time. Here's a trick. You want to pick a
time to eat every day and then stick to it
no matter what. If you start snacking all willy nilly

(46:08):
every time you get hungry, that is a logistical nightmare,
and you're probably gonna use up all of your available
food much quicker when those hunger pains set in. People
have eaten anything. I mean, you can eat the buttons
off your clothing, but keeping something in your stomach is
not the same as eating, and your hunger is at

(46:29):
least half a mental game. So give yourself stuff to do,
keeping watch, patching your shelter, collecting water. If you don't
have a time piece with you, you can try tracking the sun.
You can scratch marks on a piece of metal or
wood and use it like a sun dial. And just
as important, you're gonna want to give yourself goals for
when you get home. Having goals like that increases the

(46:51):
will to live, because survival it's not really about heroics.
It's about doing the small little things that help you
stay on this side of the dirt or or ice
or rocks. I mean, you get my point. Stay dry,
stay warm, stay positive, and remember you don't have to
feel brave. You just have to keep this up until

(47:11):
help or spring your rives. Remember Perado, having lost both
his sister and his mom on the same trip, he
became a driving force for getting the hell out of there.
They had eaten people. Were they really just going to
stay there, continuing their horrifying diet until they were all dead? Nope,

(47:32):
If they survived, they honored the sacrifice. But if they died,
history would remember them as just being a bunch of pimples,
no better than the crew of the Essex, which is
another story to recap. Between the crash, the cold, the injuries,
the hunger, and now the avalanche, their group had shrunk

(47:53):
from forty five to seventeen, and now in order to survive,
they needed to cross the andes On. So they had
to do two things. First, they'd have to pick a direction.
Then they had to figure out how to survive an
impossible trek out of a high mountain valley surrounded by
towering peaks. Oh and it's worth noting that none of

(48:13):
them had any mountaineering experience, and they would be doing
this in sneakers and T shirts. They knew the cold
alone would most likely kill them, but like I say,
sometimes people just need something to do with the last
fifteen minutes of their life. So they sent some small
scouting parties to try to climb the surrounding ridges, donned
in plane wreckage to protect themselves from the elements. Three

(48:36):
men ascended for hours, only to find that their path
had all been hammed in with peaks and they were
forced to stumble all the way back to the fuselage.
All of this was trial and error. The site where
the plane went down wasn't really a recognized valley with
a formal name back in nineteen seventy two, and there
were no geographic or topographic maps to be had. So

(49:00):
these boys, Parado and Canessa, dressed about warm enough for
a tennis game in makeshift snoware trekked out of a
snow filled valley and climbed eight one hundred and ninety
three meters that's twenty seven hundred and fifty feet, sucking
in paper thin air up a slope as steep as
sixty degrees for more than seventy two hours. Picture climbing

(49:24):
an icy ladder with no ice axes or crampons or
boots for that matter, for three days. And that was
just the first one see when they reached the summit,
And don't ask me how they did it, They just
did it. Their long, hard effort was rewarded with a
visual panorama of unimaginable proportions. They had hoped and expected

(49:46):
to see the green valleys of Chile, or a lowland slope,
or some obvious path to civilization, but what they saw
were mountains, serrated and distant and endless. All the way
to the horizon. They were going to have to cross
multiple mountains, some as high as forty six hundred meters
or fifteen thousand feet. By early December, their numbers had

(50:09):
dropped to sixteen, so this attempt had to succeed. The
plan was simple, but awful. Climb out of the valley,
head west and just keep going until they reached Chile
or died. And three men had been chosen for this
final assault, Fernando Parada, Roberto Canessa, and Tintin Vezintin. Whether

(50:31):
taking the track or staying behind in the wreckage and
waiting was worse was debatable, and on December the twelfth,
nineteen seventy two, exactly two months after the crash, these
three men left camp for the final time. And it
was as brutal as you can imagine. They might as
well have been climbing straight up. The air was so

(50:52):
thin and the snow collapsed beneath their feet. At night,
they crawled inside a makeshift sleeping bag made of garbage
and huddle for warmth. And once they topped that first summit,
they reevaluated and sent Tintin back to camp. They just
weren't gonna have enough supplies for three people. Parado and
Canessa continued alone, trudging west into the sun for guidance,

(51:15):
rationing each bite of dried meat, crossing glaciers and ridges,
and huddling into their garbage bag for ten days. Like
we said, Parado, he felt like he had nothing to lose.
At a point when Canessa lost all strength and told
him he just wanted to die, Parato just wouldn't let him.
They both wanted to die, but they just couldn't do

(51:37):
that to each other. And on that tenth day, for
the first time in sixty days, they saw something color.
They saw color and it was green. They were as
excited as two ninety pound skeletons could possibly be. And
as they finally passed below the snow line and found
vegetation and some degree of warmth in a stream they

(51:57):
could actually drink from, then they saw something really weird cattle.
If they had any strength at all, they would have
attacked the things like beavers. And that's when they noticed
a farmer herding livestock on the other side of a
river that was too wide and too violent for them
to cross, and too loud to be heard over. The
farmer was a man named Sergio Catalan, and of course

(52:20):
they didn't know he was a Chilean farmer because they
didn't know where they were. Parado wrote a note, wrapped
it around a rock, and then summoned all the strength
in his body to hurl it across the river, and
it read, I come from a plane that fell in
the mountains. I'm your Aguayan. We have been walking for
ten days. We have fourteen friends still alive in the airplane.

(52:42):
We need help. Please come and tell us where we are.
The farmer understood, so he threw them some bread and
a nice tight spiral. Did a bunch of sign language
to tell them he had their backs, before disappearing on
his donkey down the slope. Parado and Canessa camp near
the river, and the next day Catalan returned with more
food and reassurance that help was on the way. Back

(53:06):
At camp, it had now been twelve days since their
companions departed. They were emaciated and frost bitten, and fighting
off thoughts that their friends had clearly died one day
into their journey. You can only imagine the feelings that
washed over them as the distant whoop, whoop whoop of
helicopter blades entered the valley. They knew only a miracle

(53:29):
could have delivered their friends to safety, and now it
was going to be their turn. It had taken till
mid afternoon before the pilots spotted their debris sticking through
the snow and finally landed, and what they found shocked them.
The survivors emerging from the wreckage were emaciated beyond recognition,
waving feebly and tattered clothes, with sunken faces and hollow

(53:51):
eyes like zombies. They barely weighed one hundred pounds. Now,
flying in the Andes was dangerous even for million military helicopters.
The thin mountain air reduces lift, so they were only
going to be able to carry out six survivors at
a time. The rest were forced to wait until the
following day and had to huddle in the fuselage for

(54:13):
one last terrible night, and on December the twenty third,
after an unimaginable seventy two days alone in the mountains,
the survivors were evacuated to hospitals in Santiago. They were
treated for frostbite and malnutrition and dehydration, while crowds and
reporters cheered and fought for a photograph. For the families

(54:36):
who raced to the scene, many wept uncontrollably as they
were reunited with sons and brothers suddenly from the dead,
while the families of the twenty nine who had not
made it had their hopes crushed all over again as
they realized their loved ones were not part of this miracle.
Paparazzi and reporters wanted a lot more than photos. They

(54:59):
wanted answer how had they been able to survive ten
weeks in the harshest environment on earth with no food?
And it didn't take long for the headlines about miracles
to start to be replaced with headlines about man on
man nomnom Frenzied reporters absolutely besieged the hospital, looking for
details and running crazy, sensationalized stories. The survivors tried to

(55:23):
calmly explain what happened in a press conference, that it
was done not with disrespect, but as an act of
loyalty and humble necessity. Ironically, now that it was their
turn to be eaten alive by the press, something unexpected
happened the families of the dead. They didn't condemn them.
They approached them with understanding and spoke about it, rather

(55:45):
than revenge killing them in their hospital beds. In time,
the Catholic Church in Uruguay publicly stated that the act
was not sinful. They agreed with their interpretation of the
Eucharist and said that it was done out of necessity
and in the spirit of self preservation. Nine times out
of ten they would have been labeled as monsters and

(56:05):
lived shunned existences filled with guilt and shame and new
names and plastic surgery. Instead, they came to be recognized
as men who had endured the impossible. By the time
they got back to Uruguay, they were welcomed by thousands
of supporters. Their survival became an unusual source of national

(56:27):
unity and pride. Not as good as a World Cup,
but pretty good. So what happened well for one head
math is never as good as actual math math. Poor
weather forced them to use dead reckoning instead of instruments,
and the pilots misjudged their position. White out conditions left

(56:48):
them with no visual references, and strong mountain winds and
turbulence only complicated things. They timed their crossing and by
three point thirty they were confident that they had cleared
the mountains, but it turns out they were still so
east of the path and their flight math was off.
By about twelve minutes, they were sixty kilometers or thirty
seven miles from the plant Shoon Pass, and again unaware

(57:09):
they were surrounded by mountains higher than their flight path.
They even contacted Santiago Air traffic Control to let them
know that they had cleared the mountains and were on
their way, except obviously they hadn't, and they were descending
into some of the most treacherous terrain on the planet,
and this would screw them up later when rescue planes
were looking in the wrong place, the point being they

(57:32):
were irreversibly screwed and what happened became unavoidable, and GPS
not being a thing yet certainly didn't help. The crazy
Chilean terrain didn't help. Poor radio fixes didn't help. And
I even heard it speculated that having the rugby team
on board kind of forced them hand and made them
sloppy because they wanted to land faster, because the team

(57:53):
was on a schedule, or because they were being annoying.
But I put zero stock in that. In official terms,
chalked up to a controlled flight into terrain caused by
navigational error in poor weather. Instead of descending into a
beautiful Chilean valley, they were headed into a mountain wall.
The five rugby players and one steward who disappeared when

(58:15):
the tail broke off were never found. Many of the
survivors struggled with trauma and nightmares and feelings of guilt.
Some would talk about it openly, but others avoided speaking
about it for years. And obviously it wasn't just the crash.
Although they all agreed, no one would have made it
off the mountain alive without consuming human flesh. The whole

(58:36):
idea freaked them out for the rest of their lives.
The valley they crashed into didn't have a name before
the accident, like we said, but today it is called
de las Lagrimas, the Valley of Tears. And some of
you may have heard of this story before. A journalist
named Piers Paul Reid wrote an incredibly extensive book in

(58:57):
nineteen seventy four called a Lie. It went on to
become an international bestseller, and in nineteen ninety three, a
big ass Hollywood movie of the same name was released.
Survivors even advised the production, making sure the crash and
survival scenes were accurate. Years later, de facto attending physician
Roberto Canessa continued studying medicine, even though he should have

(59:21):
had enough of it to last a lifetime, and he
went on to become a renowned pediatric cardiologist, dedicating his
life to saving children. Where Nando Pirato became a world
traveling motivational speaker, inspiring others with tales of resilience and leadership.
He once encapsulated the experience in a single line. He said,

(59:43):
we were not heroes. We were ordinary people, given no
choice but to keep going, to keep walking, and somehow
that was enough. I won't be following up on the
stories of all sixteen survivors here. This would have to
be a much longer podcast to do it right. But
I can tell you something remarkable about them. They actually
returned to the crash site in pilgrimages. They left mementos

(01:00:07):
and the memorial cross to honor those who had died.
Twenty nine lives were lost, yet by their sacrifice, sixteen
survived for seventy two days in one of the most
impossible environments on the planet. I don't believe I've ever
used the term miraculous before, but in the history of

(01:00:28):
this show, of all the resilient or serendipitous or impossible
things that we have ever seen, I feel very strongly
and comfortable in saying that the story of the Uruguayan
Rugby air crash disaster of nineteen seventy two is the
closest thing to a bonafide miracle that we have ever seen.

(01:00:56):
I did this episode as a thank you for a
very special listener who asked to remain nameless and over
extended themselves to help me out of a jam. Fifty
to sixty hours of painstaking work is maybe the best
way that I know how to say thank you and
show the depth of my appreciation, and it makes me
happy to be able to do this for them. I've

(01:01:17):
heard people describe this tale as extraordinary, but that's not
nearly good enough a word to explain what happened. It
is remembered, even fifty years later as the miracle of
the Andes. They literally study it in psychology and in
medicine and even in business leadership courses. You have any
idea how deep you have to dig to refuse to surrender,

(01:01:39):
in spite of having your quality a life, scrape the
barrel as hard as this, and to be able to
do it when the whole world seemingly abandoned you. And
even more than that, can you understand how profound the
details of your story have to be to completely overshadow
and make people forget about all of the cannibalism. I
understand why people who don't believe in a higher power

(01:02:00):
would look at this story and say someone was watching
over them. They'd probably argue he watched a bunch of
them die. But if God didn't have anything to do
with those boys climbing out of that valley alive, I
just don't know what he does with his time. If
you spend less than seventy two days this year buried
by snow or trapped in the belly of a vehicle,
and you're happy and you know it. The song says

(01:02:22):
you should clap your hands. But if you really want
to celebrate but don't want to spend more than seven
calories doing it. Have you heard my rant about my
Patreon being a good place for introverts or shut ins?
This show survives by the whims of my supporters, and
the vast majority of Patreon supporters sign up, make a
simple monthly donation to keep the show they love going,

(01:02:45):
and then they just back away through some shrubs and
I never hear from them again. I love all of
my followers, paid free, whatever, and you can learn more
at patreon dot com slash few Funeral eight followers are
obviously better, but it's all love and support and my
appreciation is bottomless. And if you have a hankering for

(01:03:07):
ad free episodes, extra content, all that good stuff. And again,
I'm really truly sorry about those ads. They're really out
of my control. Long story short. Patreon dot com slash
funeral Kazoo is the best way to get rid of them,
and it's also responsible for me having been able to
do this show as much as I have over the
last five years. It literally buys me time to do

(01:03:28):
the show instead of other work. No Patreon and I'm
down to three to six episodes a year, but failing that,
you can always just visit, buy me a coffee dot
com slash Doomsday, and show your support with a one
time donation. And I would like to offer a quick
and really heartfelt shout out to Maloriemar Edward Wedding, the

(01:03:49):
incomparable TJ Silky Socks, Hey Silk, Sean Rommel, and joe
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and crises. They are often the first and sometimes the
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it will be a nice change of scenery to get
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(01:05:21):
off and thanks for listening.

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The Uruguayan Rugby Aircrash Disaster of 1972 | Episode 94

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Uruguayan Rugby Aircrash Disaster of 1972 | Episode 94