Surprising Survival Stories

Could you survive in these amazing

survival

situations? Let's talk about that. ♪ (musical theme) ♪ - Good morning mythical! - I'm a survivor. Once recently, one weekend, my wife went away with some friends of hers and I had to stay with my kids. - Oh. -Ah. - And I survived. - (stifled laughter) - And so do they. We both did it. - It was

surprising

ly difficult. - MMM. But we did it. So I hope the story I just told you rivals the amazing

survival

stories

we are going to share with you today even though I know they are not. - You can identify with these people... - ...is what you're saying. - I can relate! - And I'm wearing camouflage! - We are all survivors.

We talked earlier this year in another episode about amazing island survival

stories

. These are non-insular survival stories. - We are already off the island. - (laughing) Yeah, we're moving to... - ...to the mainland, people. - But these are

surprising

. They are very surprising. May 26, 2013. A guy named Harrison Okene. He is a 29-year-old cook who works on a tugboat off the coast of Nigeria. - Pulling other boats. And cooking! -He mind his own business... ...and he does his own business... poop... in the ship's bathroom. -He's in the bathroom when he arrives...-It's okay! ...hit by a huge wave, which causes the ship to sink.

And the ship sinks very suddenly, like 100 feet before anyone has a chance to react. He begins to see what there is... First of all, he leaves the bathroom and goes into another little room. He starts to see water coming under the door. He says, "Uh..." He knows what's going on. - The ship is upside down. - Can you imagine the panic? - Crazy! -And then what he does is think quickly and he climbs onto a mattress. I usually go under the bed when I panic. - Make a water bed, Link. - (both gasp) This guy is...

He made a waterbed! And he's on the waterbed... Doesn't seem like that's going to help. When you're sinking. Well, he helped, because he stayed in a four-foot airbag for 62 hours. Now, a lot happened during those 62 hours. Number one, all of his other crewmates died. At some early point in the process. What is the air situation? That's what I do not understand. - The air situation. -How do you breathe? He is breathing trapped oxygen. And because of the pressure at that depth, you actually get a lot more oxygen there. So 62 hours. - As if the ship were upside down... - Yes, it's an air pocket. - OK yes. - It's like when you get into the jacuzzi - and there's an air pocket... - In your pants? ...and he makes you look like you have a lot of fat down here.

Then you say: - (spitting) And it looks like you farted. - (laughing) - Yes, yes. - It's inside the fat pocket... - ...in a swimsuit. - Why is Rhett wearing pants? - Do you understand the logic now? - Now that you've used that analogy... - ...I'm locked up. -So he's inside a swimsuit... he's inside a swimsuit in a jacuzzi. - (laughing) - That's where this is happening. - I understand. -No. He is in this air pocket. He is breathing your highly concentrated, highly oxygenated air. His other crewmates have died. He can hear fish and sharks eating them. - Oh. -He has nothing to eat, except a... ...can of Coca-Cola.

This guy stretches that can of Coke for 62 hours. It's me finding the Sprite in the ice bath. It's like, "I can survive here now!" - Well, it's not that funny. - Oh. - (team laughing offscreen) - Yes. And then, this is what happens after 62 hours. (rescuer's voice) Alright, so you should be walking on the roof, right? (Link) Diving rescuers? - (inaudible) - What is that? Well. - Okay, you found one, okay? - Is anyone alive! -He is alive! He is alive! -He is alive. Okay, keep it there. Keep it there. Alright. Just keep it there, keep it calm, okay? - (Link) Wow! - MMM.

Okay, calm him down. Pat him on the shoulder. (Link) "Pat him on the shoulder. Pat him on the shoulder." -(Rhett) Look, there he is. - (Link) Okay. (Rhett) There's Harrison. He says, "Oh, you're not a Coke can." - "You are a man." -He looks a little disoriented. Now I'm surprised that the diver who rescued him didn't get scared. But what surprises me most is that he didn't get scared. What did he think he was holding his hand down there? Some creature dressed in black that... appears? - I mean, this guy has been through... ...a lot in those 62 hours.

And he could see, the guy thought he was just grabbing a dead body, and then he grabbed it again. - Yeah! - So the diver was crazy. - That's crazy! And the reason the diver sounds like a chipmunk is because they put helium inside their breathing mixture. That's a little fact I learned during this process. - Well. Anyway, Harrison is now the official spokesperson for Coca-Cola. - That is not true. - And its new 62-hour Coca-Cola campaign. - (Link and team off screen laughing) - Okay, I have one. Mauro Prosperi is a Sicilian police officer and pentathlete.

And he ran...-That's a lot. -...in 1994, he ran in the... ...Marathon des Sables, or "say-bull," a 150-mile race across the Sahara Desert in Morocco. 150 miles across a desert... - Sign me up! - ...sounds crazy. It's so dangerous... - It's crazy. ...they make you sign a waiver that says where to send your body... when you die. - Hmm. I want to be cremated and thrown into the Cape Fear River. Alright, here's one of the rules. If a sandstorm comes up while you're running 150 miles across the desert, you're supposed to sit down, cover your head, and wait it out.

Unless you want to win the race! - (laughing) That's right! - Mauro decides that he is going to - continue running. - Hmm. Elegant. Because a sandstorm came and he kept running. - MMM. - And running. And running. - You can't see very well in a sandstorm. - No. - Six hours later... - Because of everything about Darude. - (Link and team offscreen laughing) - The sandstorm... - Darude appears in your eyes. - It is the "roughest" of sand storms. - (laughs) - Six hours later, the storm subsides. Mauro, of course, is alone in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

Completely off course. What is the guy supposed to do? He simply chose a direction and started walking. - Well. -Random direction, he starts walking. - 36 hours later... - Oh, that's a long time. ...he is left without food or water. Now I'm going to go ahead and spoil this for you. A, he survives. -Ah. But B, it was 10 days later. The guy survived in the Sahara Desert, totally alone and with nothing but a bottle of water for 10 days. -He is Sicilian. -The first thing he started to do was...-... urinate in the water bottle. -UH Huh. - And then drink that. - Oh, wow. - But that gets old after a while. - That happened early.

There's a kind of diminishing returns to peeing in your own water bottle. Trust me. - Do you mean it gets worse? - It turns more yellow. Oh, look at it. - It's more yellow... ...and there's less and less of it. And then it becomes like yellow pudding. - (laughs) He starts... (laughs) - (crew groans in disgust off-screen) - (laughs) - "Mm, suddenly I have... - ...a mirage of pudding in my water bottle " -(sighs) He starts eating lizards and scorpions, which I don't recommend. Very crispy. There's not much water in those. Then he finds an abandoned sanctuary, in the desert, and camps there. - Oh!

And he rips off the heads of 20 bats and starts drinking their blood. - Oh. Better than pudding. -I don't know if he could do that. Well, you haven't been in this situation, man. Without ideas! No... next week, on this show, I don't want to have to... rip a bat's head off. -Yes.-Like his faces...-Challenge of eating bat heads. His face lights up just above the screen. Let's start with that. Then, after a total of 10 days, he meets a group of Berber nomads, and...-Very classy. - They say: "You're not even in... ...Morocco anymore. You ran to Algeria." - 186 miles off course. - (laughing) Oh, God. - It's a long way for one person to walk. - But do not worry.

He kept going... ...and ran the race six more times after that, placing 12th in 2001.-Oh, 12th? OK that's fine. - Mauro! - Keep it up, man! Do not give up. - Keep trying. It is not necessary to drink urine every time. You probably could do better. Well, this one comes from Juliane Koepcke. On Christmas Eve 1971, she was 17 years old. She travels by plane over the Peruvian jungle. - Well. This is the Amazon rainforest. I guess we are in the same region of the world. The plane is stuck... - It's okay. ...by lightning, and then... The light flashes, which means... maybe we're being struck by lightning. -Nartu Foty.

The plane is struck by lightning. The plane breaks into several pieces. She lands on an island. There is a polar bear and there is a group of people called the Others. Oh wait! - No. That's something else. She lands... The plane literally breaks down, and she falls, in her seat, still stuck in the seat, strapped to the seat, two miles in the air and hits the rainforest canopy. And somehow the seats she's attached to...she's in the middle seat and she has...-...two seats on either side of her. - Do you protect her? She somehow protects her from it and (stutter) breaks her fall a little and ends up hanging upside down in this seat.

Of course, she is knocked unconscious, but when she wakes up, all she has is a broken collarbone and some scratches. Incredible! She falls two miles from the sky. - Wow. - Now he has to figure out how... ...to get back to civilization. Now, her glasses fell off during this. Can you see it? (laughing) at her Her glasses fell off...-Stupid glasses! - ...during this terrible experience. And she lost a shoe. She then uses her remaining shoe to make her way through the jungle. She had a little experience in the jungle. Her parents were like researchers. So she knew, "I have to be careful with these snakes." So she had the snake shoe technique.

She is feeling her way through the forest. She then she comes to a stream and she knows, this is smart, because she had learned this, and you should always do this, she goes down the river. She finds a stream and heads downstream. Ten days later, the only thing she has left is the water she drinks from the stream and some candy she bought on the plane. -Did he use her shoe for everything? I imagine her drinking from the shoe. Using it like a snake. - Well... - Like a weapon. She doesn't say it, but I like to think so, Link.

Yes, she drank exclusively from her shoe and she also ate sweets from her shoe. - Good. -Anyway, 10 days after this, she finds a ship. She now has an infected arm, full of worms. -She has a worm arm, people. - Yuck. And earlier she had seen her father pour gasoline on a dog's wound to treat it. - Well. -Then she pours the gasoline from this ship into her worm arm and 35 worms come out. - Yuck! - That's just a small detail. A little detail for you. Instead of getting on the boat, she said, "I didn't want to steal the boat," so she waits on the boat.

And finally the guys whose ship she was on came back. They take her to civilization. This is an incredible test, as you can imagine. Almost two weeks. - 17 years old! - It's actually written about it. Her story is cataloged in a book called "Deep Survival." It's an audiobook that you can get on Audible by Laurence Gonzales. It covers her story in much more detail. Also many other incredible survival stories. And it also tells you what you can do to get out of some situations that... you might find yourself in. - Oh, because we haven't helped you... ...apart from the shoes and removing bat heads.

You should hear that. And she's in luck, because she can get a 30-day trial using our link, audible.com/GMM. There are over 180,000 titles besides Laurence's book, so listen to any of them, guys! - Yeah! - Link in description. - Thanks for liking and commenting. - Do you know what time it is. Hello my Name Is . I'm from Syria and this is my favorite card, the 10 of Hearts. And it's time to spin... - (card slides) - ...The Wheel of Mythology. Thanks to Audible for sponsoring this episode. Remember to visit audible.com/GMM to get your free 30-day trial!

Click over to Good Mythical More, where we look at two more amazing survival stories. Surprise! Survive! Click through. (union) "Beatboxing Dolphins!" (making beatboxing and squeaking noises) - (Rhett beatboxing) - Sounds like a monkey. But he is a dolphin. (shriek)