Juliane Koepcke was 17 when lightning split the plane she was traveling on with her mother.
It was Christmas Eve 1971. LANSA Flight 508 was traveling from Lima to Pucallpa, Peru, carrying 92 people on board. Juliane fell strapped to her seat from about 3,000 meters above the Amazon rainforest. She survived the impact. Her mother, ornithologist María Koepcke, did not. Of the 92 people on that plane, Juliane was the only one left alive.
With a fractured collarbone and deep wounds, she walked alone for 11 days through the Peruvian jungle, guided by what she had learned as a child in Panguana, the scientific station her parents had founded years earlier. That knowledge was what kept her alive until some fishermen found her. Today, more than five decades later, Juliane is a biologist specializing in bats and runs the same station that once taught her how to survive the jungle that nearly killed her.
