Are there any documented cases of a person or persons, having been sucked up into the funnel of a twister, being carried quite a good distance, and surviving?
Specifically: I would be very interested in accounts of a person “riding” a twister, and remaining fully conscious throughout the whole ordeal and surviving.
Does Pecos Bill count?
There is a fairly well known (though quite possibly a UL) story of a woman carried a great distance by a tornado. It’s well known because when she landed, she discovered she had been deposited right next to a 45 of the single Stormy Weather. Sounds unlikely, but certainly possible. I did a quick search on Google for this, but didn’t come up with anything. I haven’t checked Snopes yet.
Here’s a reference to the Stormy Weather story (along with a couple of other tornado ride stories):
http://freepages.travel.rootsweb.com/~schneiderjj/letters2.html
Still, I can’t guarantee these are accurate.
I’ve heard of people being thrown a little ways and living… watch some of the shows on tornadoes where they interview people who were caught in them. It’s probably happened at some time, but documented cases would be harder to find… after all, do we generally beleive wild stories people tell us, let alone one from someone who lives in a trailer park who has no witnesses? But, if there is a guy who’s been struck more than half a dozen times by lightning and lived, I’m sure someone has been blown a few feet by the wind and lived through it at some point in history.
My cousin Jeff was carried several hundred yards, he suffered a broken collarbone and a bunch of infections from all the debris blown into his flesh.
I saw a first-person account of a person who had been riding in a car when a twister caught them. One man was sucked out of the car, but the other lived although he was pretty severely injured.
Twice now, I’ve read the thread title as “Has a human being ever “ridden” a tomato and survived?” I get a mental image of a bustling rodeo, with brave but foolish young cowboys attempting to tame the untamable and deadly tomato. One by one, they’re gored to death. Yee-haw!
My wife has told me a story several times of an infant supposedly picked-up by a tornado and deposited a mile or so away totally unharmed (physically).
I have no cite for this and my wife, although a fairly credible person, can hardly count as 100% reliable in this case. I’ll ask her for more info and see if I can dig up a cite.
There was an article in Reader’s Digest a year or two ago abiut a pair of tornadoes that hit in TN, and they quote accounts of people’s houses exploding around them, and riding a bathtub up, up, and away. I don’t know how far they went, but they came down in the same neighborhood, so it couldn’t have been too far.
Roy Sullivan, the Park Ranger who was struck by lightning seven times, lived and worked in the mountains of VA in Luray. He was on The Tonight Show once and told Johnny Carson that God had come to him in a dream and told him why he was struck so often. Sullivan refused to tell the reason, and it died with him when he killed himself several years ago. He did so by electrocuting himself.
Not really. He did kill himself, but I have no idea how.
Damn, that is EXACTLY how I read the title… scarey
Hardly a scientific answer, but I remember a story like this from “These Happy Golden Years” by Laura Ingalls Wilder. According to her, the stories she wrote were all based on truth, so take that for what it’s worth. This would have taken place in South Dakota, near De Smet, sometime between 1880 and 1885. (Disclaimer–I’m going to repeat this story from memory, since I don’t have the book in front of me.)
Apparently, two boys had ridden out from their farm on two donkeys to take something into town. The storm hit while they were still out, and when it was over everyone in the countryside went looking for them. Eventually, one of the boys found his way home. He was completely naked. He and his brother had been riding the donkeys hard, trying to outrun the storm when the tornado picked all four of them up. The boy yelled to his brother to hold on to the harness, but a few seconds later he was torn from his own donkey. He blacked out at this point. Next thing he remembered, he was floating in empty air, falling to earth slowly. He hit the ground running, with not a stitch on. I remember this part especially because Wilder made a point of how they couldn’t figure out how the clothes came off, even the lace-up boots, without bruising or marking the boy in any way.
Wilder goes on to say that they finally did find the other boy and the two donkeys. They were found together, the boy naked, the donkeys stripped of their harnesses, with every bone in their bodies broken.
Wilder also relates the story of a man whose house was completely wiped off the face of the earth in this same storm. A few hours later, they notice a dark spot in the sky. Something falling towards them. Closer and closer, and then it hits. It was the door to the farm house, and it fell exactly where it had originally been. This was hours after the storm had come and gone.
Weird stuff.
I heard this story from my grandmother, mother and aunt, often, independently of each other, and over many years.
They were driving out of Pontiac, Illinois in 1944 and spotted a tornado up ahead. They stopped their car and another car, about a mile in front, stopped as well.
The tornado picked up the car in front of them, turned it around, and then gently put it back on the road in exactly the opposite direction.
Neither the driver or the woman in that car were hurt, but both were shaken up when my grandmother drove up to see how they were.
Not exactly bronco-riding the winds, but freaky nonetheless.
My mother once told me about a distant relative who knew someone picked up by a tornado on the US side of the St. Lawrence and dumped over on the Canadian side.
Also, my father was on one of the ships that picked up to Jetskiers trying to trek from San Diego to Catalina Island. These idiots later were submitted for a Darwin Award.
Whack-A-Mole, I think I heard that same story and I think it happened within the last few years. A family was crowded into a closet for safety and the baby (I think it was a year old or so) was ripped out of the parents’ arms by the force of the wind as the house blew up around them. The child was later found–and as wild as this may sound, I think s/he was even found in a tree. But alive. I know I read this.
Here we go. Didn’t have it quite right (no tree). Second to the last paragraph:
http://www.weather.com/newscenter/specialreports/tornado/awesome/miracles.html
Most of the people who find themselves flying around the inside of a tornado only live if a UFO plucks them out of the air, does experiments on them, then leaves them on a rural road.
At least that’s what they say. 
Surviving a tornado is written about by David Foster Wallace (he got lifted up, spun around and smacked into a fence) in the first chapter of his highly recommended book “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”.