This makes no sense, because obviously parachutists in free fall for long periods do not lose consciousness. However, I’ve had multiple people state repeatedly that people jumping from tall buildings are unconscious or even dead before they hit ground. I’ve always assumed this was wishful thinking.
Does anyone know if there is any validity to this theory? Or, if not, where the myth originated? I’ve tryed searches on SDMB and snopes, but I can’t find anything relevant.
Kind of a tough thing to prove or disprove. Empirical tests would be rather immoral to implement. (Sounds kind of like the UL that if you dream of dying you will die [like dreaming of falling off a cliff]. No humans I know know what others are dreaming of, much less what someone who died in their sleep was dreaming of.)
IIRC, people at street level in NYC on 9/11 who saw people jumping saw some holding hands all the way down. I’d imagine if they did lose consciousness or died, they would’ve lost their grip on each other.
I’d also guess that some people that were weak of heart might just expire, or at least be in the throes of a heart attack on the way down.
Well, there’s no reason for them to lose consciousness. Even at terminal velocity, humans stay conscious and alert, unless other factors come into play (trauma, blood loss). I suppose sheer terror could make someone pass out, but I very much doubt it automatically would.
I noticed while watching the videos of the WTC jumpers that one of them was flailing his arms(like when one is trying to regain their balance) all the while he was falling. I considered the notion that his arms may have only appeared to hve been flailing due to the wind acting upon his questionably unconscious body, but upon further speculation it became very apparent that he was indeed quite conscious.
I can’t think of anything that would deprive a person of consciousness during a fall–particularly if they jumped. As you noted, parachutists do not lose consciousness during free-fall, and they far for longer distances, at greater speeds, and at altitudes where there is less oxygen (although no one does sport jumps from altitudes of thin oxygen). There have been several people who have survived a parachute that failed to open. I do not remember any of them having claimed to have lost consciousness before they struck. (The woman I know whose chute failed to open did not even lose consciousness when she struck, although she had the ameliorating luck to fall into a swmpy marsh.)
There was a report many years ago, from someone who interviewed several survivors of long falls, that claimed that at some point during the fall, each of them had come to a realization that they were totally beyond having any control over the situation and resigned themselves to their fate–at which point they each described a serene calmness overtaking their original panic. I don’t know whether this was later misconstrued as losing consciousness or not. (I have no memory of who collected the interviews, so I have no idea whether they harvested only “good” memories or whether anyone has ever tried to corroborate their findings.)
Most first time skydivers experience sensory overload. They often have no recollection of the free fall afterward. Of course this isn’t the same thing as losing consciousness.
Even after training, with safety equipment, and jumping voluntarily, the instinctive response is terror.
Gravity accelerates falling bodies at 9.8 meters per second squared. That means a fall from a typical high rise would take about two seconds. A leap from the roof of the World Trade Center would have ended in slightly over five seconds. That doesn’t leave much time to achieve inner peace.
Possibly on the other hand, I have seen a newspaper interview (sorry, no cite) with someone who had done a study of people who’d survived suicide attempts off the Golden Gate Bridge. Their main conclusion was that the jumper seems to invariably regret their action once they’ve committed to it. Depending on what then happens during the fall, this doesn’t necessarily contradict the above, but the tenor of the article suggested otherwise.
I wish I had a link to the article I read (probably found it on CNN or MSNBC) talking a little bit about this very topic. So many people were disturbed beyond comprehension by the WTC jumpings, so some reporter tied together some information like the suicide jumpers-survivors data and some interviews with psychologists.
I think some of it is wishful thinking (it’s just too awful to imagine those people in utter terror all the way down) but one psychologist says there is an element of control and choice in the decision to jump. That is, I choose to die like this rather than by burning, or crushing, or leaving no identifiable remains for my family. While it’s not a choice anyone would want to have to make, he suggested that it might have been a calming realization for those who jumped.
The more I type this out, the more it sound like total b.s. to me. I sure liked reading it at the time, though.
Well clearly they DID make that choice, in a coherent enough fashion to do things like hold hands on the way down. So they must have thought it was the best alternative at the time. If the only other alternative is to be burned alive, I can certainly understand it.
There is nothing to suggest that consciousness is lost as mentioned above but I do not believe that any pain is felt on impact as the individual would be dead before the sensation of pain would be transmitted to his brain.
Were any of the individuals who jumped or fell out of the WTC windows identified?
I think I read the same article as Cranky above, about the psychology of leaping from the WTCs. The main idea was that people realized that they had the choice of either staying in the painful inferno of their offices, where people were dying slowly and it was generally hell, or they could step into the cool, inviting air, and after 5 seconds, it would all be over.
There were incidents cited of New York skyscraper fires from the last century (none of the buildings named meant anything to me, so I don’t remember them), and an anecdote from a cop who once scared a guy out of jumping from (I think) the Golden Gate bridge by threatening to throw him off – the idea being that it was only appealing to die that way if it was your own choice to do it.
I remember watching hell unfold on CNN that Tuesday morning, and watching people jump. My cow orkers couldn’t figure out why they were doing it, why they didn’t just wait for rescuers to arrive (this obviously before we knew that no rescuers would ever arrive), but I could see the logic. Death looms before you inside; you’re on the 109th floor; you doubt any rescuers will ever make it to you. And people -do- sometimes survive falls from great heights, and aren’t there supposed to be updrafts around skyscrapers anyway? I could see how the odds might look better for jumping than for staying in and facing sure incineration.
I think the article was in The New York Times, but I think you have to register to search their archives, and I am too lazy (though somehow not too lazy to write a novella for the SDMB). Good article, though.
As mentioned above, while jumping into so-called THINair might cause unconsciousness, jumping from roughly 1,400 feet up will not. The air there, while unspeakably smoggy even before hundreds of gallons of Jet-A fuel were burning around them, was perfectly breathable. In fact, considering their height and proximity to New York Harbor, I’d WAG that the air at 110th floor was MUCH better than it was at the 25th floor, again burning fuel notwithstanding. They would not have gone unconscious. They would not have suffocated.
As for the force needed to “break their neck”. It takes a great impact to break a cervical spinal bone. Were they leaping from a jet plane moving at the speed of sound or greater, and had no protective gear on, AND went head first into the rushing air outside the jet, then perhaps the wind shear could break their necks. Again, the terminal velocity attained by simply jumping off those ledges doesn’t in any way lend itself to a bone-breaking speed.
Not until the last moment, anyway. This is an awfully hard thread to post to.
The business of trying to chose between burning alive and jumping isn’t something I’ve thought about since 9/11. I suppose that since everyone knows what it feels like to be burned in some small way, and many adults have either seen or heard about the awful and painful and PROLONGED recoveries from severe burns to the body, they may have decided that they would rather not risk living through incineration to a lifetime of pain. I cannot really imagine the mindset, I’ve never had to face true mortal terror. The two who held hands, at least had the wherewithal to decide to do so. Jumping guaranteed death, IMHO- burning guaranteed myriad results, none of which were tolerable to contemplate at that moment.
Boy, my hands are shaking just thinking about this in depth.
While this thread was obviously promted by discussions I’ve had since 9/11, I’m sorry if it has become a renewed source of pain. I was hoping it could stay more abstract, as in “hey, I heard this odd thing about people who jump off buildings, and I was wondering if anyone knew the source of this urban legend”. I should have realized that anyone with two brain cells would have made the obvious connection to pictures from 9/11.
I know we all want to fight ignorance, and dispelling urban legends is part of that, but I would like to extend apologies to those who might have preferred to not think about this particular one.
sigh
Thank you all though, for confirming that my logic was sound. I still wonder where this comforting myth got started.
Just for the record, the odds of surviving a fall from that kind of height is virtually zero. My wife is a psychiatric nurse who has worked with suicidal patients, and has studied this stuff. Falls from a height are generally considered to be the most reliable way to ensure death, even more so than shooting yourself in the head.
There are a handful of people who have survived terminal-velocity falls, but in every case they either landed on something very soft, or broke their falls along the way by hitting tree branches and the like. Falling into a an area like the the neighborhood around the WTC would be fatal to an extremely high degree of certainty.
In his 1945 book The Natural History of Nonsense, Dr. Bergen Evans the then popular urban legend that people falling from great heights are dead before they hit the ground.
He noted a well-documented case in which a coal miner who suffered a fatal fall had the presence of mind to shout warnings to the people below him on his way down.
A fall from the top of the WTC would have taken about ten seconds, not five. Your terminal velocity would have been about 120 mph, which is close to 180 fps. Ten seconds would be a helluva long time in that circumstance.
In my own experience free-falling, I broke my second cervical vertebra (the Christopher Reeve vertebra). But that was when the chute opened. What you feel in the free fall is initially the falling, accelerating sensation, followed soon by just a very strong wind in your face. No breaking bones, passing out, etc.
This is an awfully hard thread to post to.