In history, who survived the most plane crashes? The most shipwrecks?.. Overall, who survived the most disasters that normally we think of as more likely to lead to death than life? The incidents should be big enough to be easily checked, homemade accidents are quite common but are rarely covered.
Does Roy Sullivan, who claimed to have been struck by lightning 7 times, count?
Ninja’d by seconds
This guy’s survival was so incredibly unlikely he has his own wiki article:
Not too many people can be nuked twice and walk away intact.
Yes. Though it can’t really be verified. I was hoping to see people who suffered from multiple different types of disasters - like, a person surviving 2 plane crashes, then 1 sinking, then perhaps 3 lightnings. Now that’s undeniable luck.
To be fair, we only got 2 nuclear attacks in history, so the sample is rather too small for conclusion. Too bad that while his “achievement” imo is as impressive as Mr Sullivan above, 2 cannot compete with 7.
OTOH, there’s this interpretation:
Q: So tell me sir, how much nuclear warfare have you survived?
A: All of it.
An impressive feat. Two is not a large number. Two nukes is however an impressive amount of death and destruction in anyone’s book.
The exact number is certainly not verified, but Cuban officials claimed that the CIA attempted to kill Castro over 600 times. He survived to die of old age at 90.
There was even a documentary about it:
Depends on how you spin it. Mr. Yamaguchi survived 100% of all nuclear attacks in history, while Mr. Sullivan merely survived a microscopically tiny percentage of all lightning strikes in history.
There’s this guy…
John Priest Survived the Titanic and 5 Other Sinking Ships.
Charles Lindbergh got the nickname “Lucky Lindy” not because he successfully crossed the Atlantic but because he parachuted to safety from doomed planes on four separate occasions within a couple of years. That is claimed to have been a record at the time (circa 1926) but it has probably been surpassed since.
I’m almost afraid to ask- but did the kids call you Mr. Glass?
Unsinkable Sam survived three ship sinkings between two different navies.
Oh, and he was a cat.
600+ unsuccessful attempts to kill Castro? That sounds absurd.
This article claims that the Bush I administration tried to kill him 16 times, and the Clinton administration tried 21 times.
I find it hard to believe that the CIA or the US government cared enough about Castro by Clinton’s administration to even try to assassinate him once, much less 21 times.
It’s obviously Cuban security services puffery. If the number is not a complete fabrication, perhaps it maps to any time they obtained any piece of intelligence about CIA plotting.
But it appears to be true that assassination was a US objective for a very long time.
Oh I don’t doubt that we tried to do him in. But claiming that there was an attempt on Castro’s life more than once a month for 49 years is ridiculous. Baghdad Bob type ridiculous.
Violet Jessop survived the sinking of both the Titanic and the Britannic, its sister ship which sank in WWI.
It is pretty clear to anyone who has looked into this that Roy Sullivan’s case suffers from lack of any real solid evidence.
No one witnessed the lightning strikes. The sentence on wiki that states his supervisor verified it is suspect because his supervisor didn’t see it happen and wasn’t even at the park for several of the strikes.
The physics of lightning ‘bouncing off trees’ and hitting him in a faraday cage/truck don’t make any sense. Also it would have moved so fast that he couldn’t have seen or recognized that it bounced off a tree.
His scorched hat is not what happens when someone is hit by lightning. Other hats that have been hit have been ripped to shreds, not just scorched.
being struck by lightning is immediately debilitating enough that you just can’t go walk over to a water source and put out your flaming hair.
He also claimed to have 23 bear encounters where he had to hit them with sticks.
It far more likely that Roy was prone to telling tales than actually having this many incidents happen to him.
The author of the “Biggles” books, WE Johns, had a fairly disastrous career as a flyer:
On 1 April 1918, Johns was appointed flying instructor at Marske Aerodrome in Yorkshire. The aircraft of the time were very unreliable and he wrote off three planes in three days through engine failure – crashing into the sea, then the sand, and then through a fellow officer’s back door. Later, he was caught in fog over the Tees, missed Hartlepool and narrowly escaped flying into a cliff. Shooting one’s own propeller off with a forward-mounted machine-gun with malfunctioning synchronisation was a fairly common accident, and it happened to Johns twice. The commanding officer at Marske was a Major Champion, known as ‘Gimlet’, a name used later by Johns for the hero of a series of stories.
… Johns’ career flying strategic bombing missions was characteristically short, lasting only six weeks. On 16 September 1918, he was piloting one of six DH.4s on their way to bomb Mannheim when his aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire and he was forced to drop out of formation. He jettisoned his single 250-pound (110 kg) bomb and turned for home, but was attacked by a number of Fokker D.VII fighters. During a lengthy but one-sided battle, Johns’ observer and rear-gunner, Second Lieutenant Alfred Edward Amey, was badly wounded and the aircraft shot down. …. Johns remained a prisoner of war until after the Armistice of 11 November 1918.
Wiki: W. E. Johns - Wikipedia
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Yep, that’s my point. List any unique disaster, or perhaps even invent 1, and a survivor will have a “100%-all-of-it” success rate. That why, while counting the numbers instead of percentage isn’t perfect, imo it’s a somewhat better approach. In any case, qualitatively assessing is the worst of the bunch, because it’s too open for debate. That is not to say that I don’t agree with you about nuking being the baddest among mentioned disasters.
Priest & Lindbergh were really impressive. Looks like a lot of career hazards here, that’s why they got a high streak in 1 type of accident. Let’s improvise a bit and assign an x2 modifier to those with different disasters under their single belt.
Haha, I didn’t know about that film. The actor, Jackson, seems to have a knack for interesting characters.
Considering the short average lifespan (~14yr) of a cat, that’s somewhat more remarkable than our records. If we extrapolate the data of people’s life expectancy in the 40s, then Sam had the equivalent of 9 shipwrecks.
I think the real number, as almost always, lie between those 2 extremes of 37 & 638. But 37 is more readily verified. However, we don’t really know the general success rate of assassination attempts. My guess is that it’s low. So Castro falls into a category where the ‘disasters’ are not widely covered enough, and the deadliness is questionable.
From that reading, I guess the number is 6?