On Christmas Eve 1971, LANSA Flight 508 from Lima, Peru, to Pucallpa, Peru, crashed during a thunderstorm killing 91 people – all of its 6 crew and 85 of its 86 passengers. The sole survivor was a 17 year old girl, called Juliane Köpcke , who fell 2 miles (3 km) down into the Amazon rainforest strapped to her seat and remarkably survived the fall. The next morning, the high school student awoke in the jungle floor, surrounded by fallen holiday gifts. Injured and alone, she pushed her mother's death, who'd been seated next to her on the plane, out of her mind. Instead, she remembered one of her father's advice, a biologist: To find civilization when lost in the jungle, follow water. Koepcke waded from tiny streams to larger ones. She passed crocodiles and poked the mud in front of her with a stick to scare away stingrays. She had lost one shoe in the fall and was wearing a ripped miniskirt. Her only food was a bag of candy, and she had nothing but dark, dirty water to drink. She ignored her broken collarbone and her wounds, infested with maggots.

On the tenth day, she rested on the bank of the Shebonya River. When she stood up again, she saw a canoe tethered to the shoreline. It took her hours to climb the embankment to a hut, where, the next day, a group of lumberjacks found her. The incident was seen as a miracle in Peru, and free-fall statistics seem to support those arguing for divine intervention.