Falling from 10,000 meters without parachute was a safe death. Until Vulović appeared

Suddenly, the hostess Vesna Vulović Recover knowledge. He is bite and can barely move due to his partner’s inert body. Half of Vesna remains on the plane, and the other half is out. What had just happened was going to challenge physics for decades: no one, neither before or after, had been able to survive a free fall without parachute from 10,000 meters high after the explosion of a commercial flight.

The question since then is simple: how the hell managed to leave alive?

The wrong flight. On January 26, 1972, Vesna Vulović, a young 22 -year -old Yugoslava flight Jat company for a confusion of names with another partner. The itinerary included several scales between Stockholm and Belgrade, and nothing presaged that it would be the most extraordinary and tragic flight of his life.

The accident. After taking off from Copenhagen to Zagreb with 28 people on board, the plane reached cruise altitude. Minutes later, at 4:01 p.m., while the then Eastern Germany, He disappeared from the radar suddenly. An explosion at the front of the luggage compartment left the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 in two to more than 10,000 meters high. What followed was a brutal vertical fall, a bleak scenario in the snowy mountain of Srbská Kamenicein the then Czechoslovakia.

There was only one survivor: Vesna.

Silence: an attack. Just a few hours after the accident, Czechoslovacos secret services They took control absolute of the place. Access to press was not allowed, much less civilians. The next day, an unidentified man, in a somewhat strange Swede, called the Kvällsposten newspaper ensuring that he was Croatian and a member of a nationalist group that had placed the bomb.

The Yugoslav government immediately pointed to The UstachaCroatian ultra -right organization. Ten days later, the remains of a alarm clock supposedly linked to an explosive were presented as proof. Black boxes were never found, there were never arrests, or claims by any organization.

The documented miracle. As we said, the official report indicated the cause of the accident Like a bomb placed by a Croatian nationalist group, although the culprits were never identified. Even so, the authorities closed the case in 1974 attributing it to an explosive attack.

The official story argued that Vesna fell from More than 10,000 metersprotected by a series of improbable factors: a catering cart that kept it trapped in the fuselage, the friction of the air that damping the fall and the so -called terminal speed (maximum speed that reaches a body moving within an infinite fluid under the action of a constant force), the snow on the slope of the mountain that reduced the force of the impact, and finally a part of the relatively intact plane protected from the final blow.

That was so amazing that even the mythical Mythbusters reached Recreate the case And they concluded that the possibility of surviving was not void, although, of course, tiny.

Tributes. Vulović suffered multiple fractures, entered a coma for almost a month and was temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. However, he managed to recover, walk again and even fly again.

In fact, the woman was honored in London By the book Guinness With a record that remains: that of the person who has fallen without parachute and has survived (prize, by the way, delivered by Paul McCartney himself).

The doctor. Over the years, Vesna shared Some memories rebuilt from what they told him. In her words and those of the man who rescued her, a former German army doctor named Bruno Henke, she was in the central part of the plane, not in the tail, contradicting the official theories that explained their survival.

Henke, a neighbor of the area, argued that he found it in the middle part of the plane, at the height of the wings. He found her head down, with the torso out of fuselage and legs inside. Vesna always He believed his testimonyIn fact, he had a close relationship with Henke.

Something does not fit. Let’s recapitulate: Vesna’s body, as we said at the beginning, was partially inside and outside the fuselage, with that “miraculous” cart literally nailed to his back. And here appears one of the great doubts, because that incongruity undermines the physical hypotheses about how he could survive, since a person in the middle zone of the device could hardly have remained within it After an explosion that left it at two high.

Herself He pointed out thatas the plane was half empty, it probably moved among the passengers, according to the service protocol. To do everything a little more complicated, Vesna’s amnesia about everything happened on that date prevented verifying the details.

Boom. In 2009, the story He took a turn unexpected. An investigation by journalists Peter Hornung-Andersen, Pavel Theiner and Tim Van Beveren, published by Tagesschau and issued by the ARD chain, He unearthed documents Dak For mig fighters of the Czechoslovak Air Force when it flew to low height, just 800 meters from the ground.

According to This versionthe plane descended by an emergency and was confused with an aerial threat when entering a restricted area, perhaps linked to a Soviet missile base, or coinciding in the airspace with the plane of the Soviet leader Breznev’s own leader in official visit to East Germany. The demolition would have been Undercover by the Police Secret, which built the history of the “world record” to hide the incident. This version was based on official documents, testimonies of witnesses who saw the plane flying whole before exploding, and what is doubtful, the apparent physical impossibility of surviving a fall from such a height.

The official silence. Czech authorities They denied categorically the alternative version without offering contrary evidence. They never explained the absence of black boxes or responded with documentation to refute the new findings. A general came to declare that “at least 200 people should have known something” if it were true, but did not explain the testimonies, the reports or the systematic destruction of files. The researchers They denounced Lack of cooperation, pressures, and the existence of officials still involved in senior positions. The official explanation was still standing, but its legitimacy collapsed.

Vesna’s story, meanwhile, remained Like a mixture of myth, survival, propaganda and national symbol. In Yugoslavia it became heroin, although in 1990 they fired her from her job for criticizing Slobodan Milošević. Vesna lived Withdrawal in Belgradebesieged by the fame he had not sought and for a feeling of guilt that dragged his whole life. When they asked him for his fate, he answered sadly that he felt guilty of having survived, and that he often thought that perhaps he should not have done it. Died at home in December 2016.

Between faith and disbelief. Today, the Case of Vesna Vulović It is between physical prodigy and historical manipulation. The lack of memory of the only witness, the disappearance of key evidence, the contradiction between the official version and the subsequent data, and the inaction of the authorities to clarify with scientific rigor what happened, leave the case in an ambiguous field.

Believing in the history of the fall from 10,160 meters requires accepting a cluster of coincidences so perfect that they touch the miraculous. Believing in the cover -up hypothesis requires accepting that, for decades, two secret services (the Czechoslovaco and the Yugoslav) managed to impose a global version without anyone being questioned seriously. In any case, the Vesna storywith its mixture of chance, tragedy, politics and science, it remains one of the most disturbing and moving enigmas of modern aviation.

A story where the truth, perhaps forever, was suspended … at medium height.

Image | Picryl, clippertic

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