Juliane Koepcke

• 1. A Fall From The Sky

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  Juliane Koepcke fell three thousand meters to the ground, still strapped into her airplane seat, after lightning struck the aircraft above the Peruvian Amazon. She survived. Crashing through the rainforest canopy in December 1971, she then spent eleven days alone in the jungle before finding help. Her mother did not survive the disaster. How does anyone walk away from a fall that killed almost everyone else aboard, and then survive eleven days alone in dense rainforest? The answer starts years earlier, at a research station her own parents built in that same jungle.

• 2. A Childhood In The Rainforest

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  Maria and Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke were German zoologists working at Lima's Museum of Natural History. Their only child, Juliane, was born on the 10th of October 1954. When Juliane turned fourteen, her parents left Lima to found a research station called Panguana deep in the Amazon rainforest, and she went with them. Living at Panguana, she learned survival skills that stayed with her for years afterward.

  The Deutsche Schule Lima Alexander von Humboldt required Juliane to return and take her exams. Peruvian officials had disapproved of her living so far from formal schooling. She graduated on the 23rd of December 1971, one day before her life changed again.

• 3. Booked On Flight 508

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  Maria wanted Juliane back at Panguana by the 19th or the 20th of December, ahead of the holidays. Juliane wanted to stay in Lima long enough to attend her own graduation ceremony on the 23rd. Maria agreed, and the two of them booked a flight for Christmas Eve instead. Every other flight out of Lima was full. Only LANSA, an airline with a poor reputation, still had seats. Hans-Wilhelm urged his wife not to fly with that particular airline. They booked the flight anyway. On the 24th of December 1971, one day after her graduation, Koepcke and her mother boarded LANSA Flight 508.

• 4. Why She Lived

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  Koepcke came out of the fall with a broken collarbone, a deep cut on her right arm, and an eye injury. She had also ruptured a ligament in her knee and suffered a concussion.

  Koepcke's seat was a window seat, attached to two others in a row of three, still strapped around her when she hit the ground. Experts believe that row of seats acted like a kind of parachute or helicopter blade, slowing her descent. A thunderstorm updraft, the same storm that brought down the plane, may have softened the impact further. Thick foliage at the landing site likely absorbed some of the force too.

  As many as fourteen other passengers were later found to have survived the initial crash. They died before rescuers could reach them. Koepcke would need to find her own way out long before any rescue arrived.

• 5. Following The Creek

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  For nine days, Koepcke followed a single creek through the jungle, trusting it would eventually widen into a river and lead her to people. Insects bit her constantly along the way, and botfly larvae burrowed into the open wound on her arm.

  On the ninth day, she reached an encampment that local lumberjacks had built but were not using at the time. A few hours later, the lumberjacks returned. They poured gasoline into her wound to kill the parasites and paddled her by canoe for eleven hours toward a more populated area. From there, she was airlifted to a hospital. Her recovery, and the rest of her life, still lay ahead of her.

• 6. Rebuilding A Life

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  Once healed enough to travel, Koepcke joined search parties combing the wreckage site for other victims. Her mother's body was found on the 12th of January 1972.

  Koepcke then returned to her parents' native West Germany, where she fully recovered from her physical injuries. She studied biology at the University of Kiel, just as her parents had, and graduated in 1980. A doctorate from LMU Munich followed, after which she returned to Peru to study mammalogy, focusing on bats. Her thesis, titled "Ecological study of a bat colony in the tropical rain forest of Peru," was published in 1987.

  In 1989, Koepcke married Erich Diller, a German entomologist who studies parasitic wasps. When her father died in 2000, she became director of Panguana. She currently works as a librarian at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich. Long before she took that post, though, others had already begun turning her story into books and films.

• 7. Telling The Story

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  In 2011, Piper Verlag published Koepcke's own account of the crash, a German-language book titled Als ich vom Himmel fiel. The English title translates it as When I Fell from the Sky: How the Jungle Gave Me My Life Back. That book won the Corine Literature Prize the same year. In 2019, the Peruvian government named her a Grand Officer of the Order of Merit for Distinguished Services.

  Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Maria Scotese made the first film about her story in 1974, a low-budget and heavily fictionalized production called I miracoli accadono ancora. Released in English as Miracles Still Happen, and sometimes known as The Story of Juliane Koepcke, it starred English actress Susan Penhaligon.

  Werner Herzog told her story more faithfully in his 1998 documentary Wings of Hope, narrated by Koepcke herself. Herzog had a personal reason for pursuing it. He had been scheduled to fly on that same LANSA flight himself, while scouting locations for his own film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God. A last-minute change of plans kept him off the flight. He had wanted to make the film ever since narrowly missing that flight. But Koepcke avoided the media for decades, and he could not reach her. He eventually found her by contacting the priest who had led her mother's funeral. Koepcke later visited the crash site with Herzog, calling the trip a "kind of therapy."

  Journalist Franz Lidz described Koepcke as a particularly interesting interview subject, noting that she was initially reluctant to speak with him. She agreed only after he told her he "just wanted to write about the science of it, rather than focusing on the childhood trauma." That condition still shapes how her story gets told today.