Sole Survivor: Part Three – The Rescue

Ten days after falling two miles from the sky, Juliane Koepcke stumbles upon a remote hut in the Peruvian rainforest—only to be mistaken for a mythical water goddess by the men who find her. Weak, injured, and barely holding on, Juliane learns the harrowing truth: the jungle has swallowed the wreckage of LANSA Flight 508, and as far as anyone knows, she is the only survivor. As she embarks on a desperate journey back to civilization, the world begins to learn of the miracle girl who defied death itself. But survival comes at a cost—and Juliane is about to face the hardest truths yet.

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• 16:40 [Ad] Persons of Interest
• 17:23 (Cont.) Sole Survivor: Part Three – The Rescue

Transcript

[Underscore Music]

Maria smiled and said, “I’ll follow this man anywhere. If necessary, to the end of the world.” 

[Theme Music Start]

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

[Theme Music Play Out]

[Under Score Music]

It has now been 10 days since Juliane Koepcke fell 2 miles out of the sky and 10 days of this young resilient woman surviving in the wilds of the Peruvian Rain Forest. Juliane was taking shelter in a random tambo she found next to the river when three men emerged from the forest. The men were shocked at her appearance, but they introduced themselves as Beltran, Carlos and Nestor. The three men were forest workers, and this was indeed, their hut. They gave Juliane some farina to eat, this is a mixture of roasted and grated manioc, water and sugar, it is similar to cream of wheat, but not as overly produced. The men also examine and tend to Juliane’s wounds, they take the time to remove as many of the maggots as they can from her open cuts. As Beltran sat with Juliane removing the maggots he confessed to the young girl, “at first I thought you were the water goddess, Yacumama.” Yacumama means "Mother of water", referring to an enormous serpent believed to live in the Amazon Rainforest. The Yacumama is believed to be the mother of all creatures of the water. According to legend, the Yacumama would suck up any living thing that passed within 100 steps of it. To protect themselves, the local indigenous peoples would blow on a conch horn before entering the water, believing that the yacumama would reveal itself if it was present. Juliane was shocked by Beltran’s statement, “Why?” she asked. And Beltran responded, “Well, because you are so blond. And because of your eyes. And because there’s no one living anywhere near here. Especially not any white people. Good thing you spoke to us right away.”

And this was the first time Juliane learned that the river she was floating on, the river that would take her back to safety, was completely uninhabited by human beings. The men had heard of the LANSA crash, so Juliane began to ask them questions. She asked about the other passengers, had they been found, how many had survived, the men stared at her speechless, none of them knowing what to say and then Nestor spoke up, “No, senorita, not even the plane has been found. It has simply disappeared in the jungle, as if it closed its fist around it. As far as I know you are the only survivor.”

The only survivor!

The only survivor!?

It was inconceivable, she could not be the only one, because if she was the only one it meant…she had to stop, she could not think about what that meant.

The men gave Juliane a pair of pants and a shirt to wear, and she was finally able to make her body accept a few spoonful’s of the farina and after just a couple of spoons, she is already full.

Without warning, two more men emerge from the trees, Amado and Marcio, and these men are just as shocked to see the rather worse for wear teenager sitting in their camp. “Who do we have here?” says Marcio with an air of surprise. Once again, Juliane tells the story of how she fell from the sky and 10 days later, here she was. Juliane and the 5 men spend the rest of the evening talking and they tell her about the large-scale operation to find the crashed LANSA flight, an operation that has had no success thus far.

The men agree that it would be best to get Juliane to a doctor as soon as possible, but it was too late in the day for them to depart, so they will spend one more night here in the remote tambo and they would set out for civilization in the morning.

[Music Change – Back on the River]

The next morning as dawn broke, the men put the outboard motor back onto the boat and Juliane made a valiant attempt to walk back down to the river, but in the end, it was easier for the 5 men to simply pick her up and carry her to the boat. They laid her down and made her as comfortable as they could, covering her body with the tarp to keep her dry. Juliane slept off and on as the boat made its way through the ambling waters, the riverbank flies by her and when she is awake she makes conversation with the men, they tell her that the name of this river is the Rio Shebonya and it was truly and completely uninhabited.

This trip down the river seems to go on forever, when they finally reach the mouth of the Shebonya river it opened up wide into the Rio Pachitea and on the banks of the Pachitea river sits the village of Tournavista, this was their destination. Around noon, the boat pulled up to the shore and the men tied it off, they wanted to quickly stop for something to eat. There was a house sitting in the middle of a field and as the men exited the boat with Juliane and began walking toward the house, a few small children start running toward the new arrivals. When the children saw Juliane, they turn around and ran away screaming, an adult woman also turned her face away from Juliane and screaming in horror, “Those eyes! I can’t look at them! Oh God, those terrible eyes!”

Now, Juliane knew that she looked rough, but this seemed like a bit of an overreaction, so she turned to the men and asked, “What’s wrong with her? What’s going on with my eyes?” It was then that the men explained that Juliane’s eyes were completely red, and I’m not talking about red eyes like a teenage kid who just smoked one too many joints, no, Juliane’s eyes were completely blood red, there was no white, there was no color in her iris, she just had two bright red balls for eyes, “no wonder I can’t see well”, Juliane thought. Later when she was able to look in a mirror, Juliane completely understood the woman’s reaction. 

After a quick bowl of soup, much of which Juliane could not eat, they were back on the water, still making their way to Tournavista. By 4 o’clock the group arrived, they docked the boat and immediately a stretcher was brought to carry Juliane, this perturbed her because she felt like she could walk on her own. The nurse who also arrived already knew Juliane, her name was Amanda del Pino, and she had given Juliane her tetanus shot before she had left to live in Panguana. Nurse Amanda wanted to give Juliane a shot of penicillin to help fight infection, but Juliane refused, she knew that her father Hans was highly allergic to penicillin, she was not sure if she was, but hell after falling 2 miles out of the sky and surviving in the rain forest for almost 2 weeks by herself, she did not want an antibiotic to be her downfall. Nurse Amanda understood and so she administered a different drug to stave off the infection. 

Everyone was very careful with Juliane, treating her with kid gloves and at some point, someone snapped a photo of her that would end up on the cover of LIFE magazine. In this photo, Juliane is standing on a porch, she has a bathrobe over her shoulders and Nurse Amanda is holding her up by her arm looking very concerned. The following day a newspaper published an exclusive interview with Juliane, that she positively did not participate in.

After her wounds were treated, an American pilot named Jerrie Cobb offered to fly Juliane to the Linguistico de Verano in Yarinacocha, where a group of missionaries were studying the languages of the Natives and translating the Bible. Just the thought of getting back on an airplane scared the pants off Juliane, but she was too week to protest. Soon, Juliane is loaded onto a twin-engine Islander and Jerrie tries to comfort Juliane by telling her that she was the first woman in the world trained as an astronaut and she assured Juliane that flying with her would be as safe as flying in the arms of an angle.

After they arrive Juliane is taken in by Dr Frank Lindholm, who gives her much needed medical treatment. Dr. Lindholm finishes pulling the maggots from Juliane’s arm as well as her leg. He also finds a rather long wooden splinter which is embedded in the sole of Juliane’s foot, she had not even noticed that it was there.

After all of the treatments, Juliane is asked if she would like anything to eat, she immediately asks for a chicken sandwich, which is made for her right away, after devouring the sandwich, Juliane lays back and falls into a deep sleep. She is finally found; she is finally safe.

[Music Change – The world knows]

As Juliane slept in a bed for the first time in a couple of weeks, the news of her survival spread all over the world. The family members of the other passengers had just begun to reconcile the fact that their loved ones were lost forever, but now a mad euphoria began to spread amongst them, surly if this teenage girl had survived there had to be other survivors as well. That evening the commander in charge of the search operations held a press conference where he confirmed the news of Juliane Koepcke’s survival and at first no one could believe the story. The commander informs the public that Juliane is still in shock and needs time to recover, therefore he has forbidden anyone from speaking with her. When the commander tells the press about Juliane’s relatively light injuries, it only stirs up the family members of the other passengers more. If she had sustained such light injuries, surly others have survived as well.

Juliane described where she had landed, she gave as many details as she could and some locals recognized the area she spoke of, they called it Quebrada Raya, the stingray stream. The following day a plane was sent to fly over this area and during this scouting mission they spotted the first piece of wreckage from the LANSA plane’s fuselage.

Juliane woke up the next morning, unaware that the world now new about her plight. As she lay in the bed, she found herself in an indescribable state, after going through all of this turmoil, now she just felt a void deep inside of herself, she was not happy, she was not upset, she just was. As she sat in that state of limbo, the door opened and in walked her father Hans, he walked in and asked, “How are you doing?” and Juliane simply said, “Good.” And then the father and daughter embraced, neither of them cried, but they were happy to see one another. Hans sat next to Juliane’s bed, and they just existed together, Hans was never a big talker, and in this moment, Juliane was glad for that.

Juliane’s left knee has swollen dramatically, it turns out she had torn her cruciate ligament during the crash and then she walked on that torn ligament for 11 days through the jungle. The doctors are shocked, she should not be able to walk at all, but until she was safe, her knee had never bothered her, it had never even swollen up, it was holding off until her body could deal with another injury. The search commander visited her in the hospital and he asked that she not share any details about her experience until everything could be cleared up, Juliane agreed to this request. 

Reporters began flocking to Pucallpa, plunging the small town into chaos. Journalists and members of the public gather outside of the hospital, all of them clamoring to speak with the girl who fell from the sky. But the commander had secretly moved Juliane to a private house, so she was not even at the hospital.

Now that at least one crash site had been located, locals did not want to wait on the government to locate their family members, so a group of 10 locals set out to locate more crash victims. Marcio, one of the men who had found Juliane in the tambo served as a guide to these desperate family members. A pilot named Clyde Peters, flew to the crash site and parachuted out of the plane, to land at the site on the ground, but this heroic attempt failed. Not only did Clyde lose his equipment, but he injured his leg when he landed. Now rather than Clyde being helpful, he was now just another missing person, and he would not be found for 3 days. No good deed, huh?

The military delegation takes 2 days to reach the crash site that is only 12 miles away as the crow flies. On January 6th, more civilians follow Clyde’s misguided example, but learning from his mistakes, these men are lowered from helicopters with power saws. By the following morning there are now 20 men on site, half are the military group and half are civilians, but they all agreed to work together.

Hans pays Juliane a visit, and he is very upset, he does not believe that the commander is doing everything in his power to look for other survivors. The journalists have now found out where Juliane is being kept and they descended on the private home of Dr. Lindholm, it took everything they could do to continue protecting Juliane’s privacy. Hans tells her that he has set up an official interview with a magazine called Stern, “They’re serious, and then we will have our peace from the others.” He tells her.

Two journalists came to interview Juliane for just a couple of hours each day, they did not want her to overexert herself, so they take it just one day at a time.  Hans is always present during their conversations, which makes Juliane happy.

[Music Change – The Search Party]

On the morning of January 7th, the first piece of the wreckage is located. The searchers use their power saws to clear the land around the wreckage so helicopters can land, this takes 6 hours of hard labor. Within just a few hundred yards of this spot they locate the tail section of the plane as well as the plane’s gally. Luggage, along with all of its contents are strewn all over the area as well. 

On January 8th, more wreckage is located, along with the first 20 corpses. Searchers find an unimaginable landscape of brutalized bodies, and their minds are filled with images that they will never be able to forget. In the press the scene is compared to Dante’s Inferno. The coroner is flown out to the crash site, and he immediately becomes ill at the scene before him. The ground is littered with wrapped Christmas gifts, luggage and cloths and the trees were ornamented with severed body parts, the smell of decomposition was all around and King Vultures sat in the trees, waiting their next meal.

The first victim to be identified was the pilot, Carols Forno, who had to be cut out of the cockpit, he was only recognizable by the seat he was still strapped into. Next to be found was a 14-year-old girl named Elisabeth Ribeiro, who was identified through the jewelry she was wearing, her father, who was one of the civilians on the rescue crew, recognized it as he had given it to his daughter as a gift. Elisabeth’s remains fit into a black garbage bag that her father insisted on carrying to the helicopter himself. 

Hans travels everyday to Pucallpa, where the government has set up a temporary morgue for the crash victims, Hans goes everyday to look for his wife, Maria, but so far, she is yet to be recovered. If Hans is not in Pucallpa, he is sitting silently in the corner of Juliane’s room. She looks across the room at her father, who’s face is etched with grief, and she asks, “What’s the matter?” Hans looks up, as if he is returning from another world and he says, “Oh, nothing, I was just grieving a little for your mother.”

[Music Change – Maria]

On January 12th, Hans returns from his daily trip to the makeshift morgue in Pucallpa, only this time Hans seems paler and more serious than usual. Hans tells Juliane that he has just identified her mother at the morgue, he had lost it on a reporter who tried to force his camera into the coffin and snap a photo of his deceased wife and I mean, who would blame him, I would 100% go Tobey Maguire on them if that was me, but anyway.

Hans explained to Juliane that he could not be 100% sure that the victim had been Maria, because apart from the woman’s lower jaw, the rest of her head had been missing. Hans had identified his wife from her feet, she had those kinds of toes where her second toe was much longer than her big toe, you know, the strange things about your partner’s body that you would always be able to recognize after a lifetime spent side by side.

Juliane could now let this settle into her mind, Maria Koepcke, her mother and inspiration was truly gone, but somehow or for some reason, Juliane did not cry, it had been 19 days since she had fallen from the sky and deep down, maybe she had always known that this would be her reality. Hans shows his feelings about the situation through angry outbursts, first at the journalists who where unrelenting as he stood before coffin no. 22 and attempted to identify the body of the person who he loved the most in this entire world and then at the authorities who had fucked up this whole situation from the very beginning.

Hans began to doubt his own identification of his wife, questions raged through his mind, why was the upper part of the head gone, the rest of the body was fully intact, and why was the corpse in such a fresh state after 19 days. Juliane had located other bodies just 4 days after the crash and those bodies had already been attacked by bugs and insects, not to mention the king vultures. So why was Maria’s body in such a drastically different state? Only one thing seemed to make sense and if it were true, it made the situation even more difficult to handle. Maria Koepcke must have not died during the plane crash.

Hans composed a letter to his sister which read in part, “Yesterday I looked at Maria’s corpse. The coffin was already soldered up; everything was difficult. I was shown Maria’s wedding ring. Whether it was found on the hand no one knew. The definite identification is supposed to have been made through the dental bridge, but the upper part of the skull was missing. Incidentally, the corpse was astonishingly fresh, that is, only destroyed a little bit by vultures and insects. It’s not impossible that Maria was alive for days and that the missing parts of the skull were removed later.” Hans goes on to request that an autopsy be performed when her body arrived in Germany.

Maria was embalmed on January 13th and on January 14th there was a small service held in her honor inside of a hanger at the Jorge Chavez International Airport. Friends and family who attended to show their respects stated that the service was quite moving and the drama of the planes taking off and landing in the background made for a very dramatic atmosphere. The following morning her remains would be flown to Munich, Germany and on January 21st, Maria Koepcke was laid to rest on Lake Starnberg, next to her late father. Juliane was in no state to travel and so she could not attend this service, Hans also chose to stay in Lima with Juliane, this was probably less about being there for his daughter and more about his state of profound grief after having lost the love of his life in such a tragic way.

[Music Change – Dark Spiral]

Hans has suffered an unimaginable loss, and, in his grief, he begins to spiral, he cannot stop thinking about Maria and how she died. In his own efforts to rationalize what had happened he stated, “She may have been alive, even when she was found.” When Juliane responded to this with a simple question, “But then why is she dead?” Hans had thought this through, and he said, “Perhaps she was killed!” Hans could not stop spiraling and he had to know the truth about his wife’s death. He had asked his sister Cordula to arrange an autopsy when the body arrived in Germany, which she did, but the report was slow in being produced. In February, 4 weeks after her burial, Hans receives word that the postmortem exam was not able to definitively identify the remains as belonging to Maria Koepcke. In fact, a fully embalmed and well-preserved body never even made it to Germany. To the family’s horror they were told that when the coffin was opened in Germany, only a few bones where inside the casket. And to deepen this mystery, one of the bones located in this mystery coffin was Maria’s lower jawbone, how was that possible? The doctors who had conducted the autopsy and the doctors who performed the examination in Germany agreed that it was impossible for the body to have decomposed during the flight from Lima to Munich. 

On January 24th, 1972, a mass funeral service was held in Pucallpa for the 44 crash victims who came from this city. All 44 bodies were interred in a mausoleum inscribed as Alas de Esperanza “Wings of Hope”.

During the rescue operations in the dense jungle, one volunteer seemed to have quite the knack for finding lost bodies, 26-year-old Mario Zarbe, found almost half of the crash victims all on his own. After the official searches were called off Mario and several other civilians continued to search and they found an additional 6 bodies, amongst these final bodies to be located was an American boy named David Ericson, David’s parents had already held a funeral for their precious 18-year-old son, before his body had been found by Mario.

Juliane believes that at least some of her mother’s remains were also buried in the mausoleum, splitting her eternal resting place between two places she loved, her home in Germany and her home in Lima, either way, Juliane is certain that Maria has found her peace.

[Music Change – Back to Panguana]

 At the end of January 1972, Juliane is finally well enough to travel and so, she and her father decided to go back to Panguana. But their relationship has now drastically changed. Juliane is no longer a child living a carefree life, she was now an adult and she felt woefully unprepared. 

Juliane wanted to pick her life back up, right from December 24th, when the mortal coil had been torn asunder, but that was impossible. She begins to prepare for the abitur, just like all of her classmates and this gives her something to look forward to. She will stay in Lima and get to hang out with her friends, there will be ice cream and movies, and trips to the beach. After the Abitur, Juliane planned on studying biology, but for that she will have to go back to Germany. 

When it comes time to travel to Lima, Hans books a flight for the both of them. “Do we have to fly” Juliane asked her father, who was reassuring and attempted to comfort Juliane throughout the trip. The flight is pretty standard, [Landing Gear]but when the landing gear begins to move upon their decent, Juliane jumps, Hans tells her to relax and Juliane breaths out a huge sigh of relief. After the plane lands and everyone begins exiting the plane, Juliane finds that she can hardly walk because her legs are shaking so badly.

As they exit the plane a gaggle of reporters are there waiting for the girl who had fallen from the sky and lived. As she exited the plane it was like Juliane was walking the red carpet at some start studded event, cameras flashed all around her and reporters shouted interesting and completely idiotic questions. Juliane will stay with her classmate, Edith, who lives in her grandmother's apartment. The girls find that the reporters are relentless and anytime they were coming or going from the apartment, the reporters would be right there. Juliane had focused on ignoring the journalists, surly if she never spoke to them, they would leave at some point, but that ended up not being the case. Eventually Edith came up with a plan, she told Juliane that she should speak with them and if she answered their questions, they would leave, after all they came for a story, give them the story and they will be on their way.

Taking the advice of her friend, one day Juliane walked outside and sat on a swing set, she smiled pleasantly at the reporters and she answered their mondain questions, and it turned out that Edith was right, the pack of press who normally followed Juliane everywhere she went started to dwindle. 

Hans Koepcke, as you may suspect, was not a man that watched television, he was an intellectual after all, but life can be serendipitous, and on the day, Juliane Koepcke decided to sit on a swing set in a bikini and tell the whole world that she was doing fine, her father just so happened to be tuned in to the news. 

Later that evening, Hans finds Juliane and he is more than angry, “So that’s how you mourn your mother!” he shouts before telling Juliane that he has made a decision, she will not remain here in Lima for her Abitur, she will fly back to Germany immediately. Juliane is shocked and she begins to cry. How could he do this, she just lost her mother and now he was taking away her home too. She hoped that somehow her father would change his mind, but that would not be the case. 

After several days and after Hans had calmed down, he explained his decision to his daughter, “Here in Peru, you’ll never get any peace. These journalist vultures will keep you from being able to lead a normal life. Believe me, this is for your own good. In Germany you will be able to start a new life.”

A new life, what an interesting phrase, because it would never be a new life, Juliane will forever be missing her mother, a new life cannot bring her back, she did not want a new life, but she did not have a choice.

Juliane’s classmates organized a farewell party for her, and they gave her a gift consisting of a gold ring with a piece of pink tourmaline, so she would never forget them. Pink Tourmaline is the stone of love, compassion, emotional healing and self-love. It helps calm one’s emotions in times of distress, and it is the perfect stone to carry if you suffer from daily bouts of anxiety.

Before Juliane left for Germany, she continued to spend time with her father. One afternoon as the pair strolled down the streets of Miraflores, Hans began explaining something to his daughter. He and his wife followed an ancient Egyptian belief that the sun had life-giving powers and they also adhered to another rule as well, “One of them is never to say good-bye to each other while arguing or to go to sleep at night without making up first.” Hans stopped and stared at his daughter while he said this, there was nothing more important. It was during this time that Juliane realized that her father was at the very end of his emotional rope. 

[Music Change – Back to Germany]

Although Juliane had flown once since the LANSA plane disintegrated around her, that was a short 55-minute flight, now she had to make an 18-hour journey with an overnight layover in New York. The time passed quickly for Juliane during this flight because the pilots allowed her to sit in the cockpit with them and ask as many questions as she wanted. This abated some of her fear, but not all of it. Juliane did not sleep at all on the 18-hour flight, and she was completely exhausted when they finally landed in Frankfurt. After landing in German, Juliane still had one flight left to take her to Kiel where her aunt Cordula and her grandmother were waiting for her. 

Juliane’s first few days in Kiel were dizzying, it was so cold here compared to Peru and Juliane did not feel well, and she was constantly nauseous. Her knee which had swollen after her rescue gave her constant pain when she walked and her eyes began to turn a yellowish color, her aunt immediately took her to the hospital to be examined. The hospital staff quickly admitted Juliane and they placed her into the isolation ward. The ligament in her knee had ruptured and on top of that, she had a full-blown case of hepatitis. A little gift from all the river water she had drunk during her long trek through the jungle. Her now grossly swollen liver had been the cause of her constant nausea. As Juliane lay there in the isolation ward of the hospital, she was thankful for the alone time, her mind was all over the place and this incident afforded her the time for her mind to wrap itself around all the craziness happening in her world. She learned of more bodies being found in the jungle and through this gruesome news, Juliane Koepcke finally learned that she had been the sole survivor of LANSA flight 508. 

LANSA airlines would never operate again, after all this had been the last airplane in their small fleet. Through the crash investigation many disturbing facts were brought to light, firstly, the mechanics working for LANSA were not even legitimate airplane mechanics, they had only ever worked on motorcycles before being hired by the now defunct airline. Also, the two pilots who had been flying the plane did not have commercial pilots’ licenses. And the plane, the last airplane that LANSA had not already crashed, was completely constructed of left over parts from other airplanes, what a shit show. 

[Music Change – The End]

After recovering from her host of injuries, Juliane continued her education in Germany. Like her mother and father before her, she attended the University of Kiel where she would earn a degree in biology. Juliane would go on to earn her doctoral degree from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where she met the love of her life, Erich Diller, a fellow biologist. Together Juliana and Erich returned to Peru where she would study and then publish her thesis, “Ecological study of a bat colony in the tropical rain forest of Peru.” While in Peru, Erich studied parasitic wasps, just like Maria and Hans, Juliane and Erich were two peas from the same pod.

Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke passed away in the year 2000, he was 86 years old. Maria’s mother once told Juliane, “Your grandfather was not thrilled at all about letting Maria go all by herself on that long journey. But Maria said, “I’ll follow this man anywhere. If necessary, to the end of the world.”

In 1998, Juliane returned to the site of the crash with film maker, Werner Herzog, who had been in that airport on Christmas eve 1971, attempting to get onto LANSA flight 508, but being saved by our mysterious universe. Werner filmed a documentary with Juliane entitled, Wings of Hope, where Juliane traveled back through the jungle and showed the whole world everything that she had endured. Werner Herzog said, “Juliane did not leave the plane, the plane left her.” 

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

Resources:

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Koepcke, J. (2013, September 13). Juliane Koepcke fell 10,000ft to earth after plane crash and lived. Mail Online. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2418765/Juliane-Koepcke-fell-10-000ft-earth-plane-crash-lived.html

Lidz, F. (2023, June 15). She Fell Nearly 2 Miles, and Walked Away. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/science/koepcke-diller-panguana-amazon-crash.html

Juliane Koepcke. (2024, January 14). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliane_Koepcke

Maria Koepcke. (2023, October 14). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Koepcke

Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke. (2024, January 27). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Wilhelm_Koepcke

Líneas Aéreas Nacionales S.A. (2024, February 8). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%ADneas_A%C3%A9reas_Nacionales_S.A.

LANSA Flight 501. (2024, January 2). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LANSA_Flight_501

LANSA Flight 502. (2023, September 7). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LANSA_Flight_502

LANSA Flight 508. (2024, January 19). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LANSA_Flight_508

Wings of Hope (film). (2023, August 4). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Hope_(film)

Juliane Koepcke: How I survived a plane crash. (2012, March 24). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17476615

R. (2024, January 16). The Story of Juliane Koepcke: How a Teenager Survived 11 Days in the Amazon Jungle After a Plane Crash in 1971. Rare Historical Photos. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/juliane-koepcke-surviving-story/

Mateo Pumacahua. (2024, January 24). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mateo_Pumacahua

A. (2022, November 28). Yacumama – the myths around the mysterious giant serpent that dwells in the Amazonian waters. The Archaeologist. https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/yacumama-the-myths-around-the-mysterious-giant-serpent-that-dwells-in-the-amazonian-waters