The black effect presents family therapy. And I'm your host, Elliot.

Connie.

Jay is the woman in this dynamic who is currently co parenting two young boys with her former partner, David.

David, he is a leader. He just don't want to lead me.

But how do you lead a woman? How do you lead in a relationship? Like, what's the blueprint?

David, you just asked the most important question. Listen to family therapy on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave, which makes this the traditional arrangement for short stuff.

That's right. A tale of survival of a young german woman.

Yeah, I don't know why, but Julianne Kupka started making the rounds like, a year ago, and since then, everybody's written on her story because it's an amazing story. But I couldn't figure out what it was that set it off. I heard about her on, like, some quora thread that was suggested to me, and I don't know if that's the one that kicked it off or not, but she's made the rounds.

She may have just opened up for business.

No, I don't think so, because she released a memoir, but that was back in 2011, so I don't know what happened, but she suddenly became part of the zeitgeist. And I understand why for two reasons. One, zeitgeist is a german word, and she was a german national by birth. And secondly, the story is just so, frankly, amazing that everybody should know it.

Yeah, for sure. There's a great Werner Herzog documentary about it. That's a pretty quick watch for such a harrowing story. But as all things Werner Herzog, I highly recommend it.

It's called wings of hope, or wings of hope.

It's really good. So she was a young woman that was raised in the jungle. Her dad was a zoologist and her mom was an ornithologist. And she was raised in the jungles of Peru because they were researchers in the Amazon. And she sort of grew up with this, I mean, I think, kind of idyllic life of being this nature girl living in the jungle. She said she went to the school of the jungle, and it was a really unique upbringing for a young german woman.

Yeah, I mean, her parents were like, hardcore. They were in Germany, they met in Germany. They were like, where's a place that's just so biodiverse? It's not really on the map. And they went there and they founded a research station called Panguana, and that place is still there today. It's a large nature preserve now, but her parents founded that and she was raised there, starting in her tweens, I believe, and then eventually moved on to private school in Lima. But, yeah, in between that time, she learned all the animals, she learned what sounds they made. She learned how to avoid who. She basically just learned how to survive in the jungle, which really set her up nicely for one of the most significant events in her young life. That came later.

Yeah, it was a very sad event. Christmas Eve, 1971, she was a 17 year old. She was on a flight with her mom and looking to go celebrate Christmas with dad. And this flight turned really scary. There was a very bad storm. And one of the. Sort of. One of the few times where you can point to an actual plane being struck by lightning in the air hasn't happened that much. I think this one's regarded as kind of the worst of all the times that's happened. And with about 20 minutes to go in the flight, this plane is hit and all of a sudden plummeting toward the ground with 92 people on board.

Yeah, what's sad is apparently her mom was not a fan of flying. She found it unnatural. And before it got hit by lightning, it had started to hit some horrible turbulence, like luggage was falling down on people from overhead. And her mom said, she's like, I hope. I hope this goes okay. So when the. When the plane did start to break up, apparently Julianne heard her mom say, now it's all over. So that's pretty horrible, right? This is not just a regular plane crash. They were at 10,000ft and the plane broke up so thoroughly that Julianne said that essentially she didn't leave the plane. The plane left me. She was still strapped to the bench seat that she had been sitting next to her mother in. But all of a sudden it was just her. Her mother and the other passenger, I guess, were just sucked right out of their seats. And she found herself totally alone, 10,000ft in the air, headed straight down toward earth.

Yeah, just hurtling toward the ground. She said that, and this is the only thing that saved our life, basically, was this. This really thick jungle canopy. And she said she remembers, literally remembers being in the air, falling toward the ground and seeing that the treetops look like heads of broccoli. Next thing you know, she wakes up on the ground. She's alive. She's got a broken collarbone, she's concussed, cut up pretty badly, got kind of you know, beat in the face, obviously. So one eye was swollen shut. So she's in. In bad shape, kind of going in and out of consciousness, but eventually wakes up. She had pretty poor eyesight and was missing her glasses, which was no good. And she would soon learn that she was the only survivor out of the 92 passengers and crew.

Yeah. I say we take a break and come back because as bad as falling out of the sky 2 miles down and surviving alone in the Amazon is, it actually just went from bad to worse for her at this point.

I'm ilya Connie, and this is family therapy.

My best hopes, I guess. Identify the life that I want and work towards it.

I never seen a man take care of my mother the way she needed to be taken care of.

I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father. Is that true?

That's true, and I'm not offended by that.

Thank you for going through those things and thank you for overcoming them.

Thank God for the limits.

Every time I have one of our sessions, our sessions, be positive. It just keeps me going.

I feel like my focus is redirected in a different aspect of my life now.

So, how do we do today?

We did good.

The black effect presents family therapy. Listen now on the Black effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, it's me, Blippi. And this is my best friend, Mika. Hi, I'm Mika and this is our brand new podcast, Blippi and Mika's road trip. The Blippi mobile will take us to amazing places. Click, click. Put your seat belts on. Get ready for a ride. We're gonna have some fun. We'll explore and listen to the sounds of awesome places like bars, racetracks and even construction sites. Follow your ears. What do you hear? And we'll meet new friends along the way. They'll teach us awesome new things about the places and things we see and hear. What did we learn today? It's so cool. Listen to Blippi and Mika's road trip podcasts on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

So you said flight 508 is considered the worst lightning strike disaster in aviation history. 91 of the 92 people on board died, including her mother at this time. Though when she landed, miraculously survived falling 2 miles down to earth from mid air. She didn't know this, so she started looking immediately for her mother. She spent the first day looking for her mom. Looking for anybody, really. But in particular, her mom. And she didn't find anything. I don't know what day it was. I think perhaps the fourth day of walking around in the Amazon. I guess we can say she walked by herself in the Amazon, surviving for eleven days. Day four, she came around the bend and found a really grisly piece of wreckage that I can't imagine seeing this. Yeah.

This was two men and a woman who landed headfirst so forcefully that they were buried 3ft into the ground. And this is the part I don't quite get. She checked the feet to see if it was her mother and saw that the toenails were painted so she knew it wasn't. But, and I'm not nitpicking, she was clearly traumatized. But I thought her mom got ripped apart, are ripped out of the seat next to her on the bench and so she wouldn't be strapped into another bench. But I guess that's nitpicky.

Yeah, I know. I had the exact same thought and I chalked it up to trauma too. Or just maybe hope or something like that. I don't know.

Sure.

Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. I mean, three people, I've never been there, so I'm not judging exactly, but I mean, imagine seeing three people still strapped to their bench seat all head first into the ground with their legs sticking up. That's just. I just can't imagine that stuff like that actually happens sometimes in the world. And this poor girl saw that on day four of wandering around the Amazon, totally lost. But like we said, she was just about as prepared for this experience as a person can be from her upbringing. And she remembered after a while, like, okay, what did I learn as a kid about living in the jungle? And one of the things that came to her was her father telling her, if you're ever lost in the jungle, find water and just follow it one way or the other, because eventually you're going to find humans living around that water.

Totally. And that's a smart rule of thumb, period. If you're ever, you know, lost in the woods or something. And at the very least you have some water. And she lived on that water because she didn't have much food. She had a little bit of candy. It was the wet season there, so there wasn't like low hanging fruit, literally, that she could get ahold of. It was obviously because it was wet season. It was super hot, super humid. But she did get some water from that river which kept her alive. And like you said, for eleven days she trod that creek, then stream then it became bigger into a river. Eventually, she was basically at the point where she had given up hope. And she was, you know, kind of succumbing and to the idea that she might die. And she saw a boat on the riverbank and thought it was a mirage. But she went over and touched it to make sure it was real. Followed a path from that boat to a shack, where she found some forest workers who immediately were like, you know, great. They gave her some fruit and started taking care of her and taking care of her wounds right away.

Yeah, I think when she came in the shack, their famous quote was, what the what? Yeah, this was gross. I can't remember which article. I think it might have been from the New York Times article by a guy named Franz Litz. And he said that they poured gasoline on her wounds that had maggots sprouting from it like asparagus tips. I mean, she was in bad shape. Chuck, just put yourself in this girl's mind for a second. You don't need glasses, do you? Just, like some reading glasses, maybe.

Yeah, reading glasses.

So you've never needed glasses except to read. One of the worst things that can happen to you if you wear glasses and are significantly nearsighted in particular, is to lose those glasses. This girl wandered around the Amazon for eleven days, nearsighted without her glasses. And that was one of the least of her concerns at that time. I just. When I think about that, it just sends a chill down my spine because it's so awful to not be able to see like that.

Yeah, I imagine so. She, you know, she survived. She got flown to safety. She got reunited with her father. The real, obviously, huge tragedy here for her personally and for her father was they lost their mother and wife. And so, you know, she comes back home, you know, obviously elated to be saved, but instantly mourning her mom's loss. She avoided the media, and that's why I think she maybe didn't was open for business more recently because she very famously avoided the media, except for Werner Herzog, who was supposed to be on that flight, because he was scouting stuff for either movie or documentary. I couldn't tell which. And he reached out. He was very moved by the story, obviously, because his close connection and reached out to her. And I guess because of his eastern european heritage, they might have bonded, or at least she trusted him. And that's when he made wings of hope, man.

It's just nuts. So, yeah, in that documentary, apparently he got her to go back to the wreckage site. And there's still plenty of wreckage just sitting there in the jungle from that. From that plane crash. Because it crashed in such a remote area, there's just no way they were ever going to remove it.

Yeah, it was tough stuff. She also talked to some of the people who saved her. It's really amazing.

Yeah, I've got to see that. Then.

It's not long. You can watch on YouTube.

Okay, cool. There was something else that I thought was really great about her. She apparently made one of those deals with God or the universe or whatever and said, like, if I make it through this, I promise to dedicate myself to nature and humanity. And after she was saved, she made good on it. She's been, she's used a lot of her spotlight to help drum up, I guess, contributions and donations to preserve the Amazon, in particular to preserve penguana, the preserve, appropriately enough. It started out, I think, around 445 acres and it's grown to 4000 plus because of her, just through private fundraising.

I wonder if God was like, oh, I thought you were going to say like, in service of me, but that's cool. Like, that's good too.

But first God said, how are you alive? So, yeah, one of the other sweet things I think about this is she returned to Panguana. She got her own doctorate in biology. She focused on bats and worked with her dad. And then her dad died in 2000. So she took over the Panguana biosphere preserve and research station and as far as I know, still runs the show there. She considers it her sanctuary, just like it was for her parents.

Amazing. I wonder if she has shirts that says not that biosphere.

Amazing tale of survival, I'll tell you that much, buddy.

And does that mean short stuff is up?

I would say so, sure.

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