This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

On Christmas Eve, I'm going to the Christmas Eve of 1971, 17-year-old Yuliana Koppka took her seat next to her mother on Lansa Flight 508. She figured it would be a routine flight, once she had done a dozen times before.

But just a few hours later, she was free-falling through the sky, about to land in the middle

of the world's densest jungle, completely alone.

If anyone was going to survive trekking through the Amazon, it was Juliana Kapka.

Daughter of two German zoologists, she had spent most of her childhood seeing her parents' work at the Lima Museum of Natural History.

When she was just 14 years old, she accompanied her parents to establish a research station inside the Amazon.

Her parents made sure that she was well-versed in biology, zoology, ecology, and most importantly, the skills to survive the jungle.

She'd returned to Lima to finish school, and initially she and her mother were planning

to return to the research station on December 19th or 20th. But Yuliana insisted she wanted to

attend her graduation ceremony on December 23rd, leaving them scrambling to book a flight home on

Christmas Eve. The Peruvian airline, Lansa, had a reputation for old and malfunctioning

planes, and Yuliana's father begged them to avoid flying on it. But since it was the only

flight left on Christmas Eve, they booked their tickets for Lansa Flight 508.

Things began okay, but midway through the flight, the plane flew into a thunderstorm.

Lightning struck its right wing, igniting a fuel tank. The plane exploded in mid-air,

ripping apart over the rainforest. In an instant, Yuliana was falling 10,000 feet to the ground, still strapped into a row

of seats. Somehow, though, miraculously, she survived the fall. Perhaps it was the updraft

from the storm, or the surface area of the seats slowing her descent. Maybe it was even the

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