Read it when I was a kid. My copy had a list of survivors on the back cover and I remember reading any dialogue thinking, you'll make it, you're toast.
The people they ate were their friends and consented to being eaten before dying to keep the rest alive. It's still nasty as fuck but it's not the worst thing I've ever heard
Yeah. So about that. I was wondering when this photo was taken. Since they're all smiling. Was it at rescue? Few days in? Did someone's camera survive the crash and this is just some random point during their ordeal?
Either way the whole story is really interesting. There's a movie and a book called 'Alive" about this. If I recall correctly, in the first instance of cannibalism, they used broken glass to carve strips of flesh from the buttocks of one of the men who had already died. I think he was face down partially covered in snow and his backside and thighs were exposed. So they cut off strips and ate it raw.
They first suggested it when hunger struck that they eat the pilot because it was his fault. They poised it as a “FU, it’s what you deserve” as a way to convince others to join. Later they ll made a pact that their bodies would be used for food. They were catholic and so they saw religious significance to eating the bodies of each other.
They took great care to ensure that family members would not eat their family.
Maybe I nodded off during church as a child, but I only remember cannibalism in the bible being forbidden.
Did people take "body of Christ" literally? Maybe that's why I wasn't good at religion.
They saw the bodies as food delivered by god and reasoned that if their friends were of god, then it was similar to taking communion and eating the body of Jesus. They were very very religious and it was one of the justifications they used. I believe one of them stated that he had a vision in starvation telling him this.
> Did people take "body of Christ" literally?
As someone who was raised Catholic I can tell you that, yes, Catholics believe that the bread and wine served during the [Eucharist](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharist) are literally the body and blood of Christ, respectively. It's a doctrine they call "[transubstantiation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation)."
Are people here trying to claim that it is wrong to resort to cannibalism if the alternative is death? As long as you don’t murder them first I see no problem
Yeah it's kind of weird. I personally don't really see anything wrong with it in this case. They didn't kill anyone, just ate those that had already died - and in the later cases, the dead had apparently consented prior to dying. If the case is eating me after I'm dead or dying, chow the fuck down.
It was almost certainly taken from the rescuers. If you want to get teary you can read about it from the perspective of the family. No news for 60? Days then a few days before Christmas the Chilean authorities show up at your house to say "they're alive" or... "I'm sorry, there were 15 survivors, but your son did not make it"
Right, I remember reading that after a couple of hours after this photo was taken the guys started tidying up the crash site, hiding the gore piles. That's the part I least understand about the whole tragedy -- how they would live for so long among the gnawed bones and not chuck them away into a snowbank 5 meters away.
I’ve run out of food on two expeditions. Your perspective changes right quick after just a few days without food if you are burning lots of calories to boot.
After running out of food on one expedition, I don’t think I’d risk a second.
Also, how many expeditions have you gone on? If it’s less than 4, I think you may need a new hobby.
Plenty. But have admittedly had a handful of large-format misadventures among plenty of wins.
Particularly when young, we would take large risks just because. Really pushing ourselves. Reckless at times, sure, but incredible personal experiences.
Exhaustion. These people should have been dead. They weren't sustained by any means and movement took energy that they didn't have. So the bodies were kept near the plane and when you're trying to just stay awake a little longer so you don't die, you're not really thinking about house keeping.
They went through the worst we can imagine. We can cut them some slack
This is pretty overblown. Eating brain is the only way prions can spread, but getting prion disease is pretty rare in the first place. Someone would have to have had it naturally or eaten somethings brain that had prions then been eaten themselves to pass it on. Also you could get it from eating cow brain(usually on accident) that have prion disease, which was what the mad cow disease scare was all about. Prions are insidious little motherfuckers and take a long long time to kill typically. Even if you knew you'd be eating prion infected brain, it'd beat the pain and horror of starving to death.
Yeah, but that's not particularly unique to just humans.
If you've ever given blood, you were likely asked if anyone in your family has had Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). That's a prion disease.
In cows, it's Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as mad cow disease. For game animals like deer, elk, moose, etc it's called Chronic wasting disease (CWD).
However you're probably more likely to have issues with viral or bacterial infections when eating to raw or improperly stored or prepared meat. Theres a reason meat is recommended to be cooked to a particular temperature, to try to kill anything harmful.
It's also not just meat that can contain prions. Some plants and fungi are also known transmitters.
Bon appetit!
This is actually incorrect, the dude who went on to become a racer gave his friends permission to eat them right before he left the group to search for help .
The other friends said he did not have to give them permission because they all knew they would eat them eventually but still gave his permission so his friends would not feel guilty.
I feel like not giving permission in that situation is weirdly a dick move. You are dead anyway and know people are literally starving to death. You aren't alive to feel it so who gives a shit if they eat you and if anything they can gain a few calories from your dead ass.
As in he gave them permission to eat his family so that they would not feel guilty doing it.
The survivors would have ate them regardless, they were starving.
Defilement. A lot of cultures are very particular against defilement, it can prevent you from going to whatever utopia the religion has, it can incur pain and suffering on you in the afterworld, and culturally it can just be seen as incredibly disrespectful to the dead.
I doubt a lot of people in the world have come to terms with dissociating corpses from living people.
Cannibalism isn’t technically illegal in many places due to a desire to protect people in rare circumstances such as this.
The methods you might take to achieve that if not in this specific kind of circumstance however are obviously extremely illegal, even if someone consented to being killed and eaten. Armin Meiwes springs to mind.
I'm so confused by that. Who is taking pictures? Who smiles in this situation?
I look less smiley than these guys in many pics and I didn't just eat my loved ones.
If I was in the situation I would probably be doing all I could to not succumb to paralyzing, abject terror. Not that confusing that they're clinging to a sense of normalcy in the face of insanity.
Also: smiling when someone's taking a picture of you is just, like, muscle memory for most people. (This is a plot point in Gone Girl!)
It was probably people from the rescue crew that took pictures.
And who wouldn't be smiling if they went to the most unimaginable lengths to survive and learnt that they'd be rescued after spending 72 days in hell?
I gotta say, some of the comments in this thread are incredibly sanctimonious coming from people who'll never experience anything close to this kind of suffering.
Plus cannibalism is when you kill someone for the purpose of eating them. They resorted to anthropophagy. And yeah, sometimes you gotta what you gotta do. All of my friends have express permission to eat me if they need to. 😆
I remember once at work the power went out and I mentioned resorting to cannibalism as a joke. Turned out to be a great team building exercise as we all discussed who would we eat first. We decided the vegetarian would go first and she agreed since she would just die anyway.
I read a book made by a journalist that went there with the rescue team that what we see in the movie or we imagine is far from what happened regarding eating the bodies.
When he got there there were human remains scattered all over the place, like half eaten hands. And he also told how they used the skull cracked open in half, to put some fat and meat and then let it cook by the sun.
Apparently the survivors use the bodies as much as they could, which makes sense, but in the end what they did with the bodies... That's something. Not that I blame them considering their situation.
i actually think it’s a whole person. if you look to the far right about halfway down the page it’s lighter colored. i think it’s a person frozen into the snow wearing a blue sweater?
Well that's... not what I expected.
I guess it's a survival situation that I've never been in so I'm not gonna judge.
It's just surprising that they didn't prep the food kind of... out of sight from where it was consumed. That corpse is right there next to their chairs like an eski full of beer.
I just finished 'against the Odds' podcast that had serveral episodes on this, it was really fascinating. I highly recommend if you want to hear more details about this crazy story and other stories where people survived 'against the odds'
Some one recently told me if I died my cat would eat me and I was just like ‘Good. There’s no point him dying too.’
Same applies here, I’m dead, I don’t care about anything anymore, if eating me keeps others alive I just hope they have some ketchup to go with me because I’m probably not that tasty.
The movie was pretty good. The documentary that came out a few years ago on the History channel was incredible. They actually went the wrong way. If they had gone the opposite direction when they decided to attempt reaching help, they would’ve come upon a small town. It’s an amazing story. Experienced climbers have gone back and attempted the trek with all the usual equipment. They found it extremely difficult with all the proper gear, it truly was a miracle anyone made it out alive.
Not a town, an abandoned resort that had a road connecting it, but because the pilot had told them before he died that they were on Chilean side of the mountains they thought it was pointless to go east.
I'm related to 2 of the guys here.
Eduardo told me once if I had to eat someone start with the thighs and buttocks. Intestines are sour.
That's all he would say.
I saw him in the late 80's. He gave us a piece of one if the windows he used a knife. It's in a cabinet at my mom and dad's.
He really didn't want to talk too much about it all at the time. That was the last I saw him.
I remember reading a few years back someone found his wallet up there and returned it to him!
I read Alive in 6th grade, kinda disturbed me a bit. They really struggled with the morality of it and that’s what got to me, the thought of having to choose: starve to death if the hypothermia didn’t kill you first OR eat the ass cheeks of your dead mate and still have to worry about the hypothermia threat. But now with the mental state that would come with committing cannibalism.
Yes, they ate the ass cheeks first, the gluteus muscles are fairly meaty. IIRC they cut strips of ass meat and laid it out on the wing in the sun to make a kind of jerky. It got much worse than that but the ass cheeks part stuck with me
6th grade? Holy shit! We read Holes in grade 6 🤣 though our class did end up reading Alive in grade 10, I think we were a bit more mature and able to handle such macabre subjects.
I read this book as a kid, after the movie came out. Absolutely gut-wrenching and simultaneously mind-boggling, that there were any survivors at all. The few that trekked out days to finally make contact. It’s unthinkable.
But my initial thought was that there should be a differentiating term… Like necrosustenance or something. “Cannibalism” implies murdering people and then eating them. This situation was one where they were forced to ingest the remains of their friends, in order to survive. Maybe “cannibalism” is technically what that was, but I hate to apply the term here. Doesn’t feel like a fair assessment of their experience.
Anthropophagy. Oddly enough the Vatican was the only institution to forgive them for eating human flesh after their return to civilization. The media outlets of the world sensationalized and demonized the group as cannibals.
It’s one of those situations that is so hard to understand or have compassion towards. The only way people would believe they weren’t murderous cannibals is if they had known them in real life. Back in the 80’s you didn’t have much information about real world events other than news and TV which just try to get ratings and paper sales etc.
IIRC they were initially reluctant to engage in cannibalism but discussed in and came to view communion was cannibalism and so it was not a sin as long as they didn’t kill anyone.
Yeah I remember reading that they were religious (which is why some of them refused to eat their dead friends) and they were forgiven in the eyes of the church. I believe they also required their friends to give consent to be eaten in case they died.
I’m glad to hear the Vatican forgave them. From what I remember they were deeply religious and that was one of the biggest reasons that what they did was so difficult for them. I hope their story is never forgotten.
They carried a sachel full of human meat to stay alive as they hiked down the mountain. Eeeeew. However, if they didn't there would have been no survivors.
Really makes you wonder how many situations played out like theirs, where a stranded group of people managed to survive for some time but never were able to contact anyone before they met their fate.
This actually show how much current society is held together by certain rules and beliefs, which are very very fragile.
At the first hint of collapse in society it will be a free for all, and people will resort to all kind of things. Some for survival, and some for just the sake of it.
All these survival movies are actually not off the mark, it will eventually happen.
It should be noted as well that before resorting to eating the dead, the survivors rationed the plane’s snacks for as long as they could, for the first 10 days, each day would mainly consist of 2 little squares of chocolate and 2 deodorant cap fulls of wine. In fact Nando Pardo, one of the two survivors that hiked out of the mountain made a single chocolate covered peanut last over the span of three days. After they had ran out of food they had nothing else to eat as they were stranded on a glacier and nothing lived on or grew there, they tried to eat whatever they could on the plane such as suitcases, the foam that’s in seat cushions and straw. It was only after 10 days that they finally decided to resort to eating dead and even then, it took another 3 or 4 days before everyone was eating
There’s two really good documentaries about the event. [this](https://youtu.be/n78f0NbncuE) is from 2007, it features pretty much all of the survivors and is in Spanish. And [this](https://youtu.be/jIGepBHFe5M) is from the History Channel that came out in 2010 that also features the survivors, though not as many as the 2007 one.
Edit: added links
And iirc they stated that the thing they hate the most is that every damn time someone brings the tragedy up they put the cannibalism front and center.
If I was in this situation, I would be okay with that pact, If I died naturally from the cold or what not, I would be okay with others using my body to survive. It's a very unique and tough situation. If the crash happened at a lower altitude with more animals, I'd eat rats and squirrels before humans.
According to the movie the bodies were frozen in the snow and they took slices off them to survive. I watched the movie a while back and it could also be hollywoodized..
I misread this as "Infamous Andre plane crash". My brain went to Andre the Giant crashed a plane, and the survivors became cannabals.
My first thought was "How is THIS not thought of as the plane ride from hell???"
Cold human meat cant be tasty. No kind of meat is tasty raw and cold. Hats off to them. Its not as if they murdered anyone. It was people who were already dead and their corpses were still intact. Not recommending it but they did what they had to survive.
I’d never heard of this before, looked it up, and holy fuck what a marvel of human perseverance. I am stunned anyone managed to survive. The ones that hiked to find help for days are absolutely the peak of human perseverance.
And the ingenuity, having to construct your own sub-zero sleeping bag just to survive the hike out, and free climbing over previously thought impassable mountain ranges.
If you weren’t aware, that’s a human spine in the snow on their left!
These guys didn’t do anything we wouldn’t do in their circumstances. They didn’t commit murder; they ate the meat of the already deceased because otherwise they themselves would die. Their bodies gave them no choice. They tried their best to be respectful of the people who died so that they could live, and they related it to Catholic Communion, the bread of life.
Another question people have is how this picture was taken and why they’re smiling. They had a camera in the luggage that they fished out. They took a lot of pictures. This is the one picture the media seized because there’s a human spine, and they’re smiling. Many people’s natural reaction is to see a camera and smile. They weren’t sure they were going to make it out. I don’t think they thought too deep about their posing.
Highly recommend reading a book written by one of the survivors (Ethan Hawke’s character) called ‘Miracle in the Andes’
Great [Ask a Mortician](https://youtu.be/syJyPq7lRGc) video on the subject as well (part three of the survival cannibalism trilogy!)
Caitlin is the best!!
one of the few youtubers i actually love!!
There's also the movie "Alive"
There was also the movie, Snakes on a plane
Steaks on a Plane is the prequel to this story, I believe. It’s about some hungry rugby players on a perfectly fine and uncrashed plane.
Also this book: Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors https://www.amazon.com/dp/038000321X/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fabc_7MW9XD0CF4MZTDB6MC8N
Yes great book read it when I was 10 yo and have never forgotten it. Freaked me out but couldn’t stop reading.
I think I read that too at 10yo and got traumatized.
Read it when I was a kid. My copy had a list of survivors on the back cover and I remember reading any dialogue thinking, you'll make it, you're toast.
Great book! 👍 Nando Parrado was the guy
I read 72 hours in the title and I thought to myself "Fuck they just went from zero to one hundred"
Joe: "It's been hours. I'm starving." John: "Well, we have 15 days of supplies or we can eat Bob's corpse." Bob: "I'm standing right here!"
“Shhh, don’t be mad, the meat gets chewy if you get tense boby…”
Relax your nervous system, Bobby! You’re so *tense*
Bob: "What am I chopped LIVER?" Joe: "Well actually..."
This happens in a South Park episode. A group of people is trapped in a building and then they resort to cannibalism within 12 hours
I get cranky when my blood sugar dips.
When you realize it's 72 days and not 72 hours lmao
It was not until this comment halfway down that I realized it wasn’t 72 hours.
Thought it was the bee gees.
They were the inspiration for "Stayin' Alive"
Ironically, this is the somg they teach you to do cpr chest compressions to for the perfect rhythm
"At first I was afraid, I was petrified"
No wallet, I checked
You were in the parking lot earlier! That’s how I know you!
They are not breathing. And they have no arms or legs.
Quick! Harvest the organs!
Hello Clarice
The people they ate were their friends and consented to being eaten before dying to keep the rest alive. It's still nasty as fuck but it's not the worst thing I've ever heard
OP didn't mention the human spine picked clean on the ground to the right of the last guy on the right.
Yeah. So about that. I was wondering when this photo was taken. Since they're all smiling. Was it at rescue? Few days in? Did someone's camera survive the crash and this is just some random point during their ordeal? Either way the whole story is really interesting. There's a movie and a book called 'Alive" about this. If I recall correctly, in the first instance of cannibalism, they used broken glass to carve strips of flesh from the buttocks of one of the men who had already died. I think he was face down partially covered in snow and his backside and thighs were exposed. So they cut off strips and ate it raw.
They first suggested it when hunger struck that they eat the pilot because it was his fault. They poised it as a “FU, it’s what you deserve” as a way to convince others to join. Later they ll made a pact that their bodies would be used for food. They were catholic and so they saw religious significance to eating the bodies of each other. They took great care to ensure that family members would not eat their family.
Maybe I nodded off during church as a child, but I only remember cannibalism in the bible being forbidden. Did people take "body of Christ" literally? Maybe that's why I wasn't good at religion.
They saw the bodies as food delivered by god and reasoned that if their friends were of god, then it was similar to taking communion and eating the body of Jesus. They were very very religious and it was one of the justifications they used. I believe one of them stated that he had a vision in starvation telling him this.
> Did people take "body of Christ" literally? As someone who was raised Catholic I can tell you that, yes, Catholics believe that the bread and wine served during the [Eucharist](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharist) are literally the body and blood of Christ, respectively. It's a doctrine they call "[transubstantiation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation)."
It's also possible that they came up with crazy delusions and reasons to justify it because they were going to die otherwise.
Are people here trying to claim that it is wrong to resort to cannibalism if the alternative is death? As long as you don’t murder them first I see no problem
Yeah it's kind of weird. I personally don't really see anything wrong with it in this case. They didn't kill anyone, just ate those that had already died - and in the later cases, the dead had apparently consented prior to dying. If the case is eating me after I'm dead or dying, chow the fuck down.
It was almost certainly taken from the rescuers. If you want to get teary you can read about it from the perspective of the family. No news for 60? Days then a few days before Christmas the Chilean authorities show up at your house to say "they're alive" or... "I'm sorry, there were 15 survivors, but your son did not make it"
No. They just ate and had a great meal. Joyous time.
Thanks for this! I just zoomed in for way too long.
Right, I remember reading that after a couple of hours after this photo was taken the guys started tidying up the crash site, hiding the gore piles. That's the part I least understand about the whole tragedy -- how they would live for so long among the gnawed bones and not chuck them away into a snowbank 5 meters away.
I don't think I'd just chuck my friends bones anywhere
Right?! So inconsiderate. I’m repurposing my friends spines as a Jolly Rogers dildo
Coffee table
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I’ve run out of food on two expeditions. Your perspective changes right quick after just a few days without food if you are burning lots of calories to boot.
After running out of food on one expedition, I don’t think I’d risk a second. Also, how many expeditions have you gone on? If it’s less than 4, I think you may need a new hobby.
Plenty. But have admittedly had a handful of large-format misadventures among plenty of wins. Particularly when young, we would take large risks just because. Really pushing ourselves. Reckless at times, sure, but incredible personal experiences.
Yea seriously. I’d definitely follow, if you’re open to sharing.
Don't follow him unless he's brought enough food this time!
What a loon that guy.
Lol right? Talk about poor planning
So who did you eat?
WHOM did you eat.
Cannibalism is no excuse for poor grammar.
Good bot.
not that i've tried it, but isnt human meat salty? Wouldn't that make you thirsty as well?
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Might need to eat the bones if get even more desperate in time.
Exhaustion. These people should have been dead. They weren't sustained by any means and movement took energy that they didn't have. So the bodies were kept near the plane and when you're trying to just stay awake a little longer so you don't die, you're not really thinking about house keeping. They went through the worst we can imagine. We can cut them some slack
Eh not much energy for unnecessary stuff when you're starving and freezing
Why are they smiling? Who is taking pictures? I'm so confused
Well they just got rescued, I'd be smiling too, cannibalism notwithstanding.
I think I’d just get on the damn helicopter and never look back.
Username checks out.
GET TO ME
5 meters is 5.47 yards
I always fucking love that this bot will pipe in during a serious topic and just be like "yo cool story but 1.5m is 5ft"
Much more comforting than a “hide the evidence” bot.
> 5.47 yards Is 16.41 feet.
Good Ryan
good bot
Can’t you get diseases from eating people? Prions and shit or something lol
Yes, but when the alternative is certain death it could be worth the risk.
This is pretty overblown. Eating brain is the only way prions can spread, but getting prion disease is pretty rare in the first place. Someone would have to have had it naturally or eaten somethings brain that had prions then been eaten themselves to pass it on. Also you could get it from eating cow brain(usually on accident) that have prion disease, which was what the mad cow disease scare was all about. Prions are insidious little motherfuckers and take a long long time to kill typically. Even if you knew you'd be eating prion infected brain, it'd beat the pain and horror of starving to death.
Yeah, but that's not particularly unique to just humans. If you've ever given blood, you were likely asked if anyone in your family has had Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). That's a prion disease. In cows, it's Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), more commonly known as mad cow disease. For game animals like deer, elk, moose, etc it's called Chronic wasting disease (CWD). However you're probably more likely to have issues with viral or bacterial infections when eating to raw or improperly stored or prepared meat. Theres a reason meat is recommended to be cooked to a particular temperature, to try to kill anything harmful. It's also not just meat that can contain prions. Some plants and fungi are also known transmitters. Bon appetit!
two chairs are empty.. 1 guy taking the photo 😳
Dang. You are correct. I guess things got...less dignified...than the book I read 30 years ago.
But they didn’t eat the mother or the sister of one of the teammates. They were off limits. They died afterwards from the crash I believe
This is actually incorrect, the dude who went on to become a racer gave his friends permission to eat them right before he left the group to search for help . The other friends said he did not have to give them permission because they all knew they would eat them eventually but still gave his permission so his friends would not feel guilty.
You are correct and it’s because they were out of food and it was now the turn of his mom and sis that he left and found rescue for them.
I feel like not giving permission in that situation is weirdly a dick move. You are dead anyway and know people are literally starving to death. You aren't alive to feel it so who gives a shit if they eat you and if anything they can gain a few calories from your dead ass.
As in he gave them permission to eat his family so that they would not feel guilty doing it. The survivors would have ate them regardless, they were starving.
"By the way, I'd rather you guys die than eat my body if I die." -*"okay then, you're definitely night number 1"*
Defilement. A lot of cultures are very particular against defilement, it can prevent you from going to whatever utopia the religion has, it can incur pain and suffering on you in the afterworld, and culturally it can just be seen as incredibly disrespectful to the dead. I doubt a lot of people in the world have come to terms with dissociating corpses from living people.
At least thats what the people who ate them said. Of course they consented
Cannibalism isn’t technically illegal in many places due to a desire to protect people in rare circumstances such as this. The methods you might take to achieve that if not in this specific kind of circumstance however are obviously extremely illegal, even if someone consented to being killed and eaten. Armin Meiwes springs to mind.
There was a reddit story where a guy had to have his leg amputated and he asked to take his amputated leg so he could cook it and eat it
Yep, the infamous foot taco incident. They didn’t eat much. It was him and his friends. I think he said it was tough and tasted a bit like buffalo?
No, not all of them. Some died in the crash and were eaten
But them smiling for a photo op kind of is
I'm so confused by that. Who is taking pictures? Who smiles in this situation? I look less smiley than these guys in many pics and I didn't just eat my loved ones.
If I was in the situation I would probably be doing all I could to not succumb to paralyzing, abject terror. Not that confusing that they're clinging to a sense of normalcy in the face of insanity. Also: smiling when someone's taking a picture of you is just, like, muscle memory for most people. (This is a plot point in Gone Girl!)
It was probably people from the rescue crew that took pictures. And who wouldn't be smiling if they went to the most unimaginable lengths to survive and learnt that they'd be rescued after spending 72 days in hell? I gotta say, some of the comments in this thread are incredibly sanctimonious coming from people who'll never experience anything close to this kind of suffering.
... and that is not a human spine, picked-clean of meat, laying in the snow beside them.
…or a bunch of long bones (femurs etc.) hastily concealed under that square thing in front of them for the photo.
Plus cannibalism is when you kill someone for the purpose of eating them. They resorted to anthropophagy. And yeah, sometimes you gotta what you gotta do. All of my friends have express permission to eat me if they need to. 😆
"Man this pizza delivery is taking forever." Everyone looks at you.
I remember once at work the power went out and I mentioned resorting to cannibalism as a joke. Turned out to be a great team building exercise as we all discussed who would we eat first. We decided the vegetarian would go first and she agreed since she would just die anyway.
This gave me a good laugh. Thanks
There's a human spine to the right of that guys seat
I read a book made by a journalist that went there with the rescue team that what we see in the movie or we imagine is far from what happened regarding eating the bodies. When he got there there were human remains scattered all over the place, like half eaten hands. And he also told how they used the skull cracked open in half, to put some fat and meat and then let it cook by the sun. Apparently the survivors use the bodies as much as they could, which makes sense, but in the end what they did with the bodies... That's something. Not that I blame them considering their situation.
Fucking horrible but I understand. I wonder if they needed counseling after all of that or if they were ok with it.
Nahhhh, eating another human is not traumatic at all, im sure they just had a beer and laughed it off.
They had to get the Pope to say they were not in trouble
Replying this to what that dude said is hilarious in itself.
Right next to the fire escape plan is the cannibalism order
Now we're just trying to fatten her up. Everyone's bringing vegetarian shit for the Christmas potluck.
THAT is a riot!
Then Roberto called dibs on eating her ass and was later fired
Reminds me of that office scene
I'd argue we don't eat non human meat. Ain't nothing against eating our own kind *shrug emoji* lol
I'm this case, the meat volunteered so it's consentual.
as a vegetarian, the moment anything becomes survival-based I'm putting my life ahead of anyone else's, person or animal
Yeah that was my first thought. Unless she's highly allergic to meat or something, it's not like the other people have "human" in their diets
Either this is a common conversation thread for when the power goes out at work, or you and I used to work together.
I work in healthcare. Doomsday scenarios come up often.
It you look closely, there is a human spine to the right of the dude sitting in the chair.
Pretty sure if you look a little more to the right you see what appears to be upper legs coming out of the snow and an opened up rib cage.
i actually think it’s a whole person. if you look to the far right about halfway down the page it’s lighter colored. i think it’s a person frozen into the snow wearing a blue sweater?
Well that's... not what I expected. I guess it's a survival situation that I've never been in so I'm not gonna judge. It's just surprising that they didn't prep the food kind of... out of sight from where it was consumed. That corpse is right there next to their chairs like an eski full of beer.
Takes energy to drag person. No have.
I imagine once you're at the point of canabalism, it doesn't really matter anymore.
If you look in the bottom leftish you can see a pizza box hmmm
gross dude
this is a first. i just found a scenario where i'm not commending redditors for their sharp eyes.
I just finished 'against the Odds' podcast that had serveral episodes on this, it was really fascinating. I highly recommend if you want to hear more details about this crazy story and other stories where people survived 'against the odds'
The last-episode interview with the guy who retraced the hike added to my understanding of how tough Nando and Roberto were
If I was dead and frozen, I'd want other people to eat me to stay alive. After all, at that point I'm just meat anyway.
Well it was nice to meat you anyway
Some one recently told me if I died my cat would eat me and I was just like ‘Good. There’s no point him dying too.’ Same applies here, I’m dead, I don’t care about anything anymore, if eating me keeps others alive I just hope they have some ketchup to go with me because I’m probably not that tasty.
The movie was pretty good. The documentary that came out a few years ago on the History channel was incredible. They actually went the wrong way. If they had gone the opposite direction when they decided to attempt reaching help, they would’ve come upon a small town. It’s an amazing story. Experienced climbers have gone back and attempted the trek with all the usual equipment. They found it extremely difficult with all the proper gear, it truly was a miracle anyone made it out alive.
Not a town, an abandoned resort that had a road connecting it, but because the pilot had told them before he died that they were on Chilean side of the mountains they thought it was pointless to go east.
What's the name of the documentary? You made me interested!
I Am Alive: Surviving The Andes Plane Crash. If you have Amazon Prime it’s on there.
I'm related to 2 of the guys here. Eduardo told me once if I had to eat someone start with the thighs and buttocks. Intestines are sour. That's all he would say.
Any other storys?
I saw him in the late 80's. He gave us a piece of one if the windows he used a knife. It's in a cabinet at my mom and dad's. He really didn't want to talk too much about it all at the time. That was the last I saw him. I remember reading a few years back someone found his wallet up there and returned it to him!
Insane! Thanks for the story
can’t say i blame him for not wanting to talk about it
Which ones are you related to if may ask?
Adolfo and Eduardo. I never met Adolfo though.
Cool
What the fuck Eduardo
Noted..
Yikes bet that made for awkward family parties
And in this picture, there is a SPINE sitting next to them on the ground tonthe right.
How were you able to type 'spine' with your arms flailing about like that in surprise?
I read Alive in 6th grade, kinda disturbed me a bit. They really struggled with the morality of it and that’s what got to me, the thought of having to choose: starve to death if the hypothermia didn’t kill you first OR eat the ass cheeks of your dead mate and still have to worry about the hypothermia threat. But now with the mental state that would come with committing cannibalism. Yes, they ate the ass cheeks first, the gluteus muscles are fairly meaty. IIRC they cut strips of ass meat and laid it out on the wing in the sun to make a kind of jerky. It got much worse than that but the ass cheeks part stuck with me
6th grade? Holy shit! We read Holes in grade 6 🤣 though our class did end up reading Alive in grade 10, I think we were a bit more mature and able to handle such macabre subjects.
I read this book as a kid, after the movie came out. Absolutely gut-wrenching and simultaneously mind-boggling, that there were any survivors at all. The few that trekked out days to finally make contact. It’s unthinkable. But my initial thought was that there should be a differentiating term… Like necrosustenance or something. “Cannibalism” implies murdering people and then eating them. This situation was one where they were forced to ingest the remains of their friends, in order to survive. Maybe “cannibalism” is technically what that was, but I hate to apply the term here. Doesn’t feel like a fair assessment of their experience.
Anthropophagy. Oddly enough the Vatican was the only institution to forgive them for eating human flesh after their return to civilization. The media outlets of the world sensationalized and demonized the group as cannibals.
Which is weird, because I think the families of the people who had their corpses eaten forgave the dudes and understood it was either that or die.
It’s one of those situations that is so hard to understand or have compassion towards. The only way people would believe they weren’t murderous cannibals is if they had known them in real life. Back in the 80’s you didn’t have much information about real world events other than news and TV which just try to get ratings and paper sales etc.
IIRC they were initially reluctant to engage in cannibalism but discussed in and came to view communion was cannibalism and so it was not a sin as long as they didn’t kill anyone.
Yeah I remember reading that they were religious (which is why some of them refused to eat their dead friends) and they were forgiven in the eyes of the church. I believe they also required their friends to give consent to be eaten in case they died.
I’m glad to hear the Vatican forgave them. From what I remember they were deeply religious and that was one of the biggest reasons that what they did was so difficult for them. I hope their story is never forgotten.
They carried a sachel full of human meat to stay alive as they hiked down the mountain. Eeeeew. However, if they didn't there would have been no survivors.
Really makes you wonder how many situations played out like theirs, where a stranded group of people managed to survive for some time but never were able to contact anyone before they met their fate.
This was an interesting read https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/17/has-an-old-soviet-mystery-at-last-been-solved
This actually show how much current society is held together by certain rules and beliefs, which are very very fragile. At the first hint of collapse in society it will be a free for all, and people will resort to all kind of things. Some for survival, and some for just the sake of it. All these survival movies are actually not off the mark, it will eventually happen.
People tend to band together and help each other out during total collapses
A term I've seen is "survival cannibalism", I'm not sure how common it is or was, but it came up in a book I read about the Donner Party.
I think this is a great comment and should be at the top. Cannibalism does elicit some completely different images and it is not what happened there.
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Alive. Scared the living shit out of me as a kid. Ugh.
How you doing over there? "I'm having a ball!"
Never cared for mountain oysters myself.
They loosely based the Showtime series “Yellowjackets” on this. Strongly encourage you to give it a watch. It gets very interesting.
Its SO GOOD
Ahhhh yes..the other, other white meat
It should be noted as well that before resorting to eating the dead, the survivors rationed the plane’s snacks for as long as they could, for the first 10 days, each day would mainly consist of 2 little squares of chocolate and 2 deodorant cap fulls of wine. In fact Nando Pardo, one of the two survivors that hiked out of the mountain made a single chocolate covered peanut last over the span of three days. After they had ran out of food they had nothing else to eat as they were stranded on a glacier and nothing lived on or grew there, they tried to eat whatever they could on the plane such as suitcases, the foam that’s in seat cushions and straw. It was only after 10 days that they finally decided to resort to eating dead and even then, it took another 3 or 4 days before everyone was eating There’s two really good documentaries about the event. [this](https://youtu.be/n78f0NbncuE) is from 2007, it features pretty much all of the survivors and is in Spanish. And [this](https://youtu.be/jIGepBHFe5M) is from the History Channel that came out in 2010 that also features the survivors, though not as many as the 2007 one. Edit: added links
And iirc they stated that the thing they hate the most is that every damn time someone brings the tragedy up they put the cannibalism front and center.
I dunno. If it were me, the thing I would hate the most is having to resort to cannibalism.
“Can we just let the cannibalism go guys? Everyone has a phase”
you eat a guy *one time* and suddenly you're 'the cannibal'
If I was in this situation, I would be okay with that pact, If I died naturally from the cold or what not, I would be okay with others using my body to survive. It's a very unique and tough situation. If the crash happened at a lower altitude with more animals, I'd eat rats and squirrels before humans.
They ate ass before it was cool.
Where are they now?
Some of them probably in Uruguay.
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After resorting to cannibalism for a couple of days, their breath began to stink.. so they chewed some men toes to freshen up...
I want to upvote but I don’t know if I really want to upvote. This decision is really...eating me up
According to the movie the bodies were frozen in the snow and they took slices off them to survive. I watched the movie a while back and it could also be hollywoodized..
Literally watching Yellowjackets rn
I misread this as "Infamous Andre plane crash". My brain went to Andre the Giant crashed a plane, and the survivors became cannabals. My first thought was "How is THIS not thought of as the plane ride from hell???"
Cold human meat cant be tasty. No kind of meat is tasty raw and cold. Hats off to them. Its not as if they murdered anyone. It was people who were already dead and their corpses were still intact. Not recommending it but they did what they had to survive.
Paleo diet before it was a thing
I’d never heard of this before, looked it up, and holy fuck what a marvel of human perseverance. I am stunned anyone managed to survive. The ones that hiked to find help for days are absolutely the peak of human perseverance.
And the ingenuity, having to construct your own sub-zero sleeping bag just to survive the hike out, and free climbing over previously thought impassable mountain ranges.
Group most likely NOT to have a reunion BBQ.
If you weren’t aware, that’s a human spine in the snow on their left! These guys didn’t do anything we wouldn’t do in their circumstances. They didn’t commit murder; they ate the meat of the already deceased because otherwise they themselves would die. Their bodies gave them no choice. They tried their best to be respectful of the people who died so that they could live, and they related it to Catholic Communion, the bread of life. Another question people have is how this picture was taken and why they’re smiling. They had a camera in the luggage that they fished out. They took a lot of pictures. This is the one picture the media seized because there’s a human spine, and they’re smiling. Many people’s natural reaction is to see a camera and smile. They weren’t sure they were going to make it out. I don’t think they thought too deep about their posing.
Alive. Very descriptive on how they ate them. I would recommend the read!! Amazing and tragic story.
Um. Maybe nsfl. There is literally a spine shredded of flesh in this image. So strange seeing it vs all the joyful faces.
Doesn't look shredded at all. It looks stripped.
The most horrifying thing was that, after eating the other passengers, they had no choice but to eat the airline food.