In 1972, there was a Uruguayan Flight to Santiago, Chile that would become a flight of legends. Unfortunately, that plane crashed in the Andes and the survivors were forced to live on the flesh of those who had died in the plane crash.
If you were in such a situation, what would you do? It’s sometimes easy to play the armchair quarterback but if you actually had to live it, you might have to make some tough decisions.
One would think that eating a friend who had died would be a very difficult thing but according to one of the survivors, that wasn’t even the worst part. This was revealed by Roberto Canessa, who was with 44 other people on the flight when it crashed into the mountains.
16 people survived the crash out of the 45 on board. They eventually had to eat the dead passengers, and they survived for 72 nights in some of the worst conditions imaginable.
Roberto spoke about the ordeal and said that there was something worse than eating the flesh of his friends. He said: “The people that look at this story from outside think that eating our dead friends was the worst part.
“But the worst part was the avalanche. I was buried alive for five or six minutes thinking I was dying. We were buried there for four days.”
He went on to say: “So there’s a succession of events that happened that made the stories so intriguing, and led people to ask, ‘how did you do that?’
“Well, 19-year-old rugby players, university students, all these components were very important for us to build a different society.
“There were no amicable forces, from being a rugby player to a mountain man, we didn’t even have snow in Uruguay.”
Netflix dramatized the events and talked about how the survivors made it through. They interviewed the survivors in order to do it, and they learned some interesting facts.
One of those facts had to do with black urine, which means that the body is already beginning to consume its own organs.
They went on to say that it was ironic because they were not going to use the other bodies at first but they were already consuming their own bodies because of starvation.
You can watch the streaming movie, Society of the Snow on Netflix.