How Three Plane Crash Survivors Were Rescued Batman-Style From A Remote Jungle
by Pauli Poisuo
Scene: The year is 1945. A solitary plane is flying over a vast, mysterious valley that’s surrounded by mountains. Now, we’ve all seen movies, so we know what’s coming. Of course the plane crashes, and of course the few survivors are stranded in the unforgiving jungle as their comrades race against time to rescue them.
We wouldn’t bother recounting this story if that’s all that happened here, though. The tale I'm about to tell went wildly viral at the time. Media covered the case intensely, comparing the valley to the fictional Shangri-La and telling amazing tales about the survivors and their adventures. It’s hard to blame the press for going absolutely nuts, because this is the kind of story where every little detail goes incredibly hard. The rescue mission involves a very literal Batman gambit, and at one point while all of this was going down, a guy gets drunk off his ass and parachutes into the valley to hang out with the survivors.
But I’ll start at the beginning.
The plane fell on May 13, 1945, in an appropriately dramatic manner: by slamming into the side of a mountain so hard that it broke in two, was crushed into a pancake, and set on fire. Somehow, five of the 24 military people on board managed to survive the impact, and three of the five lived to tell the tale. The problem was that they were now stranded in Baliem Valley, a huge and virtually unreachable jungle-filled area in New Guinea.
The three surviving passengers had no means of escape and no idea when they’d be found. Oh, and they weren’t exactly alone. The valley was populated by up to 120,000 people of the Dani tribe, who’d had virtually no contact with the rest of humanity, whom many people assumed to be violent cannibals — which wasn't actually true and was simple prejudice. The tribespeople who came to check out the trio were actually super chill, and even provided them with supplies.
However, this still left the survivors with the minor issue of being stranded in the middle of a particularly remote and inaccessible corner of the world. The military found the wreckage a few days after the crash, but there was no getting in and out of the valley with a rescue plane, and the location was far too high for a helicopter. Out of options, the people in charge of the rescue asked themselves: “What would Batman do?” Or, rather, “What will Batman do in a movie that will premiere 63 years from now?”
Remember the Hong Kong extraction mission in The Dark Knight where Batman grabs Lau the criminal banker, and a huge plane yanks them both into the sky? Yeah, that’s not the cutting-edge sci-fi tech the movie would have you think. In fact, an arguably even cooler MacGyver version of the method was used to rescue the survivors. A bunch of paratroopers had earlier landed in a clearing in the valley to provide medical assistance and supplies, and then a lightweight glider was flown in after them. A rope was fastened to the nose of the glider, the other end to an enormous loop suspended from poles well out in front. The survivors climbed in, and a Douglas DC Skytrain flying only a few feet above the ground hooked the loop as it flew over, pulling the glider aloft. It must’ve been a pretty wild ride — two additional trips with gliders saw the completion of the rescue — but probably not half as wild as the media frenzy the survivors walked into.
Oh, and that drunk parachute guy I mentioned earlier? He was a Canadian documentarist named Alexander Cann, who learned of the rescue mission beforehand, and wanted to check things out. "He screws up his courage with a little bit of liquid courage, [and] just dives out the plane,” which is how author Mitchell Zuckoff described the incident. “He's swinging like a metronome because he is dead drunk on the way down."
Cann survived his jump and met the survivors, who were no doubt delighted to add “random drunks falling from the sky” to their list of things to worry about. At the end of the day, Cann’s move was totally worth it, though. He’d brought a camera with him, and managed to make a pretty damn cool documentary about the rescue. Unfortunately, the footage indicates that at no point in the mission did anyone wear a batsuit.
