The human body is a pretty fragile thing, when you think about it.  Maybe not as fragile as movie makers try to make it seem, but still far less durable than a lot of other life forms on this planet.

In the movies they’d have you believe that, at least for nameless bad guys, you can be killed instantly with a good swift kick to the shin.  But if you’re a hero (or anti-hero), you can brush off even nuclear blasts with little more than an endearing scratch or two.

Real life, of course, isn’t like that.  Introducing foreign bodies into your own, especially of the pointy variety, is decidedly unadvised.  It’s generally a good idea to avoid the business end of guns, and most will tell you that knives do not belong in your belly (or your back, but that’s another article).

The average person holds about five litres of blood, or one and a half gallons.  It’s roughly 7% of your body weight, so the bigger you are, the more red stuff you carry.  Of course, if you spring a leak you have a problem.  That same average person can, in theory, easily survive a loss of blood ranging from 10-15% of capacity (or about half a litre), but beyond that, things get dicey.

Contrary to popular belief though, having a bullet rip through your innards isn’t strictly fatal.  It’s actually the blood loss that results from all the holes that will kill you.  Yes, there are some other things going on when you’ve been perforated, but as the spunky female supporting character will always tell you, you’ve got to stop the bleeding.

Though, you realise that this is all based on a best case scenario, right?  Well, maybe not best case, you’ve just been shot, after all.  The point is, there are lots of people who defy the odds of survival; people who not only laugh in the face of death, they pretty much give it the full-monty.

Perhaps the most famous and bewildering tale of such defiant survival is that of Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin.  His story is widely misrepresented, however.

Rasputin, as I’m sure you’re familiar, was something of a sensation in Russia at the turn of the 20th century.  A most controversial figure, he was said to be one of the most powerful faith healers ever to have lived, he was (depending on who you ask) an occultist extraordinaire, and was certainly a most influential spiritual guru of the time.  And above all, he was a trusted advisor to the Tsars, and, according to historians, was the primary catalyst for the fall of the Russian Monarchy.

Whole volumes have been written on who Rasputin was, how he lived, and how he died.  Strange as he was, and despite what certain films would have you believe, he was definitely mortal.  Though he certainly held tight his grasp on this world when royalty conspired to send him on.

You’ve probably heard the condensed version of the tale; he was poisoned, shot, beaten, and finally drowned at a dinner party in his honour.  Though, lest you get the wrong idea, this was not just how they partied in Russia at the time.  No, it was Rasputin’s benefactors – who had grown tired of his meddling in political affairs – who decided to put an end to his influence.

Rasputin’s friend (or so he thought) Felix Yusopov invited the mystic to a late-night social gathering.  To spare you the minutia of detail, much of which is in question, what is known is that Rasputin had been served wine and pastries laced with cyanide.  Most accounts agree that he reluctantly imbibed copious amounts of the poisoned wine, though he may or may not have eaten the tainted pastries.  Though, for whatever reason, he did not succumb to the toxin, except by way of becoming quite drunk.

Desperation set in and either Yusopov himself, or another conspirator – perhaps Dimitri Romanov – attempted a much more overt act to dispatch the holy man.  Rasputin was shot in the left side of his abdomen (some tellings claim he was shot in the back) and he fell to the floor, apparently lifeless.

Thinking they had succeeded, the conspirators made haste to dispose of Rasputin’s belongings, and later returned to remove his body, whereupon they found him still very much alive, and attempting escape by crawling up a flight of stairs to the courtyard.  Well, this simply would not do, so fellow conspirator Vladimir Purishkevich again tried to shoot him, missing twice and then finding his mark in Rasputin’s back as he fled.  He took a final round to the head, in what one can only imagine would have been an Oscar-worthy scene, and fell to the snow.

Yusopov, who apparently had been moved to madness by the evening’s events, then set upon him with a truncheon, beating him about the head and body until he was finally pulled away.  Wouldn’t you know it though, but Rasputin was still alive.

Having had enough of this unending assassination, his murderers wrapped him in a carpet and dumped him into the nearby Nina River.  Much to the surprise of authorities though, when the body was dredged from the river some days later, there were signs he had yet been alive and had injured his hands trying to break through the ice from the underside.

An unbelievable tale, for sure, but as mentioned, his wounds alone could have been survivable, at least in the short term.  Whether he had some immunity to cyanide, or perhaps his hosts administered it incompetently, any single event he suffered that night could not conclusively be deemed fatal on its own.  Mostly because none were, until he drowned.

But he’s not the only person to have survived grievous injury at the hands of an attacker.

Jumping back into the 21st century, on May 27, 1988, a Suffolk Country, New York police officer named Kenyon Tuthill was ambushed by a crazed man with a shotgun while he sat in his patrol car.  Tuthill took a point-blank shotgun blast to the face, which, as you might imagine, removed not only most of his face, but nearly 30% of his head.

Anyone reading this would be right to assume that Officer Tuthill’s life ended that night, but what if I told you that he never even lost consciousness?

His attacker fled immediately following the shot, likely assuming the officer dead, but Tuthill was still very much alive.  The officer called for help over his CB radio, though with most of his mouth gone, he managed only garbled moans.  He underwent nine hours of surgery to save his life that day and his attacker was eventually apprehended and was ultimately sentenced to life in prison.

Officer Keyon Tuthill survived what no one thought was possible; since then he has gone through more than 17 facial reconstruction surgeries, and was a featured story in the documentary Ultimate Survivors: Winning Against Incredible Odds (1991) starring William Shatner.

These two stories from what seem like opposite sides of history, sit in stark contrast to our news headlines.  People are killed so often, and sometimes in such seemingly benign ways, and almost always for no good reason.  Our bodies are subject to assaults on every level, and at a glance it seems there’s no logic involved in who lives and who dies.  Rasputin’s story typically incites talk of magic, and sorcery, and alchemy, but when a regular guy like Officer Tuthill can survive such massive injury through sheer will, magic seems unnecessary.  One thing is certain though, of all the ways a life can be destroyed, killing each other is the worst.

Source: Where the Weird Things Are
http://martinjclemens.com/hard-to-kill-not-just-a-bad-movie/

Here’s a historical oddity I found by accident last week. It’s an article from the June 1948 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories entitled “Fortean Aspects of the Flying Disks”. It appeared just a year after the term “flying saucer” was coined, in the wake of the Kenneth Arnold sighting (at the time this was the defining event in ufology, rather than Roswell – which as I’ve discussed elsewhere was strangely ignored despite being in the public domain).

The Amazing article must have been one of the first to link the UFO phenomenon with the word “Fortean”. Interestingly, this seems to have been a minority view at the time. Today, the idea that UFOs are “Fortean” (in the sense of extraterrestrial, or at any rate beyond the understanding of science) is probably the first thing that springs to most people’s minds. But in those days, the prevailing view seems to have been that they were some sort of military technology produced here on Earth. The author refutes this explanation by pointing out that, as recorded in the writings of Charles Fort, similar things were seen in the skies long before they could possibly have been produced by human technology.

The author, by the way, was one “Marx Kaye” – which according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database was the pseudonym of a little-known science fiction author named S. J. Byrne. You can read the article online at the Internet Archive (it starts on page 154 of the magazine). In fact that’s where I read it. I do own a few issues of Amazing Stories from the late 1940s, because of my interest in the Shaver Mystery, but not this particular one.

There is, of course, a close connection between the Shaver Mystery and the early days of ufology, in the person of Amazing’s editor Ray Palmer. As I wrote in The Mystery of Flight 19 : “... Palmer wasn’t completely satisfied with the Shaver paradigm and was ready to abandon it if something better came along. And in 1948, that's exactly what happened, when Palmer became one of the first to jump on the Flying Saucer bandwagon!”

You can see the transition starting to take place before your eyes, if you read Palmer’s editorial at the start of the issue containing the Marx Kaye article. In fact, I found Palmer’s take on the subject far more interesting - from a historical perspective – than Kaye’s. Again, you can read it for yourself (page 6 of the magazine), but here are a few quotes:

    Now that science has proved in so sensational a manner at least two phases of the Shaver Mystery, we have a prediction to make. We predict, based on evidence now in this editor’s possession, that it will be definitely proved that space ships are visiting the earth right now.
    The question arises, if space ships do visit the Earth, is it a matter of “national security” and may we talk about it? [...] Perhaps in wartime, our military would clamp down on all talk concerning military matters. But right now we aren’t at war with anybody, and we, in America, have the right of free speech and can talk about anything we please.
    For the benefit of those readers who are under the impression that there was a censorship on the now famous flying saucers, that’s just plain poppycock. There never was any censorship (other than that of individual newspaper editors who “laid off” of a subject that was beginning to look ridiculous).
    For more than twenty years we [i.e. science fiction magazines] have been talking about space ships, and maybe we’re right at last! But “authorities” who will get the first reports of the mysterious craft, when they appear, will think there is a “leak” if they read any old issue of Amazing Stories at all! Moral: More “authorities” ought to read science fiction – they won’t be so surprised by logical developments as they develop.

Unfortunately there aren’t any UFO-related pictures in this issue of Amazing, but here is a Fortean image of a different kind from the back cover – the apparition of an exotic city in the sky that was seen over Alaska in 1887.

Source: Retro-Forteana
http://forteana-blog.blogspot.com/2015/01/fortean-aspects-of-flying-disks.html