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See posts, photos and more on Facebook. | | |  · FollowJanuary 1 at 4:19 AM ·His engine exploded nine miles above the Earth. What happened next was worse than falling.On July 26, 1959, Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin was flying his F-8 Crusader jet fighter over the southeastern United States when his engine failed without warning.He was cruising at 47,000 feet. That is nine miles above the ground. Higher than Mount Everest. So high that the sky turns black and the air is too thin to sustain human life. At that altitude, the temperature outside his cockpit was seventy degrees below zero.Rankin had only seconds to make a decision. He could try to glide the crippled jet down to a safer altitude before ejecting, or he could pull the ejection handle immediately and take his chances.Smoke filled the cockpit. The controls went dead. He pulled the handle.The ejection seat rocketed him into the freezing void. The sudden decompression hit his body like a sledgehammer. At that altitude, the pressure is so low that fluids inside the human body begin to expand and vaporize. Pain exploded through his abdomen and his eyes. His emergency oxygen supply failed. He began losing consciousness almost immediately.Then his parachute deployed. And that is when his nightmare truly began.William Rankin had ejected directly into the heart of a cumulonimbus thunderstorm.From the outside, these storms look like towering white mountains in the sky. Pilots avoid them at all costs because inside, they are vertical hurricanes. Updrafts can exceed one hundred fifty miles per hour. The violence inside is almost beyond description.Rankin fell straight into one.Instead of descending toward Earth, he was caught. Powerful updrafts seized his parachute and hurled him back upward. Then he was thrown sideways. Then yanked upward again. He was no longer falling. He was trapped, spinning inside a living storm that refused to let him go.Hailstones the size of golf balls hammered his body from every direction. Lightning cracked so close that he could feel the static electricity lifting the hair on his arms and smell the sharp burn of ozone in the air. Thunder was no longer just sound. It was a physical force that slammed into his chest like a fist.Rain flooded into his parachute, collapsing it and sending him into freefall. Then the canopy would reinflate and jerk him violently upward again. The motion was so brutal that he vomited. He lost consciousness. He woke up still spinning, still trapped, still being torn apart by forces no human was meant to survive.The temperature swung wildly. At the top of the updrafts, far below freezing, ice formed on his flight suit, his exposed skin, his eyelashes. Then he would plunge into warmer air and the ice would begin melting, only to refreeze seconds later when he was hurled back up.The rain was so heavy it felt like drowning in midair. He gasped for breath and inhaled water. His lungs burned. His body was bruised and bleeding from hail impacts. He was hypothermic and frostbitten at the same time.Time stopped. Minutes stretched into what felt like hours. He later said he believed he was going to die inside that cloud, spinning forever, never reaching the ground.And then, after forty minutes of impossible violence, the storm finally released him.He broke through the bottom of the thundercloud at about ten thousand feet. For the first time since he ejected, he was falling normally. He could see trees below. He was descending toward a forest in North Carolina.Rankin crashed through the tree canopy. Branches snapped around him. His parachute tangled in the limbs, slowing his fall just enough. He slammed into the earth, badly injured but somehow still breathing.For several minutes he lay motionless on the forest floor, unable to believe he was alive.Then he stood up. He freed himself from his parachute. He began walking.His body was covered in welts from hailstones. He had frostbite on his hands and face. He was bruised from head to toe, bleeding from multiple wounds, disoriented from oxygen deprivation and trauma.But he was alive.He stumbled through the woods until he found a road. Then a farmhouse. A shocked farmer opened his door to find a battered pilot in a torn flight suit standing on his porch.William Rankin looked at him and said simply: "I just fell out of the sky."When military doctors and meteorologists heard his story, they were stunned. No one had ever survived being trapped inside a violent thunderstorm at that altitude. The conditions he described should not have been survivable.Decompression sickness should have killed him. The hailstones could have knocked him unconscious permanently. The extreme cold should have caused fatal hypothermia. Lightning could have struck him directly at any moment.But everything that should have killed William Rankin somehow did not.He spent weeks recovering from his injuries. Doctors documented severe bruising, frostbite, minor burns from lightning proximity, and internal damage from the violent forces that had thrown him through the sky.In 1960, he published a book about his experience called The Man Who Rode the Thunder. It remains the only firsthand account of surviving such conditions.His testimony helped meteorologists better understand the internal dynamics of severe thunderstorms. Aviation safety protocols were updated. Ejection seat designs improved. High-altitude survival training incorporated lessons from what he endured.William Rankin continued his military career after recovering. He flew more missions. He never ejected from another aircraft.When asked about those forty minutes inside the storm, he said it was the longest forty minutes of his life. Time had stopped. He had been suspended between Earth and space, caught in a force so violent it seemed impossible to escape.But he did escape. Through training, physical resilience, and a measure of luck that defies explanation.He retired from the Marine Corps and lived a quiet life, rarely speaking publicly about what happened. He passed away in 2009 at the age of eighty-nine.More than sixty years after his ordeal, meteorologists still reference his account when studying severe thunderstorms. Pilots still learn about him in survival training. His story appears in aviation safety manuals and meteorology textbooks around the world.Because William Rankin proved something that science said was impossible. The human body can endure conditions that should be unsurvivable. When every system fails, when nature unleashes its full fury, when death seems absolutely certain, survival is still possible.He fell nine miles through a storm that tried to destroy him.And he walked away.#WilliamRankin #TheManWhoRodeTheThunder~Old Photo Club
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