Lost in Outer Space

by Tod Olson

  For two years she had lived at Panguana, the family’s research station deep in the rain forest. During the rainy season she and her parents could only get there by boat. Their hut stood on stilts to keep it dry when the river flooded. Tarantulas and lizards dropped from the palm-frond roof. Every morning, Juliane had to shake out her boots to make sure no poisonous spiders had moved in during the night.

  Now she split her time between Lima and Panguana, city and jungle. It was a strange existence that set her apart from her city friends. Since the age of five she’d been referring to animals by their Latin names. She had raised fig parrots by chewing up bananas and feeding the mush to them. She could imitate the ominous hissing sound of a tarantula. When she came back to Lima after a stay in Panguana, her friends told her she walked strangely. She’d gotten used to lifting her feet high off the ground to keep from tripping over roots.

  Over the years Juliane had been recording birdcalls or collecting insects during a lot of important social events. Had it been up to her mother alone, she would have missed the most important one of all. Her graduation from Lima’s Alexander von Humboldt School fell on December 23. The night before was the Fiesta de Promoción, Peru’s version of a senior prom.

  Juliane’s mother, Maria Koepcke, wanted Juliane to skip both events. She was anxious to get out of Lima. Juliane’s father was waiting for them at Panguana. He had already cut down a Christmas tree and put it up in one of the huts. And Faucett, the more reliable of the two airlines flying to Pucallpa, had no seats on December 24.

  The last thing Juliane’s mother wanted was to fly LANSA. Once, in the United States, she had been on a plane with a failing engine that had to make an emergency landing. The experience made her skittish every time she flew. Besides, as an ornithologist, she had spent her life studying birds. With their hollow bones, sail-like feathers, and inexhaustible energy, birds were made for flight. A plane, by contrast, was a bulky mass of metal that looked like it should never leave the ground. Maria Koepcke couldn’t help feeling that humans weren’t meant to fly.

  Still, Juliane stood her ground. She loved the rain forest and rarely complained when her parents’ work took her away from her friends. But she didn’t want to miss graduation. She had saved her money for a long dress with a pretty blue pattern and short sleeves cinched at the end. A college student she’d known for a month, tall and broad shouldered, was taking her to the dance. It would be her last chance to say goodbye to many of her friends.

  In the end, Maria gave in and bought LANSA tickets. Juliane went to the dance and the next day crossed the stage to receive her diploma.

  The following morning, Christmas Eve, Maria and Juliane stood in line for Flight 508. Out the plate-glass window of the airport, they could see the Electra L188 that would take them to Pucallpa. To Juliane, the plane looked beautiful, clean and shiny.

  It did, however, have an unfortunate nickname. LANSA had stamped the name “Mateo Pumacahua” on the side of the airliner. Pumacahua, as everyone learned in school, had led an army of indigenous people in rebellion against Peru’s Spanish rulers in the early 1800s. His rebels carried slings and clubs into battle against Spaniards armed with rifles. The war did not end well for the rebels, and when it was over, the Spanish authorities hanged Pumacahua for treason. Then they cut him into pieces and sent assorted body parts around the country to be displayed as a warning.

  Two young Americans in line next to Juliane noticed the nickname, too. Nathan Lyon and David Ericson lived with a group of religious missionaries in the rain forest, not far from the Koepckes’ research station. Nathan was just 13, but he was determined to ride his bike from the rain forest across the mountains to Lima. He had traveled by truck to scout the route, and now he was flying home to his parents at the missionary community. At 18, David had delayed college for a year to help the missionaries provide medical aid and other services to indigenous villages in the area.

  Looking out at the plane, Juliane, Nathan, and David saw the opportunity for some dark humor. Let’s hope this Mateo Pumacahua keeps its parts intact, they joked.

  At around 11:00 a.m., 86 passengers climbed aboard the LANSA plane. Juliane and her mother, David and Nathan, Narda Sales Rios and her son, all took their seats, eager to be home for Christmas. Werner Herzog and his camera crew stayed behind, resigned to another day of waiting.

  Juliane found her place next to the window in the second-to-last row, somewhere near the student Alberto Lozano. Her mother sat to her left in the middle, and a heavyset man settled his bulk into the aisle seat.

  At 11:38 a.m., the plane rumbled down the runway with none of the grace of Maria’s birds. Its four propeller engines, spinning in a blur, somehow lifted more than 40 tons of metal, baggage, fuel, and passengers into the air. The pilot, Carlos Forno Valera, banked over the Pacific Ocean and headed east toward the Andes Mountains.

  The plane was about to carry its passengers through one of the most abrupt transitions a traveler can make on Earth. Lima sits just north of the Atacama Desert, the driest place on the planet. In the Atacama you can find places that don’t see rain for four years at a time. Just over the mountains lay the vast expanse of the Amazon rain forest. In the Amazon’s northwest corner, where moisture gets trapped against the Andes, 20 feet of precipitation can fall in a single year.

  As they climbed toward the crest of the Andes, the passengers in the cabin were in a holiday mood. They slept, read, or chatted with each other about Christmas plans. Juliane thought the flight attendants seemed cheerful as they served sandwiches and soft drinks.

  About twenty minutes into the flight, the plane began to leave the desert air of the coast behind. At 12:09 p.m. Captain Forno Valera radioed in their position over the town of Oyon, nestled into the heart of the Andes at 12,000 feet. He couldn’t yet see what awaited them on the other side of the mountain range.

  Just 100 miles south and east of Flight 508, a giant mass of moisture-laden air had gathered over the western edge of the rain forest. Trapped against the towering walls of the Andes, the storm rumbled its way northward.

  At about 12:20 p.m., the Electra motored out of the mountains. Some 20,000 feet below lay the eastern edge of the largest rain forest in the world. But the ground had vanished from view. The storm, sweeping up from the south, had begun to engulf the route to Pucallpa. The plane had 150 miles to go on a northeast path—a half hour of flying time at the most.

  As a thick bank of clouds closed in, Captain Forno Valera had fuel for just four hours total. He faced a choice: He could veer north and try to stay ahead of the storm. He could land in Huanuco, which lay almost directly below, and wait out the weather there. Or he could reverse course and bring everyone back to Lima.

  But LANSA had already created dozens of irate customers, stranding them for the holidays when they wanted to be with family. And for all the rain that falls in the Amazon, most storms don’t pack a lot of energy. Pilots tried to avoid them, but when they had to fly in bad weather, they knew what to do: Keep the altitude setting constant, at a safe distance from the ground; don’t fight the winds because it puts too much stress on the plane.

  Captain Forno Valera set the altitude for 21,000 feet, kept the plane on its northeast route, and pressed ahead.

  Out her window on the right side of the plane, Juliane Koepcke could see two of the four big turboprop engines working hard against the heavy air. It wasn’t long before the plane began to shudder. The flight attendants made their way through the aisle, telling everyone to fasten their seat belts. To Juliane, it seemed no worse than the flight from Cuzco with her graduating class. But in the middle seat, Maria was getting anxious. “Hopefully everything will be okay,” she said.

  The man in the aisle seat slept, oblivious to it all.

  The sky outside darkened, as though the pilot had found the mouth of a cave and dove inside. Raindrops pelted the metal sides of the plane. Water streaked the window next to Juliane’s face. And now, the shaking turned violent.

&nbs
p; The plane lurched up, down, and up again. Water and soda went airborne. Overhead compartments popped open one by one. Flower bouquets, Christmas cakes, and hand luggage flew through the aisle. Lightning bolts pierced the darkness outside, and screams began to fill the cabin.

  It got worse by the minute—the vicious shaking, everything coming unmoored in the cabin, the pitch-black sky broken by blinding flashes closer and closer to the plane. Juliane found herself holding hands with her mother. And still the man in the aisle seat slept.

  Twenty minutes into the heart of the storm, the sky outside Juliane’s window exploded with lightning. Bright yellow flames erupted from the wing. The plane pitched downward, and before the roar of the engines blocked everything out, Juliane heard her mother say, “It’s all over now.”

  Then she felt a whoosh sweep through the plane, and suddenly everything vanished. She was in the air, strapped to her seat, and all of it was gone—her mother and the sleeping guy and the two boys from the missionary station and the smiling flight attendants and the Christmas presents and the plane.

  Even the plane was gone.

  Below her was a forest that looked like densely packed heads of broccoli, spinning slowly and growing closer by the second.

  For your reference, the page numbers that appear in the print version of this book are listed below. They do not match the page numbers in your eBook. Please use the “Search” function on your eReading device to find items of interest.

  Photos ©: viii bottom: Yale Joel/Getty Images; ix center right: Courtesy Sy Liebergot-Apollo EECOM Flight Controller; ix bottom left and right: NASA/honeysucklecreek.net; 14: San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris Images; 16: Rue des Archives/The Granger Collection; 22: Yale Joel/Getty Images; 24: Bettmann/Getty Images; 61, 81: Photos by Eric Long, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM 98-16043, NASM 99-15227); 85: AP Images; 110: Bill Eppridge/Getty Images; 114: NASA/Universe Today; 121, 125: Bill Eppridge/Getty Images; 138: NASA-Apollo (digital version by Science Faction)/Getty Images; 147: AP Images; 151, 163: NASA/Framepool; 171: Bill Eppridge/Getty Images; 175: AP Images; 185, 189: Bill Eppridge/Getty Images; 190: AP Images; 192: Leif Skoogfors/Corbis Historical/Getty Images; 197: GSFC/Arizona State University/NASA. All other photos courtesy of NASA.

  Illustrations by: cover: Shane Rebenschied; 50-51 and 65:

  Richard Chasemore; 65 (inset) and 90-91: Jim McMahon.

  Copyright © 2017 by Tod Olson

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  First edition, February 2017

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-92817-5

  Book design by Jessica Meltzer

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