'Miracle!' 4 young kids survive 40 days alone in Colombian jungle after first surviving fatal plane crash

Four young siblings from an indigenous group in South America are true survivors. They first survived a plane crash that killed all the adults on board, and they then survived 40 days alone in some of "the most inhospitable" jungle area in all of Colombia until rescue teams finally located them.

"Miracle! Miracle! Miracle! Miracle!" chirped a voice on an army radio at about 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon. At that point, the hundreds of volunteers who had been searching for weeks for the four missing children knew that they had all been found alive.

The unfortunate saga began on May 1, when the four kids — ages 13, 9, 4, and 11 months — and their mother hopped aboard a Cessna 206, a single-engine plane, heading from the Amazonian village of Araracuara to San Jose del Guaviare, a city hundreds of miles away.

Sometime during the flight, authorities received reports of engine failure. The engine failure must have been catastrophic as the plane crashed, taking a nosedive into the earthen floor of a sparsely populated jungle. When rescue teams located the plane approximately two weeks later, they found the remains of the pilot, the children's mother, and one other adult. However, the children were nowhere to be found.

The fact that the children's bodies hadn't been found gave search teams hope, but the odds of their ultimate survival appeared bleak. Not only was that area of the jungle inhabited with venomous snakes, predatory animals like jaguars, and armed militia, but the trees there are so tall and the foliage so dense that the sun's rays often cannot reach the earth. The area also regularly experiences heavy rainfall and is full of insects.

Still, the volunteers clung to the hope that the older children, who are all members of the indigenous Huitoto people, had learned some survival skills from their elders. "This is a virgin forest, thick and dangerous," said John Moreno, an indigenous leader from the Vaupés region. "They would have needed to draw on ancestral knowledge in order to survive."

Four young children found alive in Colombian jungle after more than 5 weekswww.youtube.com

Rescue helicopters scoured an area encompassing about 125 square miles and regularly broadcasted a message from the children's grandmother, asking them to stay put. They also dropped off food packages, and rescue teams were encouraged, even after weeks of unsuccessful searches, when they discovered fruit rinds with a child's teeth marks still there as well as some discarded diapers and a baby bottle.

"This isn’t a search for a needle in a haystack," Brigadier General Pedro Sanchez claimed at the time. "It’s a tiny flea in a vast carpet because they keep moving. Their bodies haven’t appeared, and I’m sure that we would have already found them if they were dead."

At last, on June 9, a full 40 days since the plane crash, one of the rescue dogs located the children. Though dehydrated, covered in bug bites, and slightly injured from all the walking, they were otherwise in fair condition. The first words out of their mouths were almost all related to food. "I'm hungry," the eldest, a girl, said as she ran into the arms of one rescuer. "I want some bread and sausage," quipped one of her brothers, who also sadly told the rescue crew, "My mother is dead."

The kids had to be hoisted into the helicopter, which could not land in the area. They were then transferred to a military medical plane and flown to a hospital in Bogota, the nation's capital. The children's father and grandparents were overwhelmed with relief and gratitude. "I am very grateful, and to Mother Earth as well, that they were set free," the grandmother said.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who erroneously tweeted weeks ago that the kids had been found, is now celebrating the confirmed rescue mission.

The children "have given us an example of total survival that will go down in history," Petro said.

"The jungle saved them," he added. "They are children of the jungle, and now they are also children of Colombia."

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