In a world as large and diverse as ours, there's going to be people who have experienced things that literally no one else on earth has. Things that are so absurd and just beyond the boundaries of what we consider to be real life, that it's hard for us to even believe they actually happened. As you can hopefully tell from the title of this video today, I'll be covering the story of one of those experiences.

So without further ado, settle down. Make yourself comfortable. Grab yourself a snack. Welcome back, guys. My name is Andy Chang, and this is Hidden Stories.

On the evening of July 26, 1959, at 5 p.m.. A 39 year old U.S. Marine Corps pilot named Lieutenant Colonel William Rincon was making a routine flight to the city of Beaufort, North Carolina. Since he had made that exact same flight several times before in the past and it was a relatively short flight only around 70 minutes, he was feeling pretty relaxed and wasn't really thinking and worrying about much.

The only tiny thing that he had on his mind was the fact that over the course of the trip so far, it had started looking more and more likely that it was going to thunderstorm. The sky had become completely covered by this dark, heavy field of menacing, looking, thick, black clouds. But still, it wasn't like William, who was a veteran who had flown in both World War Two and the Korean War, had never piloted an aircraft in such conditions before.

And although thunderstorms and thunderstorm clouds could potentially be extremely dangerous for his aircraft, since he and his wingman, who was flying in a separate jet behind him, were already pretty close to the destination. They decided to simply cruise at a slightly higher altitude than normal at around 47,000 feet in the air to avoid all the nasty stuff going on down below them.

This was actually pretty standard protocol back then, and for a while things were going pretty smoothly. There was absolutely nothing to worry about at all, or so William thought. Mere minutes before William and his wingman were supposed to start their descent towards their destination, William suddenly heard a loud thump and then rumbling noises coming from inside his engine.

Now, during the flight, especially one that high in the air with a literal thunderstorm and right below hearing any sort of unusual noises at all coming from the engine was straight up horrifying as William fumbled with his controls quickly but calmly trying to figure out what was going on. Another loud thump came from within the engine, this time causing the red warning light inside the cockpit to begin glowing.

This light only came on when something was horribly wrong and William's heart sank as his engine. The one thing powering his entire aircraft and literally keeping it floating in the air suddenly plummeted from its normal power levels to zero. 47,000 feet in the air. His engine had come to a complete stop, likely because of some sort of damage or interference from the thunderstorm.

But despite everything going completely and utterly wrong, William, being a veteran pilot, was still fairly calm, actually. He simply transmitted to his wingman power failure may have to eject. Then he tried several times to restart his engine and just get his plane up and running again, but was unsuccessful every time. And when his melted plane began to literally fuel on the edge of just nosediving towards the ground at near the speed of sound, which was the current speed that the plane was moving at with William only just barely managing to hold it steady with his controls.

He realized it was a lost cause. There was no way to save his plane and with no other choice at 6 p.m. on the dot. William ejected himself from the aircraft into the dark, dangerous skies outside. Now, since William wasn't wearing a pressure suit. He obviously hadn't anticipated that he would need one. He knew even before ejecting, that the extreme altitude he was at would make for an extremely uncomfortable ejection.

Since the sudden decompression from leaving the plane, it would be incredibly severe. But still, he did have an oxygen mask, so at least he knew he would be able to breathe in. Having experienced and survived ejecting from a plane under heavy enemy gunfire in Korea, he figured it couldn't be any worse than that. Due to his extensive experience as a pilot.

He was just as equally experienced at skydiving. But little did he know this particular skydive would be unlike anything anyone on Earth had ever experienced. The very moment William ejected from his plane, the force that propelled him from his cockpit into the atmosphere, also ripped off the glove on his left hand. Now, this was very scary news for him, since he had literally just gone from a 70 degree Fahrenheit environment to -70 degrees in just a few seconds.

Almost immediately, he began experiencing rapid onset frostbite on that, now completely bare left hand. And if that wasn't already bad enough, the sudden decompression that occurred from suddenly leaving the plane's cockpit was far more excruciating than anything he could have ever imagined. Within mere moments, the sudden change in air pressure had caused a mass of new speed, as well as his abdomen area to begin swelling up like crazy.

And before long, he even began feeling blood dripping out of his eyes, nose, ears and mouth as well. The sheer pain and discomfort were so agonizingly intense that William was fully convinced in that moment that the atmospheric pressure would kill him long before he ever reached the ground. But as he plummeted towards the dark clouds below. Somehow, some way, he was not only still alive, he also had not lost consciousness from the pain and from the blood loss, which was extremely lucky because while he was falling, William realized that he had not actually yet put on his oxygen mask.

In the sheer chaos of ejecting from the plane and then immediately getting slammed in the face with such pain and discomfort, he had simply forgotten to. As such, he quickly began trying to reach up with his one good right hand to grab ahold of that mask, which had been repeatedly hitting him in the face as he was falling.

But to William's shock and horror, as he desperately kept trying to raise that right hand to just put on his mask, no matter how hard he tried, no matter how much effort he put in, it simply wouldn't release. He couldn't raise his right hand. As William began trying to move his other limbs as well. He realized he couldn't move those either.

In fact, it felt like he just couldn't move anything at all. Turns out, as William was freefalling towards the ground, he was unintentionally spinning. As such, the rotation induced centrifugal force on his body was so strong that he was falling while simply being frozen in place, almost like a surface. This absolutely terrified William. He knew without a doubt that not having an oxygen mask severely reduced his chances of survival, since there's not that much oxygen at all, that high in the air every second.

He didn't wear his mask. He was simply increasing his risks of either developing brain damage or simply dying. But luckily, after just a few seconds of struggling to regain control of his own body, he had fallen through enough height to the point that he had reached the wispy white clouds at the very top of the thunderstorm clouds, which caused him to start spinning significantly slower and finally allowed him to hook up his oxygen mask to his face and breathe in the cool, pristine oxygen we take for granted.

Now, luckily for William, his parachute actually had a built in barometer that was designed to auto deploy at around 10,000 feet in the air, which was a much more breathable altitude. So even if William had suffered frostbite on both of his hands and couldn't pull the parachute ripcord himself, which actually very well may have been the case, he would still be fine.

But although under normal conditions, it would usually take William, maybe around three and a half minutes of freefall to reach 10,000 feet from 47,000. These conditions were obviously not normal at all. He had been falling to increasingly colder and darker clouds, which by then were literally thunderstorm clouds that were almost pitch black on the inside, making it so that William couldn't see much around him at all.

And after he'd already fallen through these clouds for what he felt like was many, many minutes, after all, it's kind of hard to keep track of time while you're falling through a cloud. He began to worry that because of the poor weather conditions, his barometer had somehow malfunctioned and that he was already past 10,000 feet. He began to anxiously wonder whether he should just pull the parachute ripcord himself to avoid just slamming into the ground at full speed.

But of course, that came with the risk of deploying the parachute too early, which during a thunderstorm could be devastating, but with so much excruciating pain from how mind numbingly freezing noise and from his frostbite clouding his judgment, William was just thinking that maybe he should actually give in and just pull the court. When he finally felt the incredibly relieving and familiar upward tug of his parachute deploying for a brief moment, a bit of relief and happiness floated through him.

He took off his oxygen mask, which is now almost completely depleted, and took a deep breath of fresh air. He'd gone through the worst of it. I mean, he had to have and everything should be okay. But William had no way of knowing was that he was actually still around 8000 feet above the 10,000 foot altitude that he was expecting.

Turns out the strong updrafts and wind inside the clouds had significantly decreased. Williams Terminal velocity, which had triggered the barometer much earlier, although the air at his current height was still breathable. The truth was, he was still far from the earth. And since at that point he was still deep inside the thunderstorm clouds and he still had a long way of slowly gliding down to get out of them.

He wasn't safe yet at all. And to make matters just that much worse, the storm was just about to start. Now, the exact name of the clouds that William was falling through were CUMULONIMBUS CLOUDS. Since they're the only type of cloud that can produce hail, lightning and thunder. Their nickname is Thundercloud. So it's just based off of this description alone.

It is absolutely not the type of cloud that anyone would like to find themselves in. Shortly after William's parachute had deployed, he suddenly jolted as these intensely bright, pure blue bleeds of light shot past him, terrifyingly close to his face. Almost immediately after a monstrous explosion roared through the air, an incredibly violent boom that William felt more than he hurt.

To his horror, he realized that this was lightning and thunder and it was just happening all around him. He realized that at any given moment, he or his parachute could be shredded to pieces by these bolts of light and a 1.1 stroke so close to William and lit up so brightly in front of him that he actually thought that he had just died.

He knew he had to get out of there and fast, but he was literally in a parachute, slowly floating down it with no real way to speed things up. And although he tried to rack his mind and come up with a plan before he could think any further without a sliver of a warning, William was suddenly slammed by what felt like a massive wall of dust, solid air.

All of a sudden, he was somehow inexplicably soaring, thousands of feet back into the air. Turns out he had been hit by one of the extremely powerful updrafts that exist inside thunderclouds. And although the ascent up was extremely jolting and it made his head spin wildly, nothing on earth could have prepared William for the trip back down, you see, but getting forced upwards by the updraft, he had been pushed deeper into the thundercloud.

The exact opposite of what he had wanted. And as the updrafts energy finally dissipated and he was falling back downwards, he just started to get violently and incessantly being pounded in, slammed by the incredibly intense wind, rain and even large solid chunks of hail, the size of baseballs just coming from all directions. The storm was now in full force and William had been sent into the heart of it, and he was being pelted with so many different pieces of icy shrapnel, so many different times that it was leaving large welts just all over his body.

And if he didn't still have his helmet on, he very, very likely would have just died from head trauma. But that wasn't even the worst of it at times. Throughout William's descent, the air had become so saturated with rainwater that when he tried to take a breath and inhale like normal, he just couldn't and wouldn't inhale a nose full of water, instead suddenly finding himself just completely struggling to even breathe.

William had to figure out how to just time his breaths, right, so that he would only breathe when he was outside his pockets of water. But since he had no real way of really anticipating where these pockets were, this was a very difficult task. And water just found its way into his nose anyways. And he also just had to pray that this pockets of water wouldn't be so big, that it just wouldn't give him any chances at all to breathe.

William found himself becoming increasingly worried about the strange but terrifyingly real possibility of drowning in the sky. But he had finally made it back down from the updraft. And you could breathe normally. And it seemed like all his nightmares were finally over. He slammed right into yet another updraft and got shot right back into the sky, having to endure the exact same process all over again.

To William's horror, these updrafts were so powerful and there were so many of them that every time he came back down, he would get launched right back up. He was literally just completely stuck in this agonizingly painful and seemingly endless cycle of just up and down, up and down, up and down. Despite having wanted to leave the thunderclouds faster, it seemed like now he was permanently stuck inside them, trapped in a forever unending loop.

Williams Up and down, cycled happened times and times and time again so many times that he just completely lost count. He was being flung and spun in so many different directions and so quickly that at one point he just got seasick and threw up. The only thing he could do every single time he got shot back up was just hope and pray that his parachute wouldn't get shredded up in the chaos and that he also wouldn't get sent right into it and become entangled in it.

But incredibly, after what genuinely seemed like an eternity of hoping he wouldn't drown, hoping his parachute wouldn't rip apart, hoping he wouldn't be shredded, apart by lightning or large hailstones by some unbelievable miracle. William's parachute was still intact enough to hold him up. And William himself, who at this point was just completely exhausted and battered beyond belief, realized that he was finally starting to fall back down.

And soon afterwards he emerged from the bottom of the thundercloud back into the world. For the first time all evening. Rain was only falling from one direction from above him, and he could actually see the ground. As William drifted closer and closer to earth, temperatures began to rise and he finally started regaining some sensation in his numb frostbitten limbs.

Although he was still in pain and sore all over, he knew that he was okay. After everything he had gone through, he had finally escaped from the storm. Against all odds. He had survived when William was just a couple hundred feet from the ground, almost like an affectionate goodbye gift of sorts. The storm sent him one last strongest of wind, sending William straight into the branches of a nearby tree and causing him to slam headfirst into the tree trunk.

But luckily, William's helmet saved him once again from suffering any serious damage, and he was able to untangle himself from the mess and climb down to the ground. When he checked the time, it was 6:40 p.m.. Incredibly, William had spent 40 entire minutes falling through the air and trapped in that storm cloud. Since he didn't know where he was and couldn't see any signs of civilization, he used his marine training to start walking in a search pattern until he successfully located a road.

Then he stood next to it and tried to hitch a ride to the hospital. It took a while since not everyone was brave enough to take in the bruised, bleeding frostbitten from an encrusted pilot, but eventually a nice stranger did stop for him and helped him phone an ambulance at the hospital. Doctors discovered that despite everything William had gone through, his injuries were relatively minor.

He had some frostbite and some decompression shock. And of course, he had bruising and welts all over his body. But miraculously, he didn't seem to have any severe injuries. Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin would eventually go on to write a book about his experiences called The Man Who Wrote the Thunder before passing away at age 88, almost exactly 50 years after the day of the incident.

He's the only human in history who is known to have survived the fall from the very top of a cumulonimbus thundercloud and lived to tell the tale. And now you know his story. With that being said, I hope you found this story interesting if you're new here. Hi, my name is Andy. I told the story true hidden stories once a week.

I personally guarantee you that every single story I cover from here on out will be just as interesting as today's. So stick with me as always. Let me know your thoughts. Feedback, story, suggestions, comments down below. I'll see you guys soon.