The Survivor: Breaking the Ultimate Taboo to Live

April 27, 2006 -- -- Standing in front of a group of high school students on the outskirts of Dallas, a man named Nando Parrado had an unusual lesson in life and death to share.

"Can you imagine how terrible and slow and horrible is the death sitting down, freezing and looking to your friends," he asked them.

Parrado shared his story in an exclusive interview with "Nightline" and Outside Magazine.

"Let's say that I could close this room, put the temperature to 30 degrees below zero, no lights, nothing ... and let's wait. There's nothing to eat. Who would die first?"

For Parrado this was no mental exercise. He experienced this. His story began on Friday the 13th in October 1972, when he was 22 years old.

That day Parrado and his teammates from the Old Christians Rugby Club boarded a chartered flight from Uruguay to Chile. There was plenty of room to spare, so Perrado's sister and mother joined them, planning to do some shopping and sightseeing abroad.

It was a fateful decision.

The flight followed a course across the snow-covered Andes. But at an altitude of 14,000 feet, and some 250 miles off course, it crashed into the mountains.

"From the moment when I realized there was something wrong," explained Parrado, "to the moment of impact, not more than 10 seconds elapsed."

"I looked through the window and about 25, 30 yards away from the tip of the wing, I saw this black-and-white wall rushing by at the speed of the airplane, mixed with clouds. And that took me three or four seconds to analyze. My brain then says a plane cannot fly that close to a mountain."

Survival Instinct

The majority of passengers actually survived the initial crash, but Parrado spent the first three days in a coma.

When he came around there were 28 passengers still alive. But then he learned that his mother had died, and his sister Susie was seriously injured.

"They said 'Your mother is dead.' Just like that. And where's my sister? 'Your sister is wounded. She's lying there in the front.' ... It's not that they wanted to be blunt or strong. They were immersed in that dilemma of surviving," he said.

He nursed his sister for two days but her injuries were too serious, and she died. Parrado's attention turned toward avoiding being the third member of his family to die in the Andes.

At such an altitude there was no vegetation that they might be able to consume as food. All that was left in the cabin were some chocolate bars, chocolate-covered peanuts, jam and discarded wine. And temperatures were so severe -- minus 35 at night -- that it took ages for the ice to melt so that they could drink water. Incredibly, they survived for seven days on these minuscule morsels.

But soon the terrible reality hit them. If they did not find some food, then they would all die of starvation. In a sudden and shocking moment, resistance to the final taboo of any modern civilization was breaking down.

"I think that the first thought of surviving in a way that breaks all the taboos of civilization, eating human flesh, starts to creep in your mind around the seventh or eighth days after the last chocolate-covered peanut was finished," he said.

"I was there lying at night and suddenly this thought comes into my mind. The only thing we can do is eat the dead bodies of our friends. But, I thought, if I'm thinking this, all the other guys, they are like me, they must be thinking the same thing."

Rescue Effort Called Off

The following day, the remaining survivors had an open discussion and entered into a pact. That they would eat the flesh of their friends who'd perished in the crash and cold. One of the players, who was a medical student, was charged with dissecting the flesh. Their desperation for survival had transformed them into cannibals.

Parrado explained that, "when you are there, you're not the same person. You're surviving on instinct. All your primal thoughts come to you as an animal. You're surviving on instinct. You have to survive. Repulsion is something that doesn't come to your head. Surviving does."

At least able to line their stomachs and fight off immediate starvation, the survivors managed to get a transistor radio to work for a few minutes. Tragically, they would hear a report that said the rescue effort was being called off.

"As soon as I finished listening to that, I imagined how we would die together there. Frozen, looking into each other's eyes."

Parrado decided that he could not die on the glacial mountains. He decided to see if he could find help in the middle of nowhere. After discussions with various team members he set out on a trek with his friend Roberto Canessa. It was mid-December.

In thin jeans, wearing rugby cleats and carrying a sock filled with human flesh as their only supply of food, they began climbing mountains and navigating some of the most treacherous terrain on the earth.

Twelve days later, just four days before Christmas, they sighted a Chilean peasant on horseback. It was the beginning of the end of their ordeal. Within 24 hours, they were rescued and given medical care. They then accompanied helicopter pilots back to the crash site and collected the remaining survivors.

The Past Kept Him Alive

At the end of it all, Parrado points to teamwork as the key to his own survival.

"Everything changes very fast and you have to decide by yourselves. Nobody's looking for you, you're abandoned. Forty degrees below zero, no winter clothes. How do you survive?"

He said, "We survived because we were a team, a fantastic team. We were friends 10 years before the plane crashed, we went to the same high school, we lived in the same neighborhoods, we were hanging out together. We suffered on the field, we won a lot of games and we were defeated many times ... but all that, we lived together. And that saved us on those circumstances because even a few minutes after the plane crashed, we were acting as a team."

It is an incredible story of courage, fortitude and sacrifice. One that the students, and any who hears it, are unlikely to ever forget.