Alive
The shocking true story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 and the moral horror that saved sixteen lives
The crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 into the Andes Mountains on October 13, 1972, and the subsequent seventy-two-day survival ordeal of the passengers would become one of the most controversial and morally complex survival stories ever recorded, forcing sixteen young men to make the unthinkable decision to consume the flesh of their dead friends and teammates in order to stay alive in one of the most hostile environments on Earth, and the psychological and ethical dimensions of their choice continue to provoke debate and reflection more than fifty years after their rescue shocked the world. The flight was carrying forty-five people including nineteen members of the Old Christians Club rugby team from Montevideo, Uruguay, along with their friends and family members, traveling to Chile for a tournament, and the passengers were young, healthy, optimistic people with their whole lives ahead of them, many of them students from wealthy families who had never experienced real hardship and who could not have imagined that their routine flight would turn into a nightmare of freezing temperatures, starvation, and impossible moral choices that would haunt them forever.
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