The honest conclusion of the science is that a specific and unusual combination of factors produced a survivable outcome in a situation that almost universally produces death. Which of the identified factors was most important, and what would have happened if any single factor had been different, is not answerable from the available evidence.
What is answerable is that it happened. She survived.
## Memory, Testimony, and the Limits of What Can Be Known
Any account of Vesna Vulović’s experience of the crash runs into a fundamental epistemological problem: she does not remember it. Her amnesia — covering the period from approximately an hour before the crash to approximately a month after — means that her own testimony about what happened is secondhand. She knows what she was told, what she read in newspaper accounts, what the doctors and investigators told her, what her parents told her when she finally saw them in the hospital. She does not know what she experienced.
This creates an unusual situation for a survival narrative. The most dramatic part of the story — the explosion, the fall, the impact, the early moments of the rescue — are events that the person who most people want to hear from cannot describe from her own experience. She can describe what she was told. She can describe how she felt when she was told. She cannot describe what it was like to be in that fuselage section as it fell, because she was either unconscious or in a physiological state that precluded the formation of memories.