Anyone have one. Not myself, but someone I met.
Forty years ago "76" ,where I grew up, a sightseeing helicopter crashed, killing the pilot and a newlywed couple. This was near Pigeon Forge, TN. 11 years ago, I met a man on a trip when four of us were traveling to Baton Rouge for a bowling tournament.

He was talking about his business making concrete birdbaths, lawn jockeys and other lawn decorations. He sold products to the Rattlesnake Kingdom where the copter was operating. The owner invited him up for a free tour. He and his wife were on the last flight that made it back.

Not me, but my father had an event like that.

He was a B-24 Radio Operator and backup Waist Gunner in WWII. He was assigned to fill in with another crew for a mission; at the very last minute, the regular crew member was put back on duty and my father stayed on base.

That plane got shot down; most of the crew was reported to have safely parachuted out of the plane, only to be captured and hanged by the Germans.

Several, but I'll only bore you with a couple. I was an Armor TC in Vietnam. Had the main gun swung to the left, which put the turret and me out over the right track. Right track hit an IED, blew me back, saw stars, but didn't get a scratch. Left a big crater, and did enough damage to the tank that I was issued a new one. Crew was also positioned such that they did not get a scratch either. later, in LE, got shot through and through twice at Halitosis range with a .44 Mag. Did a lot of damage but, obviously, the round didn't hit anything that immediately killed me, or leave me with a long term disability, other than it didn't do my hearing any good. Ok, one more. As a young officer, saw a car parked in a pitch black area of a large city park, closed at the time. Man and woman in car. Discovered the male was a felon and parole absconder. No time to get a back up. Took him into custody. Found a big hunting knife under the front seat. Later in the booking room, the suspect said he's intended to kill me, but I never moved into a position where he thought he could do it without getting shot. He was dispassionate as told me this, and I had no doubt he was telling me the truth......

I was the subject of a kidnapping attempt many years ago. There were multiple individuals involved and had the plan well thought out. They were positioned near the entrance to a grocery store. At the moment of planned opportunity they realized I had a dog waiting outside the store. They went to adjust their plan, but the moment was gone and their plan fell apart.

The person who organized the kidnapping had years earlier recruited an individual and his son to kill me while rock climbing. I was convinced to climb in a ridiculously dangerous place, without ropes. Things got strange during the climb, I distanced myself from the individual. He tried to catch up to me using a convenient foothold that I did not trust. Moments later he bounced down the mountain to his death.

I was 16 at the time. It took me until I was 22 years old to realize that the climbing incident was no accident. Soon all many other strange events made sense and I realized what someone was trying to do.

First one, Aug. 1st 1978 Buenos Aires. I was living in Belgium back then and brought a belgian friend with me for a short visit to my country.
We took a 24 hours long train trip from the north of the country back to the capital city and we were to depart back to Belgium in a couple of days. We were exhausted but when we arrived to our temporary place we got a call from my friends that the farewell party was that same night, not the following.
We gathered at a friend's place until it was time to go party. We partied until 4am and split.
8AM I receive a call telling me that my friend's place (where we gathered the previous night) had been bombed. I was so tired it took me a while to understand. My friend and sister were ok, they (and the rest of my group) had left before the explosion. His parents were far enough of the explosion to go unscathed. Had we stayed longer or kept the original date for our sortie, some or all of us would have died that night. My friend's bedroom was destroyed completely. The girl who slept on the floor above (the targeted family) died in the explosion.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfardHtYij0

Second one, a lot more recent. A shooting club opened in the middle of downtown. Very fancy. I became an instant resident. One day I brought ten of my nerdy friends to shoot with me. A couple of days later I had an appointment with another fiend to meet there at 5pm. I failed to show up, got delayed delivering a PC. At 8 PM someone tell me that a range exploded in a ball of fire. Couldn't get hold of my friend. He missed the appointment also and we were both watching TV expecting the firemen to remove the corpse of our friend (each other) from the place.
This was an indoor range in the middle of the city, small and fancy. They had a sophisticated closed air filtering system to prevent the noise to bleed out and scare the neighbors and city dwellers (it was located on the main theaters avenue, think Broadway NYC). There was a gas leak on the street pipe and the gas filled the air ducts and filtering system of the range until it exploded. We missed our appointment that afternoon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jUcV08na8o

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Many years ago I was on an icy highway in Colorado. Lost control, slid all over plus a couple 360 degrees spins. I firmly believe the l
Lords hand took control and before we slid off the mountain the car amazingly slid backwards and made a 90 degree turn and placed the front of the car perfectly positioned at a side road next to a stop sign just as if I'd come that way and came to a stop on that side road stop sign. I hope that makes sense, and sorry about the long sentence. To this day my passenger will verify this.

In my early 20's, on a road trip, in a large field that served as a campground. Rows of cars with a driving lane in between each two rows. I had laid out a sleeping bag on the ground next to our car, which was the last in our line. It was late and very little activity. I was half asleep and not paying attention, but vaguely knew a car was approaching by the sound (headlights, if they were on (might have just been parking lights and available light from a few light posts), not visible from my position relative to the car). Moments passed and suddenly for no reason I was aware of, I sat up with a start. Not out of fear or alarm or anything cognitive; I just sat bolt upright. A few seconds later, the car rounded the bend and rolled right over my pillow. The driver jumped out in a panic-- knowing he had run over something-- and rushed to see if I was ok. I just chuckled and said, yeah, I'm fine. Found a tire tread mark on my pillow in the morning.

I've had others, but that comes quickly to mind.

we traveled all over the western states , camping , four wheeling, sight seeing and photographing.

In retrospect I often wonder just how fortunate we were.

60 miles from another soul, way the hell back in the outback, just the two of us, in a pick up .

I know for a fact we almost drove in too two growing operations, and we slept overnight for two nights , 6 miles from a car that was buried with three drug dealers in it, a day before we got there.

Maybe the few bears that we encountered that were our biggest worry, but I know a lot of very bad crap goes on out in the boonies

My own mother, who was too poor to attend, missed out on a student government trip to Atlanta in the Winecoff Hotel, which burned and killed all the students.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winecoff_Hotel_fire

Yes.

Back in 07 I got a new ATV set out to ride on spring weekend. as I was alone, I teamed up with a couple other riders. Things went well in the morning, had lunch and set out again after lunch.

We were riding some pretty steep stuff in the morning and we got to a rutted incline that was not as steep as the morning, but more winding. I hit tat trail a little harder getting about 2/3rds of the way up and hit a root step which bounced me into a tree. I fell off the quad and found myself tumbling down the trail and my quad was following me.

Something in my head told me to stop and I did, sitting upright in a rut. Then I got hit in the back of the helmet and I saw my ATV tumbling down the trail, bounced off a tree and eventually stopped rubber side up.

It turned out that I stopped in the deepest rut in the trail and I think what hit me in the back of the head was the foot base in between the wheel wells as the quad rolled over the top of the rut.

I didn't think anything of it then, but now I realize how lucky I was not to get paralyzed or killed.

I was riding a bicycle over the port Orange bridge just south of Daytona, I was in the bike lane. I got hit by a Cadillac estimated to be going 55 mph. I traveled about 100 yards up a steep bridge as I was flying I kept seeing the ground then I'd see the sky, over and over, ground then sky. I was tumbling up the bridge. I caught my toe during a tumble and spun my foot 180 degrees the wrong way. I came to rest and had a bunch of people stop and try to render aid, except the driver of the caddy. My left leg was ripped open and my foot was off at weird angle.

Many years ago (the winter of 8th or 9th grade), I was spending the night at a friends house. They had an around 300 acre farm with a smallish river running through it.

We were outside goofing around the following day and were sliding around on the ice on the river. It was over a slow spot in the flow that had frozen over. About 75 yards downstream, the flow picked up and that part was not frozen. I heard the ice crack about a half second before I was completely submerged under the ice. The river's flow was slow but fast enough that it took me away from the hole that I made in the ice when I went through. I remember being to the point that I just about lost consciousness when I popped up downstream where there was no ice.

To this day, I haven't been out on the ice since.

That's one of about half a dozen.

Yeah, winter of '02-'03, I was driving my girlfriend to her mother's place in upstate NY. I had an '89 Buick Century with bad tires and it was as wintry as you'd want in the Adirondacks, and snowing heavily at the time. We were headed east, and were approaching Paul Smith's college entrance. It was a curving decline to the left, and I thought I was going slow enough. There was a tractor trailer behind me, and one oncoming. At the apogee of the curve, the back end kept on going and I steered into it but we were sideways in a blink, and the entire view out of my windshield was the side of the semi in the other lane. I don't know what I did, but I managed to give enough input to the car that as the oncoming semi passed, I wound up in the lane behind it, turned 180 degrees from where I had been facing seconds before, and the semi that had been behind me passed within what had to have been inches.

At a complete stop, watching death depart in both directions, I took a few deep breaths while my girlfriend was hysterically screaming. She wanted to give me nine kinds of hell about it and I finally told her to shut up. "Hey look, you're alive and unscathed and it's over. Shut your mouth. We still have a half hour to drive and I don't need this the entire time."

But the truth is, if it hadn't come off as perfectly as it had, we likely wouldn't have survived intact, if at all. That's the singular moment in my life where I knew then and know now that I came extremely close to the edge. I've had a number of close calls on the road, but nothing like that before or since.

At least 3 times, all involving cars and intoxication. I was inebriated in every one of these.

First one, an oncoming car with 6 people in it, crossed over the divider. I swerved to the oncoming lanes, and he missed me but went into a tree sideways. 1 killed instantly, 1 died the next day. 1 more injured and unconscious, with 3 that walked away. The investigation interview was almost as rough as when I tried to render assistance.

Second one, I fell asleep at the wheel while driving on the interstate doing 60 plus. Fell asleep in the right lane, woke up on the left shoulder without hitting anything.

Last one rolling up to a stop light, poor visibility in a downpour, there is a car stalled ahead of me, I am doing about 50. My car somehow slid around the other with a foot or two of space.

I quit drinking that year, I wasn't going to push my luck any further.

Many, many years ago as a village/town cop, I answered a "man with a gun call". When I arrived, family members advised me that a 19 year-old resident had been shooting at streetlights, and was presently in his bedroom with a shotgun.

I entered the house and found him as described, lying in his bed with the gun along his left leg, pointed roughly at the doorway where I was standing.

I aimed my gun at him and ordered him out of the bed, all the while using my other hand to stave off his mother, who was screaming at me not to shoot him.

He put his hand on the gun and began to raise it, and I ordered him one last time to put it down.

He looked me in the eye and slowly lowered the gun and I went over to him and flopped him over and cuffed him.

The shotgun was loaded with birdshot, one in the chamber.

I have recounted this event to other cops over the years and all said that I should have fired the moment he raised the gun.

Maybe so.

We are both still alive, though.

Tim

I’ve had more close calls than I care to remember. Some I escaped from because of other people being around to help and others that would fall into your “Angel on your shoulder” category.

The one that first came to mind was an experience while deer hunting during archery season in high school. I was walking through the woods and something caused me to stop. I don’t know if it was something I felt, or something I heard, but just as I stopped an arrow passed just in front of my face and stuck in the tree next to me. It was right where my head would have been if I hadn’t stopped.

I was in the Peachtree 25th building fire.

I worked for Franklins Printing at the time. The lights dimmed and it was dark outside. It looked like it was raining until I realized it was actually glass coming down along with office chairs. Thick black smoke blotted out the sun.

Was the first to the woman that jumped 6 stories. She was alive and had broken her ankles. My boss tended her as I ran to pull fire alarms.
I ran to the corner and yanked the alarm switch, than down to the next corner and yanked that one also.

It took a solid 5 minutes before the fire trucks got there, but the WSBTV reporter was there before I got my hand off the alarm switch.

He blocked the entrance gate with his car to be the first on scene filming the people desperately screaming for help from the thick black smoke billowing from the windows and the first ladder on the scene just smashed it out of the way. The truck never slowed down as the car tumbled out into Peachtree Street.

Smoke was pouring out from the main bus from under the street, then the transformer just exploded down in its hole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peachtree_25th_Building

Waiting to cross the street on the way to work one morning. Light changed and as I took a step into the crosswalk someone grabbed my backpack preventing me from getting creamed by a large truck that blew through the light. It was early morning and I wasn't fully awake until then. Now I always look and I've grabbed or yelled at a few folks since.

One that really shook me was speeding too fast and not paying attention to the traffic light. By the time I realized that it was red and I was going over 100mph it was to late to even try and slow down let alone stop. I just held the throttle and gave in to the idea that this was going to be it for me. I made it through the 4way intersection between two cars traveling perpendicular to me. I didn't see them, I didn't try to angle between them, I didn't think anything at all, I was just numb.

I've done crazy shit on a motorcycle, usually on purpose, but that one I was asleep at the "wheel" and just got dumb lucky.

I will mention one of the 14 nearly fatal experiences that I've had.

When I was five I was running through the yard of my parents friends in Las Vegas at full speed and ran into a plate glass door. True plate glass, not safety glass.

It shattered.

I, however, went from child-like warp speed to falling backwards in the thickness of the glass. Good thing, as the large shard that tore me open from the top of my sternum to my abdomen would have gone through my head. I recall my father running in slow motion across the room and thinking something along the lines of "Oh, shit, he's really mad." Off we went to the hospital. I recall one other thing, lying in my blood covered mother's arms as my father blew through a stop sign going like a bat out of Hell.

My mother, to her dying day, said she saw my guardian angel grab me just as I hit the door. She wasn't given to histronics; if she said she saw an angel, she saw an angel. Its as reasonable an explanation as any other.