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Frane Selak, the luckiest unlucky man
Seven disasters survived and a lottery win — and almost nothing to prove any of it.
The story, as told everywhere: between 1962 and 1996 the Croatian music teacher Frane Selak survived a train that went into a river, a plane door that blew out mid-flight, a bus crash, two cars that caught fire, a bus that hit him, and a fall from a mountain road into a tree. Then in 2003 he won about a million dollars on the Croatian lottery.
It is the best luck story ever told, and that is close to the problem. A Croatian journalist who went looking for records of the accidents in 2012 found essentially nothing — no contemporaneous reports for most of them, no corroboration beyond Selak's own retelling, which had grown in detail over the years.
The lottery win is real and documented. Selak later said he gave most of it away to family and charity, bought a modest house, and kept one thing for himself: a hip replacement. He died in 2016.