On the morning of May 19, travelers in the vast Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica, discovered what could be the remains of Cody Roman Dial, son of the legendary Alaskan adventurer Roman Dial. Cody disappeared in July 2014 while traveling alone in Corcovado, and his father has been looking for him ever since.

By coincidence, Roman was scheduled to meet with FBI officials in Washington on May 20, a long hoped-for meeting in which Roman intended to enlist more help with his search. Instead, the FBI told him that the body of a young man had been found in Corcovado. Roman and his search team flew to Costa Rica on May 21 to help identify and recover the remains. They appear to be Cody’s, Roman confirmed in an e-mail sent Sunday night: “It’s his stuff definitely. Only thing missing are his glasses as far as I can tell.” He said that it will be a month or so before they can get a DNA match from the bones.

Roman has spent two years combing the Costa Rican jungle on foot and fighting for the attention of authorities to aid his search. Over time, he began to believeÌęthat his son had been murdered. And investigators working with Roman even identified a suspect. The remains have complicated Roman’s understanding of the case. “His money and passport suggest no foul play,” he told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű on Sunday.

In a second twist of timing, a six-part documentary on the search for Cody debuted May 22 on the National Geographic Channel. Much of focuses on the challenges Roman’s team of outdoor experts encountered while traveling through Corcovado. It also lays out an early theory of Roman’s: that Cody, age 27 and an expert outdoorsman when he disappeared, was murdered in the jungle. Director Aengus James, who returned to Costa Rica this weekend with Roman, says he initially intended to identify a suspect in the final episode, but told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű on Monday that the resolution of the series will likely be reworked.

“We are where we are today because of the continued efforts by Roman and (Dial’s wife) Peggy (and) the local community here who also desperately wants to know what happened,” James wrote. “There is a tangible investigation studying his remains to determine the cause of death.”

Prior to the discovery, says James, the team had worked with Costa Rican authorities. “We turned over our findings immediately and we’ve been in contact with Costa Rican authorities the whole time,” he says. “And they confirmed that [their suspect] has become their sole suspect as a direct result of evidence we turned over.”

According to James, the 2014 discovery of Cody’s backpack in a hostel near the park’s entrance was a pivotal moment in their investigation that led them to believe foul play might have been involved. Roman concluded that Cody had either completed his initial trip and then re-entered the park with minimal supplies, without contacting his family, which seemed unusual, or that his bag was taken from him after he was killed.Ìę

The human remains were found in an area between the small towns of Dos Brazos on the park’s northeastern edge and Carate on the southern Pacific coast. The towns sit about eightÌęmiles apart, but are separated by mountainous terrain and are not connected by any sanctioned trails. Under Costa Rican law, visitors to Corcovado must travel with a licensed guide, and Dos Brazos is not an official entry point. But in his final e-mails home, Cody made it clear he intended to travel illegally from the town alone.

Corcovado, a 160-square-mile park on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, is one of the most diverse and lush jungles on earth. It can also be a dangerous place for solo travelers. The park is filled with illegal gold mines, and violence often breaks out between rival miners and police. It also has no shortage of natural dangers: cliffs hidden by foliage, rivers that lead to box canyons or over waterfalls, and venomous snakes.Ìę

Cody was at least the second American to disappear in the park in recent years. David Gimelfarb, a 28-year-old doctoral student from Chicago, went missing under similar circumstances in August 2009. Like Cody, Gimelfarb was in Corcovado between stints at grad school,Ìęand traveled into the park alone.Ìę

Cody had been to Corcovado once before, as a teenager tagging along on one of his father's research trips. The elder Dial has a Ph.D. in biology from Stanford, and has been a professor at Alaska Pacific University for more than two decades. Corcovado was a favorite of his research destinations. On his APU website, Roman detailed trips where he and his students would dangle from ropes high in the park's trees to study monkeys.

Corcovado was supposed to be Cody'sÌęsecond-to-last stop on a multi-month tour of Central America's largest national parks. He told his parents that after Costa Rica, he would be heading to Panama and then home to Alaska for graduateÌęschool in the fall.

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On July 10, Cody Dial, the son of legendary Alaskan adventurer Roman Dial, embarked on what was supposed to be a five-day trekking trip in Costa Rica. Thirty-one days later, nobody has heard from him.

The 27-year-old Cody Roman Dial— “R2” to friends and family—was traveling through Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica’s largest and most ecologically diverse landscape, when he went missing. Tourists have been required to hike with a guide since February, but Cody was alone and told his parents that he intended to trek illegally off the permitted trails.

Details about Cody’s disappearance remain contradictory, but several facts are accepted: Officials have no record of his entrance into the park, he was reported missing by his parents on July 22, the search mission began on July 24, and this was Cody’s second time visiting Corcovado. He’d accompanied his father to the park as a teenager.

That’s about all we know. The Tico Times, a Costa Rican English-language paper, reports . But later reporting casts doubts on the sighting. Authorities were also told that Cody was spotted outside the park, but none of the tips have been substantiated. In one case, a local man claimed that Cody hired him as a guide and paid him with cash withdrawn from an ATM.Ìę

His parents, Roman and Peggy, did say that claim can’t be true. They were able to obtain withdrawal records from Cody’s bank in Alaska, and found that no such transfers were made from Cody’s account.

“He’s very cautious, extremely well-educated, and he knows the dangers,” Peggy said. “I'm confident.”

The Corcovado National Park is an eco-tourism and research hot-spot (Roman has led teaching and research trips there to study the ecology of the jungle canopy). It sits on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, just north of the Panamanian border, and is partially isolated from mainland development on the Osa Peninsula. It’s 160-square miles of mountains, beaches, and rain forests are biologically diverse. But the park can be a dangerous place, even for experienced travelers. Canyons and rivers, hidden by thick foliage, can trap hikers, and the terrain makes even simple navigation dangerous. There are also the venomous snakes and roughly 400 illegal gold mines.

Complicating matters further, officials have been unable to distinguish between illegal miners’ campsites and any traces Cody may have left. In late July, .

Last week, After several weeks of delays, Roman received permission to search for his son on his own, Peggy said. He is focusing his efforts on remote waterfalls and canyons. Cody may have been trying to follow a river out of the wilderness—a sound strategy in less densely vegetated Alaska—and inadvertently become stuck in a deep canyon.

Both Cody’s family and friends in Alaska believe a happy outcome to the search is still possible. Cody grew up exploring the Alaskan wilderness, and, like his father, is a backcountry expert. He was studying for a Masters in Environmental Science at Alaska Pacific University, but put the program on hold in January to spend the winter and spring trekking through every major national park in Central America.

Roman has been an Alaskan legend since arriving in the state in the late 1970s. , he pioneered the use of packrafts—inflatable kayak-style boats made of industrial-grade fabric. The boats revolutionized backcountry travel in Alaska and launched modern adventure racing, a sport in which Roman was a dominant figure for two decades.

He’s also a four-time winner of the grueling , first in 1982 and most recently in 2002. The race predates, and many Alaskans claim was the inspiration for, the later crop of more famous and more commercial adventure races such as the Raid Gauloises and Eco-Challenge. The Classic has no checkpoints, no prize money, and no race officials. Cody became the youngest person ever to finish the race when he completed the Eureka Summit to Talkeetna course in 2004* at age 17. Just last weekend at the 2014 event, .

“He’s very competent and strong and smart and that’s probably why there’s hope in this situation,” said Paul Twardock, who, like Roman, is both a long-time professor at APU in Anchorage and an accomplished backcountry guide and outdoorsman.

The Dials are asking that checks be sent to Margaret Dial at Alaska USA Federal Credit Union, PO Box 196613, Anchorage, AK, 99519. All checks should say “Cody Roman Dial Donation Account” on the memo line. All donations will go toward defraying costs associated with the Dials' search.

Matt White () was a Pararescueman in the U.S. Air Force and Alaska Air National Guard. He has written about Alaska for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, SBNation Longform, Los Angeles Magazine, and other outlets.

*An earlier version of this story stated that Cody completed the course in 2014. We regret the error.

Ìę

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When Asiana Airlines flight 214 broke apart at the end of a San Francisco runway in July, five people spilled out the back. A Korean teenage girl sitting in Row 41, the line of perforation down which the tail section tore away from the rest of the plane, was nearly the sixth.

“Everything in the back disappeared,” the girl told the San Jose Mercury News, speaking in broken English. She told the paper that she did not want to be identified, but was traveling with the same group of teenagers as the two girls who were pulled out of the plane, as were three flight attendants seated behind them. “Before, two toilets behind. After, no toilets. I see light.”

One of the girls ejected, it now appears, was thrown from her seat later in the crash than the other four.Ìę She ended up next to the plane’s left wing. Investigators now believe, she was covered in a layer of firefighting foam and then run over by a firetruck arriving on the scene.

The second teenager from row 41 died from injuries she sustained as she skidded down the runway, for perhaps as long as a quartermile.

Miraculously, the three flight attendants all survived (though two still remained critical at the end of August), skidding over 1000 feet until coming to rest near a 747 that had been waiting to take off. A pilot onboard that second plane posted his account of spotting the Asiana flight attendants to a message board on PPRuNE.org.

“I was looking out the left side cockpit windows and noticed movement…. Two survivors were stumbling but moving…. I saw one survivor stand up, walk a few feet, then appear to squat down. The other appeared to be a woman and was walking, then fell off to her side and remained on the ground until rescue personnel arrived.”

They were so far from the main plane that it took rescuers 14 minutes to find them.

Modern commercial jets can carry hundreds of people 10 times faster than you can safely drive on a city street, which is 10 times faster than you can probably walk. Though millions of people witness it everyday, the transaction of physics between an airplane and gravity is unimaginably violent. If your puny body ever actually came face to face with what lies beyond your window seat, you’d die almost instantly, via several horrible mechanisms—hyperbaric trauma, friction, blunt force, hypoxia—competing to be the thing that actually killed you.

And yet, very rarely, someone crosses over into the great beyond of speed and height on the other side of a plane’s thin wall and lives to tell about it. People have survived being ejected from commercial passenger planes flying smoothly at great heights, and from ones that were crashing with them still inside. Some have been blown out by explosions, others torn free from their seats. Some have jumped or been pushed.

Still, don’t go eyeing the exit door the next time your Southwest flight hits a few bumps over Nashville. Surviving an ejection from a commercial airliner is probably the rarest occurrence in all of aviation. That at least three and, at least initially, four people appear to have done it on the Asiana crash is probably unprecedented.

“It doesn’t come up very often,” says Michael Barr, a Vietnam fighter pilot and crash investigator who has taught at USC’s Aviation Safety and Security Program for 28 years. Barr figures he’s studied 500 plane crashes, and can’t recall seeing a single case of someone surviving being thrown out of a commercial airliner during flight, even as it was crashing. “You can reduce the risk, but if you happen to come out, it becomes neither rhyme nor reason. You’d tell somebody like that, ‘Hey, great, you made it. Go to Vegas, go play the slots.’ ”

There are practical reasons why surviving a crash, even if you are tossed from one, is growing more common. When a commercial airliner crashes, the chances are good—one widely quoted statistic is about 80 percent—that the impact will be ‘survivable’, a number that goes up with every new generation of planes. Asiana 214 was a Boeing 777, among the newest and safest planes in service. The 777’s seats that the flight attendants appear to have ridden down the runway are designed to withstand forces of 16gs before breaking loose from the floor. Engineers found that in many previous crashes with less robust seats, “if those seats come loose, they basicly become missiles in the cabin,” said Barr.Ìę The burly engineering meant to keep the Asiana seats in place likely also made them a safer sled for the Asiana crew.

Ironically, the earliest documented survival of an ejection from a commercial airline flight bears a striking resemblance to the Asiana crash, minus a half-century of safety science. In April 1965, British United Airways Flight 1030x was descending towards Jersey, an island just off the Normandy coast of France, when the pilot, like those on Asiana, misjudged the approach. Also like the Korean jet, the rear of the plane clipped an object on the ground, sheared off the entire tail section and ejected a stewardess.Ìę Dominique Silliere, 22, was found badly hurt but alive near the wreckage, the only survivor.

In the 48 years between Silliere and the Asiana crash, the number of people to have also survived airliner ejections is probably less than 10, tracked only by media reports and amateur databases like the Free Fall Research Page.

Most of the known ejection survivors are featured in which premiered at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival in July. The film recounts the experiences of the 14 people across the world known to be the only survivors of major commercial airline crashes. Tellingly, of the film’s 14 survivors, just three ended up outside their plane.

The director, Chicago-based filmmaker Ky Dickens, said most survivors have searched for explanations or meaning to their experience. Perhaps not surprisingly, the film is the first time several have spoken in public.

“Society reacts to the survivor like, ‘You’re so lucky!’” said Dickens. “What gets lost is that this was a horrible trauma for them.” If they can avoid it, said Dickens, survivors generally don’t share their stories in their lives. “They have a fear of being judged by people who think they should be doing something inspirational.”

On the other end of the spectrum from Asiana-like mid-crash ejections are two young girls who survived preposterous falls from planes. Best known is probably Juliane Koepcke, a German teenager who, on Christmas Eve 1971, was flung from a plane when it exploded over Peru. Still in her seat, she fell about 10,000 feet before crashing through jungle canopy. Bruised and missing a shoe, she followed streams and rivers for 11 days before finding help. German filmmaker Werner Herzog was supposed to be on the flight and revisited the site of the crash with Koepcke for his 2000 documentary, Ìę Throughout the film, though, it feels like it is Herzog, not Koepcke, who is searching for meaning.Ìę She, it seems, has made peace with her unlikely fate. But as Herzog’s film crew combs the jungle for wreckage from the flight, he wonders why he was allowed to not be on it.

Columbian Erika Delgado, 9, survived a similar fall in 1995 when her mother pushed her from a burning plane as it came apart near Cartagena. Exact accounts vary, but another pilot reported an explosion broke the airplane into two pieces somewhere around 12,000 feet. Delgado landed in a swampy marsh near the rest of the wreckage. If Koepcke is at peace with her fall, Delgado, it seems, is not. In “Sole Survivor,” Dickens has another survivor, George Lamson, call Delgado on camera, but she doesn’t want to be in the movie.

“Sole Survivor” began as a coping mechanism for Dickens after a near-miss car crash in which a friend died just minutes after the two traded seats. Haunted by her friend’s sudden death, Dickens contacted Lamson, who was 17 in 1985 when his Galaxy Airlines flight crashed during takeoff from Reno. Lamson’s row of seats was thrown clear and he came to rest upright on a nearby road. The teenager was so sure he had died, said Dickens, and that he was now in some sort of afterlife, that he unbuckled his seatbelt and took off running until he was snapped back to reality by seeing a billboard.

Deconstructing the decisions, physics and odds behind Lamson’s one-in-a-million ejection survival was relatively straight forward. A high school diver, Lamson followed an instinct to tuck his legs over his head, as if entering a somersault dive, when the plane first bounced. As the bench of seats ejected, his legs protected him while his father, seated next to him, suffered fatal head trauma.

That’s the “How.”Ìę The “why,” for many, never comes. When Dickens showed an early cut of “Sole Survivor” to Lamson, she said, “He looked disappointed. He said ‘I really thought I’d know after making this film why this happened to me.’

“It’s really just luck,” she said. “We can’t ever know the reason why.”

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