A group of high school soccer players are the focus of Showtime’s Emmy-nominated thriller series Yellowjackets, which follows them as they fly to a tournament in Canada and have their plane crash. The girls turn to cannibalism in order to survive the severe weather, and even after being saved for years, the events of 1996 continue to haunt them. Although the plot seems improbable, the series was inspired by actual events that happened in 1972 in addition to a book.
The terrifying experiences of Flight 571 of the Uruguayan Air Force
The Old Christians Club was a rugby team that departed Uruguay for Chile in 1972 in order to play a match against another team. The rugby squad was one of the 45 passengers on the aircraft. Sadly, the aircraft crashed into the Andes mountains due to a novice pilot and weather-related problems, killing 11 persons instantly, including three crew members and eight passengers.
For two months, the remaining thirty-four passengers attempted to survive in the bitterly cold wilderness. It took just eight days for the rescue efforts to be canceled for them. And it took two hikers named Roberto Canessa and Nando Parrado 72 days to find them.
One of the accident survivors and rugby player Fernando Parrado penned the best-selling book Miracle in the Andes: The True Story of Surviving 72 Days on the Mountain Against All Odds. “Hunger is the most primal fear of human beings.”- he wrote .
Is the show close to reality?
William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies and this incident serve as inspiration for the movie Yellowjackets. The novel tells the tale of several British youths who were stuck on an island and attempt to rule themselves.
Though they are all female, a group of soccer players in the program experience something akin to the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 event, in which a group of rugby players became stranded in the mountains. Although some Lord of the Flies aficionados expressed concern about a group of girls portraying such cruelty, the audience recognized that there was absolutely no issue. We know the girls did cannibalism even though the story skirts the subject.
The girls in the program are stranded in the cold for two years, in contrast to the fact where the survivors were stuck there for seventy-two days. In contrast to the book, Yellowjacket tells the story of five survivors—Misty, Taisha, Natalie, Shauna, and Travis—as their pasts resurface as problems in their adult lives. It is a fantastic women-centric storyline.
