10 People Who Survived Gruesome Accidents Against All The Odds

Stepping away from the world of drills and knives and arrows for a moment, we come to the bizarre tale of the man who shot himself with a particle accelerator.

Whilst a researcher in the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, a man called Anatoli Bugorski was working with the largest Soviet particle accelerator, the pleasingly named, Synchrotron.

Bugorski was checking a faulty part of the accelerator one day in 1978, when the safety mechanism failed (perhaps this is what was wrong with it?) and a proton beam travelling close to the speed of light shot out and hit him in the face.

He describes seeing a flashing of light that was "brighter than a thousand suns", but didn't report feeling any pain at all. The beam measured at 600 times more powerful than was thought to be enough to kill a person and tore its way through his head.

Over the next few days, Bugorski's face swelled up beyond all recognition and parts of it began to slough off, revealing the path that the beam had taken through skin, bone and tissue. 

The incident did not affect his mental capacity at all, but he did lose the hearing on one ear and sustained significant nerve damage to one side of his face. The effects of this are that the damaged half of his face cannot move and does not age, he suffers from severe "tinitus" like symptoms, and has occasional seizures. Apart from this, Anatoli Bugorski is still able to function perfectly normally after his brush with death.