On March 12, 2006, 19-year-old Matt Suter was inside a mobile home near Fordland, Missouri, when a powerful tornado suddenly struck.Suter was reportedly standing on a sofa near a window when the storm tore into the mobile home. In an instant, the violent winds lifted him completely off the ground and carried him away.

When the tornado passed, Suter was nowhere to be found.

He had been carried approximately 1,307 feet (398 meters) from the location where he had been standing before being deposited in a field. Remarkably, he was alive.Suter had suffered injuries, but they were nowhere near as severe as one might expect from being carried hundreds of meters through a tornado. He was taken for medical treatment and eventually recovered.

The extraordinary incident became particularly famous because Guinness World Records has recognized Suter’s survival as the farthest distance a person is known to have been carried by a tornado and survived. The storm that struck the area was classified as an F2 tornado under the Fujita scale, indicating estimated winds of roughly 113–157 mph (181–253 km/h).

What makes Suter’s story so remarkable isn’t simply the distance. Tornado winds can turn debris into dangerous projectiles and violently throw objects through the air. Yet Suter somehow survived being caught in the storm, carried nearly four football fields’ length, and dropped into a field.