An 11-month-old baby was thrown around 100m (330ft) by a tornado in Tennessee and survived (News, February 8). The baby was hurled out of his home and landed near a post office with only minor facial bruising. But this was not a unique case of flying through a tornado and surviving.
In 1947 two men in Texas were picked up by a tornado, thrown over treetops and landed uninjured about 60m away. In 1955 a man was sucked out of his house in Kansas and landed in a tree unharmed.
The unofficial record for the longest distance travelled by anyone surviving a tornado belongs to 19-year-old Matt Suter. On March 12, 2006, he was visiting his grandparents in their mobile home in Missouri when a tornado struck.
“It got louder and louder, like ten military jets coming at us,” he said. “Suddenly there was lots of pressure inside the house. The front and back doors that were both locked came off their hinges and blew out.”
He was flung over a fence and landed in a field, and meteorologists calculated that he had been thrown 398m (1,306ft) in winds around 150mph. The longest distance an object is known to have been carried by a tornado was a personal cheque that flew 223 miles from Stockton, Kansas, to Winnetoon, Nebraska, in 1991.