Featured Image Credit: bushcraftbuddy.com/Ricky Megee
Topics: Australia, Food And Drink
Anish Vij
The incredible survival story of a man who fought for his life after being stranded in the Australian outback for 71 days isn't exactly straight forward.
Ricky Megee is known for the time he was stranded crossing the Northern Territory and Western Australia back in 2006 when he was 35-years-old.
Amid a number of accounts, he claimed he was driving through the Outback of Australia when his car broke down. Though in another story, he said he was drugged and left stranded after his car was hijacked.
Either way, he was all of a sudden left alone in the dire Aussie heat with no food or water supplies, according to his autobiography which was released in 2010.
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Going into survival mode, he said he was forced to construct a makeshift shelter using random materials, with a diet of cooked frogs, lizards and plants.
As a result, he lost more than 130 pounds of weight.
And if it wasn't for finding a water resource in the outback, he most likely would have died.
He claims to have collected dew in plastic sheets and drank from puddles formed by the very occasional rain showers.
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He also came across a natural dam, with him recalling his survival methods to The Times: "I ate the leeches raw, straight out of the dam. Grasshoppers I just ate them. But the only thing I really sort of had to cook was the frogs.
"I slipped them onto a bit of wire and stuck the wire on top of my [shelter], let the sun dry them out a fair bit until they were a bit crispy and then just ate them."
His rescue eventually came after he was discovered by a group of station workers at the Birrindudu cattle station.
Mark Clifford, who was the manager of the establishment and later visited Ricky in hospital, said that the Aussie had the weather to thank for his survival.
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"It's probably not too bad out there if you've got a hardy constitution, which he obviously does," he said.
"It's the middle of the wet season at the moment, so he had enough water to keep himself in a decent state. So it's not as hard as people think.
"And there's lots of frogs and snakes and lizards about. They don't give you much nutrition, but they give you enough. Still, he was 105 kilos [230lb] before it happened and was 48 kilos afterwards."
While he was recovering in hospital all those years ago, Mark added: "I saw him last week, when he'd just been admitted. He looked like a skeleton then, but I saw him on TV last night and he looked completely different."
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Meanwhile, police confirmed at the time that not a single crime was committed amid the conflicting stories.
A spokeswoman for Northern Territory police said: "It has been ascertained that this man spent a considerable amount of time in this area.
"The investigation so far has found no evidence to suggest any criminal offences have been committed. Police are still trying to locate the man's vehicle."