Apparently the only thing pythons and pendants have in common is one man, who found a special piece of jewelry while python hunting in the Everglades. Check out this amazing story:
Like most people who signed up for Florida’s official Burmese python hunt last winter, Mark Rubinstein slogged a couple times through the Everglades without ever seeing one of the elusive snakes.
Something else caught his eye, though.
In the dirt along a levee, about 10 miles deep into the wetlands, Rubinstein found a gold pendant, with sapphires forming a cross inside a circle of diamonds. One edge of the penny-sized medallion was melted and misshapen.
It may have fallen from the sky. Rubinstein was hunting near the crash sites of two airplanes that went down in the same area: Eastern Flight 401, a New York flight that crashed as it prepared to land in Miami in 1972, and ValuJet Flight 592, a 1996 flight to Atlanta that caught fire shortly after takeoff and plummeted into the remote swamps west of Miami.
Rubinstein hopes to return the jewelry to its rightful owner.
“We’ve got to get this back to the family, if we can,” he said last week.
All 104 passengers and five crew members aboard the ValuJet flight died. The Eastern flight carried 163 passengers and 13 crew members. Seventy-seven people survived, thanks in part to a Homestead man who was catching frogs from his airboat that night. He pulled survivors onto his airboat and turned his headlamp skyward so rescue helicopters could find the crash.
Read more about this amazing story.
“Diamonds will survive anything, and sapphires will, too.”