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On January 8, 1956, five American missionaries were speared to death by Waorani warriors on a riverside sandbar in Ecuador. Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming, and Roger Youderian had only recently made contact with the tribe, which could only be reached by plane. Though the missionaries were armed, they did not fight back against their attackers, believing that they were prepared to face eternity while the unsaved tribespeople were not. Several years later, the families of Jim Elliot and Nate Saint returned to the area, made successful contact with the Waorani people, and led many of them to Christ, including the same warriors that had killed their loved ones. The story was memorialized in the 2005 film, End of the Spear. (Pictured: Ed McCully, Peter Fleming, and Jim Elliot, in front of the plane they used to reach the Waorani.)