Here's what life for 'Baby Jessica' is like today

On October 14, 1987, long before Twitter, or Facebook, or even the internet really, 18-month-old Jessica McClure went viral. The entire country waited with bated breath as rescue teams struggled to save "Baby Jessica" – as she became known in the papers – who was trapped in a well for nearly 60 hours before she was finally extricated, miraculously alive.

It all happened in her family's home in the oil city of Midland, Texas, where her aunt, Jamie Moore, ran a daycare center. Jessica was playing with a few other children in the backyard while her mother, Cissy, watched over them. Cissy went inside the house for just a moment to answer a phone call, and rushed out when she heard the other children screaming because Jessica had fallen down a well that was 22-feet-deep and only eight inches in diameter.

The fact that the well was so deep and narrow and that she was trapped under solid rock made the rescue mission uncommonly difficult, and as each hour passed, parents everywhere watching their worst nightmare unfold on CNN began to lose hope for her survival. But the rescue teams managed to drill a parallel well and then create a tunnel to where baby Jessica was trapped, and finally, at the 58-hour mark, she was safely brought above ground.

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