Episode 111 | Historical Events

In this History episode we focus on Operation Mincemeat — the 1943 British intelligence operation in which a dead Welsh vagrant was given a fabricated military identity, chained to a briefcase of fake invasion plans, and floated ashore in Spain, fooling Hitler into moving his forces away from Sicily before the largest Allied amphibious landing of the war.

The idea was first sketched by Ian Fleming. The man who made it possible died alone and homeless in London.

#HistoryMystery #OperationMincemeat #WorldWarII #BritishIntelligence #HistoryPodcast

Episode 110 | Historical Events

In this History episode we focus on December 3rd, 1984 — the night a Union Carbide pesticide plant in central India leaked 40 tons of methyl isocyanate into a sleeping city, killing thousands before dawn, leaving half a million people permanently damaged, and producing a CEO who flew to the scene, was arrested, flew home, and died in Florida in 2014 having never faced trial.

The site has never been cleaned. The people of Bhopal are still living with it.

#HistoryMystery #BhopalDisaster #UnionCarbide #IndustrialDisaster #HistoryPodcast

Episode 109 | Historical Events

In this History episode we focus on H.H. Holmes — the man who built a hotel blocks from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair fitted with gas jets, soundproofed rooms, and a basement kiln, used it to kill multiple people while 27 million visitors came to see the future, and was caught only when insurance fraud investigators found the trail.

Twenty-seven million people came to see the future. Some walked in and never came out.

#HistoryMystery #HHHolmes #WorldsFair #TrueCrime #HistoryPodcast

Episode 108 | Historical Events

In this History episode we focus on May 13th, 1985 — the day the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a military-grade satchel bomb from a helicopter onto a residential row house, killing 11 people including five children, letting the fire burn until 61 homes were destroyed, and producing no criminal charges against anyone involved.

Philadelphia bombed a neighborhood. Eleven people died. No one went to prison.

#HistoryMystery #MOVEBombing #Philadelphia #AmericanHistory #HistoryPodcast

Episode 107 | Historical Events

In this History episode we focus on Thanksgiving Day 2009 — when 26-year-old medical student and father John Edward Jones became trapped headfirst in an unmapped passage in a Utah cave, inverted at 70 degrees, 125 feet underground, and died there after 28 hours of rescue attempts that could not free him.

His second child was born after his death. The cave has never reopened.

#HistoryMystery #NuttyPuttyCave #JohnJones #Caving #HistoryPodcast

Episode 106 | Historical Events

In this History episode we focus on May 31st and June 1st, 1921 — the 18 hours in which an armed white mob, assisted by city officials and the National Guard, burned 35 blocks of Greenwood, the most prosperous Black community in America, to the ground, killing between 100 and 300 people and leaving 10,000 homeless while the historical record was suppressed for decades.

Nobody was ever charged. The land where Greenwood stood is now partly a highway.

#HistoryMystery #TulsaRaceMassacre #BlackWallStreet #AmericanHistory #HistoryPodcast

Episode 105 | Historical Events

In this History episode we focus on January 28th, 1986 — and specifically the night before, when Morton Thiokol engineers told NASA not to launch in the cold, presented data showing the O-rings would fail, were overruled by managers told to take off their engineering hats, and watched seven people die the next morning because they were right.

The last recorded words from the crew were pilot Michael Smith's voice: "Uh oh."

#HistoryMystery #ChallengerDisaster #NASA #SpaceShuttle #HistoryPodcast

Episode 104 | Historical Events

In this History episode we focus on the 1983 kidnapping of Freddy Heineken — one of the wealthiest men in the Netherlands — by five broke friends who spent two years planning it, held him in a soundproofed warehouse cell for 21 days, collected the largest individual ransom in history at the time, and then spent the rest of their lives paying for it in ways they hadn't planned.

They got the money. It wasn't worth it.

#HistoryMystery #HeinekenKidnapping #TrueCrime #Netherlands #HistoryPodcast

Episode 103 | Historical Events

In this History episode we focus on the Byford Dolphin diving accident of November 5th, 1983 — the moment a dive tender released an external clamp before the inner door was sealed, dropping the pressure inside a North Sea oil rig's saturation diving system from nine atmospheres to one in a fraction of a second and killing four men instantly.

Five men went to work that night. One came home.

#HistoryMystery #ByfordDolphin #NorthSea #IndustrialDisaster #HistoryPodcast

Episode 102 | History's Mysteries — Mysterious Events

In this Mystery episode we focus on January 24th, 1961 — the night a US Air Force bomber broke apart over North Carolina and dropped two hydrogen bombs, each more than 250 times the power of Hiroshima, onto American soil, with three of four safety mechanisms on one weapon failing before a single switch held and prevented detonation.

The switch held. The classified report stayed secret for decades. Part of the second bomb is still in the ground.

#HistoryMystery #GoldsboroB52 #NuclearWeapons #ColdWar #MysteryPodcast