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This story originally aired on May 27, 2017. B.J. Listman is one of the elevator operators at the Space Needle. The Space Needle and the Smith Tower, according to B.J, are the only places left in Seattle where there are actually elevator operators. This iconic Seattle landmark has enchanted B.J. since he was a child. “It's kind of funny actually. I have one of those three-foot tall paper Space Needle models, and the model kit had you glued the elevators in place, but I never did because I like

This story originally aired on May 27, 2017. Jesse Hayes’ love of flying began as a kid growing up in Texas. His family had a car but they also had an airplane, which Jesse’s father adored. Jesse says that as an African-American family, that meant that they could literally fly over racism when they went on trips to visit family. The airplane made it possible for Jesse’s family to avoid the things that made traveling difficult for so many people of color in the American South at that time — such

This story originally aired on May 27, 2017. A group of students from the University of Washington is working on a way to create satellites that could stay up indefinitely and fly in a circle over a particular patch of the earth. The results could mean cell phone and internet coverage in disaster areas, along with super-high-resolution images of remote places on the planet. Right now, they’re testing their ideas, which have taken the shape of a 12-pound glider with a 20-foot wingspan attached to

This story originally aired on May 27, 2017. There’s a letter on Yulina Bilombele’s dining room table that she cannot read. “Defendant failed to pay the rent and has further failed to vacate and surrender the premises.” Bilombele is a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo. She’s 80 years old. She does not speak English. She is too frail to work and she does not have the money to pay rent. So, she turns to the man many Congolese refugees in Seattle call: Floribert Mubalama. “They want us

This story originally aired on May 27, 2017. Traveling on a commercial flight these days can be rough. Perks such as free meals and pillows are long gone. Today, airlines charge for everything from where you sit on the plane to how much legroom you’re allotted. It’s easy to forget there was a time, not too long ago, when passengers dressed up to get on an airplane. 79-year-old Gloria Sferra remembers very well what flying used to be like. She was a stewardess for Pan American Airlines from 1962

This story originally aired on May 27, 2017. Michael McAndrews has had a lifelong love affair with birds. It all started with an article he read as a kid in National Geographic. It profiled homing pigeons used in wartime to communicate messages between troops. Michael was captivated by the story of a bird named Cher Ami that saved almost 200 American soldiers in France during World War I. So he started buying his own birds and training them. In fact, his classmates called him “birdbrain,” not as

This story originally aired on April 30, 2016. Vanessa Davids did most of her military service “inside the wire,” as an Arabic translator on a base in Iraq. Her job called on her to translate audio and video recordings, in hopes of gathering intelligence, foiling attacks and probing enemy action. She translated bomb plots, beheadings, even in some cases child pornography. As a result, she got an intimate, and dark, perspective on human nature.

This story originally aired on February 7, 2015. In 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was a state-of-the-art engineering achievement, a dramatic suspension design spanning a strait of Puget Sound. Sure, it had a bit of a "bounce," but the engineers all assured the public that was normal . Only a handful of bridge workers seemed truly alarmed. Then one day, on November 7, a storm kicked up 40 mph winds, and the bridge began to contort. Soon its undulations took on a distinctive, twisting-ribbon

In April of 1977, five nuns took a week-long vacation to Grayland Bea ch State P ark. Just south of Westport on the Washington coast, this park is known for its rolling sand dunes and expansive beaches where drift logs ofte n wash onto the shores. After spending the week cooped up in a camping trailer, the sisters took one last walk when the sun finally came out. That’s where this story begins. In a matter of seconds, water flooded the coastline and with little time to react, two sisters were

Jason Detwiler is an assistant professor of physics at the University of Washington, and he’s on the hunt for a natural phenomenon that is insanely rare. It's a specific reaction called neutrinoless double-beta decay -- a term so egg-headed that when he sat down to explain it to Sound Effect host Gabriel Spitzer, Gabriel made him give it a nickname: the “jelly doughnut.” (Perhaps Gabriel was hungry.) There’s a good payoff for this hunt -- if Detwiler does find a "jelly doughnut," it may explain