On 28 th November 1952, a chance occurrence – a clerical error – resulted in Bob Hofferber not catching his scheduled flight from Fort Ladd, Alaska to McChord Field in south Tacoma. It was an error that likely saved his life. The U.S. Air Force C-54G Skymaster crashed on its approach , resulting in the deaths of all but two of the people on board. Bob had spent most of the day checking out of Ladd Air Force Base, where he was coming to the end of an eighteen-month deployment in the Air National

Arik Cohen’s grandparents survived the Holocaust, all four of them. The likelihood of that happening is astronomical -- and he has the calculations to prove it. A self-professed geek, Cohen began looking at the history of his family to figure out the statistical odds of each person surviving and contributing to a grandson: himself. Cohen’s crunching of the numbers also allowed him to look closer at four individual tales of survival against the odds. Arik Cohen is a member of the Holocaust Center

This week on Sound Effect, our theme is "What Are the Odds?" We'll meet the grandson of Holocaust survivors who calculated the very low probability that he would even be born. Then a typo may have saved Bob Hofferber's life, by keeping him off of a military plane bound for Tacoma in 1952. In another story of the twists of fate, group of nuns walking along a Washington beach are overtaken by a rogue wave, changing their lives and their relationship with God forever. We'll get to know a scientist

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

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

The population of Concrete, Washington is about 700 people, and back in 1938, it wasn’t much different…about 1,000 people lived there. But 79 years ago yesterday, while a famous radio broadcast was frightening a good portion of the population across the country, things went a step further in Concrete. When Orson Wells broadcast his famous War of the Worlds broadcast on October 30, 1938, if you didn’t tune in at the very beginning, you probably weren’t aware that this was a radio play, not actual

On July 3, 2017, KNKX took its live broadcast of All Things Considered to the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Seattle, on the eve of their centennial. We told stories about the locks' creation, its present impact on the region, and its future. This audio is a sampler of the three-hour broadcast. You can also listen individually to each of the stories we did that day.

To say that Seattle musician Lydia Ramsey was raised in a musical family would be kind of an understatement. “Me and my brothers joke that, like, in order to sit down in our living room, you had to pick up an instrument because it was taking up the chair. And then you’d be like oh, well I’m holding this so I might as well play something on it,” said Ramsey. Eventually, Lydia would decide to dig a little deeper into her family history. What she found out is that music has been woven through her

What if something was thought to be gone forever? Would you still go looking for it? There is a man named David Benscoter , who does just this. Benscoter spends a lot if his time exploring an area of Eastern Washington known as the Palouse. He searches abandoned homesteads, looking for varieties of apples that are believed to be extinct. “These trees, they’re just going to go away someday. And if I don’t do it there’s no one who’s going to search for them,” says Benscoter. It turns out, some of

Seattle Writer Rachel Kessler started this discussion by reading a passage from an essay she wrote that was recently anthologized in a book Ghosts of Seattle Past. “I ride down Yesler every day to get to the library where I research and write. At this point I decided to investigate my own family's history which it turns out is connected to Yesler way and 17th. ‘How far back do you know your family?’ The genealogy librarian opened up the ancestry search engine on the computer in front of us. I