When Australian spearfishing champion Rodney Fox survived an horrific attack by a Great White Shark in 1963, it inspired him to learn more about the predator that tried to eat him. He invented the Shark Cage to help him do it safely. Rodney's was one of the worst non-fatal shark attacks ever recorded. He's been describing his miraculous escape from the jaws of death to Rebecca Kesby.

(Photo: A Great White Shark - Getty Images)

A plague of African desert locusts flew 5,000 kilometres non-stop to the Caribbean in 1988 in a journey never before recorded. They are thought to have come over with Hurricane Joan and the islanders were horrified at the sight of millions of dead and dying locusts on the beaches. Ministries of Agriculture feared the insects would become an established pest and would ruin crops but the surviving locusts seemed disorientated and soon died out. Claire Bowes has been speaking to an entomologist from St Lucia about the strange visitors who didn't like bananas.

Photo: Getty Creative Images

A doctor working in Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon recalls the massacre there in September 1982. Over the course of three days, Lebanese Christian militiamen killed and raped hundreds of the Palestinian inhabitants of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut in revenge for the assassination of their leader, Lebanese president elect, Bashir Gemayel. Dr Swee Ang treated the wounded in the basement of the only hospital in the camp; she tells Louise Hidalgo her story.

Photo: A Palestinian woman cries while civil defence workers carry the body of one of her relatives from the rubble of her home in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila in West Beirut, 19th September 1982 (Credit: STF/AFP/Getty Images)

Karl-Heinz Borchardt was arrested just after his 18th birthday by communist secret police in East Germany. His crime was writing a letter to the BBC World Service in protest at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He has been speaking to Abby Darcy about how he was caught out by the Stasi.

Photo: Karl-Heinz Borchardt at the time of his arrest. Copyright: Dr Karl-Heinz Borchardt

A group of hippies known as the London Street Commune occupied a sixty-room mansion in central London in September 1969. 144 Piccadilly became a flash point for the conflict between alternative culture and the mainstream – and it was later cleared by the police. Lucy Burns speaks to Richie Gardener, who was one of the squatters.

Picture credit: A policeman removes a flag from the balcony of 144 Piccadilly as squatters are evicted from the building, London, 21st September 1969. (Photo by Terry Disney/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Customers queued for hours to take their savings out, fearing the mortgage lender was about to go under. The Bank of England had to step in to support it. It was the first sign in Britain of the coming global financial crisis.

Photo: Northern Rock customers queuing outside the Kingston branch, in order to take their money out on September 17th 2007. Credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

When West African tin miners unearthed evidence of a lost civilization. In the 1920s, terracotta heads and figurines were unearthed near the village of Nok in central Nigeria. They were ignored until a British colonial officer and archaeologist, Bernard Fagg, realised they were evidence of an unknown African culture dating back over 2,500 years. Alex Last speaks to Bernard's daughter, Angela Rackham.

The last man to be executed by guillotine in France was a disabled Tunisian murderer, Hamida Djandoubi. He was beheaded on September 10th 1977 at the Baumettes prison in Marseille. Ashley Byrne has spoken to the daughter of lawyer, Emile Pollak, who defended Hamida Djandoubi and who was present at his execution. The death penalty was outlawed in France in 1981.

Photo: A man looks at a guillotine in an exhibition. Credit: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images.

In 1974 during a live broadcast of Carl Orff's, Carmina Burana as part of the BBC classical music season 'The Proms', the principal baritone singer collapsed into the orchestra pit in a dead faint. A member of the audience stepped forward to sing the rest of the piece. Patrick McCarthy had only just graduated from music school, but became something of a national hero when he rescued the show. He describes the night he saved The Proms at The Albert Hall in London to Rebecca Kesby for Witness.

(PHOTO: Patrick McCarthy outside The Albert Hall, London 1974. Getty Images)

An ambitious ecological experiment was launched in Arizona in September 1991. It aimed to see if human beings could produce everything they needed to survive - in a man-made environment. Rachael Gillman has been speaking to Linda Leigh, one of the eight scientists who spent two years sealed inside the giant greenhouse known as 'Biosphere 2'.

Photo credit: TIM ROBERTS/AFP/Getty Images