Witness History

In 1982, audiences around the world fell in love with a gentle alien stranded on Earth and the young boy determined to help him get home. Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial became a global phenomenon and gave us one of cinema's most memorable lines, ‘E.T. phone home.’

Peter Coyote played Keys, the mysterious government agent on the trail of E.T., a role that became one of the film's most memorable characters.

M...

In 1995, Octavia E Butler became the first author to receive a MacArthur “genius” award for science fiction writing.

From a young age she dreamed of writing books, but faced many challenges, including poverty, sexism and racism in the publishing industry.

Her sci-fi books are now taught in schools and universities across the United States.

She died aged 58 in 2006. Her friend Nisi Shawl spoke to Alex Collins in 2023.

Witn...

When the set fell apart for an ambitious cinematic space opera that was produced on a characteristically small Turkish budget, nationally famed director Çetin İnanç had to think fast to save his film.

What resulted was a domestic hit in 1982, originally called The Man Who Saves the World. Now known as Turkish Star Wars, it's a production regularly referenced as the worst movie ever made.

Louis Harnett O'Meara uses an archival inter...

In 1976, American toy designer Jim Swearingen was working at Kenner, a mid-sized company in the American Midwest.

When a script for a new film called Star Wars landed on his desk, Jim was intrigued. Larger toy companies had already passed on the chance to make the figures.

"It was difficult from the point of view that it was a movie, could be in and out of theater in weeks, maybe months," he said.

"It was science fiction, and toy buy...

On the 5 September 1986, hijackers took over a Pan-American Airways flight during a stop-over at Karachi Airport in Pakistan.

The armed Palestinian terrorists wanted to fly the plane to Cyprus and Israel, to free members of their organisation who were jailed there.

But, after the pilots escaped the cockpit, the plane stayed on the ground for 16 hours with almost 400 passengers on board.

When the power on the plane ran out &ndash...

On 4 September 1995, Hurricane Luis hit the Caribbean island of Antigua.

Two people were killed and three-quarters of homes were destroyed.

Authorities said it set the island back by a decade.

Resident Eli Fuller tells Jen Dale about the havoc caused by the hurricane.

Witness History is a short BBC World Service podcast about history that takes you inside big moments from the past through first-hand testimony and archive. Each weekday,...

It is 50 years since a peace movement began in Northern Ireland spawned by the killing of three children. There had been seven years of sectarian violence.

On 10 August 1976, Anne Maguire was walking along Finaghy Road North in West Belfast with her children when an out-of-control car plunged into them. It was driven by a member of the Irish Republican Army paramilitary group who had been fatally wounded at the wheel by British Arm...

In 2007, an abandoned photo album revealed the chilling normality of life at the Nazis’ most notorious concentration camp, Auschwitz.

The 116 black-and-white images had been sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington DC, to be considered for their archives.

In the photographs, SS officers are seen laughing, singing and celebrating, while a short distance away hundreds of thousands of people, mainly Jews,...

On 31st October 2004, Uruguayans voted to enshrine water as a human right in their constitution, the first country in the world to do so.

The so-called water referendum was organised by an alliance of residents' associations, trade unions, scientists, and environmentalists.

Campaigners on horseback criss-crossed the country, they held community meetings in towns and villages across Uruguay and collected 283,000 signatures, the n...

In the 1950s, scientist Edward Knipling began what would become one of the most successful eradication campaigns in history: the fight against the New World screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite that caused devastating injuries to livestock and wildlife across the Americas.

Edward Knipling proposed breeding and releasing millions of sterile male screwworm flies to prevent the insects from reproducing, an approach that became known as t...

First published in 1980, the Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book brought novelty cakes to the masses.

From the swimming pool filled with jelly, to the ghost and the 'choo choo train', its recipes became core memories for generations of children.

Agnes Lee was part of the team behind the book, designing more than 20 of its quirky cakes, including the famous Rubber Ducky, which was later featured in the children's...

In 1954, a massive government-run resettlement programme began in Canada.

This saw the relocation of nearly 30,000 people from isolated ‘outport’ fishing communities in Newfoundland and Labrador to designated ‘growth centres', intended to provide better education and facilities.

In some cases this involved physically moving houses with ropes and pullies, then floating them to new locations.

Catherine Harvey speaks to...

In March 1945, the British Fourteenth Army were advancing on the city of Mandalay in central Burma, now known as Myanmar, which was held by the Japanese Army.

The army was made up of soldiers from across the British Empire, with units from the United Kingdom, India, East and West Africa all fighting side by side.

The BBC’s Douglas Cleverdon accompanied those troops into battle, making what is thought to be one of the first e...

In 2011 Asha Bhosle, India’s queen of melody, was officially named the most recorded artist in music history. The Guinness World Record recognised the astonishing scale of her career, having performed up to 11,000 songs in more than 20 Indian languages since 1947.

The title previously belonged to her sister Lata Mangeshkar, and together the siblings dominated India’s playback singing world for decades, lending their voic...

When the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck the coast of Kenya, a baby hippo named Owen was swept out to sea and separated from his family.

After being rescued, he was taken to Haller Park in Mombasa, where he formed an extraordinary bond with Mzee, a 130-year-old giant tortoise. Their unlikely friendship captured the world's imagination and became an international sensation.

In 2023, conservationist Dr Paula Kahumbu told Gill Kearsley...

In 2008, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and his rival Raila Odinga signed an unprecedented power-sharing deal to end a wave of violence that had left more than 1,200 people dead.

Kibaki would remain president, while Odinga would become prime minister, a role created as part of the settlement. They hoped the accord would end the bloodshed that had engulfed Kenya after the disputed election two months earlier.

Maina Kiai was Chair of the...

In 1963, as Kenya celebrated independence from British rule, one of the last Mau Mau fighters came out of hiding and laid down her arms.

Muthoni Kirima was the first and only woman to be appointed field marshall in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army - better known as the Mau Mau.

She had been living in the Kenyan forest for 11 years, fighting with other armed rebels to reclaim land taken by European settlers.

Thousands died or were im...

In 1952, Princess Elizabeth became queen while staying at the Treetops Hotel in Kenya. But she wouldn't make the discovery until hours later.

The 25-year-old Princess Elizabeth and her husband were on five-month royal tour of the Commonwealth, and their first stop was Kenya.

The overnight trip to Treetops, a lodge in the Aberdare National Park, was supposed to be a relaxing break. But the princess didn’t yet know that, back in...

In 1997, scientists travelled to Tsavo, Kenya, in search of a cave believed to have been the den of the man-eating lions that terrorised railway workers in 1898.

The two lions stalked Indian and African men building the Uganda Railway, dragging victims from their tents at night. It was nine months before the officer in charge of the railway project, British Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, could kill them.

Nearly a century la...