Episodes

Japanese ‘holdout’ Shoichi Yokoi had been hiding out in the jungles of Guam since the Second World War when he was discovered by hunters on 24th January, 1972, dressed in clothes woven from tree fibre. The 57 year-old soldier had endured 27 years living in an underground shelter he dug himself, eating toads, river eels […]

The Rock And Roll Hall of Fame welcomed its first inductees in a star-studded event at the Waldorf Astoria, New York on 23rd January, 1986. But the ceremony was not the glamorous HBO spectacular we have come to expect today: the audience was mostly music executives, and it was not filmed for television. Conceived by

According to Finnish legend, a peasant farmer named Lalli murdered the Christian missionary Bishop Henry on the ice of lake Köyliönjärvi on January 20, 1156, dispatching him with an axe blow to the head. It is fair to say things didn’t go terribly well for Lalli after that. He met a gruesome fate that takes

One of earliest recorded UFO sightings in America happened on 18th January, 1644 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when lights rose out of the water near Boston, zoomed across the sky and vanished over the horizon. The events, as documented by the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony John Winthrop in his journal, took place

On January 17, 1893, Hawaii’s monarchy was overthrown when a group of businessmen and sugar planters forced Queen Liliuokalani to abdicate, the first step towards the islands’ annexation as a US territory and eventual admission as the 50th state in the union. Interest in Hawaii began in America as early as the 1820s, when New

Prior to the release of his book Don Quixote on 16th January, 1605, Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes had previously been a soldier, a royal messenger, a tax collector and – for a spell – a slave. But perseverance paid off for the aspiring author who, at the age of 57, produced a book that

It was today in history in 1404 that Henry IV issued the Act Against Multipliers, a ban on the mysterious art of creating or duplicating gold, more commonly known as alchemy. It came at an odd time for European science because the widespread efforts to transform so-called base metals, such as lead or copper, into

Rerun. Dr James Bedford became the first dead body to be cryogenically frozen on 12th January, 1967 – a day still commemorated in the ‘suspended animation’ community as Bedford Day. But in this burgeoning (pseudo)science, there were plenty of preparations yet to be made. Which meant that the freezing team – lead not by scientists but enthusiasts

British Airways paid out one of the largest libel settlements in UK history on 11th January, 1993, for engaging in disreputable business practices, including shredding documents, poaching passages, and circulating hostile and discreditable stories about their upstart rival Virgin Airlines. The so-called Dirty Tricks revealed that British Airways had created a secret unit within a

On 10th January, 1870 John D. Rockefeller took his first steps towards becoming the world’s richest ever person by forming his company, Standard Oil. He had arrived in the oil industry at a time of wild instability when oil refining was almost a cottage industry. Rockefeller quickly realised that if he had control over not