The mysteries of the Bayeux Tapestry and surviving 9/11

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26:42Still to come, the weather report that changed the date of D-Day in the Second World War and an outbreak of religious fervour in 1980s Ireland. I remember distinctly arriving at the place, standing there and staring at a light in the rain with hundreds if not thousands of people. But before that, the United States has been marking 25 years since the deadliest terror attack in history, 9-11. When one of the four hijacked planes used in the attack was flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, firefighter Jay Jonas and his crew were sent to rescue people. As the two towers targeted by the planes collapsed, Jay and his crew astonishingly survived.

27:28He's been telling Rowan Bridge how. Good morning. 64 degrees at 8 o 'clock. It's Tuesday, September 11th. I'm Lee Harris. Here's what's happening. It's primary day and the polls are open in New York City. September 11th, 2001 started like any other day for listeners to New York's radio station 1010 Winds. But nothing would ever be the same again. 8.46 in the morning. We just had a plane crash into level 4 of the World Trade Center. The Boeing 767 has just been deliberately flown into the north tower of the World Trade Centre. Firefighter Jay Jonas and his colleagues raced to the scene. As others fled, Jay ran into the tower lobby to be briefed on his role.

28:12There was a line of fire officers waiting to speak to the chief in charge, who was Pete Aiden. And just around that time, we saw a large black shadow on the ground and we heard a loud noise outside.

28:34All of a sudden, a man came running in from the outside and yelled out that a second plane has just hit the South Tower. So at that point, whatever thoughts we had that this might have been a horrible accident were gone. We were under attack. Jay was briefed on his team's role and went to speak to them. Here's the deal. It's a raw deal, but this is what we have to do. We have to go upstairs for search and rescue in this building. And we can't use the elevators because they've been exposed to fire. And the last thing I said to them was, they're trying to kill us boys. I said, let's go. Weight down with equipment, he and his team started climbing the stairs.

29:0927 floors up, everything changed. We felt and experienced something nobody ever felt or experienced before. We heard a loud noise outside.

29:24And our building started to sway back and forth violently. We had no idea what that was. I went to the north windows. I couldn't see anything. I just saw the white dust pressed against the glass. The dust was from the plume that engulfed the area as the south tower collapsed. And I just looked at my guys. It's OK. Our mission is no longer doable. It's time for us to get out of here. And we started heading down the stairs. We got to about the 20th floor and we saw a woman standing in the doorway and she was crying. My fireman stopped and one of those was Tommy Falfield. He turned and looked at me and he says, hey Cap, what do you want to do with her?

30:01I looked at her and she was crying. She was in distress. I said, all right, bring her with us. And people have questioned me about that. I said, what a monumental decision. And I says, well, that's why we went there. We didn't go there to have the World Trade Center experience. We went there to save somebody's life. And we started heading down the stairs with her in tow, but that greatly slowed us down. The woman's name was Josephine Harris, but she can't move at anything like the speed of the firefighters. We made it to the fourth floor and Josephine Harris falls to the floor and she starts yelling at us, leave me, get away from me, don't touch me, leave me alone.

30:36This is after we slowed ourselves down to rescue her. I wasn't very happy with Josephine Harris at this point. As unhappy as they were, Jay and his team weren't going to leave her. As they're working out how to carry her out of the building, events overtake them. The tower comes down on top of them. A moment caught on camera by a BBC crew nearby.

31:01Deafening noise. Tremendous vibration. We were bouncing up and down off the floor like we were ragdolls. Every time a floor would hit another floor, you'd hear a loud boom, but they were in quick succession, so it was like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So I just covered up, anticipating that this was going to be it. We were going to be killed, we were going to be crushed, waiting for that big beam or that big piece of concrete to come and crush us. And then the collapse stopped. Miraculously, they'd survived the most catastrophic building collapse in history. More than 1 ,400 people had been killed in a matter of seconds.

31:38But the stairway had shielded Josephine Jay and his colleagues. The B stairway was in the centre of the building, so you would think that that would be the worst place to be. Well, actually, it was the best place because if you watch the way the building collapsed, the building peeled away like it was a banana. We were the banana in the center of the building. You know, it kind of peeled away. Incredibly, others too had survived that initial collapse, including fellow firefighter Mike Wacola, who would ride to work with Jay. This was to be his last day in the New York City Fire Department. He was scheduled to retire September 12th.

32:12He got on the radio and he said, mayday, mayday, mayday. This is the officer of Ladder Company 5. I'm on the 12th floor B stairway. I'm trapped and I'm hurt bad. And we had passed it on the stairway coming down the stairs. The stairway's still there, but it's loaded with debris. And you can move debris and shimmy up the banister and you can climb. So I made it to the 5th floor and the second Mayday came in. And I still couldn't get to him. I made it to this half landing of the 6th floor. Finally, the 3rd Mayday came in. And he says, is anybody out there that can help us? So sorry, Mike, I can't help you.

32:48And I went back down the stairs. And that was the last I heard from Mike. He passed after that. Buried under the twisted metal burning jet fuel and collapsed masonry of the North Tower, Jay Jonas realised he and his team probably wouldn't be able to get themselves out. The rescuers would have to be rescued. He put out a mayday call. Mayday, mayday, mayday. What is your location?

33:16Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is ladder six. We're in the North Tower, Beast Stairway, fourth floor, and we're trapped. It took a couple times to get through, and then finally a chief from the 6th Division got on the radio. So, okay, ladder six, we got you. We got you. North Tower, Beast Stairway, fourth floor. It was okay. Things are looking up. I still don't have the words to describe how I felt. I knew all these guys were coming to find us. After several hours buried in the rubble, a shaft of light cut through the dust and debris. The hole proved to be the way out of Stairway B. Climbing up the tangle of twisted metal and masonry and out through the hole, the first firefighter laid a path for the others to follow.

33:59One by one, my guys left the stairway holding onto this rope, getting down to the point where they were out of where we were. And now you're outside, but now you're surrounded by buildings that are on fire and fire coming up through the rubble and everything. So we weren't out of harm's way yet. Jay and his colleagues had survived the collapse and being buried alive, but they still faced a clear and present danger. Before these buildings collapsed, you had 10 to 20 floors of fire in them. These fires didn't go out when the building collapsed. As a matter of fact, they got bigger. It was like you're walking on a volcano with twisted metal and bad air.

34:35There's smoke and dust that were travelling through the air. So this dust coated the steel and made the steel very slippery. It was like you're walking on ice. You've got to be very careful. Because if you fell, you fell on jagged metal, which wouldn't feel good. It was arduous making your way across there. Remarkably, everyone, including Josephine Harris, made it out without serious physical injury from the collapse. Despite surviving when countless friends and colleagues didn't, Jay says he's never had survivor's guilt. If we passed Josephine Harris and not picked her up, it would have bothered me.

35:10But we were doing everything everybody else was doing, and we just happened to be in the right spot at the right time. The decision to rescue Josephine Harris quite possibly saved your life. Well, there's no doubt that us stopping to save her saved her life. By her making a stand on the fourth floor, that put us in the exact right spot. For us to make a stand, this is where we're going to ride this out, and live. How do you reflect on all of that now? I'm blessed that I was part of the biggest rescue effort in the history of the United States. The only thing is that almost all the guys who participated in this rescue effort were killed.

35:45So their heroism was left on the battlefield.

35:52The former New York firefighter Jay Jonas was speaking to Rowan Bridge. And further programming to mark 25 years since the 9-11 attacks can be found across the BBC World Service and at bbc.com. Next to one of the unsung heroes of the Second World War. In 1944, a young Irish woman called Maureen Flavin drew up a weather report that helped change the course of the war. Completely unaware that her temperature, pressure and wind speed readings were being passed to Allied headquarters in England, Maureen predicted bad weather heading towards the coast of France for the 5th of June. Her forecast led to the delaying of the largest seaborne invasion in history, D-Day.

36:36Maureen's son, Edward Sweeney, spoke to Jane Wilkinson in 2024 about his mother's crucial role. The dawn of June the 6th comes up like thunder over the invasion coast as Allied bombers send down their share of the 20 ,000 tons of bombs dropped in the 24 hours preceding the landings. The softening up of the German defences along a broad stretch at your coast. That's British Pathé on the start of D-Day in 1944. The date, June the 6th, is now fixed in the history books. But Operation Overlord should have taken place 24 hours earlier. And it was forecasts of an Atlantic storm that changed the date.

37:20Maureen Flavin sent in the crucial weather report. I felt very happy about it that we did give the right readings. Oh God, I felt proud. Back in 1944, Maureen was working as a post office assistant in Blacksod on the far west coast of Ireland. But her job wasn't just stamping letters and sorting parcels, as her eldest son Edward explains. At that time in Ireland, the meteorological service used some of the post offices as observation points and the west coast of Ireland gave you the first indications of any major change in weather. So during the war, the observations increased. Maureen had had no training in weather reporting, but she learnt, recording temperature, rainfall, air pressure and the force of the wind, using equipment set up outside the remote rural post office.

38:19Wind direction was very important. You'd have to be precise with that. Living here, we'd know the wind directions off by heart. That's Maureen, interviewed by New Decade TV for a 2019 documentary about her wartime weather reports. You went out at 10 to the hour, night and day. You couldn't get a good night's sleep. You don't want whether it's sent when it was time to go out and take another one. Maureen shared the 24-hour shifts with Margaret Sweeney, who ran the post office, and Margaret's son, Ted. Every hour, they phoned their readings to the Met Office in Dublin. I didn't like the night, Judy.

39:06I used to be afraid if it was the Germans to come in at night. Come ashore. Meanwhile, in the south of England, tens of thousands of British, American and Canadian servicemen were gathering for the most ambitious operation of the war, the assault of the Normandy beaches in France. More and more troops continue to mass in these islands in readiness for the real Second Front invasion of Europe, even though the enemy can only guess where they will invade and when, their final destination is Berlin. There's no secret about that. In fact, the Allies, led by the US General Dwight Eisenhower, had settled on a date.

39:48The invasion was to be June 5th, 1944. But they needed clear skies and calm seas to land forces safely in France. Weather reports were vital. Back in Blacksod, on June 3rd, Maureen went to take her usual readings. It was one o 'clock in the morning and it was an important day for many reasons. The 30th June, that was my birthday. It was her 21st birthday. At the time, things were pretty spartan here. No, they wouldn't have been going out for a meal or some music or anything like that then. She was working, doing her shifts, and she actually took the reading that showed the weather changes coming in from the Atlantic, the barometer dropping, and this indicated a change.

40:35a sharp sudden wind was coming in, it was going to be quite severe. But this day, it was kind of too bad to know the exact direction. So I said, ring the Coast Guard. It was ringing a while before he answered me. I swear he was probably asleep. But I asked him, I said, I'm an awful way. I can't get the wind direction. How's it blowing? It would have been Southerly, and as it crossed over Britain, the more severe wind would have been right over the channel. Maureen wrote down her figures and phoned Dublin. What she didn't know is that all her readings were being fed to the Allied headquarters in England, thanks to a deal that Britain had made with the neutral Irish government at the beginning of the war.

41:23And it was only dawn on the phone right to please check and repeat. And it was a lady in the Met Office in Britain that rang and asked to recheck the readings, which she did, and she got a second call to recheck on that forecast. It was very unusual. She thought it strange. She did wonder why she had to recheck twice. I said, what's wrong? They weren't going to tell me they were going to war. Maureen's report, now double-checked, was the first indication of the coming storm. Group Captain James Stagg, the Allies' chief meteorologist, pulled all the information together and warned Eisenhower. D-Day would have to be postponed.

42:08General Eisenhower at his British headquarters checks the working out of plans. The weather is none too favourable for invasion, stormy skies and a blustery wind. The channel is notoriously a rough body of water and the breaking waves make the landing of equipment difficult. The problem was that it would have involved large lots of life from the landing craft because they weren't capable of handling that sort of weather on the beaches. So it was a big decision to delay it. Having half a million men milling round ready to go, it was a hard time for everybody involved. But there were still important questions.

42:45How quickly would the storm pass? And could the invasion go ahead the following day? In my mind, equally as important was the weather forecast that she sent afterwards, which showed that the pressure was rising again, the wind speed was dropping, better weather was following, which allowed the Allies to carry on on the 6th. Heading out to sea after a 24-hour delay because of the weather. Now the invasion has started. 4 ,000 ships and thousands of smaller craft. The gathering of the mighty armada. Operation Overlord had finally begun. In the first 24 hours, 160 ,000 Allied troops landed on a 50-mile stretch of Normandy coast.

43:31Their aim, to drive German forces out of Western Europe. British pathway again. This is it. They're on the beach, plunging waist-deep into the sea. These men who are planting themselves on the first bit of French soil to be won back after four years. At the time, Maureen never knew the significance of her 21st birthday weather report. Historians only discovered it a decade later. By that time, she'd married Ted Sweeney, was raising a family, and had taken over as Black Sod's postmistress. But in 2021, Maureen received international recognition. As American Museum Director John J. Kelly told RTE.

44:13I have a very special award that's rarely given, rarely given. It's coming directly from the United States Congress to her, and it puts her name in the Library of Congress in perpetuity. Oh, God, I felt proud that it was from Lexar, and that we gave it right because they had other reports, remember, coming in. So, I was a bit of a racial. Oh, we were very proud of her, especially when she was awarded the Congressional Medal. In her latter life, she lived to be 100, but when you went back to the war, she remembered everything. But as a family, we were very proud of her. Very proud of her. Edward Sweeney was speaking to Jane Wilkinson in 2024 about his mother and her crucial role in the Allied invasion of Europe in the Second World War.

45:11Incidentally, the vital role weather forecasting played in the timing of D-Day is seen as so dramatic that it's been made into a feature film called Pressure. It includes a quote from General Eisenhower, who credited his tactical advantage on the day to having better meteorologists than the Germans. And now for this week's Sporting Witness. And for this, we're in a fairly niche area of competitive action. On the 5th of June 1982, a teenaged refugee from Vietnam became the first Rubik's Cube world champion. And he's been speaking to Helen Ledwick. After 40, what, 44 years? That's crazy. Can't believe you find me.

45:53The first official Rubik's Cube world championship is being held in Budapest, the capital of Hungary. and representing the United States, a 16-year-old refugee from Vietnam, Minh Thái. I don't see the person next to me. I don't see anything. I just see the cube and that's it. The cube, a 3D puzzle with six sides, each with nine coloured squares on it. You're supposed to turn the layers until each side is a solid colour. It's really hard. Minh sees a cube for the very first time a year before the championship during a history class. His friend is trying to solve it and Min wants to know... What the heck is that?

46:34That looks really cool. So Min buys a Rubik's Cube and within days he's figured out how to solve it. And he can do it in under two minutes. By the time summer school starts, he's even faster. And another classmate has news for him. They say, Min, you're pretty good. Do you know there's a contest going on in downtown right now? I say, there's a contest for this thing? Min rushes across Los Angeles to enter this contest and he wins. He also catches the eye of one of the organisers, Herbert Taylor, who's written a book on solving the cube. A few weeks later, Herbert gets in touch. Would Min be interested in taking part in the regional championships?

47:17He said, Min, do you want to go? I said, sure. So for the next few weeks, he would take me to different places, to the shopping centres where there's a lot of people. And he said, Ming, do it. Just stand there and start doing the Rubik's Cube. So he was trying to train me for audience, you know, so I can block things out and don't get nervous. The practice pays off. With a time of 39 seconds, Ming wins the regionals and qualifies for the US National Championship in Hollywood. Contestants ready? Board, start the timer. Five, four, three, two, one, go. It's filmed by ABC television. Nine finalists from across the United States get two attempts to solve the cube.

48:02They're all fast, but Min is faster. That means the winner of the US title is Min Tai with a winning time of 26.04 seconds. Min is the fastest Rubik's Cuber in the US. And when the contest is broadcast on TV a few days later, he's the most popular kid in school. The principal came out, the teacher came out, the counsellor came out, the custodian came out, all my friends, and they have a big banner hanging on the high school. Congratulations, Min Tai, 26.04 seconds. It's really cool. And then it's back to reality. Min's in his senior year, he's studying for college, But he's also in training, because the Rubik's Cube World Championship has just been announced, and he'll represent the US.

48:52Unless... Minh has only been in the country for a couple of years. His family fled Vietnam after the war, arriving as refugees. If he leaves now, he'll need special permission to return, which he doesn't have. I couldn't really go, because by the time they say, Minh, you go. OK, and then how are you going to get back? And then Dr Taylor said, oh, man, that's a problem. But all is not lost because Herbert Taylor has not given up on men. So we went to the city hall in L.A. We went and lined up for immigration and then talked to them and he was able to convince somebody to give me a return authorization, something like that, you know.

49:33So I was able to leave and return. Otherwise, I couldn't go and return. With his paperwork in order, Min makes it to Budapest. And on the 5th of June, 1982, he walks into the concert hall where the Rubik's Cube World Championship is being held and heads backstage. The audience are already there, it's full, and then there's news people and then cameras all set up. But to me, I cannot pay attention to it. I just want to wait for my name to be called and come out and compete. Everything else is second because my mind didn't have a space for that, not even a centimetre space for any kind of other events, any images can enter my mind.

50:17There'll be three rounds with three different sets of cubes. Each set has been scrambled to identical patterns and locked in a briefcase for safekeeping. It's time. Champions of 19 countries of three continents are starting now. Min walks out on stage for his first attempt, and it's good. A time of 27.16 seconds puts him in third place after the first round. So I went back, and I didn't even think about what should I do. It was all blank. My mind was like blank. I said, go back, and then second round came. Three, two, one, start. min thai 16 years of age living in los angeles california he came to the united states three years ago with his family from vietnam he first saw the cube in june 1981 and solved it within seven days of purchase in under two minutes

51:21Min has solved the cube in 22.95 seconds. He's leading the contest with just one round to go. I went backstage to wait, right? And I think between rounds, maybe there's 15, 20 minutes. It's not too long because everybody's solving the cube very fast. So guess what I was doing? I have no idea. I took a nap.

51:48Nobody knew this, OK? I just, OK, I'm done. Yep, in the middle of the high-stakes, high-pressure, first-ever Rubik's Cube World Championship, Min takes a nap and wakes up just in time for his third and final attempt. It's slower than his second, but it doesn't matter because no-one has beaten his time. He's made history. He's the world champion. Everybody come up, you know, take pictures of me and then interviewing and all this stuff. Have you expected to become a world champion in Budapest? Well, it was a very tough competition. I was pretty optimistic to win the competition in a way, but I didn't really expect it.

52:31At that moment, it felt the whole pressure was gone and life was good. You know, this is crazy. This guy came from Vietnam to the US in two years, and now his name is on Guinness Book of Records. You know, it's pretty cool. Min and the runners-up climb onto the winner's podium. Three giant Rubik's Cubes, of course. Then the new world champion is announced by the inventor of the cube himself, Erno Rubik. The world champion, 1982, winner of the gold cube, Min Tai from United States of America. This was really, really happy and laughing and shaking a piece of his hand. And I actually went around and tried to talk to all the other contestants a lot because the friendship was so amazing.

53:26You just felt that the connection is so strong, you know, and then we hug each other. And I think that's more important to me to keep in touch with them. because later on I get letters from France, from England, from India. That was so important, the friendship. More than 40 years later, the Rubik's Cube is still going strong, with millions solved each year. And it's evolved over time, with new mechanisms leading to new records. The fastest time to solve one today is under three seconds. Yep, three seconds. But that doesn't faze me in. It's just a different era, right? At that era, I was a first.

54:02and then there's a 90 to 2000 area for different things, you know. So I don't care if they can do it in one second. I'm just the first one. Right? Ming Tai was speaking to Helen Ledwick about his record-breaking Rubik's Cube performance in 1982. It really is a sport and it has a name, speedcubing. Finally this week, we're going back to the summer of 1985 when an Irish village became the focus of a national phenomenon. Thousands of people travelled to Ballinspittle after reports that a statue of the Virgin Mary was moving. Similar reports soon spread across Ireland, and that summer became known as the Summer of the Moving Statues.

54:48Helen Nedwick speaks to Eta Dungan, who travelled there as a teenager and remembers the crowds gathering at the shrine. South of the border, many worshippers at Ballin Spittle in County Cork say they've seen a concrete statue of the Virgin Mary move its arms and shake its feet, and they've now mounted an all-night vigil next to it. On Thursday night, I saw a lady sway forward until I thought that the statue would fall down. And then on Friday night, I saw a lady's face change to the face of our Lord. I remember distinctly arriving at the place, standing there and staring at a light in the rain with hundreds if not thousands of people.

55:31Eta Dungan is 14 years old in the summer of 1985. She lives in Dublin with her parents but it's the school holidays and she and her sister Claire are staying on her aunt and uncle's dairy farm in County Cork. It was a big old farmhouse and it was the type of house where even though it had a front door, which is very typical in rural Ireland, absolutely nobody used the front door and everybody just came in the back door. And one thing I would remember that there was always tea served and there was always homemade baking. In case you're wondering, there was a coffee cake with coffee icing and a peppermint cake, which would have been like a plain sponge, but with peppermint icing.

56:14idyllic summer days of playing outside sometimes helping with the harvest or milking the cows the sisters come home for dinner and then go out to play again until dark and on Sundays everyone went into mass mass was there and then in the churchyard afterwards you would have met up with your cousins and your cousin's friends so it was a big social occasion back at the farm too religion is just part and parcel of daily life I don't know if there was a specific time of the evening to say the rosary. But I suppose when my uncle wanted to go to bed, as he was up early to milk cows, he would say that it was rosary time.

56:51And so he would have had a kind of a comfier chair close to the range. And then there was lots of kitchen chairs there. And everyone would turn around and kneel and put your elbows on the chair. And it didn't matter who was there. You know, if there were visitors there, it didn't matter. It was rosary time. and the church was just central to most things in Ireland at the time. Meanwhile, just 40 kilometres away in the village of Ballansbittle, that statue of the Virgin Mary has been causing a lot of excitement. The stories began when a local woman, Cathy O'Mahony, was out walking one evening with a group of friends.

57:28They were all staggered to see the statue begin to move, although strangely they each saw it happen in a different way. To me, as if she was breathing or sighing lifelike, So her chest was rising? Yeah, chest, yeah. And the other side, the hands move. One hand move out from the other and up, you know. And the side, the head move. What went through your mind when you first saw the Madonna move? A kind of a sense of being protected. Word spreads. Dozens of people come to see for themselves. The next night, it's hundreds. And then, thousands. I remember the journey. It would have been quite a packed car.

58:12In my head, it was a brown Cortina and it would have been in a time where nobody wore seatbelts in the back of a car and quite regularly would have sat on somebody's knee. The sisters, aunt, uncle and cousins travel into the evening more than an hour down small, winding country roads. It was dark when we arrived and I remember the traffic slowing considerably. It was tiny roads that we pulled up to and I remember men directing traffic. And I say traffic, these men were just trying to find you somewhere that you could throw a car. So we pulled up tight to the side of the road so it would have been in a hedge and then we all got out of the car.

59:02It's raining. It's pouring with rain. That kind of heavy, soft rain. Irish people have different ways of talking about rain, but it was like a heavy, heavy mizzle that was just hanging in the air. I think then what I would remember is the sound of singing, hymns, and also that sense of the rosary being said over and over, like the Hail Mary over and over. And there's a certain cadence and lilt to it because sometimes someone will start the prayer and somebody else, the group, will finish it. So it's like somebody's leading the prayer and they answer. So it's nearly like a call and answer is how I remember it.

59:54It was like you were walking towards this because there was hundreds and hundreds of cars. So we walked quite a distance to get to where the grotto was. The grotto, a roadside shrine, sits up on a hillside. A life-size statue of the Virgin Mary wearing white robes and a blue sash. Hands joined in prayer. It was so high that even amongst the crowds that you were able to see it and there was a light on it. And we were just in amongst the crowd. It was quite subdued, if that's a word I could use there. It was, yeah, reverent, I would say. I'm surrounded now, I suppose, by, I would have thought, at least 5 ,000 people.

1:00:39All of them staring across this little valley to this bright source of light that's shimmering out at us. It's a very strange feeling. We just stood quietly and looked at it. And I think there was definitely a hope that you would view something or see it move, because that's what people were talking about. And we all would have known about Lourdes and Fatima and these religious pilgrim sites where the Virgin Mary was supposed to have appeared. But I remember just staring at it. You can't, no. Our head is moving out. Yeah, yeah. Definitely now. I'm bowing a lot. I've seen this now and now. Now look.

1:01:34Many come out of curiosity. More come out of faith. But few go away disappointed. I've seen a pop's face. I've seen a face with a beard. A person with a beard. But I've also seen a head with no hair. And the head turned down. I guess. After a while, Eta walks with her family back to the car and as they're walking, she turns to her sister Claire and quietly asks... Did you see anything? And she said, I don't think so, and I said, I don't think so either. But there was a sense of fear that we should have seen something or shame that we should have seen something, that others had seen something and we weren't devout enough or holy enough or why could we not see it?

1:02:26We didn't discuss how others viewed it or did they see it or did they not see it or we didn't discuss how we felt but we just had a silent bond, I would say, that was, I didn't see it, you didn't see it, fair enough, we're not in our own kind of thing. Balansbittle was just the start. That summer became known as the Summer of the Moving Statues, as reports from across the country drew huge crowds. Looking back now, Eta sees it as a moment from a very different time. So I think if I look at modern Ireland and the Ireland of the 1980s, they're two completely different places now. Something like this couldn't happen.

1:03:10But it did happen, and people believed it. thousands and thousands and thousands of people believed it. It seems strange now. A mystery, but not a singular mystery. There have been reports of similar phenomena, moving statues, crying statues, in many countries around the world. Ita Dungan was speaking to Helen Ledwick and bringing this edition of the History Hour to an end. We'll be back with more witnesses to events from the past next week. So until then, this is Max Pearson. And from all of us here, thanks for listening. Goodbye. From the pioneers. We weren't going to ask mission. We were just going to do it.

1:03:47And the celebrations. You feel you have, you win. I feel it. I was first. I was first. We were so proud of ourselves. And Cameron was proud of us too. I still cannot believe it. It was such an amazing feeling. It was incredible. To the humiliations. I did cry most of the half. Oh man, I'm failing. I'm failing this sport that I love. Sporting Witness takes you to the events that have shaped the sports world through the eyes of the people who were there. It's not just about the sport. It's about all the other things that people with disabilities learn from each other. For nine minutes, you become a fan in the stands as we take you back in time to examine memorable moments from all over the world.

1:04:32There's a magic during those moments that carries your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history. Sporting Witness. Subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:04:45Did America's war on terror work? I'm Asma Khalid, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. In the words of a former U.S. official, on September 11th, 2001, the terrorists hijacked not just airplanes, but also the direction of U.S. foreign policy. 25 years on, what were the unintended consequences of the war on terror? For the full story, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm not Jared.