On this episode of the most notorious podcast, the 1937 Hindenburg Disaster.

It's about 7.25 at night. It's a Thursday evening. And we have Herb Morrison on the field. Herb Morrison, remember, is our announcer who says it's practically standing still now.

They've dropped the ropes out of the nose. And suddenly he says, it burst into flames. It burst into flames.

Well, I can't do it anywhere near as good as he does. But suddenly the Hindenburg is on fire. And within a minute, the entire ship is on the ground in senders.

People have jumped. People are screaming. People are on fire.

Welcome once more to another episode of the most notorious podcast, I'm Eric Rivenes. Great to have you here. I know I say that every week, but it's true.

So I am thrilled to have as my guest once more the man whom I call the master of historical disaster best selling author Michael McCarthy.

Now, you might remember him from an episode just a few weeks ago about the sinking of the Eastland steamship in the Chicago River.

And you might also remember him on that very same episode towards the end, promising that he would come back and talk about his brand new book.

It is called the Hindenhindenburg, the untold story of the tragedy, the Nazi secrets, and the quest to rule the skies.

Thank you so much for coming back. You bet Eric, I'm honored to be back.

So give us the backstory on how this book came to be.

So I was teaching a course in journalism history in Chicago. This is several years ago. And we did a segment on radio.

And while doing that, I figured one of the best examples to reveal to my students was heard Morrison's famous recording on the New Jersey airfield in 1937.

When he's looking up in the air and suddenly the giant and famous Zeppelin Hindenburg catches fire, surprising the world, and certainly surprising the man on the ground, who has a microphone right in front of his face,

and suddenly has to start describing what he's seen. And a remarkable presence of mind, he kept the narration rambling.

So we listened to this in class, and it's incredibly dramatic, where he famously says, oh, the humanity.

And as we were listening, I just was sort of struck by the fact that this man had a very kind of a visceral feeling, a visceral reaction to something dramatic happening in front of him.

And as I listened over and over, we played semester after semester, new class, new class, I just kind of felt almost like her Morrison was reaching through those decades to me, listening, and saying, tell us what happened here.

And so I started looking into it. And I actually began at the time I was teaching my students because a lot of them were fairly young and didn't know exactly what the Hindenburg was or what the story was.

And I was really surprised to find out that the federal investigation that was done this summer of 1937, right after the Hindenburg fire, never really came to a conclusion.

They knew that there had probably been some leaking hydrogen somehow. They figured that the gas was ignited by passing storms, but why there was a leak remained a mystery.

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