This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

The people of Esperance, Australia, will be the first to tell you that not a whole lot happens there.

It's a quiet farming and fishing town, where the sheep usually outnumber the people.

But in the chilly early hours of July 12, 1979, at around midnight,

a handful of locals crane their necks up to the sky

and see something they've never seen before,

that no one has ever seen before.

Not in Esperance, not anywhere.

A pyrotechnics show among the stars,

full of flashing, pulsating lights and sounds that reverberate so deeply,

you can feel it in your shoes.

It was like fireworks, but it was the noise that came with it.

Jo Norman is among those gathered on a high bluff overlooking Esperance Bay.

She was barely 17 years old then, witnessing what looks like the apocalypse.

Another observer would later describe it as a train falling out of the sky while on fire.

It was like, oh my god, way louder than thunder.

And that's when everyone, we thought oh holly crap this is

actually going to fall on us you felt like you could just reach up and touch it

that's how close it felt what Joe sees that night is a spectacle that the

entire world has been anticipating with a combination of amusement and fear.

The Fall of Skylab, a space station nine stories tall and weighing over 77 tons,

...