Space travel and Mary Poppins

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes. Our guest is European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who completed the longest uninterrupted space flight of any European.

First, we go to Australia in the 1990s when amateur radio enthusiast Maggie Iaquinto befriended Soviet cosmonauts on the Mir space station. She updated them on global news as the USSR crumbled back on Earth.

Then, the inspiring story of Waris Dirie, who walked barefoot across the Somalian desert to escape child marriage and became an international supermodel.

We hear a harrowing account of Guatemala's civil war that ended in 1996.

Then, why the author of Mary Poppins, PL Travers, hated the Disney film.

Finally, the Canadian town that welcomed aliens in 1967.

Contributors: Samantha Cristoforetti - European Space Agency astronaut. Ben Iaquinto - son of Maggie Iaquinto who befriended Soviet cosmonauts. Waris Dirie - model from Somalia. Jeremias Tecu - survivor of Guatemala's civil war. Brian Sibley and Kitty Travers - friend and daughter of PL Travers. Paul Boisvert - worked on Canada's alien landing pad.

(Photo: Mir Space Station in 1995. Credit: Space Frontiers/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,
0:10.6	the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:13.0	This week, the Somali campaigner who went from life in the desert to top international fashion model.
0:19.0	They sit you down, they make the makeup, the hair, no tooth, that, then you get the clouds and you're like,
0:27.0	oh, this is really easy.
0:30.0	Also, the disappeared still missing after 36 years of civil war in Guatemala.
0:35.3	After three days, my mom went back and she faced the soldiers and she was saying,
0:41.8	like please give me at least a part of my son.
0:45.0	And the Canadian town that wanted to welcome UFOs in the 1960s.
0:50.0	The UFOss have nowhere to land in Canada. Let's make St Paul a welcoming place. We welcome
0:57.7	aliens and their UFOs to come to St Paul.
1:01.6	That's all coming up in the podcast and in a manner of speaking space is where we're going to start.
1:07.0	An amateur radio enthusiast called Maggie Aya Quinto spent a great deal of time in the 1990s trying to make contact with Russian cosmonauts on the mere space station.
1:17.0	Maggie's son Ben Aio Quinto has been speaking to Megan Jones.
1:21.0	CQC CQ, listening.
1:25.0	CQ, CQ, CQ, CQ, listening.
1:27.6	That's how you start a call if you were an amateur radio operator trying to find someone else to speak to across the airwaves.
1:35.0	It's the year 1990, on a quiet street in the rural city of KOLak to the west of Melbourne in Australia.
1:45.6	Russian-speaking amateur radio enthusiast Maggie Aia Quinto is sat in an office chair
1:51.8	in the spare bedroom of her home. The family call it the shack.
1:55.8	It just had shelves that they'd installed and all the radios were a line on those shelves.
2:01.8	There would have been a computer monitor on showing the map of the world.
	...

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