Futility Closet - 022-The Devil's Hoofmarks

Episode Date: August 18, 2014

On Feb. 9, 1855, the residents of Devon in southern England awoke to find a bewildering set of footprints in the newfallen snow. "These are to be found in fields, gardens, roads, house-tops, & other likely and unlikely places, deeply embedded in snow," ran one contemporary account. "The shape was a hoof." In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll examine the surviving descriptions of the odd marks and consider the various explanations that have been offered. We'll also revisit the compassionate Nazi fighter pilot Franz Stigler and puzzle over how to sneak into Switzerland across a guarded footbridge. Our segment on the "devil's hoofmarks" is drawn from Mike Dash's excellent article "The Devil's Hoofmarks: Source Material on the Great Devon Mystery of 1855," which appeared in Fortean Studies 1:1 in 1994. The full text (2MB PDF) is here. The Restricted Data Blog's post on John W. Campbell and his 1941 article “Is Death Dust America’s Secret Weapon?” appeared on March 7, 2014. The comments include an extensive discussion about Campbell's exchanges with Robert A. Heinlein. You can listen using the player above, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the popular website that catalogs more than 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to episode 22. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll examine some mysterious hoof prints that appeared in southern England after a snowfall in 1855, revisit the compassionate Nazi fighter pilot Franz Stiegler, and puzzle over how to sneak into Switzerland across a guarded footbridge.

Something peculiar happened in the county of Devon in southwestern England on the night of February 8, 1855. There was a snowfall that night, and people woke up to find hoof marks that looked initially like donkey's hooves all over the countryside. And I may as well say at the outset that to this day no one knows what to make of this, but I'll just go over the details. Here's an account from about a week later from The Times. This is from February 16th. It's titled Extraordinary Occurrence. Considerable sensation has been evoked in the towns of Topsom, Limpstone, Exmouth, Tainmouth, and Dawlish in the south of Devon in consequence of the discovery of a vast number of foot tracks

of a most strange and mysterious description. The superstitious go so far as to believe that they are the marks of Satan himself, and that great excitement has been produced among all classes may be judged from the fact that the subject has been discanted on from the pulpit. It appears that on Thursday night last, there was a very heavy fall of snow in the neighborhood of Exeter in the south of Devon. On the following morning, the inhabitants of the above towns were surprised at discovering the footmarks of some strange and mysterious animal endowed with the power of ubiquity as the footprints were to be seen in all kinds of unaccountable places. On the tops of houses and narrow walls, in gardens and courtyards enclosed by high walls and palings, as well as in open fields.

There was hardly a garden in Limestone where these footprints were not observable. garden in Limestone where these footprints were not observable. Often when you hear this mentioned, these days people say that there's just one unbroken line of hoof marks that went for 100 miles in a straight line and stopped, which is definitely not the case. They were all over the place, going up to doorways and back again, going back and forth through gardens, jumping up onto 14-foot walls and down into enclosed gardens and then apparently back out again. In some cases, they appeared in the middle of an unblemished field

and then disappeared again without any entrance or retreat. It's just a lot of almost impossible-to-understand behavior. The most famous of which is, according to a secondhand report, there was a haystack where the tracks went up to one side of it and emerged apparently from the other side, but there was no track on or around it. Across the haystack. Seemingly impossible. Okay. In some villages, hardly a home had not been visited. And overall, the marks were reported in more than 30 locations across the county. If it was a single creature that made the tracks, it would have had to travel 40 to 100 miles in a single night. But the longest distance that was claimed for the tracks was 100 miles. But the furthest distance

to the nanomath seems actually one single person to have followed them is five miles, which is still impressive. Nearly all the marks, whatever they were, had very similar dimensions. They're about four inches long by three inches broad, or a little smaller. And the distance between them was quite small. If your hoof is that big, you'd expect quite a long stride, but it was only about eight or eight and a half inches, which is strange. They appear to have been left by a biped, though they were nearly all of them in a single file rather than alternating left and right.

Sometimes the prints appeared to be cloven hoofs, and sometimes they were connected. And as I said, the stride was tiny. One thing that makes this whole thing even harder to puzzle out is how very few eyewitness descriptions have come down to us. There are two from two clergymen who corresponded and who gathered some of the accounts from other people. two clergymen who corresponded and who gathered some of the accounts from other people. One was a doctor who speculated briefly about it being an otter, and another was an account by a young gentleman who had submitted a description to the Illustrated London News. But that's it.

Those are the only primary sources we have, and all the other descriptions we have are basically restatements of their facts or memories that have come down from people who were trying to remember it much later. So all the descriptions we have about this are come down to really only four people's descriptions. Yeah. And unfortunately, this is before photography, so we don't have like photographs. Right.

There were people who went out the next day and made tracings of them, which is interesting because the people who did tracings actually came up with drawings of the hooves, which were strikingly similar, even though they were taken in different locations. But you're quite right. There's no photographic evidence. And even back then, newspapers reported on this. But back then, a lot of these accounts were sort of more hearsay than what we think of today as proper journalism. They weren't confirming sources. Right. So the journalists didn't go confirm it for themselves. They just were going by what they'd been told. So there's a lot of hearsay. And I think, I'll get into this later,

but one of these four eyewitness accounts, I think, is at least questionable, which maybe makes the whole thing... I don't know if that even helps because it's such an outlandish thing. But you said some people did make tracings and that these were remarkably similar to each other. So that's...

Yeah. So we'll see. It's just some of the behavior seems like, you know, the footprints would be going along the ground and then apparently leap on top of a housetop and cross and make it like down again. Things like that are harder to accept. And somebody thought that might be an otter? Yeah.

The otter claim came from this doctor who said that apparently he'd followed some of the tracks down under some low branches and they went through a six-inch pipe and emerged at the other end. So it's just hard to come up with any explanation that could make sense of all the descriptions that we're seeing. So as I say, no one person followed the track for more than a few miles or attempted to see whether it was one single connected track or to see how the prints varied or to verify all these odd reported behaviors. So it's hard to know how much of this to trust,

but if you trust any of it, it's still hard to understand what this might have been. So here are, I'm getting a lot of this description from Mike Dash, who some listeners might remember I relied on his report for a lot of the description of the Flann and Isles mystery back in episode 15, who I've really become a fan of. He's done, I have to say, a gorgeous job of collecting all the information, and I almost can't imagine a more sort of thoughtful, assiduous sifting of what evidence we have. So I'm relying a lot on him, and I'll link

to his report in the show notes. But he goes through sort of the salient claims for the evidence that we've been given, the first of which is the ubiquity of the prints uh they were apparently everywhere as i said it wasn't one track it was wandering all over the countryside rupert gould who is another researcher that i've come to respect makes the point that if you're satan and you have four inch hooves and an eight inch stride and uh as i say the the longest claim for the extent of these was 100 miles. Let's say you only had to cover 40 miles in one day. Let's make the very generous assumption that you have 14 hours of darkness to do this in, which is a lot. This is in February,

but 14 hours is a long time. Gould figured out that if you cross 40 miles with an 8-inch stride, that comes down in 14 hours. That comes down to 6 steps per second, which is incredible. That would be like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, walking at that pace. All night. Continuously for 14 hours. Without stopping. Kind of a mincing gate for the Prince of Darkness. Well, also, you say that the steps weren't next to each other.

They were in front of each other in a single file. So he was hopping or... Hopping very quickly. Hopping one foot in front of the other. That makes, honestly, as much sense as anything else. Another claim that Dash points out is the anomalous locations I've talked about. They're supposed to have walked along second-story windowsills as i say hopped over 14 foot walls um the haystack is the hardest to attribute to animals but we have that account only at second ham and hand and we don't know

how closely the haystack was examined um there's a claim that the tracks at one point walked across the river x at a point where it was two miles wide. But there, again, if you look closely at the claims, it looks like there was some tracks on one side and some on the other, but it's not clear that it indicated that it was one continuous track that just walked across the river. The similarity of the prints is striking. One of the two clergymen who was recording these facts, Reverend Musgrave, actually took a ruler and writes, quote, the interval between each impression was found to

be undeviatingly eight inches and a half. On the same day, a mutual acquaintance measured the intervals between similar prints in his garden above a mile and a half distant from the rectory and found it to be exactly eight inches and a half. This, in my opinion, is one of the most remarkable and confounding circumstances we have to deal with. But Mike Dash actually compiles a table showing that if you look at all the different reports, the stride varies between 8 and 16 inches. But all the same, the descriptions, that's not that big a variation. I mean, if you want to propose some kind of weather phenomenon that it counts with, it would be surprising that it would be that regular even. Fairly consistent.

That's another thing. We just don't know what to make of that. One odd note is that a lot of the witnesses were struck by the sharpness of the prints. I should say it was a very cold night, but then it warmed up and thawed a bit and then refroze toward dawn, which may account for distorting some of the tracks. But all the same, even though that happened, a lot of the witnesses were struck at the sharpness of the prints, and it's not clear what we should make of that. This was largely a rural area,

so the people presumably were familiar with common animal tracks, and yet they were still unsettled by what they were seeing. So perhaps they weren't tracks at all. We don't know what they were. Although I can imagine that all you would take would be one person to say, I saw these suspicious tracks, and then suddenly tracks that normally would have looked familiar to you, especially if they were slightly distorted by melting,

would suddenly look scary. Or things that weren't tracks at all. You could just sort of start to imagine that they were. And the last thing that Dash mentions, which i thought is a really good thought is that animals didn't react that night one of the two clergymen named elicombe mentioned that his dog barked a bit but if you know some of the explanations people have come up with is maybe this was some sort of odd swarm of animals or birds or something which, you know, that's as good an explanation as any, but you would think if they were out in such numbers, you'd hear some reaction or disturbance among domestic animals, and there doesn't seem to have been any.

It was a very cold night, which accounts for the fact that there weren't any people abroad or not many of them, so there just weren't any human witnesses at the time this happened, whatever it was. It's not true that this sort of thing has never happened again. In fact, Dash finds 21 cases that bear some resemblance to this. Similar tracks were discovered on rooftops in Norfolk and the Cotswolds that winter, and Charles Ford actually found a report from 15 years earlier of prints resembling those of a pony in the Highlands,

but it's not quite as ubiquitous or widespread as this. A couple other, I guess three other interesting similar cases. In Belgium, near the closing days of World War II, there were some mysterious prints reported in the snow. These were somewhat smaller than those found in Devon, but they ran for two miles in what was called a dead straight line. No one knows what that is. In 1957, a Mrs. Linda Hanson of Hull found cloven prints matching the same dimensions in stride of the Devon prints in her back garden. They were four inches across and 12 inches apart, which is about the same,

and sharply defined in about an inch of snow, all of which matches what happened in Devon about 100 years earlier. They just stopped dead in the middle of the garden, and no one knows where they came from or why they just stopped dead. And this last one, which I find the most striking and also inexplicable, is that a Mr. Wilson in October of 1950 had grown up near Devon and came back to visit the seaside that he remembered from his boyhood, and there discovered a single line of hoof marks leading from the beach straight into the sea. The beach was closed and deserted and he hadn't told anyone that he was going to be visiting,

so it seems unlikely that this was a hoax perpetrated by a human. He said the marks were whole, they weren't cloven, they were about six feet apart, and they were deeper than his own prints, and he was a large man, he weighed 16 stone or 224 pounds. And he noted, too, that these, we'll call them hoof marks, were strangely clean. He wrote, as if each mark had been cut out of the sand with a flat iron. We don't know what to make of that either, but they all have the same character of something that appears superficially like a hoof mark and just proceeds in a straight line for some distance and then just stops. One thing that's, if, I would like to favor some naturalistic explanation,

I suppose there is one, but it's hard to understand whatever that is, whether it's animals or some natural phenomenon or weather. Whatever this was, it hasn't happened again in the same scale in 160 years. So, for instance, you know, wood mice apparently, they say at one point, if a wood mouse can bound and will, in preparing to do that, will gather its feet under it and leave a mark that could be mistaken for a hoof print, for instance. But wood mice are everywhere all the time. And if they're capable of doing this at all, it's kind of hard to understand why they haven't done it again. At least not where anyone's witnessed it. Oh, yeah. So what made them? I'll just run

down the list here of various ideas that people have come up with, some of which I find enchanting, but none of which is really convincing. The weather that night was very cold, and that was known to have affected the behavior of some animals. For instance, birds that are normally over the sea were driven ashore by the cold. So there were some disturbances in animal behavior, but nothing that could really explain this, at least that anyone has been able to think of. The first one that everyone mentions is donkeys and ponies. Normally, the first description when you hear this whole episode described is that they very much resemble the tracks of donkeys.

In fact, a researcher named Theo Brown said she'd found that donkeys are, in fact, the only animals that plant their are in fact the only animals that plant their feet in an almost perfect single line when they're walking. But donkeys aren't bipedal and they can't jump over walls and onto rooftops and get over haystacks in a single bound. Birds, as I said, were driven inland and may have been there in some numbers, I suppose, without disturbing dogs and such. But birds don't have four-inch feet, and you have to make sort of contrived explanations like,

well, maybe their feet were iced up in the cold. But I don't think a bird with four inches of ice on its feet, whether it can fly at all, is debatable, and they weren't making any noise, and you wouldn't think birds would make hoof-shaped prints. Anyway, I suppose it's not impossible. Maybe it is impossible. Other animals that have been proposed are hares, monkeys, wolves. I mentioned otters. The problem with these is that none of them has, normally, the appropriate shaped prints or the right stride length to really match what they were seeing on the ground there.

Are there monkeys in that part of the world? No. Conceivably, there could be. Oh, we haven't even gotten to the crazy one. Oh, that's not even a crazy one yet. There could be some troop of escaped monkeys who were gambling through the English night. On a really frozen, snowy night.

Okay. And then disappeared. Okay. Anyway, I would accept even that. But unfortunately, monkeys don't have hoof-shaped prints. I mentioned wood mice or other hopping rodents such as rats. They could fit through pipes. The tracks were also said to fit through, to pass through holes in hedges and fences,

and so certainly mice would be capable of doing that. But it's hard to imagine a bounding wood mouse going in a straight line for five miles. And as I say, they're so so common you would expect this to have happened more than once in 1855 human hoaxers certainly aren't impossible but even then if you were a hoaxer put it that way i would probably go in a straight line both because that would be more striking if i'm trying to frighten or impress people instead of just wandering around through their gardens multiple times also if I'm a hoaxer, I don't want to get caught.

And if I take all this time to just promiscuously leave prints all over the countryside, the longer time I take to do all this, the greater the likelihood I'll be caught. You'd think someone would just... Unless it was a group of people. Yeah.

Which is possible. It has to be a very big group. But as you say, the tracks sometimes just start in the middle of nowhere. Yes. And how would a human do that? Yeah big group. But as you say, the tracks sometimes just start in the middle of nowhere. Yes. And how would a human do that? Yeah.

On the other hand, the fact that the tracks often travel in straight lines or they follow paths, that seems inconsistent with the idea of an animal foraging, for instance. So some of them, you could argue, are more human-type behavior than animal. Here are the three that I love most. A balloon, I guess an unmanned balloon, trailing a line with a hoof-shaped gratinol may have floated through the bitter night

just leaving tracks everywhere and then disappeared somehow. That's very imaginative. Yeah, I think that's a beautifully poetic image, and whoever came up with it deserves about 30 points for creativity, but there's no particular reason to think that that's what happened and a lot of reasons to doubt it

kangaroos kangaroos the revin gm musgrave he proposed this theory from the pulpit there actually were a pair of of kangaroos in a private menagerie in exmouth but there's nothing to suggest that they escaped and as elsewhere kangaroo prints don't resemble hoof marks and the stride length is all wrong. Musgrave actually said that his people were so frightened that this was something supernatural that he was just struggling to come up with any sort of explanation. Anything at all. Right, right. I don't know what suggested kangaroos to him, but that's where that came from.

My favorite by far is that the prints were left by 400 gypsies on stilts. This was advanced by an author named Manfrey Wood in a 1973 book called In the Life of a Romany Gypsy. The story is that this was one tribe of gypsies that were trying to frighten away other local tribes who they knew believed in the devil. So they spent, it took 18 months

to hatch this plot. They contrived stilts made out of step ladders and spent the night wandering around on stilts through the English countryside, apparently also jumping up onto rooftops on stilts and over haystacks and such. Yes, but people on stilts would not go—it would be very difficult to do that single file. Right. I guess they would have to practice quite a bit.

You're right. I hadn't thought about that, especially getting— Practice quite a bit. Also, unfortunately—I desperately want this to be true and this be the explanation but unfortunately wood gets a lot of the basic facts badly wrong he says this all the events happened in somerset when they were in devon and he says the prints were made with size 27 boots with a nine foot stride which is just completely wrong uh mike dash i must say is admirably open-minded. He says this isn't impossible. I mean, we can't say it didn't happen. So that may be the explanation. There's not, there are certainly better attempts at explanation than that, but we can't rule that one entirely

off the list. So I'm sorry to say that's all we have. There's just a description of something that seems sort of impossible or inexplicable that happened 160 years ago. And in the ensuing time, there's been a lot of thinking and surmising about this, but no one's come up with any explanation that really seems likely. I mentioned at the beginning that there were four eyewitness accounts. One of them, this is just me talking now, not Mike Dash. I think there are some doubts about. This anonymous correspondent to the Illustrated London News is the source of a lot of the more outlandish descriptions of this business. He's the one who says that the prince appeared to have jumped a 14-foot wall,

to have appeared on the roofs of houses and a second-floor windowsill, formed a trail at least 100 miles long, he says, followed a straight line, at one point crossed the two-mile-wide River Axe, and could not have been the marks of ordinary animals. He was later identified as a 19-year-old gentleman, and when his report appeared in the news, another reader wrote in to say, quote, the outline accompanying your intelligent correspondence recital of the circumstances hardly conveys a correct idea of the prince in question.

recital of the circumstances hardly conveys a correct idea of the prints in question. So there's some, there's sort of a, in my mind, there's sort of a cloud over that collection of descriptions. And if you exclude that, it gets a little easier. There's still a lot of hoof prints everywhere, but they're not doing these seemingly impossible things. But that still doesn't explain what the heck happened and why it hasn't happened again. So we have to leave it there. Kudos again to Mike Dash for putting together all this stuff. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. And I guess if you're Satan, do you think Satan listens to this podcast? Maybe.

Probably. If you're Satan, no hard feelings. If you did it, just write in to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com, and I'll read your email in a future episode. If you want to see Mike Dash's full 84-page analysis, look for the link in our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. If you've been enjoying the esoteric trivia that we talk about in these podcasts, you should be sure to check out our book, Futility Closet, an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements,

which contains hundreds of bite-sized oddities, as well as wordplay, puzzles, paradoxes, and other amusements and conundrums. Look for it on Amazon or iTunes and learn about a 1911 plot to steal the Mona Lisa, a cat who co-authored a physics paper, and Lewis Carroll's proof that 2 times 2 equals 5. In episode 20, we discussed John W. Campbell's role in publishing a science fiction story in 1944 that so accurately described an atomic bomb that the government launched an

investigation of both Campbell and the story's author, Cleve Cartmill. Bruce Little wrote in to say how much he'd enjoyed that piece and to tell us about a post on Campbell on the Restricted Data blog. Apparently, Restricted Data is a blog about nuclear secrecy, past and present, run by Alex Wellerstein, who is a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Wellerstein's March 7th post on this blog is all about Campbell and an article that Campbell wrote in 1941 entitled, Is Death Dust America's Secret Weapon, which I thought was a great title, and was basically Campbell's speculations about making dirty bombs containing radioactive materials. According to Wellerstein, in the early 1940s,

many science journalists and science fiction authors were writing about topics such as radioactivity and atomic bombs, and that was at least until a voluntary censorship on the atomic energy topics began in early 1943. So Cartmill's story in 1944 attracted the attention of the authorities but these earlier articles and stories apparently did not even though some of them were fairly accurate or had you know some factual material in them maybe cart mill stood out because the others had been the others all stopped yeah they were sort of suppressing themselves after early 1943 uh apparently in the early 1940s, Campbell was

rather interested in the possible implications of using radioactive materials and dirty bombs. In response to Wellerstein's post, one of the commenters on the blog went through Robert Heinlein's correspondence to see what he and Campbell had discussed on the topic. It seems that in 1940, Campbell wrote to Heinlein about the idea for a story using radioactive dust weapons. The two corresponded back and forth about the story, which Heinlein then wrote and submitted for publication in Campbell's astounding science fiction magazine. Campbell suggested what became the ultimate title for the story, which was Solution Unsatisfactory. And what I thought was really amusing is apparently Campbell said to Heinlein, quote, the story is weak because the solution is palpably sympathetic, synthetic and unsatisfactory. And that very fact can. So Campbell published Heinlein's story in his May

1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, and then he published his own article on death dust in July in another periodical called Pick. Also, similar to how you had said that Campbell supplied ideas to Cartmill for his story on the atomic bomb, Campbell wrote to Heinlein in January 1940 saying, quote, I spent a half day up at Columbia talking cyclotrons and atomic power to the nuclear research men up there and came away with several interesting impressions, one of which led to an idea which might fit with your series of shorts, end quote. Apparently Heinlein replied to this that he also had been hearing about fission from a friend who was an engineer and physicist working on cyclotrons over at Berkeley. So this exchange led to Heinlein's story about nuclear fission called Blow-Ups Happen, which was published in 1940. And I just thought it

was interesting how these writers were actually getting information from people working in the field of nuclear research and then turning this into stories and articles, at least until the topic was suppressed in 1943. Yeah, there's actually a little bit more. I didn't manage to squeeze this into my piece on Cartmill, but it's interesting. While the Army was investigating Campbell, they learned that he'd been seen having lunch with Edgar Norton, who was an engineer with a classified Bell Laboratories project. And when they looked deeper into that, they found that also attending that lunch was a man named Will Jenkins, who wrote science fiction under the name Murray Leinster. Leinster had also been doing some sort of amateur experiments with his daughter and had been communicating with Isaac

Asimov because he had access to the mass spectrometer at Columbia. Asimov, in turn, was working at the Philadelphia Navy Yard with Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp. So it seemed like the deeper they looked into this, the more they found this network of science fiction writers who all seemed to know each other and were quite closely connected with the act of science. So you can't really blame the Army for being nervous about this. But the writers were, none of them had a motive to do anything wrong. And they were so sort of open-handed about what they were doing that the whole investigation sort of fell apart. But I think looking back, the whole thing is sort of a testament not just to Campbell, but to all these writers for being so well-connected to high-level science that they could even be suspected of a conspiracy.

Yeah. Well, thanks to Bruce for letting us know about the post on Campbell, and we'll have a link to the Restricted Data blog post in our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. In episode 21, we recounted a story about Franz Stiegler, a German fighter pilot who couldn't bring himself to shoot down a badly damaged American B-17 during World War II. Rob Pryor wrote in with a really interesting addendum to our story. He says, Franz Stiegler was a member of the Recreational Aircraft Association Flying Club in Delta, BC for many years. That's where I met him, although I was a very young boy at the time. The story about Charlie Brown didn't come to light until well after I knew him, but another anecdote about him was amusing. The Flying Club had dinner parties

at various members' houses from time to time. As pilots do when they get into a group, they tend to share stories, and eventually, with this group, those stories ended up back at the war. The club had a number of ex-military in it, ranging from former pilots to former infantrymen, and some from each side of the war. Everyone was sitting on the back deck on this particular day, and the discussion eventually found its way to the Blitz over London. After talking about how some of the German bombers never made it back and how much damage had been done during the Blitz, someone remarked that it was a horrible time and that it was amazing they lived through it.

Franz replied, yes, it was a horrible time indeed. Just as he said that, the lady of the house, who was British and had been in London during the Blitz, came out the back door onto the deck and heard him. She asked, oh, Franz, were you in London during the Blitz too? Franz just nodded and said, yes, I was there as well. Overhead. Yeah. Everyone else sat very quietly and said nothing for a few moments, knowing what she didn't. That Franz was one of the fighter escort pilots during the Blitz.

He was there, but he was above the action as it were. We don't know what the reaction of the lady of the house would have been if she'd known that Franz was up there with the bombers, so the topic was changed and the evening went on. I don't know if she was ever told the truth. That's a great story. That is a really good story, so thank you, Rob, for sending that in. And we always appreciate hearing from our listeners, so if you have any comments or questions, you can leave them in the show notes

or email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. This is our lateral thinking puzzle segment. This week, I'm going to be giving Greg a puzzle and he's going to try to solve it using only yes or no questions. Try. He's going to try. You ready? I'm most taken promise. Okay. This puzzle this week comes from Paul Sloan's Lateral Thinking Puzzlers. Okay. Ready?

Yes. Okay. During the Second World War, there was a footbridge over a ravine between Germany and Switzerland. It was guarded by a German sentry. His orders were to shoot anyone trying to escape over the bridge and to turn back anyone who did not have a signed authorization to cross. The sentry was on the German side of the bridge. He sat in a sentry post and came out every three minutes to survey the bridge.

A woman desperately needed to escape from Germany to Switzerland. She could not possibly get a pass. She knew that she could sneak past the sentry while he was in the sentry post, but it would take between five and six minutes to cross the entire bridge. There was no place to hide on or under the bridge, so the guard would be easily able to shoot her if he saw her on the bridge escaping to Switzerland. How did she escape across the bridge? Okay, let me get the details again. Sure.

He's on the near side, let's say. The German side, yeah. Of a footbridge that crosses a ravine. Right. He comes out. Yes. Say again, every three minutes? Every three minutes.

The footbridge would take almost two minutes to cross. No, the whole bridge takes five to six minutes to cross, so she wouldn't have enough time. Right, right. Sorry, I mean, but it would take. Two intervals, yeah. If she just walked across, I guess ran across the bridge. Yeah. He'd spot her before she got to the other side.

Right, right. She has no pass um this happens on earth they're human beings they don't have actual identities i need to know about are there other people i need to know about no okay does she make it i mean so she comes up with some way to get across yes all right so it's just a puzzle about how to get across this bridge right right he comes out you said every three minutes yeah and it, you said, every three minutes. Yeah. And it takes, you said, five to six minutes to cross the bridge. To cross the entire bridge, yeah.

Does the solution involve her distracting him or detaining him somehow? No. Okay, so let's say this. She comes up with a solution, whatever it is. Right. And reaches the other side of the bridge. Yes. Without being seen.

Is that true? No. Without being seen by him? No. He does see her. Yes. Ah. Okay. Excellent.

I like this line of thinking. That's further than I usually get. All right. Let's work backwards. Okay. She figures out a solution. Yes. She does get into Switzerland.

Yes. She gets there by crossing the footbridge. Yes. So at some point, she enters Switzerland via the footbridge. She gets to the far side of footbridge. Yes. So at some point she enters Switzerland via the footbridge. She gets to the far side of the bridge. Yes. That's correct. Yes. At that point, you're saying he has spotted her. He has seen her. When? When does he see her? Sometime before she reaches Switzerland. Yes. Does he think she has the right to cross the bridge? No. No. He knows she's fleeing?

No. Well, I'm not sure. Wait a minute. Okay. No, that's right. What she's actually doing is fleeing Germany to Switzerland. Yes. Does he realize that at any point?

No. Does he think she has a pass? No. Does he think she otherwise has the right to cross the bridge? No. Does he see her at a pass? No. Does he think she otherwise has the right to cross the bridge? No. Does he see her at any point? Yes. Does he see her before she gets on the footbridge?

No. Does he see her while she's on the bridge? Yes. I'm assuming that she crosses from the near side to the far side in one pass and doesn't turn around or come back or any, you know, she just starts here and goes directly there and that's the whole. No. Ah, even better. She starts in the near side. Yes. And starts across the bridge.

Yes. Let me back up a little bit. Okay. She waits and, all right, he pops out of his little hut. Right. Let's assume it's a hut. Okay. Goes back in.

Now she's got three minutes. Yes. She starts across the bridge. Right. So far, so good. Okay. Goes back in. Now she's got three minutes. Yes. She starts across the bridge. Right. So far, so good. Yes. If she kept going at this point, she'd get halfway across and he'd pop out and spot her and shoot her. Right. So that's not what happens. Right. Right? Well, not exactly as you've said it. Okay. What a mysterious thing to say. She starts across the bridge. Yes. Before the three minute mark, she does something. Yes. Before the three-minute mark, she does something.

No. Before the three-minute mark, she does something. Okay, let's say yes. You're making this up as you go along. I think I'm almost there. So she, you say she starts across the bridge. Oh, I think I see. She starts across the bridge. He goes, all right, he pops out of his little hut. Right. He starts across the bridge. Oh, I think I see. She starts across the bridge.

He goes, all right. He pops out of his little hut. Right. He looks at the bridge. The bridge is clear. There's nobody there. Right. He goes into his little hut.

Right. She starts a little timer. Yeah. She goes across the bridge. Yeah. And at the 2 minute 55 second mark, she turns around and seems to be heading back from Switzerland. Yes. Yes.

He pops out of his hut and sees, oh, here comes someone from Switzerland. Right. That's not anything I have to worry about. She pops back in and then she flees oh, here comes someone from Switzerland. Right. That's not anything I have to worry about. Pops back in and then she flees across the... No, you almost have it. Nobody's allowed to cross the bridge without authorization. So she pretends she's coming from Switzerland. Right.

And then he comes out and says, show me your papers that you can cross into Germany. Oh, oh, oh, oh. And she says, I don't have any papers. And he's like, well, then go back to Switzerland. That's good. That's even better, actually. So that was very good. You did a very good job. That was back to Switzerland. That's good. That's even better, actually. So that was very good. You did a very good job.

That was a complicated puzzle. That's a good puzzle. I wish that were true. Yeah. If anybody has a puzzle that they'd like to see us use in this segment, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Well, that's it for this episode. You can see our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com,

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