Futility Closet - 029-The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser

Episode Date: October 6, 2014

In 1828, a 16-year-old boy appeared in Nuremberg, claiming that he'd spent his whole life alone in a dark cell. In the latest Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the short, sad life of Kaspar Hauser and ponder who he might have been. We'll also revisit the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, encounter some self-landing planes, and puzzle over why a man would bury 15 luxury cars in the desert. Sources for our segment on Kaspar Hauser: Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, 1996. Martin Kitchen, Kaspar Hauser: Europe's Child, 2001. Links from listener mail: Being in the Shadow, Australian psychologist Kate Russo's site about the psychology of eclipse chasing. A 1997 NTSB report regarding a Piper PA-24 that "landed itself" after the pilot passed out due to a carbon monoxide leak. The "cornfield bomber," a Convair F-106 Delta Dart that landed in a Montana farmer's field in 1970 after the pilot ejected. When the local sheriff arrived, the jet's engine was still idling. This week's lateral thinking puzzle is from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's 1994 book Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles. Corroborating links are here and here (warning -- they spoil the puzzle). 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]. We're off next week -- Episode 30 will go up on Oct. 20. 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 29. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll meet Caspar Hauser, a 16-year-old boy who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, claiming that he'd spent his whole life alone in a dark cell. We'll also revisit the Pacific Northwest tree octopus, encounter some self-landing planes,

and puzzle over why a man would bury 15 luxury cars in the desert. And just a note to our listeners, we're going to be taking off next week, so we'll be posting episode 30 on October 20th. On May 26th, 1828, a 16-year-old boy walked into the city of Nuremberg, Germany, carrying a letter. He attracted attention almost immediately

because he appeared to be unable to speak and almost unable to walk. He wasn't injured, he just couldn't walk. The letter he was carrying was addressed to a local cavalry officer and was written by an anonymous person. He said that he'd cared for the boy since he'd received him as an infant in 1812 and had taught him to read and write, but had never let him leave the house. The boy, as I said, could barely speak. He could say the word horse over and over, and he could say the sentence, I want to be a cavalryman, as my father was, but he didn't seem to know what that sentence meant.

So, not knowing what to do, he was eventually brought by the cavalry officer to the city authorities. At the police station, he wrote the name Kaspar Hauser, which is the name that he's come to be known by. But he wasn't able to give any account of himself and, as I say, could barely speak. He carried a second short letter that was supposedly written by his mother saying his name was Kaspar and he'd been born in 1812 and that his father was dead. and that he'd been born in 1812 and that his father was dead. But beyond that, they couldn't tell much about him, where he had come from, or anything about his background.

Since they didn't know what to do with him, at first they just put him into a tower where he was cared for by a jailer there. He wasn't in jail, that was the man's job. And it was found that he refused all food except bread and water, even though he appeared healthy. He seemed to be about 16 years old, but his intellectual development was inferior. The mayor of Nuremberg took great interest in the case, as it became clear that they couldn't establish who he was, and spent a lot of time talking to him, and got out of him this almost incredible story.

The boy said he'd spent his whole life, as long as he could remember, in a darkened cell six to seven feet long, four feet wide, and five feet high. The only things in the cell were a straw bed to sleep on. He had two, three toys, two wooden horses and a wooden dog. And every morning when he woke up, he'd find bread and water next to the bed. And there was a sort of commode, which is just a hole dug in the floor, basically. And every morning when he woke up, the commode was emptied, more food was put out for him. And occasionally he found that his shirt had been changed. And sometimes his hair and his nails had been cut, but he never saw another human being.

This is the story he told. But then one day recently, a man appeared, who was the first human being he'd ever seen, he said, and the man said it was time to leave and taught him sort of very roughly how to read and write. And to say this phrase, I want to be a cavalryman as my father was. And then they traveled three days to Nuremberg, and the man told him to go in there and give the letter to someone and then departed hastily. That was the story the boy told. But he understood speech, apparently.

If somebody showed up and said these things to him, he understood. Yeah, so there are questions immediately. I'm just trying to puzzle that together. Like if he'd never seen another person, but he understood what the man was saying to him. Yeah. There are a lot of, I'll get into the questions later, but one of those is this. You can say he was about, he appeared to be about 16 years old. Yeah. Just answer this one question now. He said that he couldn't remember a time before he was in the cell. Right. But some theories say, all right, perhaps he had a relatively normal

infancy and then was abducted between say the ages of two and four and then put in the cell. Right, so he had learned some language. So he had some exposure to language, but that still leaves an awful lot of open questions. And I'm just wondering how quickly he could learn to read and write, given that his language skills would have been minimal at best. Yeah, and that was apparently phenomenal, yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's a lot to say.

Anyway, that's the story we're starting with okay uh he was given to i'll just explain to people who don't know the story what happens is he spends five years uh staying with a succession of people who take care of him and then he's killed at the end of that in a mysterious stabbing and to this day no one's established who he really was or where he came from. He's only known as Caspar Hauser. The first person he stayed with was a local schoolmaster named Daumer, who, since he lived with him and spent a lot of time talking with him, developed more fully the extent of his extreme isolation in this cell, if that's what happened. He said, Hauser said, during his imprisonment he had no self-awareness at all

and never wondered whether there were any other living beings beside himself, whether anything existed outside his cage, nor did he ever wonder where the bread and water came from that he found and consumed daily. Never saw the sun, never heard a bird sing. It was literally complete isolation. There were kind of romantic rumors that were put about since it became increasingly clear that they put out searches within a you know

a three days radius of nuremberg and couldn't come up with any theories about nobody said he was missing no no one identified him at all so there were theories put about that he was uh the legitimate heir to uh the title of the house of bad they had had, they'd run out of heirs, basically. The last prince, the last male heir had died in infancy. And there was sort of a theory put about that that prince had actually survived, but had been swapped with a dying infant to make it look as though the inheritance had run out. So it could be given to this scheming woman's sons instead oh so she had an incentive to sort of hide the real prince and that's who casper hauser was that story i'll just say right away doesn't go anywhere because even though

the mother was too ill at the time to see her uh dead baby her mother did and wrote about it fluently and other people did. So that whole theory goes away, but it was really prevalent at the time that he was some lost prince, which makes a great story. It does. What begins to happen now is two things. As I said, Hauser stays with a succession of caretakers, and there are two sort of threads that run through this. One is that he gets into these odd mysterious encounters with uh

antagonists that no one ever sees which i'll tell you about in a second the other one is unfortunately that each of these caretakers that he stays with kind of gets disenchanted with him they tend to say that he's vain and hypocritical and tends to lie a lot particularly to curry sympathy when he needs to which kind of casts a shadow over a lot of the stories that he tells, including the one that he gave when he first came to town. Anyway, the first of these odd encounters is that on October 17, 1829, this is about a year and a half after he first came to town, he was found in the cellar of the schoolmaster's house bleeding from a wound on the forehead.

He said he'd been confronted by a hooded man who said, you must die before you leave the city of nuremberg and then who had tried to kill him but he'd gotten away no one saw this hooded man and the that fits into the early romantic tale because the story there would be that um the people at the house of baden had realized that their plot might be uncovered because Hauser's memory is better than they'd counted on, and now they'd have to kill him just to keep it quiet. Right, right. Although why they didn't kill him in the first place is a little confusing. Yeah, I wondered the same thing.

I guess you could come up with some convoluted explanation. Also, the timing of this is that Hauser had just had a quarrel with the schoolmaster, and so critics say that perhaps he'd invented this story just to allay punishment for that and to just curry sympathy among people there's no telling one way or the other there's no evidence but that sort of fits an unfortunate pattern that you start to see in what happens to him over these five years um he was then given to another caretaker and sort of the same thing happens. On April 3rd, 1830, a pistol shot was heard in his room,

and he was found to be bleeding from a wound on the right side of his head. He said he'd been up on a chair trying to get some books down from a shelf and knocked against this pistol, which was mounted on the wall, and set it off. There were marks showing that the pistol had gone off, but there was some doubt about whether the wound on his head had actually been caused by that. And similarly here too, he had been in a recent quarrel with this new caretaker and it's possible that he was just inventing a story to try to evade punishment or just occur a good favor. Again, there again, we don't know, but there's still some room for doubt there. The next person who takes an interest in him

is actually a British nobleman named Lord Stanhope who gained custody of him in 1831. Hauser, in talking to people, had seemed or claimed to respond to some words of Hungarian. And so there were some... Stanhope wondered if he might be a lost Hungarian prince, sort of along the same lines, and spent a lot of money over taking two journeys to Hungary.

There was a cholera epidemic there at the time, so they couldn't get as well into the country as they'd hoped to. But that whole journey didn't go anywhere. And in the end of it, Stanhope was quite bitter about it, just as the other caretakers had been. In fact, he published a book after Hauser died, saying that he felt it was, quote, his duty openly to confess that I had been deceived. So you can see sort of a theme developing here. He was then given to another schoolmaster, and their relationship was strained, apparently,

because he said that Hauser tended to lie frequently as well. But then it all comes to a strange end. On December 9th, 1833, Hauser and the schoolmaster had a serious argument, and then five days later, Caspar Hauser came home with a deep wound in his left breast. He said he'd been lured to the Anspach court garden, and that a stranger had stabbed him there while giving him a bag. Police searched the garden and found a violet purse that contained a penciled note in mirror writing that said, Hauser will be able to tell you quite

precisely how I look and from where I am. To save Hauser the effort, I want to tell you myself from where I come. I come from blank, the Bavarian border, blank, on the river blank. I will even tell you the name and then the initials MLOL-O. No one quite knows what that means. It's not clear why he would just write blanks when he's trying to identify himself or why any of this was written in mirror handwriting. It should be said that there were a couple grammatical errors in the letter that were typical of Hauser's writing himself and that the letter was folded in this peculiar triangular fashion

that Hauser tended to fold his letters. So that doesn't help the case but unfortunately whatever had happened in the court garden he was mortally wounded um there's it's not clear he said uh it was another hooded man who had done it um but skeptics say that perhaps he wounded himself and just did. Yeah, I was wondering about that. To part. Doctors confirmed that it could have been self-inflicted.

Uh-huh. But unfortunately, it was whoever wounded him, it was a bad enough wound that it wound up killing him. Right. The King of Bavaria, uh, offered a large reward, but the murderer was never found. And, uh, now Kasper Hauser, whoever he was, lies in Anspach under a headstone that reads, here lies Kasper Hauser, an enigma in his own time. His origins unknown, his death mysterious, 1833. And in the court garden where he was stabbed, there's just a monument that reads, an unknown person died here in a mysterious way,

which now almost 200 years later is really almost all you can still say about Caspar Hauser. The most mysterious thing you can say. Yeah, it's just a stone with that inscription on it. There's been all kinds of investigations about this in the ensuing years. More than 3,000 books have been written, 14,000 articles have been written about him, and there's still no consensus about who he was or where he came from. I had known about this story for years, but I hadn't ever looked into it this deeply until I started researching this podcast segment. And for whatever it's worth, my impressions are, it just seems very skeptical. I mean, sort of fishy to me, at least the story on the face of it, particularly the story he came to town with.

Yeah. The mayor, this 41-year-old Mayor Binder of Nuremberg, published a proclamation when Caspar Hauer first came to town explaining the story that the boy was telling. And there are three things about that that just seem to me, frankly, incredible. One is that he said that black bread and water were his only nourishment. Even if you think that he was abducted at four,

that he wasn't kept in confinement since his birth. Well, yeah. I mean, you can't eat bread at two months old. That's still 12 years. Yeah. You can't live on bread and water

for 12 years. Well, that's what I was wondering. I mean, I would think his growth would have been extremely stunted if there was no protein, no calcium, no vitamin D. If he never got sunlight, his bones wouldn't have grown properly. Yeah. So that's one thing. He said also that when he awoke, he found the commode emptied, more food was placed out for him, his hair and nails were cut, and his shirt was changed.

I find that hard to believe, too. I mean, could you sleep so soundly every single day for 12 years that you'd never be awakened by someone who was putting out more food for you? That's a good point. Not ever, yeah. And the last thing is this business about walking, which I guess we've already talked about. At one point, Kasper Hauser wrote an autobiography explaining his life in the cell, and he writes verbatim, I could not, after all, walk and did not know that I could stand up. Since nobody had taught me to walk, the idea never occurred to me to want to stand up. But when they left for Nuremberg with this mysterious man, he rode to the top of a mountain on the first day, and then the man got him down from the horse and taught him then and there to walk.

Right. And then he walked for two straight days after that. His complaints were that his feet were tender because he'd never used them before and that his back and legs hurt but otherwise he walked for two days yeah if the story is true well it's like in the well it's like that's like the reading and writing somehow this guy taught him to read and write in a very short period of time well his vocabulary is limited when he first got to town but it was 50 words which is more than you'd expect i mean there was a uh psychiatrist at the time psychiatrist at the time who looked into this and said this that that amount of isolation should have reduced almost anyone to idiocy if it was that

complete but if you're that skeptical you're then left with the question well then who was he he was someone he came from somewhere and as his fame spread first through Bavaria and then around the world, no one ever came forward and said, that boy's a fraud. I know his real identity. No one ever said that. To this day, no one has any theories about who he really was. The best guess that I've seen about this, at least in my own research, comes from Martin Kitchen, a history professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada,

who published a beautifully well-researched book about this in 2001. He says the most probable answer is that he was an epileptic and mentally retarded child whose parents or guardians had decided to rid themselves of a tiresome burden. Back in those days, this is the early 19th century, there were madhouses, but not everyone who was intellectually disabled or emotionally troubled wound up in them. Often, if you had a relative who had mental or emotional troubles, you just hid them in the attic or a cellar and sort of pretended to the world that they didn't exist.

So the general notion that he had been kept in confinement throughout his child is unfortunately not that outlandish. I mean, the details he gives are probably exaggerated. But particularly if he was intellectually disabled, it wouldn't be surprising if his story wasn't entirely accurate. But that's what Martin Kitchen thinks happened, is that he was someone's child who was just kept apparently in a cellar somewhere for his childhood. And then as he approached manhood, it became clear that they wouldn't be able to maintain him anymore. And to that extent, maybe his story was true, that his father was a cavalry officer from Nuremberg who is now dead,

and the only thing they could think to do was give him a letter and send him into town and hope that someone would take care of him. If that's the case, then these sort of more fanciful stories that Hauser would tell about mysterious hooded men attacking him probably were made up just to uh encourage people to you know sympathize with him and offer him help i mean it's hard to understand it's hard to believe those are true given right yeah well it's also i mean if you're raised with very little social contact, I can imagine that you would lie because we only learn to lie because we learn that that's socially unacceptable. And that, you know, it's kind of, in some cases, beaten out of us as children.

In other cases, you know, we just develop a conscience as children. But if you had very little social contact, then you would have no reason not to lie. But if you had very little social contact, then you would have no reason not to lie. Yeah. On the other hand, if he just had a mental health issue, he could have just lied habitually. Yeah. And so that could go either way. Yeah.

Whoever he was and whatever the truth is, he led a terribly sad, unfortunate life. I mean, even if he was a displaced prince or just a commoner with a troubled family life. It's a terribly sad story, even though we probably won't ever know what the truth really is. We'll have links to some contemporary accounts of Casper Hauser's story and an image of the letter left at the site of his stabbing in our show notes at futilitycloset.com. If you haven't yet seen our book, you should head over to Amazon and check it out. Look for Futility Closet, an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements. It's full of hundreds of short, intriguing tidbits. A tantalizing mix of historical oddities, quotes, wordplay, paradoxes, and puzzles, sure to keep your brain amused. See why other

readers have called it a wonderful collection of fascinating nonsense and the most useless book you absolutely need to own. In episode 28, Greg talked about a mutual fund manager whose obituary mentioned his passion for solar eclipses and how he had traveled around the world to see them. I suggested that there must be a word for that. Thinking sounded like there should be, and it turns out that there is. Good. A commenter on Boing Boing said, I didn't find a single word for it, but apparently the term for a person who is drawn to follow eclipses is eclipse chaser.

Makes sense. So that's a thing? That's a thing. It's such a thing that the commenter included a link to the website of Dr. Kate Russo, a psychologist and an avowed eclipse chaser herself. And she studies the human experiences of eclipses. On her website she says an eclipse chaser is someone

who has made a life choice to give in to their insatiable desire to re-experience the thrill and excitement of totality. Once you have seen a total eclipse, it seems to ignite a fire that becomes a powerful driving force. Eclipse chasing is not just a hobby. Eclipse chasing is a way of life. That's really interesting because that's sort of what the mutual fund manager was saying. He was like, I know this isn't entirely rational, but I really love doing it. It's a very interesting website.

She's got a whole website on it. She's written two books. So it's a real, it's a whole thing that apparently we just never knew about. Our last episode also featured Joseph Bell, the real-life inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Another commenter on Boing Boing wrote, A friend of mine who was a big Holmes fan would talk about the detective inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Another commenter on Boing Boing wrote, a friend of mine who was a big Holmes fan would talk about the detective as though he were a real person. He considered Holmes's greatest virtue to be an unwillingness to remember any fact that he

didn't think would be useful. I was arguing that there's no such thing as useless knowledge. As an example, my friend cited an incident where someone told Holmes the Earth was round. Holmes replied that he would do his best to forget that fact because it would never help him solve a case. I wonder if Bell felt the same way. See, I have a little bit of a problem with that because I don't think you can know in advance what's

going to be useful information or not. I mean, how could you? I think if you put your mind to it, you could probably come up with some case that it would be helpful to know that the Earth was round. Yeah. Or just to provide some insight to something. Just to fill your mind with all kinds of facts just in case they might be useful. Yeah.

So I don't know. I don't know if that is a virtue to be able to be sure what facts are not useful. Well, I suppose if you could know absolutely for sure, then you could forget them. If you could know in advance, sure. If you could know them for sure, and then you could forget them, but... If you could know in advance, sure. If you could know them in advance, yeah. Also in episode 28, Greg told us about planes that had flown considerable distances after their pilots had ejected or died. This prompted a couple of our listeners to let us know about similar stories. Quintus Murray sent a link to one such story.

On December 6, 1997, a pilot in a little four-seat airplane took off from Great Bend, Kansas, and he was headed to Topeka. He set up his GPS navigation system for the flight, engaged the autopilot, and then apparently passed out from carbon monoxide poisoning. But the plane flew on by itself until it ran out of fuel, and it hit the ground in a hayfield in Cairo, Missouri, where it then skidded on its belly for about 525 feet before hitting a wire fence and then some small trees. While he was passed out? While he was apparently passed out, yeah. Although the plane was substantially damaged, the pilot miraculously only had minor injuries

himself. He eventually woke up really confused. He thought he was still airborne because he had no memory. Of landing. Right. He had no memory of anything that had happened, like past a certain point in the flight. So he thought he was still in the air and making an approach to the airport. But then he finally realized that, no, he was actually already on the ground, at which point he got out of the plane and walked to a farmhouse to try to get some

help. It turned out that the right muffler on his plane had a crack around one of its seams, and that had been allowing exhaust fumes into the airplane's cabin. The plane had actually been taken in recently for its annual inspection, but the pilot decided to fly it before the inspection had been completed. Okay. So I suppose there's a lesson in that about impatience or getting your annual inspections done completely. I wonder if that guy still flies. Yeah, I didn't know that. That's an interesting question. Claudio Ibarra also sent in a link to a story, this one about the Cornfield

bomber. This was a Convair F-106 Delta Dart that was being flown by Gary Faust on February 2nd, 1970. Faust had left the Maelstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls, Montana, just on a routine training flight, but his plane went into a spin during aerial combat maneuvers. Faust attempted to recover from the spin, but when he was unable to do that, he fired his ejection seat and left the plane at an altitude of about 15,000 feet. But apparently the reduction in weight and the change in the center of gravity just caused by his ejection actually caused the plane to successfully recover from the spin by itself. So apparently, you know, he's drifting down under his parachute and one of the other pilots on the mission has reported to a radio to him, you'd better get back

in it. So Faust was just only able to watch as his now pilotless aircraft descended and then skidded to a halt in a farmer's field near Big Sandy, Montana. Didn't crash. No. It just landed. Yeah. Faust came down in some nearby mountains and was later rescued by local residents. The airplane, surprisingly, was only really minimally damaged.

I mean, it apparently did a really good job of landing itself. And it's now on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force, I guess, for being a plane that landed itself. What are the odds? Maybe this kind of thing happens all the time. Yeah, maybe it does. And we just have been oblivious to it, sort of like eclipse chasing, the things you just don't know.

In episode 27, I discussed the remarkable Pacific Northwest tree octopus. This supposedly endangered species turned out to actually be a hoax dreamed up by education researchers to test whether middle schoolers could detect the deception. Mark Weitzenkamp wrote in to say, I am an academic advisor for undergraduate students, and on my wall I have two posters, both professionally framed, done in the WPA poster style of the 1930s. One of the posters is a scan

of a real WPA poster of a show done as part of the Federal Theater Project, and the other is the poster from the Save the Northwest Tree Octopus page. These have been on my wall for at least two or three years, and I have only had one or two students point it out as a joke. Mark goes on to say, even though there is a two-footall cephalopod in the middle of a tree, the poster has the same design and frame as the Federal Theater Project poster. It doesn't have indicators of untruth or humor. It's not that the students trust it, but rather that they have not been told to see it with untrust. Therefore, it's just another thing.

That's like a psychology experiment. Yeah, I guess it is. Literally framed the same way. Right. That's like a psychology experiment. Yeah, I guess it is. Literally framed the same way. Right.

Your podcast talks about young students being unable to see the Northwest Tree Octopus website as false. I think this is something that happens with all of us all the time. As social animals, we need to have a certain amount of trust in others in order to live around them. We build up a pocket of trust around us so we can maintain our activities of daily living. I'm reminded of studying abroad in the Czech Republic soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain. As young American students, it was hard for us to see the amount of very subtle indications of rebellion and disagreement that showed up in dissident literature from before the fall. We had grown up in an atmosphere where our pocket of trust was huge, and it generally extended to the government, the media, and the social support

network. The Czechs had a very narrow pocket of trust because they had grown up needing to parse their surroundings much more carefully to get their daily needs. That's a good point. It's an interesting point, though, because he's right. I mean, you can't walk around disbelieving or questioning everything you see all the time. That would be a very strenuous way to live. And nothing really teaches you to do that, especially if you grow up in America. I mean, maybe in other countries you're taught you need to do that. But on the other hand, then it maybe does make you too credulous to what you see on the Internet

or other people's stories that turn out to be false. But either way, you should be aware of sort of how you're calibrated to know how credulous you are or trusting. Also from episode 27, we heard from listeners about our story on Witold Poletzki, a Polish army captain who got himself sent to Auschwitz as a political prisoner in 1940 so that he could learn about what was taking place inside the camp. Poletzki is a national hero in Poland, but not really well-known outside of that country, so listeners familiar with his story said they were really glad to hear it being discussed. We like to help keep a live history

that does threaten to be forgotten, especially for people that really deserve wider recognition than they've received, like Pilecki. Yeah, he's certainly one of them. Yeah. We'll have links to the website on eclipse chasing and the two aviation stories in our show notes. You can find them at futilitycloset.com. Just click on the podcast

link in the sidebar if you don't see them. And thanks to everyone who has been responding to our shows. So if you have any questions or comments, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Okay, so this week it's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle, and I only get to ask yes or no questions to try to do so. This one is from Paul Sloan and Des McHale's 1994 book, Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles. Why did a man go to great trouble to bury in the desert 15 brand new Mercedes-Benz cars all greased and wrapped in plastic? I've stunned you. Was he trying to age them? No. Good guess.

Was he trying to hide them? Yes. Is it important who he was trying to hide them from? Yes. Is it important what country this takes place in? Yes. Did this take place in the U.S.? No.

Did this take place in an Asian country? No. Africa? No. Europe? No. Australia? No.

Antarctica? That would be very interesting, but no. What am I missing? India. No. Does it take place on one of the seven continents? Did I miss a continent? Yes.

Oh, South America. No. I missed South America. North America. No, I don't want to keep going. Okay. Do I need to figure out what country it's in or what desert it's in? What desert it's in?

Yeah, that would help. What desert? So I should focus on the desert and not the country? Either. Either or. I'm having trouble even figuring out what part of the world this is, though. Is it in Latin America? What we call Latin America?

No. I can't answer yes to anything you've asked so far. You can't answer yes? Oh, oh, oh. Is it on an island that's not part of a continent? Technically part of a continent somehow? You said he buried them in the desert. Yes.

In a desert that I've heard of, like the Gobi Desert, the Sahara Desert, like a desert with a name like that? Yes. Maybe to keep this moving along, I should just tell you where or give you a hint? No. My geography is apparently lacking here somewhere, and it's apparently... Oh, is it a desert that spans two continents? Yes.

Oh. lacking here somewhere and it's apparently oh is it a desert that spans two continents yes oh uh and a desert with a specific name that i've heard of go be your sahara one of those um i have to think of my deserts now um well you can focus on the why don't you focus on the continents or the okay is it partly in europe no partly in asia yes russia soviet union in Europe? No. Partly in Asia? Yes. Russia? Soviet Union? One of those? Either of those? Is the time period important? Yes. The time period's important. So it's a communist country? No. Okay. Was the time period important because this was the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union isn't there anymore? No. I feel like I'm so totally on the wrong track here. Okay. These are real full-size cars. Yes. And I need to know in what desert they were buried. And it's

partly in, I already forgot what I said, Asia. Partly in Asia. What of the continents is Africa? The Sahara Desert, the Gobi Desert, the... I don't know my darn deserts. Go for, go for. Oh, the country. Yeah.

Egypt. Yes. Oh. Oh. He, uh, does this have something to do with the Suez Canal? No. Um, do I need to know where in Egypt? Like, was it near something important, like the pyramids or?

Uh, no. Yes, but I don't want to lead you in the wrong direction. Okay. Was the man burying them Egyptian? Does it matter? It doesn't. I suppose it doesn't matter. Was he doing this to avoid paying some sort of money, like tariffs or taxes or something like that? Yes. Was he intending that somebody else other than him would dig them up? Yes. Was he intending that they would be dug up as part of a specific event? No. Like the building of the Suez Canal?

No, no, no. He knew there was going to be an excavation of something or... Not, no. No, but he intended that somebody else would dig them up. Yes. Somebody related to him? I don't know. Possibly. Oh, somebody that he would instruct to do this? Yes. Okay, so it's not that he was intending that somebody would find them accidentally? That's right, yes. Okay, so he was going to instruct somebody else to dig these up after some period of time or some event had occurred? Correct. After some event had occurred? Yes.

The changing of the head of state? No. Some event that was going to occur in Egyptian history? I'll say yes. And that's why the time period is kind of important? Yes. Because some event occurred that, did they switch currencies? No.

I mean, I don't. Did they change how they tax cars or other goods? No. No. But was the law being passed or changed? No. No. And it's not that the government was changing.

There was going to be a change in the head of government that was going to be germane. That's right. No. No. And it's not that the government was changing. There was going to be a change in the head of government that was going to be germane. That's right, no. Oh, oh, oh, was the borders going to be changing so it was going to be one country and now it's going to be another country? Yes. Yes. Ah. That's enough. You basically got it.

Well done. So after the borders were going to change, the tax situation would be different. Basically, this is in the Sinai Peninsula between Israel and Egypt, which after the Six-Day War was controlled by Israel. But in this period, which was in the early 1980s, it was becoming clear that it would be handed back eventually to Egypt. So some smart guy, this is how Sloane McHale described it. This incident reputedly occurred during the war between Israel and Egypt. Because of import duties, Mercedes cars were much more expensive in Egypt

than in Israel. When Israel seized vast tracts of the Sinai desert, a clever Israeli businessman realized that the land would have to be handed back to Egypt after the war. By burying the cars, he effectively exported them when the border shifted without them actually moving. His Egyptian associates subsequently sold them at a handsome profit. Aha! So in a way,

that's like smuggling without actually moving anything. Yeah, very clever. This turns out, Sloan McHale say they aren't sure whether this was true, but I find that it actually was.

Here's a, I'll put a couple links to news stories of the time in the show notes, but here's just a few paragraphs from a Knight Ritter story. This is from February 6th, 1982. Hidden beneath the dunes and groves of the Sinai Desert Peninsula lie tons of treasure worth millions, luxury cars stolen in Israel for eventual resale in Egypt. After Israel returns the northern Sinai to Egypt on April 25th, the cars, mostly late model Mercedes and Volvos, will be shoveled out of

their sandy hiding places. Thieves will be spared the risk of trying to smuggle the cars across the heavily guarded border, and their capture on the teeming streets of Cairo and Alexandria will be far less likely than in Israel. Hmm. Very interesting. Okay, my geography was a little weak there, which gave me some troubles, but that was actually very interesting. Yeah, but you got the key surprisingly quickly. Well done. If anybody has a puzzle that they'd like to send in for us to try to use on a future show, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That wraps up another episode for us. If you'd like to help support our show so that we can continue to produce it,

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