Futility Closet - 032-The Wow! Signal

Episode Date: November 3, 2014

In August 1977, Ohio astronomer Jerry Ehman discovered a radio signal so exciting that he wrote "Wow!" in the margin of its computer printout. Arriving from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, the signal bore all the characteristics of an alien transmission. But despite decades of eager listening, astronomers have never heard it repeated. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll review the story of the "Wow! signal," which remains an intriguing, unexplained anomaly in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We'll also share some more nuggets from Greg's database of oddities and puzzle over why a man chooses to drive a long distance at only 15 mph. Sources for our segment on the Wow! signal: Robert H. Gray, The Elusive Wow, 2012. Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, "Searching for Interstellar Communication," Nature, Sept. 19, 1959. Frank White, The SETI Factor, 1990. David W. Swift, SETI Pioneers, 1990. David Darling, The Extraterrestrial Encyclopedia, 2000. Michael Brooks, 13 Things That Don't Make Sense, 2008. "Humanity Responds to 'Alien' Wow Signal, 35 Years Later," space.com, Aug. 17, 2012 (accessed Oct. 31, 2014). Notes and sources for our miscellany from Greg's notes: Iowa City's web page explains that Lyman Dillon plowed a furrow from Iowa City to Dubuque in 1839. The item on oil pit squids is from George Eberhart's 2002 book Mysterious Creatures. The squids were found in "oil-emulsion pits containing antifreeze, stripper, oil, and chemicals used in manufacturing plastic automobile bumpers." Eberhart cites Ken de la Bastide, "Creature in Plant 9 Pits," Anderson (Ind.) Herald Bulletin, March 5, 1997. Thanks to reader John McKenna for letter from the ancient Greek boy Theon to his father. It's from the Oxyrhynchus papyri, from the 2nd or 3rd century: Theon to his father Theon, greeting.  It was a fine thing of you not to take me with you to the city!  If you won't take me with you to Alexandria I won't write you a letter or speak to you or say goodbye to you; and if you go to Alexandria I won't take your hand nor ever greet you again.  That is what will happen if you won't take me.  Mother said to Archelaus, 'it quite upsets him to be left behind.' It was good of you to send me presents ... on the 12th, the day you sailed.  Send me a lyre, I implore you.  If you don't, I won't eat, I won't drink; there now! The item on William and Henry James is from Vincent Barry's 2007 book Philosophical Thinking About Dying. According to the Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages (2006), Gaff's command to Deckard in Blade Runner is Monsieur, azonnal kövessen engem bitte ("Sir, follow me immediately please"). The anecdote about Alfred Lunt and the green umbrella is from the Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theatre (2013). This week's lateral thinking puzzle comes from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's 1998 book Ingenious Lateral Thinking Puzzles. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, 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 32. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll learn about the Wow! Signal, a radio signal picked up by an Ohio telescope in 1977 that seemed to bear the signs of an alien intelligence.

We'll also offer some more nuggets from Greg's collection of oddities and puzzle over why a man chooses to drive a long distance at only 15 miles an hour. long distance at only 15 miles an hour. The WOW signal is a radio signal that was received by a telescope in Ohio in August 1977 that bears the hallmarks of a signal sent by an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization. But because it's only been received once and never duplicated, there aren't really any conclusions you can draw about it. It's just an anomaly, but it's a very intriguing one. The telescope was owned by Ohio State University.

It was called the Big Ear Telescope, and this is a radio telescope, not an optical one. So instead of looking at the sky, it's sort of listening to it. But the idea is that just by listening continuously to a wide range of radio frequencies, if there is a signal that comes in, we'll be able to hear it. This was, for 10 years, the only full-time project of its type, where you're just listening for alien signals. And for the most part, there's not a lot going on. What happens is radio telescopes are big,

so just picture a telescope that's just lying on the ground and looking passively at the sky and letting the Earth's rotation sort of sweep its gaze across the sky. And while it does that, it's listening on a whole range of radio frequencies. If you picture a long table with 50 AM radios lined up in a row with each one tuned to a different frequency, and then you just sit there with your clipboard and listen intently all day long to see what you can hear. For the most part, you don't hear much. There's some background noise, but generally there's not a lot of activity.

There's not actually a human, God forbid, who has to sit there with a pencil. I was going to say that would be an awful job. But there's a computer that hums along dutifully and every 12 seconds makes a note of what it's hearing. And then every few days a technician comes along and tears off a printout and takes it to an astronomer to look at. In August 1977, he took it to an astronomer named Jerry Amon, who sat down at his kitchen table and looked over the printout. And what he saw really struck him. He said it was the strangest signal

he'd ever seen. And he wrote the word wow in the margin of the printout. That's where this signal gets its name. What had happened was three days earlier at 11.15 p.m., the computer had been scanning the sky looking toward the region of the constellation Sagittarius when a signal came in on the second channel, which was unusual for a whole list of reasons, which I'll go through here now. The first is it was very strong. for a whole list of reasons, which I'll go through here now. The first is it was very strong.

Normally, you wouldn't get a reading higher than about 4 or 5. It's significant if you go above that. But here, successively in the second channel, these are at 12-second intervals, it went 6, 14, 26, 30, 19, and 5. That 30 was the highest power signal the telescope had ever recorded, and statistically you wouldn't expect that to occur by chance in thousands of years. Second, it was a narrow band. Usually if there's a natural radio source,

it'll be reflected in a wide range of frequencies, and this was focused down at that second channel, which is unusual. It's only about 10 kilohertz wide, about the width of an AM radio station. And that's very unusual for a natural signal. It feels more artificial than that. It was also intermittent. The way the telescope worked is actually looking at sort of two windows in the sky. You can think of it as two searchlight beams, twin searchlight beams. So normally, if the first beam encounters something, the second one should follow along and encounter the same thing about three minutes later. In this case, that didn't happen. The first one encountered it, and then the second one didn't encounter anything.

That wasn't through a malfunction of the telescope. It just wasn't there. So it has this sort of intermittent on-off quality, which also feels artificial. That's, again, not something that you'd expect to find in a natural radio source. But, oh, also it was apparently from a remote source. It was, whatever this was, it was sort of fixed with respect to the stars. So the reason the signal rises and then falls is that as the telescope is sweeping smoothly across the sky, it sort of encountered this steady continuous incoming signal, swept onto it, and then swept off again.

That's why it rises and falls. So it's not something close at hand. It's more likely further out in the solar system or perhaps even further out than that. The closest star, if you just go out in the direction the telescope was looking, is 220 light years away. So it could be as far as that, I suppose, but or something in between, we don't really know. But that's not even the most exciting part of this.

18 years earlier, two Cornell physicists named Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Coccioni had published a paper in the journal Nature saying, you know, someday we might receive a message sent by an alien civilization and it might be smart to spend some time now trying to imagine what that might look like so we'll have a better chance of recognizing it if it comes in. And they did, I just think this is a clever bit of reasoning. If you do radio astronomy like we're doing now, our civilization is doing now, one of the things you figure out is that it's very productive to do work on what's called the hydrogen line, which is about 1420 megahertz. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe,

and you can learn a lot about the structure of the cosmos by studying that one frequency. And because all the civilizations that are in this universe that have developed radio astronomy, they're all studying hydrogen, so they're all going to be looking at that one frequency. If you're a big sophisticated alien intelligence that wants to send an overture that wants to reach out to other civilizations, you'd be smart then to do it at 1420 because that's sort of the party line in this universe. You know, that's the frequency that anyone who's doing astronomy is going to be looking at. So that was their prediction in 1959. They said, we should be looking for a strong narrowband signal at 1420 megahertz.

And that's exactly what the wow signal came in on. If you think again of this table of 50 radios, it came in on channel two, which is unlikely to happen by chance, but that was set at 1420. So the signal, that's why Jerry Amon wrote wow in the margin. This had all the hallmarks that we had predicted in advance that an intelligent alien signal would bear. So that's why he was excited about this and why it got so much attention and still does now. The problem is that it hasn't been repeated, so it's kind of frustrating. We can't draw any conclusions about what to make of it. If you're a good scientist, your first duty is to try to knock down your own hypothesis.

So that's the first thing the folks, the astronomers at Ohio State tried to do. And they spent months at this. They looked for satellites or spacecraft that account for this signal, but they didn't find any. There are a lot of, you can come up with a lot of theories that are simpler to explain what they saw. For instance, perhaps we sent out a terrestrial signal that bounced off some space debris and came back to us. That was the first thing Jerry Amon thought of. Or maybe there's a malfunction in the telescope. Maybe it's a space probe we'd already put out there ourselves. But none of these stands up to scrutiny. They checked for

star catalogs for sun-like stars in that area. There weren't many space probes up at that time. Voyager hadn't quite lifted off yet. If this happened today, it would be a lot more difficult because there's a lot more confounding signal sources out there now, but it was relatively simple in 1977. So that wasn't a problem. And basically no one's ever been able to find an explanation of a terrestrial source that could explain this. It really does seem like a signal that came from out there somewhere and that matches all these hallmarks of some sort of alien source. The problem is that we only have the one observation. sort of alien source. The problem is that we only have the one observation. They spent months listening again in the same direction at the same frequency and didn't get another repeat of the signal. And people have tried more than a hundred times since then listening earnestly to the sky,

and it's never been repeated, which means there's a really limited conclusion you can make about that. I mean, if you're fishing and there's a tug on your fishing line and you pull it up and there's nothing there, there's not a lot you can say about that with just one observation. I mean, there's just the fact of the tug itself. But unless you get multiple reports, you can't really start to put two and two together. So no one doubts that the signal was received, but it's sort of regarded as an anomaly. Now, no one knows what to make of it until we receive another signal. There's just no way to make anything of it, which is kind of unfortunate. It's possible, too, that it's some natural source that we don't know anything about yet.

Paul Shook at the SETILE has said, either the wow signal was the intercepted radiation from another civilization, or it's a previously undiscovered astrophysical phenomenon. Either possibility is mind-boggling. So even if it's just a natural source,

We still want to know more about it. It's a fascinating one because it doesn't resemble anything that we've seen before. So that's where it stands now. This was 35 years ago, but, uh, it's still, uh, a puzzle and still probably the most famous signal in, uh, the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Um, and, and as I say, until it's very intriguing, but until

we receive another, uh, similar signal, we won't be able to begin to understand what to make of it. I guess I should say explicitly, just to be super clear here, no one is saying this is definitely the sign of an extraterrestrial signal. We're not entitled to say that yet. What we really need is more information. And that's why I think programs like this are so important to fund. It's easy for politicians to cut programs like this because they sound frivolous and admittedly it

is a long shot but they don't cost much and if we do find some conclusive evidence of an extraterrestrial intelligence it would be the you know the most momentous event in the history of our own civilization by far so it's it's something that we should definitely still keep continuing to do i'll give the last word to uh morrison koccioni, way back in 59, in that seminal paper in Nature where they surmised about what an alien signal might look like. They closed it with this paragraph. The reader may seek to consign these speculations wholly to the domain of science fiction.

We submit, rather, that the foregoing line of argument demonstrates that the presence of interstellar signals is entirely consistent with all we know now, and that if signals are present, the means of detecting them is now at hand. Few will deny the profound importance, practical and philosophical, which the detection of interstellar communications would have. We therefore feel that a discriminating search for signals deserves a considerable effort. The probability of success is difficult to estimate, but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.

We'll have a photograph of the original WOW signal printout in our show notes at futilitycloset.com. Okay, here's another list of random items from my notes. The webpage of the city of Iowa City, Iowa says, most roads in the area were little more than trails until 1839 when Lyman Dillon plowed a furrow from Iowa City to Dubuque, and a federal road was constructed following that furrow. Dubuque Road marks a remnant of the Dillon's Furrow Route, which was also known as the Old Military Road. That's alarming to me because the distance between the modern cities of Iowa City and Dubuque is 84 miles, which seems to mean that Lyman Dillon plowed a furrow for 84 miles in 1839. I don't think I can be right about that, but I'm not able to make more sense of it. If there's any Iowans who listens to this and know anything about that, please let me know.

It's on the Iowa City website, but I haven't been able to confirm it anywhere else. Oil pit squids. Hello. Would you like to know about oil pit squids? Yes. In George Eberhard's 2002 book, Mysterious Creatures, which is basically a roundup of cryptozoology findings, he mentions something that happened in 1996 at an auto assembly plant in Anderson, Indiana, or at least they make plastic automobile bumpers there. And he writes, on November 15th, 1996, workers cleaning out a sludge pit at the GMC Delphi Interior and Lighting Plant in Anderson, Indiana, found many squid-like animals swimming in the toxic liquid. One of the animals was caught and preserved in a jar,

though it disappeared in December before officials could send it away for testing. No further specimens were found when the pit was inspected and cleaned on March 7th and 12th, 1997. Speculation ranged from mutated earthworms to bizarre bacterial growth. I haven't been able to confirm that anywhere. He cites, apparently this made the front page of the Anderson-Herald Bulletin on March 5th, 1997 in a story called Creature in Plant 9 Pits. But I haven't been able to confirm it anywhere so it's

just sat languishing in my notes. If anyone in Indiana knows anything about squid-like creatures and hasn't been devoured by a monster, maybe that's why I haven't heard about this, they've all been devoured by monsters. It seems like the Midwest is a lot more eventful than I remember it being. Well to me it seems, we did a thing on Google Notes way, way back.

Yeah. It seems like oil pit squids should have been a Google Note, but apparently it wouldn't be. In the book Philosophical Thinking About Dying, Vincent Barry writes that William James, the American psychologist, asked his brother, the novelist Henry James, to occupy his house for one year after his death in order to field any messages he might send from the beyond, and that Henry actually did this. He didn't receive any messages, but apparently spent a year in his dead brother's house to see if he could receive any. I haven't been able to confirm that either.

Apparently this is related to William's essay, Human Immortality, Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine, but I haven't been able to confirm it in any biographies of either of them. It reminds me of, I'd written back in 2006 on Futility Closet, about Harry Houdini, who spent a lot of time debunking spiritualists. He worked out a deal with his wife, Bess. They'd set up a prearranged coded message so that after he died, he could send it to her from beyond the grave. And she checked in, kept a candle burning,

and held a seance every Halloween to test that pact and never got a message from him. So finally, after 10 years, she gave up. If he sent it, she never got it. That's a little confusing, though. If he believed that there wasn't anything beyond the grave, he would be defeating himself by sending a message from beyond the grave. Harry would? Yeah, he would have been disproving his own... That's true, but i guess he'd

want to magnanimously admit that he was wrong i see just to show her yeah i guess yeah maybe he was just being petulant and withholding right it's like well i could send her a message but you know that would disprove everything i'd worked for that's true uh in blade runner gaff's command to deckard monsieur as an all covationvetion engem bitte, which means, sir, follow me immediately, please, that one sentence begins in French, continues in Hungarian, and concludes in German. This is according to the Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages. Apparently, this is a polyglot language called city speak that evolves in Los Angeles. By the way, Blade Runner is set in Los Angeles in 2019,

so if you live in L.A., get ready, because your city is going to look like that in five years. Hmm. The Flying Dutchman Bottle. This is a bottle that circled the Earth in the early 1930s. In 1929, a German scientific team threw a bottle into the sea in the southern Indian Ocean. Inside the bottle was a message that said, hey, if you find this bottle, please let us know where you found it and then throw it back into the sea. And so that way they could trace where it went. They threw it into the Southern Indian Ocean in 1929. It apparently drifted east. It was discovered at the southern tip of South America, where a number of people found it and flung it back successively

into the sea. And it finally got past South America, apparently crossed the Atlantic, past South Africa, and then the Atlantic, passed South Africa, and then found its way back to the Indian Ocean, past the spot where it had started. And then in 1935, it fetched up on the west coast of Australia. So in 2,447 days, which is about six and a half years, it had covered 16,800 nautical miles, an average of 6.8 miles a day, which is a lot. I'm surprised a bottle could stay floating, you know, let alone, you know, at all for six and a half years.

It didn't smash or anything, yeah. So I think that's some kind of record for bottle floating. Congratulations. Green umbrella, this is new to me, is apparently a U.S. theatrical term for a prop, a mannerism, or some other detail that gives an actor a window into a character. This is from the Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theater. Apparently it originates with the American actor Alfred Lunt,

who had been cast in 1927 to play Professor Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion, but was having trouble figuring out how to interpret the role. According to his wife, Lynn Fontaine, her husband suddenly sat up in bed one night exclaiming, I'll carry a green umbrella! Have I ever done that? No, I'm just imagining lying sleeping next to somebody who sits up and exclaims that. It's like, wow. Anyway, he was delighted.

Apparently that was the answer to, I'm not an actor, I don't know how this works. Apparently that was a big breakthrough for him. And he continued using it. That was in 27, 10 years later, during rehearsals for Girardot's Amphitryon. At the Schubert Theater on Broadway, Lunt called the cast together to announce that the play was off because, quote, I can't find the green umbrella. His wife, who was sitting near the footlights, reassured the cast, don't worry, we'll go on, he will find it. Half an hour later, Lunt returned to announce delightedly that the umbrella had been found and the show would go on. And finally, I've got thanks to reader John McKenna sent in a letter that an ancient Greek boy sent to his father.

We don't know exactly when. It's either the 2nd or the 3rd century. This is from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. This is just a letter from some anonymous ancient Greek boy to his father. It just seemed familiar to me. Theon to his father Theon, greeting. It was a fine thing of you not to take me with you to the city. If you won't take me with you to Alexandria, I won't write you a letter or speak to you or say goodbye to you. If you go to Alexandria, I won't take your hand nor ever greet you again. That is

what will happen if you won't take me. Mother said to Archelaus, it quite upsets him to be left behind. It was good for you to send me presents on the 12th, the day you sailed. Send me a lyre, I implore you. If you don't, I won't eat, I won't drink, there now. So some things never change. Yeah, it does seem like, yeah, human nature doesn't change as markedly as we would like to think it would over so many centuries. Yeah. If you can shed any light on squids or anything else here that I haven't been able to answer, I'd be grateful to hear from you. You can reach us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. If you usually listen to our podcast, you've probably picked up on the fact that there's

a Futility Closet book. I'm sure we've managed to mention it a time or two here and there. But what you might not know is our big news this week is that there's now a second Futility Closet book. Futility Closet 2, a second trove of intriguing tidbits. Just in time to give as a gift for those people on your list that are just impossible to buy for, or as a gift for yourself. Like the first book, it's filled with hundreds of little chunks of mental candy, a mix of quirky oddities and curiosities, funky inventions, nifty words,

and brain-teasing puzzles, perfect for whenever you need a few minutes of mental entertainment. Both books are available now on Amazon, so be sure to check them out. This week, Greg's going to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. He only gets to ask yes or no questions, and he has to try to figure out a situation that I'm going to present to him. This week, dear, your puzzle comes from Paul Sloan and Des McHale's 1998 book, Ingenious Lateral Thinking Puzzles. Okay.

Are you ready to be ingenious? We'll find out. Why does a man drive his car on a long journey at a steady 15 miles per hour? The speed limit is well above that, and his car is in full working order and capable of high speeds. Okay. By car, you mean a car, what I think of as a car, an automobile? Yes. And he's driving it, meaning he's behind the wheel and it's not mounted on a truck or something? Correct. That would be clever, but no.

Okay. In a long journey, do I need to know in particular where he's going? No. A long road journey? Yes. Like he could be on a highway, for example? Yes. And the posted speed limit is much higher than 15 miles per hour? Yes. By miles per hour, I mean miles per hour. I mean, that's what I think of. Yes. So he's actually traveling at that rate relative to the road he's on. Yes. Is there anything more I need to know about the car? No. The car is capable of driving faster than that? Yes. Is there anyone else I need to know about? No. Do I need to know his occupation? Yes. Ah. I need to know his occupation. Usually this doesn't go so well. Okay.

Is he a professional driver? No. Like, say, a taxi driver or a race car driver? No. Is he a criminal? No. Okay. Is the car like an ordinary passenger's would you say civilian car another he doesn't

he doesn't normally use this car in connection with his occupation that is correct he does not normally use this car in connection with his occupation i'm trying to make sure i've answered it correctly okay so he's he's not performing his job while he's driving the car. I can't quite answer that. I'm not sure I can answer that. Okay. Is it a white-collar job? No.

Is he... Do I need to know the geographic location? No. Or the setting? No. Is this in the desert or the mountains or something? Doesn't matter. And you say you can't quite say whether he's doing his job while he's driving the car. Right.

And it's an ordinary car. There's nothing. It's an ordinary car. Is he trying to buy time? Is he trying to. No. Go slowly. Is he aware that he could be driving faster than this?

Yes. Are there other people involved? No. There aren't other people on the road that I need to know about? No. Is the car's slow speed causing any problems that I need to know about? I mean, there's not a traffic jam or something. Correct.

That's a question I should ask. You say the speed limit is higher. Are there obstructions? Is there something preventing him from driving faster than this no he could drive he could just hit the gas and speed up yes is he pulling something is there some other vehicle involved no all right then i need to know his occupation and you say there aren't other people involved there are not other people involved okay i'm intrigued by the fact that you say you can't tell me whether he's doing his job or not. I guess you could say he is.

Let's say he is. If I had to go one way or another, I'll go with that. But he's not a professional driver. He's not a professional driver. Is he? But what he's doing, let's say what he's doing is in the service of his occupation. Let's say that. All right.

And you said there aren't other people involved. Does he normally work in one location? Uh, yeah, I, I, I would say, yeah, he's not like a salesman or something who travels. Correct. Um, I can't remember whether you said he's traveling. I mean, he's traveling to get to another location, obviously. Right, yes. And it's a long distance. Yes. He's not a criminal.

You said he's not a white-collar worker. Would you say he's... Would it be productive for me to figure out where he's going? No. Is he fleeing? No. Is he moving? Yes. I mean, is he changing locations permanently?

Yes. He is? Yes. From one, say, city to another? Possibly. He is? Yes. From one, say, city to another? Possibly. Because something has happened in his recent past? Irrelevant.

Okay, but moving permanently. He's not just visiting somebody he doesn't plan to return? Correct. Is there more in the history that I need to know about? No. I know you hit these dead ends and it's like, what else can I ask? Work on his occupation. Does he work? Okay, we said he's a blue collar worker then you would say?

I don't know. I don't know what the technical definitions of those are, so I'm not sure what this would classify as. Okay. Does he work in a building? No. He works outdoors? Yes. Is he involved in agriculture?

Probably not. My definitions are fuzzy here, but... Okay. He works outdoors, though? Yes. Man, though. Yes. Man, it's funny. It's hard to narrow this down. Aren't there games you have to play

where you just have to guess somebody's occupation or something? Yeah. There's probably standard questions or something. Does he work in the city? No. In the country? Yes. He works in the country.

Is he a farmer? No, I don't think you'd call him that, no. Does he work with living things? Yes. With animals? Yes. In the country, but he's not a farmer. Correct.

I don't think you'd call him that, no. Does he run a ranch? No. Is he a veterinarian no does he raise animals yes does he raise one particular breed of animal yes livestock no not like cows or horses or correct not like that. Animals that are native to the United States? Yes, I think so. Somebody might correct me on this, but I think so. Okay. Domesticated animals? I mean, he's not like a zookeeper? That's correct. He's not like a zookeeper.

So he's raising large numbers of one particular species of animal. Yes. Mammals? No. Not mammals? Not mammals. Reptiles? No, no.

Amphibians? No. Birds? Nope. What am I running out of here? Insects? Yes. He raises large numbers of insects in the country and he's driving a car.

He's a beekeeper. Yes, yes. So why is he driving at 15 miles an hour? Is he transporting bees? Not exactly. He's fleeing bees? There's been some horrible disaster? He's fleeing at 15 miles an hour.

No, no, he's not fleeing. Because there is something about transporting bees I read recently. Yeah, I guess it depends what you mean by transporting. Are there bees in the car? On the car? Is he hauling bees in a trailer? No. Are bees traveling with the car?

Yes. Bees are traveling with the car. Are they flying? Yes. Bees are flying along with the car yes bees are traveling with the car are they flying yes bees are flying along with the car at 15 miles an hour i like this a lot i don't feel so bad it's taking us seven minutes to get here yes a man is driving a car at 15 miles an hour surrounded by a cloud of bees yes yes because are they pursuing him? No. No, no, no. He's traveling with them. I like this. Yes, yes, yes.

Because they're all moving to a new beekeeping facility. Yeah, yeah. So he doesn't have bees, plural, in the car. What does he have in the car? He has the queen bee. He has the queen bee. And so why is he going 15 miles an hour? So the bees can keep up as he transports her.

Wow. That's a good puzzle. Yay. Terrific. If you have a puzzle that you'd like to see us try to use on the show, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's another episode for us. We want to thank everyone who's been donating to help support our show.

It takes us many hours each week to create this show, and we really rely on your support to keep it going. You can contribute by clicking on the Donate button on the sidebar of the website. You can also help us out by continuing to recommend us to others. If you're looking for more Futility Closet, check out the books on Amazon, or visit the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can sample over 8,000 captivating diversions, perfect for filling 5 minutes or 50. At the website, you can also see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes.

Just click podcast in the category list. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.