Futility Closet - 055-The Dyatlov Pass Incident

Episode Date: April 26, 2015

On February 1, 1959, something terrifying overtook nine student ski-hikers in the northern Ural Mountains. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll recount what is known about the incident at Dyatlov Pass and try to make sense of the hikers' harrowing final night. We'll also hear how Dwight Eisenhower might have delivered the Gettysburg Address and puzzle over why signing her name might entitle a woman to a lavish new home. Sources for our feature on the Dyatlov Pass incident: Donnie Eichar, Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident, 2013. "Yuri Yudin," Daily Telegraph, April 30, 2013, 25.   Here's the investigators' description of the hikers' tent as it was discovered: "Tent site is located on the Northeastern slope of mountain 1079 (Kholat Syakhl official term) meters at the mouth of river Auspiya. Tent site is located 300 meters from the top of the mountain 1079 with a slope of 30°. Test site consists of a pad, levelled by snow, the bottom of which are contains 8 pairs of skis (for tent support and insulation). Tent is stretched on poles and fixed with ropes. On the bottom of the tent 9 backpacks were discovered with various personal items, jackets, rain coats, 9 pairs of shoes. There were also found men's pants, and three pairs of boots, warm fur coats, socks, hat, ski caps, utensils, buckets, stove, ax, saw, blankets, food: biscuits in two bags, condensed milk, sugar, concentrates, notebooks, itinerary and many other small items and documents, camera and accessories to a camera. The nature and form of all (...) lesions suggest that they were formed by contact with the canvas inside of the tent with the blade of some weapon (presumably a knife)." This is the final exposure in hiker Yuri Krivonishchenko's camera. Possibly the image was exposed on the final night, or possibly weeks afterward, inadvertently, by technicians. Lead investigator Lev Ivanov wrote that the hikers' cameras gave him "abundant information based on negative density, film speed ... and aperture and exposure settings," but that they did not "answer the main question -- what was the reason of escape from the tent." Here's journalist Oliver Jensen's rendering of the Gettysburg Address in "Eisenhowese." Jensen provided his original to Dwight Macdonald for his 1961 collection Parodies: An Anthology. "The version below is the original as given me by Jensen, with two or three variations in which The New Republic's version [of June 17, 1957] seemed to me to have added a turn of the screw": I haven’t checked these figures but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country, I believe it covered certain Eastern areas, with this idea they were following up based on a sort of national independence arrangement and the program that every individual is just as good as every other individual. Well, now, of course, we are dealing with this big difference of opinion, civil disturbance you might say, although I don’t like to appear to take sides or name any individuals, and the point is naturally to check up, by actual experience in the field, to see whether any governmental set-up with a basis like the one I was mentioning has any validity and find out whether that dedication by those early individuals will pay off in lasting values and things of that kind. Well, here we are, at the scene where one of these disturbances between different sides got going. We want to pay our tribute to those loved ones, those departed individuals who made the supreme sacrifice here on the basis of their opinions about how this thing ought to be handled. And I would say this. It is absolutely in order to do this. But if you look at the over-all picture of this, we can't pay any tribute -- we can't sanctify this area, you might say -- we can't hallow according to whatever individual creeds or faiths or sort of religious outlooks are involved like I said about this particular area. It was those individuals themselves, including the enlisted men, very brave individuals, who have given this religious character to the area. The way I see it, the rest of the world will not remember any statements issued here but it will never forget how these men put their shoulders to the wheel and carried this idea down the fairway. Now frankly, our job, the living individuals’ job here, is to pick up the burden and sink the putt they made these big efforts here for. It is our job to get on with the assignment -- and from these deceased fine individuals to take extra inspiration, you could call it, for the same theories about the set-up for which they made such a big contribution. We have to make up our minds right here and now, as I see it, that they didn’t put out all that blood, perspiration and -- well -- that they didn’t just make a dry run here, and that all of us here, under God, that is, the God of our choice, shall beef up this idea about freedom and liberty and those kind of arrangements, and that government of all individuals, by all individuals and for the individuals, shall not pass out of the world-picture. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was submitted by listener Tyler St. Clare (conceived by his friend Matt Moore). 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. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and all contributions are greatly appreciated. You can change or cancel your pledge at any time, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation via the Donate button in the sidebar of the Futility Closet website. 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]. And you can finally follow us on Facebook and Twitter. 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 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 55. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. On February 1st, 1959, something terrifying overtook nine student ski hikers in the northern Ural Mountains. In today's show, we'll recount what is known about

the incident at Dyatlov Pass and try to make sense of the hikers' harrowing final night. We'll also hear how Dwight Eisenhower might have delivered the Gettysburg Address and puzzle over why signing her name might entitle a woman to a lavish new home. Our podcast is supported primarily by our fantastic patrons. If you like Futility Closet and want to help support the show so we can keep on making it, check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or look for the link in our show notes. at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or look for the link in our show notes. Okay, the Dyatlov Pass incident. A number of readers have requested this one. To my mind,

it's sort of a king of all unsolved mysteries. There's something very peculiar happened to a group of nine ski hikers in the Soviet Union in 1959, and to this day, no one understands what it was. I'll try to give the facts here as accurately as I can, but I have no idea myself what happened to them. The nine skiers were all graduates or students of the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk in the Soviet Union. And they were all already Category 2 hikers, which means they were experienced and were in fact on this trip trying for Category 3. The route they had planned out was to a mountain called Mount Otorten in the northern Urals, which is in western Russia. And that was Category 3, which is the most difficult category.

So part of their goal in undertaking this hike was to show that they were worthy of that certification. And that's important because in order to practice good hiking, they wanted to show on this trip that they were showing prudence and forethought and planning and level-headedness and evaluating the consequences of their actions, all that stuff. And they did, as far as anyone can see, according to the diaries and the cameras of the whole trip up to the end there, it looked like they were really taking extra care. Doing everything right, yeah. Which is important. So I said there were nine.

Originally, there were ten who set out on January 27th from a town called Fiji going toward this Mount Otorten. But after one day, one of them, named Yuri Yudin, had to turn around and go back. He had injured his back on an earlier hike, and the pain was bothering him, and he thought it would be wisest just to turn back. As he went back, the leader of the group, Igor Dyatlov,

told him that just the timing looked like they might be a few days late in getting back from the hike and to please pass that along to the people at the school, which he promised to do. So no one was terribly surprised when the regular due date they'd announced came and went and they hadn't shown up. But more time passed and they still didn't arrive. And finally, on February 20th, the parents of the missing hikers demanded that the school send out a search party, which they did. How long had they been gone at that point? I guess that was about three weeks. At that time, it was close to three weeks. And it took a further six days for the volunteer rescuers to find

the campsite, which is as far as they'd gotten. It looks like the hikers had gotten as close as 10 kilometers to their final goal, and according to the diaries and just the records, this was on February 1st, 1959.

They got to a pass at the time was unnamed now it's called the Dyatlov Pass after Igor Dyatlov and pitched their tent on the side of a mountain there to spend the night and something happened

while they were on the mountain the rescuers found the tent which had been pitched according to regulations and seemed okay it contained food and provisions and clothing and all this was laid out tent, which had been pitched according to regulations and seemed okay. It contained food and provisions and clothing, and all this was laid out according to the conventions of hikers. That all looked fine, but there was no one in it. And most disturbing, someone had cut

their way out of the tent from the inside with a knife. Instead of going out the regular entrance. Right. There were footprints going down the mountain from there. It looked like all nine of the hikers had run down the mountain in their stocking feet. Their shoes were still found in the tent. One of them was wearing one shoe, apparently, from the footprints. The others were either barefoot or just wearing socks. According to the timing of this, they would have been doing this. They'd cut their way out of the tent and were running downhill after 9 p.m. on February 1st,

which meant it was bitterly cold outside. It was about 30 degrees below zero Celsius, which is about 22 below Fahrenheit. So terribly, terribly cold to be outside at all, let alone underclothed and unshot. They followed the footprints, which disappeared eventually, but if you continue in that direction northeast, so if you can picture this, there's a tennis on the side of the mountain. They go down the mountain, and then opposite on the other side of this pass, there are some woods. And they found the bodies of two of the hikers under a cedar tree at the edge of the wood there. They had apparently started a fire, but had frozen to death anyway.

Both of them had died of hypothermia. And strange to say, both of them were wearing little more than underwear. And they had been laid out in what looked like, it's commonly described as sort of a respectful position there laid out as as opposed to just died as opposed to just died in the fetal position or face down or something i mean it looked like like somebody someone had left them there and oh wow uh and then further investigation showed found three more of the hikers in a line between the cedar fire and the tent, two men and a woman, all lying with their heads toward the tent as if they had been trying to make their way back to the tent and had frozen to death. All three of them had died of hypothermia as well.

So that's altogether five of the nine hikers, and all of them so far have died of hypothermia. hikers, and all of them so far have died of hypothermia, finding the remaining four took another two months, and they were finally discovered further into the woods in a ravine about 450 feet from the cedar fire. Of those four in the ravine, it's sort of a creek at the bottom of the ravine, three of those had died of violent injury. One had a skull fracture and two had chest fractures. So they hadn't frozen to death like the others. The fourth had frozen to death, but it wasn't clear what had happened to bring all this about. Something terrible had happened shortly after 9 p.m. on February 1, 1959,

and everything seemed to have been going normally right up to that moment. So the puzzle is what happened. And just a further, if this wasn't strange enough, some of the clothing in the ravine was found, some of the clothing from the other hikers. From the other hikers that worked in the ravine was found some of the clothing from the other hikers. From the other hikers? Yeah, for instance, the woman who was found in the ravine was found on her foot was a piece of clothing that had belonged to Yuri Krivonishenko, who was one of the men who was by the fire under the cedar

tree. Someone had taken part of his clothing, a sweater, and wrapped it around her foot. the cedar tree. Someone had taken part of his clothing, a sweater, and wrapped it around her foot. Also, her tongue was missing. Oh. Which is an odd detail that keeps turning up again. Her tongue was missing. So now, that's what makes this whole thing so enigmatic, because there's just a thousand odd details like that that it's hard to come up with a theory that explains all of them. And the Soviets who investigated all this at the time didn't get far either. They spent a year looking into it and finally just wound up closing the file. The lead investigator, a man named Lev Ivanov, wrote in his final report that the hikers had died, he said, as a result of, quote, an unknown compelling force, which sounds mysterious and important. But if you think about it, what does that

even mean? It just says something happened and we're not able to understand what it was. And I will just say candidly, I don't either. Some of the other sort of mysterious things you and I have talked about recently, like the Roanoke Island from a couple weeks ago and Flan and Isles even earlier, officially no one knows what happened there either, but if you look at the facts, you can come up with a pretty good guess as to what probably happened. Or what at least could have happened that would be plausible. Yeah, and here, I just can't.

I don't have the foggiest idea what could have happened to explain everything that was found. A crazed maniac? Well, I will run down the theories here that are commonly advanced, and I'll just stipulate at the beginning, I don't know what the answer is myself, but here are some of the ideas that people have put forward. One is avalanche. That's the one that's probably most commonly put forward. The idea is that they pitched their tent on the side of a mountain, and perhaps in the night, snow came down. Either they'd heard it or had begun

to impinge on the tent. They feared for their lives and cut their way out. And that's, you know, as far as I know, that's actually what happened, but there seemed to be some good reason to suspect that maybe that's not it. First of all, the mountain they were on, calling it a mountain is kind of flattering. It's more a big, empty hill. There's no record of an avalanche on it, certainly before this and nothing after this incident in 1959. How would the woman have had a sweater from somebody else wrapped around her foot? Right, exactly.

There's always some odd details that don't get explained at all. A missing tongue and, yeah. The idea of an avalanche wasn't considered as a theory by the Soviet investigators at the time. And the tent, importantly, was found intact and secured to the ground and upright, even after, you know, in all the time it took after the students had died, and then the time it took for the rescue party to find it, they still discovered the tent upright. I should mention that the image you often see, and that I'll put in the show notes, of the investigators looking at the site of the tent, the tent's in much worse shape

than it was discovered. They'd cut into it with an ice axe, hoping to discover the hikers alive. So the tent was actually in much better shape than you tend to see it in the images. There was a lot of disturbing of the evidence because they were in such haste to try to find the victims that they'd messed up quite a few things that could have shed a lot of light on this, unfortunately. So Avalanche, you can make your own judgment about that. It seems to me at least maybe doubtful. Another idea is strong winds. Because of the evidence, it's known that while most of the hikers were in the tent at about 9 p.m. preparing dinner, two of them stepped outside to urinate briefly, and there's one thought that because they pitched the tent at the windiest point on the mountain that those two may have actually been blown off

the mountain, and the others hastened after them to try to help them, and all nine of them wound up getting blown all the way down the mountain. This just doesn't seem to have been the case. It looks like— Why would you cut your way out instead of just going out the entrance? And it looks like the winds that night were only about 40 miles an hour, which is very windy, but not windy enough to blow nine people down a mountain. Yeah.

And, in fact, one of the hikers who was found frozen to death on the slope of the mountain trying to get back up to the tent was wearing a ski cap, which doesn't seem consistent. You know, if you were blown off a mountain, you probably still wouldn't manage to keep the hat on your head. Again, I don't know what did happen, but that doesn't seem likely to be it. Third theory is that they were all attacked by the Mansi people, who is an indigenous group of people who live in that region. The theory here is that the Mansi were outraged that these foreigners had trespassed on their sacred grounds, and there's just no support for

that. They're not sacred grounds. The hill doesn't have any significant spiritual or otherwise to these people. And by all accounts, the Mansi are friendly and peaceful people. Also, there's no sign of a struggle or even of the presence of any of the people at the campsite. Oh, like no other footprints. I hadn't thought about that. Like they found the hikers' footprints, but they presumably didn't find anybody else's footprints. Yeah, there's a little asterisk on that because, again, they didn't follow the right procedures when they were discovered, so things got messed up. And different accounts say different things about whether other people's footprints were present.

But no one says they definitely were. They either say there were nine prints or we're not sure. But it doesn't seem like that's the case. If there weren't Mansi, another theory is that they were armed men of some other kind or escaped prisoners, but again, who attacked them or confronted them or something. But again, this just doesn't fit. There was no sign of a hand-to-hand struggle. The cuts in the tent came from the inside, and there were no reports of escaped prisoners from any of the surrounding camps, the closest of which was more than 50 miles away. Also, I'll just add, too, it seems to me unlikely that anyone or anything was abroad on a night

like this. If it was 30 below zero, you'd be risking your life to be out for any reason. I mean, the evidence of that is as soon as the students went outside, they froze to death quite quickly. It's just terribly dangerous to be outside for any reason that night. Orbs. I have to talk about orbs. Orbs? Yeah, there are reports of glowing and pulsating orbs in the sky in February and March of 1959,

which were seen by multiple witnesses in various locations. Which sounds very spooky. It seems like the most likely explanation for this is that they were rocket tests from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which was visible from the mountains. So not UFOs? Not UFOs. I mean, UFOs in the extent that they were flying, I just didn't want to identify. But nothing more than that. And it's unlikely, I think, that even if the hikers had been able to see those, that they'd be so frightened that they'd cut their way out of a tent. Oh, I thought you were implying that whatever was in the orbs had come and done strange things. Well, you can find people who will propose that.

Or that the students were frightened, they saw orbs and were frightened? Okay. Yeah. But that just doesn't seem likely. Again, you have to keep in mind that these were extremely experienced hikers and trying to be certified at an even higher level. Right. And they wouldn't want to risk their own lives for anything less than, you know, a really compelling reason. A true emergency. Yeah. Radiation. This is just an oddity. And this is reported variously in the various reports. Apparently, the Soviet investigators, for some reason, decided to measure the radiation levels of the various bodies

and found that some of their clothing had elevated levels of radiation. It's peculiar to begin with. That they would even think to do that? That they would think to do that, but they did. Okay. And it's not clear what elevated means. They weren't just apparently just screamingly hot, but somewhat higher. And this is so muddy that you can sort of make your own judgment about what to make of it.

This was the height of the Cold War. It's 1959. And so there had been testing that winter elsewhere. And it's possible that that in itself would be enough to raise some levels in that region just naturally. But in any case, no one of the hikers, most of them died either of hypothermia or of violent injuries. Not like radiation poisoning. Yeah. I bring this up because one of the theories is that the hikers had filed with the government their planned route for their hike.

But mistakes happen. And one theory is that they stumbled into some secret military testing range or some government business that they weren't supposed to know about, and they were silenced. That's kind of a conspiracy theory. Oh, is that why their tongue was cut out? Yeah, who knows? That tongue is just... That was very symbolic.

So that's the theory there, that there's some sort of government cover-up. Ah. Which is certainly possible. I would only add that it's hard to disprove a cover-up theory even if it's false. That's true. And I'm getting some of this from a book by Donnie Icar, who is an American television producer who just got fascinated with this whole story and went to Russia to report it and published a book in 2013 called Dead Mountain,

which I recommend if you're interested in this. Anyway, one of the things he found out is that under Soviet law, the government could legally have destroyed all the records associated with this case after 25 years, and they didn't, which kind of throws a wrench into the cover-up idea. Also, it's just not clear exactly what would have happened then. I mean, some people say maybe they stumbled into the testing of some new Soviet weapon that killed them mysteriously, or the government or the military just didn't want them there and contrived to find a way to have them be discovered dead.

It just sounds, I think, implausible, and there's no hard evidence really to support it. Again, there's not any clear evidence that there was anyone else there in the camp at all. So there are other theories. Here's a few others that I won't go through in detail. Just you can take your pick. Just other theories about what might have happened. Murder, death by shockwave or explosion, death by nuclear waste, UFOs or aliens, a yeti, a bear attack, or a freak winter tornado. Icar says, this is a good, I think a good summary of the whole

thing. Donnie Icar writes, I don't remember Sherlock Holmes ever mentioning what you're supposed to do when you've eliminated everything improbable and nothing is left. It's like you were saying about Yudmila's tongue. There are so many peculiar details that it's hard to think of a theory that accommodates all of them and doesn't sound contrived or, shall we say, imaginative, which is why I think this is the most mysterious of the mysteries I'm aware of in this type of story. In doing research through this, I find that everyone, including journalists and skeptics, goes through this whole story and then can't resist putting in their own pet theory at the end. They say, well, maybe one of them went crazy or whatever it is.

I don't have a pet theory. I can't think of anything that could explain all of this. The deeper you look into it, the less sense it makes. The second half of it, I think, does make sense. If you pick up the story from the point where they're running downhill on their stocking feet, everything, or nearly everything from that point on, can be explained just because of darkness and fear and bitter cold. Well, except for the missing tongue and the sweater wrapped around somebody else's foot the sweater possibly the tongue i guess i should say well i'll get i'll get to that later okay i think even the tongue i think i think what happened is the pathologist who was making notes of all this stuff noted things like the

tongue um the woman whose tongue was missing had been lying at the bottom of a wet ravine for three weeks before she was discovered oh so it so it's possible something ate her tongue? I mean, there are natural reasons to expect that might have done it. And so when noting it, he might not have been noting, wow, this is really strange and noteworthy. He might have just saying her tongue was missing. And that doesn't imply necessarily that there's anything particularly surprising about it. Like we don't know what the rest of the state of her body was in.

Right. So I think one way to make sense of all of this, and Donnie Acar writes out a lot of this, is if you pick up the point where they're running downhill in the darkness and apparently terrified of something. In the darkness, they get separated into different groups. Four of them run into the woods and not seeing the ravine fall into it. The ravine is 24 feet high.

That's like falling off a house. So that's the violence. That explains chest fractures and a skull fracture. Yeah, maybe. For three of them. One of them managed not to get injured in there, Alexander Kalevatov, climbs back out of the ravine

and manages to see the fire that two others have started under the cedar tree. Makes his way eventually to them, but finds by the time he gets there that despite the fire, they have frozen to death. there that despite the fire they have frozen to death and thinking okay they're frozen to death he can take their clothing now to try to help his friends back in the ravine and so he lays them out nicely lays them out nicely takes their clothing uh takes the clothing back to the ravine which explains how the sweater was tied around yudmila's foot and some other clothing

was found in the ravine okay but by that time his friends who have taken these grievous injuries are uh dead and dying of their injuries and he's exhausted and freezing by this time and eventually succumbs himself to hypothermia that all makes sense that leaves three others who were just variously lost in the darkness and were trying all three of them to make their way back to the tent and when they just froze to death in their tracks so then it's just what terrified them so strongly in the first place. Exactly. And that's just, for my money, a total dead end. Well, it would seem like something was coming in or was at the entrance of the tent, the normal entrance, so that they felt they had to cut their way out rather than go through

the normal opening. Yes. A swarm of bees. Yeah, a swarm of bees. A bear. Okay. I don't know. Maybe all nine of them took some kind of hallucinogenic drug and all hallucinated at the same time.

But there's nothing in the record that suggests they would have done something like that. And even if they had, the pathologist would have found traces of it. I thought maybe if one of them was a werewolf, that could explain almost everything. A vampire. But short of that, I can't think of anything. At the time, one of the Soviet search volunteers said, quote, only a threat of death can make people run barefoot at night from the only warm shelter. And I think that's true.

They must have been terrified of something, but it's very hard to see what. If you follow, it's really kind of poignant. Part of what was found in the tent were their cameras and journals and diaries, which show that not only was everything going fine, but there was not even any dissension. On the day before they'd started this little humorous newspaper with inside jokes, I mean, they were getting along fine. And as I say, they were cooking ham and cocoa inside the tent, and these two had just stepped inside. And then something changed from complete normalcy to just utter terror in an instant. And it's very hard to think what that could be.

If they'd heard a sound or seen a light outside the tent, you'd think they might have been frightened. Some of them might even have gone outside to investigate. To check it out. But you wouldn't cut open a hole in your only shelter and run outside, all nine of them, without one of them even pausing to hesitate or even to put on shoes, they would just all go running down the hill.

It's just very hard to imagine what could have led to that. I mentioned that ten people had started on this trip and one of them, Yuri Yudin, had turned around because of his back pain. He actually lived to 2013 and he spent the rest of his life wondering what happened. Wow. He told the New York Times, if I could ask God one question,

I'd ask him what happened to my friends that night. Yeah. And he died without ever knowing, as did their parents and families. And it looks like now, 50 years on, it seems unlikely that we'll ever find out what happened to them.

By all accounts, Warren G. Harding was the worst writer among American presidents. He could speak for an hour and you'd have no idea what he was trying to say or whether he was trying to say anything at all. H.L. Mencken said, He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. And when Harding died in 1923, E.E. Cummings wrote, The only man, woman, or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead. Being eloquent is part of a president's job.

You have to be able to rouse and inspire people, and you have to mark important moments in the nation's history with something like poetry. Another president who's especially bad at this, apparently, was Dwight Eisenhower. He was more articulate than Harding, but he spoke in a sort of deliberately non-controversial, dishwater, bureaucratic language that couldn't really inspire anyone to do anything. After going to a lot of Eisenhower's press conferences, a Washington journalist named Oliver Jensen began to wonder what the president would do if he were called upon to give a really stirring address, like, say, the Gettysburg Address, where Abraham Lincoln had honored the soldiers who had fallen in battle and rallied the country to continue the fight to preserve the Union. finally typed up a new version of this speech as if Eisenhower had delivered it. At first, he circulated this just among his friends, but eventually it got out into general circulation,

and the New Republic published it in June 1957. So presumably Eisenhower eventually saw this, but we don't know what he thought of it. Anyway, here it is from Oliver Jensen, the Gettysburg Address as delivered by Dwight Eisenhower. I haven't checked these figures, but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental setup here in this country. I believe it covered certain eastern areas. With this idea, they were following up based on a sort of national independence arrangement, and the program that every individual is just as good as every other individual.

Well, now, of course, we're dealing with this big difference of opinion, civil disturbance, you might say, although I don't like to appear to take sides or name any individuals. And the point is naturally to check up by actual experience in the field to see whether any governmental setup with a basis like the one I was mentioning has any validity, and find out whether that dedication by those early individuals will pay off in lasting values and things of that kind. Well, here we are at the scene where one of these disturbances between different sides got going. We want to pay our tribute to those loved ones, those departed individuals who made the supreme sacrifice

here on the basis of their opinions about how this thing ought to be handled. And I would say this, it is absolutely in order to do this. But if you look at the overall picture of this, we can't pay any tribute. We can't sanctify this area, you might say. We can't hallow according to whatever individual creeds or faiths or sort of religious outlooks are involved, like I said, about this particular area. It was those individuals themselves, including the enlisted men, very brave individuals, who have given this religious character to the area. The way I see it, the rest of the world will not remember any statements issued here, but it will never forget how these men put their shoulders to the wheel and carried this idea down the fairway. Now, frankly,

our job, the living individual's job here, is to pick up the burden and sink the putt they made these big efforts here for. It is our job to get on with the assignment and from these deceased fine individuals to take extra inspiration, you could call it, for the same theories about the setup for which they made such a big contribution. We have to make up our minds right here and now, as I see it, that they didn't put out all that blood, perspiration, and, well, that they didn't just make a dry run here, and that all of us here, under God, that is, the God of our choice, shall beef up this idea about freedom and liberty and those kind of arrangements, and that government of all individuals, by all individuals, and for all individuals, shall not pass out of the world picture.

This week it's my turn to try to think fast and to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle that Greg's going to present to me. What do I get this week? This puzzle was submitted by Tyler St. Clair. Actually, it was conceived by his friend Matt Moore. And it goes like this. A woman signs her name on a document, and a few months later, she moves into a richly furnished new home for free. How? Okay.

A woman signs her name. So she actually puts her name on a document. Yes. Not a different name. Right. Okay. A woman signs her name. So she actually puts her name on a document. Yes. Not a different name. Right. Okay. An earth woman, an adult female living on earth. Did this really happen? Yes. To a real person?

Yes. Not like a fictional thing? Okay. Wow. Okay. Signs her name on a document. A single sheet of paper? Yes. Paper? Yes. Probably one piece of paper, not like a sheaf of papers or something. Yes.

One piece of paper. A check? No. Be easy. Yeah. I mean, it's like she wins the lottery, she the check i got it um signs her name oh oh is she a famous woman um yes i have to kind of dance around this okay it's a woman yes okay a single woman you mean unmarried no no uh one person she's not a twin or a group of people or no yeah just one woman okay but that's a raises a good point i mean is she married to someone important

unimportant unimportant does she have any relationship with somebody else that i need to know about to solve this puzzle uh like an important relationship with somebody else no i'm gonna say no okay is she sort of famous in her own right? Yes. Okay. Is this a woman that is still alive today? Well, that's why I'm dancing. Oh.

This has happened more than once. So I'm sort of addressing the general situation. The general, I see. I'm not thinking of any one specific person. Okay. Okay, that's why I was trying to come up with, like if she's sort of famous and she signs her signature, then she could make something be worth more money just by putting her signature on it.

I understand. No, it's not that. It's not that. Okay. So this document, would you say it's a legal document? Yes. Okay. Was the document issued by a government source?

Yes. Some government source? Yes. Some government source? Okay. Is it important what the document is? Should I be pursuing this? It is, but I think... That's not the best way to go about it. I think it's not the best way.

I mean, you'd get there, but it would be tricky to figure out. Okay, so what else do I know? She signed her name on a document, and then a few months later, she moves into a really... Oh, did she get elected something? Yes. She's elected something, and that's why she moves into this really nice house, because she was elected, I don't know, governor, and there's a governor's state mansion or something.

That's exactly right. You just leapt from square three to square 99. I did. She was voting on election day and then was elected governor and moved into the governor's mansion. Well done. Oh, wow. So thank you, Tyler,

and I guess thank you, Matt Moore, for sending the puzzle. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to use, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's another show for us. If you're looking for more Futility Closet, you can check out our books on Amazon.

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