Futility Closet - 063-The Rainmaker

Episode Date: June 28, 2015

In 1915 San Diego hired "rainmaker" Charles Hatfield to relieve a four-year drought. After he set to work with his 23 secret chemicals, the skies opened and torrential rains caused some of the most extreme flooding in the city's history. In this week's podcast we'll discuss the effects of "Hatfield's flood" and ponder how to assign the credit or blame. We'll also puzzle over why a flagrant housebreaker doesn't get prosecuted. Sources for our feature on "moisture accelerator" Charles Hatfield: Garry Jenkins, The Wizard of Sun City, 2005. Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, 2015. "Hatfield Made the Sky Fall (and Fall)," Kingman [Ariz.] Daily Miner, Nov. 14, 1978. "Hatfield Again Gambling Upon Making of Rain," Berkeley [Calif.] Daily Gazette, Jan. 29, 1926. "Rainmaker Wins Bet With Farmers," Ellensburg [Wash.] Daily Record, July 28, 1921. "With the Rainmaker," Dawson [Yukon] Daily News, July 4, 1905. "Rainstorms at $50 Each," St. John [New Brunswick] Daily Sun, March 8, 1904. This week's first lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Hanno Zulla, who sent these corroborating links (warning: these spoil the puzzle). The second puzzle is from Edward J. Harshman's 1996 book Fantastic 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. 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]. You can also 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 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 63. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1915, San Diego hired rainmaker Charles Hatfield to relieve a four-year drought.

He set to work with 23 secret chemicals, and the rains that followed caused some of the worst flooding in the city's history. In today's show, we'll describe Hatfield's flood and ponder how to assign the credit or blame for it. We'll also puzzle over why a flagrant housebreaker might not be prosecuted. Our show is brought to you by our magnificent patrons. If you like Futility Closet and want to help support the show, check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futility closet or look for the link in our show notes. Thanks so much to everyone who helps support Futility Closet. You're the reason this show is still going. This is a story about, I guess, the nature of proof, ultimately. You can decide what it's about.

It concerns a man named Charles Hatfield who was born in Kansas in 1875 and his family moved to Southern California in the 1880s. And Hatfield, from an early age, was interested in what was called pluviculture. There were a series of really devastating droughts in the American West around that time, and the whole region between Kansas and California was really clobbering farmers. And so the government briefly took an interest in seeing whether it might be possible technologically to induce rain in order to convince the clouds to send down rain when we wanted them to. And the short answer is, at least in 1916, no you can't, at least on a wide scale. So they gave it up.

But that effort spawned a series of sort of individual people who would go around peddling their services who claimed to be able to do this. Some of them were hucksters, some of them weren't, and Hatfield fell apparently into the latter category. He didn't see himself as a charlatan. He really thought or hoped that he was able to bring rain down from the sky. We know this in part because the San Diego Public Library still has copies of the weather textbooks that he went through as a kid that have all his underlining and notes in them.

He took this very seriously. By 1902, his father had a ranch north of San Diego, and he was experimenting there. He said he had been watching the steam swirling above a tea kettle when he got the idea of building a tower, or in this case, climbing a windmill on his father's ranch and heating some chemicals in a pan that would then waft up into the sky and somehow hopefully interact with the atmosphere and bring down rain. He did a whole lot of experimenting here, but he said after his very first try, a heavy storm came down, and that gave him enough encouragement to keep trying.

And over time, he developed what he called a secret mixture of 23 chemicals that he kept in these big galvanized evaporating tanks. And that was a closely held secret because that became his livelihood. He spent 13 years after that moving around mostly through the American West, making deals with local municipalities to bring rain down, usually for their crops. He did this in Los Angeles, in Dawson City up in the Klondike, and in other locations as far afield as Texas and Oregon. It was him and his brother Paul would go

around doing this. They'd build a tower and get heat, these chemicals in the tanks. Sometimes it would rain, sometimes it wouldn't. But when it did, his average, his success average was good enough that he could get business by claiming success elsewhere. When he succeeded, the local newspaper invariably would write up some laudatory story, and then the U.S. Weather Bureau would get angry. The bureau chief there in particular, a man named Willis Moore, was furious about this because of how unscientific all of this was, understandably. I was going to say, what kind of period did they give him? If he did his chemical thing and then it rained any time within the next week, was it counted as success, or do you know? He would hatch a new deal.

It came down to what he could sell them. Okay. And each city had a different idea of what would be reasonable. Okay. That's why I say this is a story about the nature of proof. Yeah. Because with weather, you can't hold, there's a gajillion variables. Right.

And you can't control any of them. Well, and I was saying, if you strike a long enough deal, like sometime in the next month, it'll rain. You know, you'd have a better batting average. Yeah. So the anyway, Willis Morthus at the US Weather Bureau would send in a scathing rebuttal each time the newspaper somewhere praised him. And they kind of chased him around the West in print. But he did well enough to stay in business. In San Diego, which his home region, the commissioner of the local weather bureau, actually wanted him prosecuted for fraud. So the authorities didn't like him any too much. But he was seen, particularly among just ordinary people,

as he wasn't the sort of pointy-headed scientist guy, but just seemed like an ordinary man who was taken somewhat seriously as being able to do this. And people found that appealing. How could the weather bureau be so sure that he was a fraud? Well, I guess you can argue that too uh one 1905 news story says the indisputable fact is that hatfield went into the hills 19 times to bring on a rain and 19 times it rained when he promised so you're right there's some room i mean who knows we never his he went to the grave with his secret so maybe he was on to something uh he's quoted, Hatfield is, in the same 1905 story, saying,

I worked this idea from my own genius without no assistance from anybody. I found after many experiments that certain chemicals had the power of attracting moisture in the atmosphere, and I felt sure that rain could be brought by their use. He thought he was doing good. I mean, even if he was misguided, he wasn't trying to fool anyone. He thought he could really do this. Anyway, all of he was misguided, he wasn't trying to fool anyone. He thought he could really do this. Anyway, all of this came to a head in San Diego in 1915. San Diego was suffering the fourth year of a devastating drought and was really desperate for rain.

And so they appealed to Hatfield, who had a reputation by this point, and asked him to produce enough rain to fill the Morena Dam Reservoir, which is a giant reservoir outside of town. That's a lot of rain. It was only a third full. And this is tricky. He showed up before the council, and they just were kind of kicking this idea around, and he proposed a number of deals. Like, you were asking, what would the deals be?

Yeah. They talked about a number of these, and unfortunately, they never wound up with a written contract. Oh. But the one he left understanding was that he'd agreed to fill the Morena Reservoir to overflowing between now and next December 20th, 1916 for the sum of $10,000. Oh, that gives him a long time to get it to rain. Okay.

So in effect, he'd be paid $10,000 for delivering 10 billion gallons of water in a year. Okay. And he didn't manage to do that. If the reservoir wasn't full at any point in that year, they didn't owe him anything. But as I say, none of this was written down. So Hatfield and his brother Paul went and started building a 20-foot tower beside the lake where the reservoir was. And the council told him he could start on New Year's Day, which he did.

On January 5th, a heavy rain big ran, and it grew heavier. And already there's questions about this. and it grew heavier. And already there's questions about this. The San Diego Union, the local newspaper, wrote a big headline that said, Rain at Morena did Hatfield milk skies. The story reads,

There was rain at Morena yesterday, but whether it was due to what is described in the law books as an act of God or to the efforts of Charles Hatfield, the rain pusher who was striving to win $10,000 from the city by filling Morena Reservoir with water is a subject upon which even the wisest city official or employee refuses to express an opinion. Hatfield, as I say, kept his secrets to himself and discouraged people from coming to watch him, but people did occasionally show up unexpectedly. The dam keeper at the reservoir and his wife lived in a cottage about a mile from where

Charles and Paul Hatfield were working. And occasionally they'd show up unexpectedly just to say hi or to bring them food or something. And I always found them hard at work. Hatfield was apparently working 17-hour days. Wow. And even when his brother Paul got sick at one point and Hatfield redoubled his own efforts. So it's not that he's just laughing at San Diego and, you know, glad that it's raining and hoping to reel in.

Well, it's like you said, he's not actually trying to be a fraud. He actually thinks he's doing something. And working incredibly hard at something. In fact, succeeding so well, the rain just came down in sheets and torrents. By January 16th, someone wrote a letter to the San Diego Union saying, for the love of Mike, call him off. All the city's baseball diamonds were swamped and three big games were abandoned. By Sunday night, all the love of Mike, call him off. All the city's baseball diamonds were swamped and three big games were abandoned. By Sunday night, all the telegraph and telephone services in town had failed. It gets much, much worse.

At 2 a.m. on Monday morning, a farmer named Harry Lewis reported that the San Diego River had burst its banks, which was endangering the areas, heavily populated areas named Mission Valley and Old Town. And in fact, there was a city hospital on the north side of the river that had to be evacuated to get to higher ground. The water was found to be seven feet deep on the ground floor of the hospital. And it kept raining even after this.

Monday, January 17th, the main railway line is now underwater. One witness said he saw freight cars full of sand that were, quote, brushed aside like they were toothpicks. The same witness saw what he called a haystack with chickens and little animals on top riding down the river. Man, the whole Diffendorf family of San Diego were reduced to sitting on the rafters of their barn in the Sorrento Valley. The father said, we could see all kinds of things floating down, automobiles, timbers, chairs and tables, barns where they stored the apples taken from the orchards, chicken coops, the debris stuck in the tops of the willow trees.

People now were paddling canoes down Broadway in downtown San Diego, and still the rain kept up. Now, even while it's raining, the battle lines are forming for what's going to become a legal battle between Charles Hatfield, the rainmaker, and the city of San Diego, particularly a city attorney named Terrence Cosgrove, for two reasons. One, San Diego doesn't want to have to pay Hatfield for something that was going to happen anyway. They'll be out $10,000. If you believe the rain was going to come in any case, there's no reason to pay him $10,000. There's no written contract, and there's no way to prove whether or to what degree Hatfield was the one who was bringing the rain. But larger than that, there's

so much damage now as a result of all this rain, wherever it's coming from, that San Diego is worried about liability. If they wind up paying Hatfield $10,000, then implicitly they're acknowledging that they produced the rain. So a farmer whose farm is ruined can say, well, if this is your rainstorm, you owe me a new barn. And so can everyone else who received damages from the rain. On the other hand, I don't see what grounds San Diego would have to not pay. I mean, they didn't. They just said, fill this reservoir with rain.

They didn't stipulate and no more than that. Or, you know. And who's to say. And they didn't stipulate you have to prove it's your rain and not Mother Nature's rain. Exactly. So Hatfield had enough experience working with other cities that he knew that this kind of thing might be in the offing. Occasionally he'd succeeded with other cities

and they'd try to sort of back out of the deal on these same grounds. Like, well, how do we know? Maybe it was going to rain anyway. So Hatfield knew that and called, actually, during the middle of this downpour, called the water impoundment department. And this poor clerk answered the phone. And Hatfield said, I just wanted to let you know it's only sprinkling now. And the clerk was dumbfounded for a second and then said, are you kidding?

And Hatfield said, never more serious in my life. Just hold your horses until I show you a real rain. And hung up. He just wanted to get on the record as taking credit for succeeding as a result of his own agency. Wednesday, January 19th. Now at the reservoir, 5.76 inches of rain have fallen in a day and a half. The reservoir's total supply is now greater than at any time in its history, a shade more than 8.5 billion gallons.

But because of the shape of the reservoir, it's still only barely half full. And remember, he has to... Oh, he has to fill it up. He has to fill it all the way to the top. Okay. So Charles notices at this point that these galvanized iron evaporation pans that he's using have deteriorated after three weeks of continuous use. So he stops to replace those.

They bury the old ones and he gets some new ones set up. While he does that, the sun comes out, interestingly. There's damage across the town, but it's not just horrible now. And people are able to sort of catch their breath. And generally the mood is good because they've been desperate for rain for four years. Beaches north of Mission Bay were lined with dead lobsters and abalone, it was found. The ocean was now so inundated with fresh water that it was uninhabitable for shellfish. That's how much rain they were getting. But Charles sets up his pans again,

and sure enough, the rain starts up again. And this time, it's really raining with a vengeance. They had to dynamite the western end of the Switzer Canyon Dam because it was threatening to burst, and they figured if they could just blow up part of it, it could drain more slowly rather than outright flooding someplace with a burst. Bridges began to collapse. Another dam, the Sweetwater Dam, was in danger of giving way entirely. The city deputy treasurer, a man named Seymour Tulloch, told his wife,

San Diego is cut off by transportation from the outside world except by ships, which was true. This was World War I, by the way. It was going on while all this was happening. And someone pointed out that if the war ended, they'd have no way to get word of this because they were so cut off from the outside world.

So much rain was falling in San Diego. Now it gets really bad because the rain is still keeping up. On January 27th, a big dam, the lower Ote Dam, gave way. A supervisor who happened to be watching it said it was like watching a mountain of sugar dissolving. And this released a flood of water into this narrow valley, the Ote Valley. This huge torrent of water took 48 minutes to travel 12 miles down to San Diego, carrying a force of about 1,500 tons and just annihilating everything in its path. It killed about 20 people, it destroyed homes, and it washed out all but two

of 112 bridges. And it still keeps raining. I'm getting a lot of this from a wonderful book by Gary Jenkins called The Wizard of Sun City that came out in 2005, which is impeccably well-researched and gives a lot more details than I can give here, but this is my favorite one in the whole book. This is a quote from his book. Just before 6 p.m. out on the Coronado side of San Diego Bay, the steamship Cypress was riding out the storm. The ship's anchor chain groaned, and on deck, every joint creaked. Suddenly, through the darkness and horizontal rain, the men on the bridge were aware of a massive shape looming silently toward them.

Before they could take evasive action, it was gliding past the ship's stern. The Cypress's lights illuminated the mass for a few seconds. As it did so, the crew heard the sound of cattle. The cows were clinging to what looked like a section of a bridge. It was the most surreal thing anyone had ever seen. And still the rain kept up. Finally, on January 28th, the reservoir finally reached brim full. It had taken almost 5 billion gallons just since the previous morning. It now held, the whole reservoir held 15.45 billion gallons of water. It was full up to the brim. This was the most extreme weather in the history of San Diego, and all more than 28 inches of rain fell in one month. And as soon as the reservoir was full, the rain let up, interestingly.

And Charles Hatfield finally took a breath, but people were starting to threaten to lynch him. They were getting these phone calls from people who were outraged because of all this damage. Charles's brother, Paul, who had helped him, said, we didn't know anything about it. They'd been so busy just trying to call down this rain. They didn't realize all the damage and havoc and actually death that the storm was causing.

They'd expected to be praised for this, and they only realized later what it meant. So Hatfield, now this uh legal argument i've been talking about starts to join because it's still not clear who gets credit for this or blame the contract as i say that was never written out it was sort of but hatfield can claim that they had at least an implied contract he can show that he met with the council and that they agreed to do something he said he'd succeeded this with other communities many times in the past. Some skeptics might say, well, perhaps this rain would have fallen anyway.

How do you know this had anything to do with what you were doing? He said, I never claimed to produce rain from a cloudless sky only to bring it down if there are clouds present. He said there have been many times in the last four years during your drought when there were clouds overhead, but the rain didn't come down. And he said, quote, while I had my demonstrations in force at Morena each and every time that conditions were present, rain fell in torrents, which goes back to what you were saying. What more could he really do?

I'm not saying that he did have any effect at all, but from his point of view, it is kind of a raw deal. He did everything he'd engaged to do. Well, it sounds like from what you were saying, with the great amount of rain that it actually would take to fill up the reservoir, that San Diego sort of was trying to defraud him. Like, they maybe set up a thing that they thought, well, he probably can't do any harm and at best we'll get some rain, but there's no way he's going to fill up this reservoir, so we're never going to have to pay our money.

So we have nothing to lose, yeah. Yeah. Hatfield said, the cash value of the 4 million gallons of water that is the least that can be attributed to me at Morena is $400,000 at 10 cents a thousand. You agreed to pay me $10,000 and I maintain that your city council never made a better bargain for the

taxpayers. This turned out to be a legal mistake because he was trying to err on the side of humility and conservatism. But that led Terrence Cosgrove, the city attorney, to jump on the side of humility and, you know, conservatism. But that led Terence Cosgrove, the city attorney, to jump on him and say that if he was only claiming to have added 4 billion gallons, he couldn't claim to have put in 10 billion that he'd agreed to. See, they had, they discussed three different plans. And once Hatfield appealed to one of them, Cosgrove would

say, but you didn't fulfill this other one. Because none of this is written down. There's just no way to win. Cosgrove said, you want the city't fulfill this other one. And because none of this is written down, there's just no way to win. Cosgrove said, you want the city to pay you only for what you yourself did. You do not want the city to pay you for what nature did, do you? And there's no answer to that because there's no way to tell what's what. One of the councilmen actually objected and said that Hatfield had said he'd fill the reservoir and ought to be paid. But Cosgrove had said the resolution which passed by the council simply said that Hatfield's offer was accepted, but it did not say which of the three propositions was accepted. So it's impossible to win. That seems kind of unfair. So they ruled against him. Hatfield said, I think justifiably to the press later,

it was never even hinted that I was to be paid only my pro rata of the 10 million gallons and the city was to be credited with what nature put in. This is an unfair construction of my contract, and in my filed report, I reminded the council that I told them that I did not claim to produce rain from a cloudless sky, but to convert a light rainfall into a heavy one, which of course implies that when I'm at work, nature is at work also, which sounds reasonable. has in mind is he wants to be sure that this whole thing, the storm, goes down in the record as an act of God, because if anyone starts to agree that this rain-making business has something to it, then San Diego's in a lot of trouble. The total damage estimate for this storm, according to the geological survey, was finally totaled up at $3.7 million. $3.7 million? In 1916.

Okay, wow. So it was a fortune that everyone was trying to avoid. That was really the main thing he was trying to avoid, and it looks like he did that successfully. As to the damage, Hatfield said that wasn't his fault and the city should have taken adequate precautions. He said, I fulfilled the agreement, I filled the reservoir, but the city wouldn't pay him unless he agreed to accept liability for the damages,

which, of course, he doesn't want to do. He tried to settle, sued them a few more times, and basically the courts finally found that the rain was ruled an act of God, which means that Hatfield doesn't get paid. But it also means that Hatfield isn't liable for the damage, too, which could have ruined certainly him. If it would ruin San Diego, it would certainly ruin an individual. So Charles' brother Paul said, we designed the whole works and they got a million dollars worth of water for nothing. Basically, the trial, the suit bounced around the courts for another 20 years and finally was just dismissed as a dead issue in 1938. But Hatfield's

career got a boost. If he didn't get any money out of it, he did get a lot of business. He built derricks around the American West for the next 15 years, as well as on a few international assignments. In 1922, the New York Times ran a story saying that he'd gone to Italy to relieve a drought. He was anxious to explain his secret process to Pope Pius, and if the pontiff agreed, he would try to induce rain to fall on the Vatican Gardens. He also did work in the Honduras and at Big Bear Lake in California. Basically, Hatfield, he got a lot of mileage out of this exploit, but he finally died in 1958, and if he had a secret, he took it with him. He claimed in the end a total of 500 successes. Skeptics, of course, say that he had nothing to do with it. It was going to rain anyway. The best, a lot of people have looked into this and what actually happened and something happened in San Diego in 1916.

In 1961, a meteorologist at San Diego State University named Don Edemiller looked into this, and he sort of concluded that what had happened actually was that there were four different weather fronts that collided over San Diego that January to cause the devastation. He writes, If you believe that Hatfield caused the rain in San Diego, you also have to believe that the influence of the smoke rearranged the distribution of air masses as far north as Alaska, at least a third of the way across the Pacific Ocean, and as far east as the Great Plains. Hatfield boasted his system worked to bring the clouds over San Diego

to have supplied enough energy to produce weather patterns such as occurred in January 1916, would have taken several hundred hydrogen bombs. So it's very likely that he had no effect at all, and it was just an amazing coincidence. Dumb luck, yeah. You can argue that there's this butterfly effect, that the weather is notoriously sensitive to initial conditions. But obviously, in order to exploit that, he would have had access to a lot more information than he actually could possibly have had.

So you can't really, however good his intentions and however hard he worked, you can't really probably claim that he had very much to do with it. So draw whatever conclusions you like from that. I think if there's a moral here, it's if you ever do business with San Diego, you should get it in writing. Greg's going to be trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle this time. For those who aren't familiar with them, lateral thinking puzzles mean I'm going to give him an interesting-sounding situation, and he's going to have to try to figure out what's actually going on by asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle was sent in by Hano Sola.

You ready? A robber enters a jewelry shop at night. He is recorded on surveillance video as he steals some jewelry. The next day, the police find a glove that he accidentally left behind at the scene of the crime. The traces of his DNA in that glove are tested and attributed to him. The robber is swiftly found and arrested. However, he cannot be brought to court for the crime and the police have to let him go. Why?

Wow. Did this really happen? Yes. Really? Yes. Okay, so this turns on DNA evidence. Well, let's back up. So everything here is, as as it seems a human robber robbed a jewelry store which is a store that sells jewelry yes that is all correct while the store was closed does it matter what he stole no do the details of the actual crime matter beyond the fact that he left behind a glove with dna evidence right the actual details don't matter beyond that okay so we're just looking at he's actually guilty of the crime, but he left a glove of DNA evidence that the authorities have, but they can't use that to pin the crime on

him. Right. Okay, so from a legal standpoint, does that mean the DNA couldn't conclusively be shown to be linked to him uniquely? Yes. So he has a twin brother?

Yes. Or a sibling? Yes. So it's conceivable that the twin actually robbed the store. Yes. That's exactly it. Good for you. That was really fast.

Hunter says, while the solution, he has an identical twin brother, may be a very old cliche for this style of puzzles, this one has the benefit of being a true story. The twist is that DNA tests, at least until very recently, cannot properly attribute DNA traces to twins. However, an accused cannot be brought to court if police are not able to prove that it was actually him and not the twin who committed the crime. For this puzzle, the surveillance video was added to make it more puzzling. In the true event, the robber was wearing a mask, so the surveillance

video wasn't that helpful after all, and the police's case stood on DNA traces only. I didn't realize that DNA couldn't distinguish between identical twins, although I suppose it makes sense. Hanno included some links to stories about various cases in several countries where there has been an issue. Like, I wasn't even aware that this has been a problem. Hanno's case occurred in Germany, but there have been similar cases in the UK and in the US where there was only DNA evidence against the suspect, and that can't distinguish which identical twin it could be. In 2010, the Daily Express wrote that in the UK, there are between three and 10 criminal cases a year involving identical twins who make up 0.4% of the population. So they just have to let that guy go. Yeah.

Authorities, basically they have to find some other evidence against the individual, such as fingerprints, which apparently do differ between twins, if that isn't weird enough. Or they need like some specific identifier. Like there was a case in Boston where one witness happened to notice a tattoo on one of the guys, you know, so like that made the difference. But this is apparently a real problem in the area of rape investigations where DNA evidence may be the only evidence available against a suspect. Of course, yeah. And it's just not good enough. It seems like if you were really evil and you had a twin.

Right, you would know this and take advantage of it. Yeah, you could take up a life of crime. Exactly. But in case anybody out there is thinking of doing it, they are working on developing tests that can distinguish between identical twins, DNA tests that are improving them. According to an article in the National Post from just a few months ago, it hasn't yet been widely accepted that these tests are completely reliable, but they are in the works and they're getting better all the time. So for anybody out there considering it, Futility Closet does not recommend committing crimes under any circumstances, including if you're

an identical twin. We shouldn't give them ideas. All right. Well, you did that one really fast. Do you want to do a second one? Sure. I have another little one prepared. Sure.

You said confidently. Just in case the first one went too quickly. This one is from Edward Harshman's Fantastic Lateral Thinking Puzzles. As his confederates forcibly restrained the homeowners, a man broke into a house, smashed windows, and took what was most important to them. When he came out, he was met by police officers and the upset homeowners, so he quickly handed over what he had taken. The homeowners did not prosecute the man or his confederates for their actions, and the officers did not ask them to. How come? I'm sorry to do this. this sounds like a whole lot depends on the wording can you read it again as his confederates forcibly restrained the homeowners a man broke into a house

smashed windows and took what was most important to them when he came out he was met by police officers and upset homeowners so he quickly handed over what he had taken. The homeowners did not prosecute the man or his confederates for their actions, and the officers did not ask them to. Um, okay. Is, are, are the homeowners human? Yes. Oh, I think they're like bees or chickens or something.

Oh, that would be good. It sounds like it's something so artfully worded yeah that that's very clever all right so into a dog house okay so a man has a man and his confederates yes conspired to would you call this a robbery no no all right so the confederates restrain the homeowners while the man enters their home yes is the home a building yes like a house yes um okay so do i need to know how many there are total there's just a man and several other people and they're all working together yes the homeowners are people who live in the home yes do we need to know where this happened no is this true no not necessarily uh, so they restrain the people.

He goes in, smashes windows. Yes, breaks into their house, smashes their windows. And steal something in particular. Yes. Like one object? Yes. That you say is most important to them? Yes.

Okay, so... But then... So afterwards, but immediately afterwards... Yes. He's apprehended by the police. Well, when he came out, he was met by police officers and the upset homeowner, so he quickly handed over what he had taken. And no one pressed charges?

Correct. But you'd call him a criminal and you'd call this... Would you call this a robbery? No. You asked and I said it wasn't. Okay. All right. So it looks like everything turns on this object.

Was his, is it a valuable object in terms of money? No. But it's important to them? Yes. Would you say it has, how can I ask this, sentimental value? Yes. Is it a religious object?

No. Is it a living thing? Yes. Oh my goodness. They restrained the homeowners and stole... Is it their child? Yes. Wait.

What? He stole... Okay, so a man... Is this just another way of saying it's a kidnapping? No. I did so well on the first one. You did. You did brilliantly on the first one. right well i'm getting somewhere so a man's confederates and everyone involved in this is human is that are the the man himself is is human everyone's human yes and the cat's upset now. Yes. Okay, so the Confederates restrain the homeowners, and the man takes their child.

Yes. Removing it from the house? Yes. And there meets the police? Yes. I mean, might have met the police, like, immediately afterward? Yes. But this wasn't a kidnapping.

Correct. And you wouldn't call it a crime. Correct. Do I need to know the relationship of a, I keep wanting to call it a robber, of the man to the homeowners? No. Do they know one another? No. Are they related in any way?

No. So I need to know why a man would take a living child? Yes. Human child. Yes. Out of its house. Yes. if it's not a crime. Right. Does the robber, does the man who takes the child, is his occupation important?

Yes. Is he a government employee? I think so. Does it have something to do with a crime that parents have committed? No. Are they child abusers or something? No. So it's not to do with the child's safety.

It is to do with the child's safety. He's removing the child for its own safety. Yes. But the police turn him around and restore the child to its parents. Yes. And the man's not charged because he was acting in the child's, what he thought was the child's best interest? Sure.

Was he mistaken in that? No. Was the child really in danger? Yes. Oh, oh, oh, oh. The house was on fire. Yay! The house was on fire.

So the... Oh, that's very good. So the house is on fire, and the man and his, what did you call him, confederates? Confederates. Are firefighters. Yes, and they restrain the parents who are you call them, confederates? Confederates. Are firefighters. Yes, and they restrain the parents who are desperate to get into the house to get the child, and so he breaks into the house to get the child and brings it out and is immediately confronted by the police but hands the child over to his parents.

And no one's charged. And no one's charged. I like that one. Very nice. Well, thank you, Hanno, for sending in your puzzle, and if anyone else has a puzzle they'd like to send to us, you can send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's another episode for us.

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