Futility Closet - 081-The Typhus Hoax

Episode Date: November 15, 2015

In 1939, as Germany was sending the people of Poland to labor and death camps, two doctors found a unique way to save their countrymen -- by faking an epidemic. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll learn about their clever plan, which ultimately saved 8,000 people. We'll also consider four schemes involving tiny plots of land and puzzle over why a library would waive its fees for a lost book. Sources for our feature on Eugene Lazowski: Damon Adams, "2 Doctors Used Typhus to Save Thousands in Wartime," American Medical News, July 5, 2004. Yoav Goor, "When the Test Tube Was Mightier Than the Gun: A Polish Doctor Out-Frightens the Nazis," Israel Medical Association Journal, 15:4 (April 2013), 198. Bernard Dixon, "Mimicry and More," British Medical Journal, Nov. 24, 1990. Mohammad Mooty and Larry I Lutwick, "Epidemic Typhus Fever," in Larry I. Lutwick and Suzanne M. Lutwick, Beyond Anthrax: The Weaponization of Infectious Diseases, 2009. Trevor Jensen, "Dr. Eugene Lazowski: 1913-2006," Chicago Tribune, Dec. 22, 2006. Listener mail: Cards Against Humanity, "Eight Sensible Gifts for Hanukkah." J. Craig Anderson, "Cards Against Humanity Buys Remote Maine Island, Calls It 'Hawaii 2'," Portland Press Herald, December 24, 2014. Sarah Hulett, "Inchvesting In Detroit: A Virtual Realty," NPR, March 4, 2010. Wikipedia, The Good Earth (Manfred Mann's Earth Band album). Weekend Telegraph, "Sitting on a Slice of the Good Earth," Sept. 23, 1995. Patrick Barkham, "What Greenpeace Could Learn From Manfred Mann About Saving the Environment," Guardian, July 5, 2015. Paul Evans, "Diversionary Tactics -- The Imaginative Campaigns Protecting the Countryside From Developers," Guardian, March 31, 2009. Wikipedia, "Alice's Meadow." This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Lawrence Miller. 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]. 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 81. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1939, as Germany was invading Poland, two doctors found a unique way to save their countrymen,

by faking an epidemic. In today's show, we'll learn about their clever plan, which ultimately saved 8,000 people from the Nazi labor and death camps. We'll also consider four schemes involving tiny plots of land, and puzzle over why a library volunteers to waive its late fee. Our podcast is supported primarily by our wonderful patrons, whose donations are making it possible for us to keep making this show. A lot of work goes into researching and making each episode,

so if you like Futility Closet and want to support the show, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the link in our show notes. Every pledge is really appreciated, and if you pledge at least a dollar an episode, you get access to our activity feed, where you'll find behind-the-scenes comments, outtakes and extralateral thinking puzzles,

and updates on what Sasha, the show mascot, has been doing lately. Thanks so much to everyone who helps support Futility Closet. We couldn't keep doing this without you. When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, 26-year-old Eugen Lawzowski had just finished medical school and was an officer in the Polish army. They sent him to Rozwadu, which is a small village in southeastern Poland, and he worked there for the Polish Red Cross. This was a really dire time in Poland. The Germans were rounding up Polish men and women and sending them to slave labor camps, and they were sending Polish Jews to death camps. This was particularly personal for Lissowski because the town's Jewish ghetto, where the Jewish population had been

assembled, was just on the other side of the back fence of ghetto, where the Jewish population had been assembled, was just on the other side of the back fence of his house where he lived. And he was admirable for a lot of reasons. He just seemed very courageous, even in the face of such danger in his homeland. His parents had set a good example. They had actually hidden two Jewish families in their home. So even though it was forbidden to help Jews, Lazowski worked out a system where he could help Jewish families in their home. So even though it was forbidden to help Jews, Lazowski worked out a system where he could help Jewish families in the ghetto. They would hang, if they needed medical

help, they would hang a white cloth on his fence. And then after dark, he'd make a surreptitious house call, even though this was against the rules that the Germans had laid down. And he was actually clever enough to support this plan. He created a system of faking his medical inventory in order to conceal this. In other words, he was, in order to support this plan. He created a system of faking his medical inventory in order to conceal this. In other words, in order to help the Jews in the ghetto, he'd have to use a certain amount of medicine and account for where that had come from and gone. But as it happened, his office was close to the town's railroad station,

and he was often called upon to treat patients who were just passing through the town. So what he did was, in his official reports, he would overstate the amount of drugs that he was using to treat these traveling patients. Oh, I see. And then because they would have passed through, nobody could check on it. Right. It would be very hard to sort of, if anyone were suspicious, it would be hard to detect the ruse. So he got away with that. He didn't give any thought to the danger that this incurred. He was a Catholic, and he'd taken an oath as a doctor to help people.

So he just felt, he said later, that there was no option. This was just the right thing to do, and so he did it. He had another and more dramatic opportunity to help people in Rozvod, a bit later. As a patriot, he wanted it. There was a Polish underground that was forming to resist the Nazi incursions, but as a doctor, he was reluctant to use force. And so he found a way, fortunately, to use medical science instead to help his fellow villagers. And that concerns typhus, which is one of the most feared diseases in the war. It's caused by a bacterium that's spread by lice. And in wartime, it can develop into a variety called epidemic typhus, which is even worse because of the unsanitary conditions and because people are crowded together, you know, in the privations of war, it's just more possible for it to

sort of develop into this even worse epidemic variety. The German army in particular, as it turns out, feared it because the disease was rare in Germany and so their troops lacked a natural immunity. So this sort of set up this opportunity. I guess it would also be that the German doctors wouldn't have a lot of experience in treating it either. Yeah, that's true. I think they just didn't want to tangle with it if they could avoid it. As it happened, Lazowski was practicing medicine with Stanislaw Matulewicz, who was a friend of his from medical school. And one day,

Matulewicz discovered, interestingly, an interesting little quirk of the typhus bacterium. He found that if you took a certain strain of it and you killed it so that it was inert, it wasn't dangerous, and then injected someone with it, they would come back testing positive for typhus. They didn't have typhus because the bacterium was dead, but it was a way of fooling the blood test into returning a false positive. They'd never get the symptoms. They didn't have typhus, but it was a way of sort of artificially creating the appearance that someone

did have typhus, at least according to the blood test. Metulevich just discovered that one day. And in thinking about it, Lazovsky saw that that created an opportunity for them maybe to do some good. He said later, I would not fight with swords and guns, but with intelligence and courage. What they did was they decided to inject any patient who came to them with a febrile illness, with a fever, they would inject them with this killed strain of the typhus bacterium, and then they'd take a blood sample and send it to the laboratories, which were controlled by the Germans, saying, we have this patient who seems to have a fever. Here's a blood sample.

Can you tell us what's going on? Yeah. Wouldn't it be terrible if they had typhus? Wouldn't that be terrible? Every one of them, of course, came back testing positive for typhus. So from the Germans' point of view, that looked like an epidemic was forming in the town, which wouldn't be, given the conditions, that surprising. It didn't seem suspicious.

And for the reasons I said, they didn't want at all to mess with that if that's what was happening. They didn't want to see an outbreak among their own soldiers. So instead, normally these villagers would have been sent to German labor and death camps. So in order to avoid risking an infection of their own soldiers, instead of sending these villagers off, they just quarantined the whole area, which seemed understandably like the thing to do. So what, through this sort of ruse, what the doctors accomplished is that they saved 8,000 of their Polish countrymen in 12 towns around Rozwandu, because they were quarantined rather than being deported to labor camps. One little note here I should make in doing the research for this, it's very often said that, uh, Lazowski saved 8,000 Jews. And from the best I'm able to understand this, that's not accurate.

Unfortunately, Matuliewicz's discovery came too late for them to help the Jews who had already, uh, been rounded up and deported to labor and death camps before the quarantine was declared. So the people they saved were non-Jewish Polish countrymen. Who would have gone to these slave labor camps instead. Yeah. In fact, sadly, from what I've read, even if the timing had been different and Matulewicz had discovered the trick before the Jews had been deported, the way the Germans likely would have handled it would have been simply to kill a Jew who had typhus. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Both because it was a danger to their own soldiers and because it's a very contagious

disease. And if you put a Jew who has typhus into the concentration camps, given the conditions there, it would just spread into an epidemic there. So it wouldn't have helped. So this is not to take anything away from what he did because he himself, the doctors were risking the German death penalty, which applied to all Poles who helped Jews during the Holocaust. And this is, I hadn't realized this part of World War II history, but it was a really dire time in Poland, and there was a lot of really astonishing heroism taking place throughout the country at the time. Most of the victims of the Nazi-organized Holocaust were Polish Jews,

and most of the people who were trying to rescue them were themselves Polish, which is particularly heroic because occupied Poland was the only territory where the Germans said that helping a Jew could result in death for yourself and your whole family. The stakes were really high. Yeah, and it's amazing how many Poles stepped up anyway, despite the risk to their own lives, in order to try to help the Jews. An estimated 3 million non-Jewish Poles were killed in the war, and up to 50,000 of these were executed by Nazi Germany solely as a penalty for saving Jews. 50,000 people, non-Jews, were killed solely because they had tried to help Jews, knowing that they were risking their own lives at the time.

solely because they had tried to help Jews knowing that they were risking their own lives at the time. Another example of this, just by the way, is the story of Witold Pilecki, which we told back in episode 27, who was an astonishingly brave Polish army captain who volunteered to enter Auschwitz. If you want to learn more about that, listen to episode 27.

Anyway, Lazowski and Matyulewicz knew about these penalties and went ahead anyway, but in order to minimize the risk, they didn't tell anyone what they were doing. Not even their wives. They just did it, the two of them, just to keep the risk of word getting out as low as possible. So even the patients that they were doing this to probably didn't know that it was a ruse. That I don't know. But it would have been a risk to have told them,

but on the other hand, these patients might have thought they actually had typhus. There was one. It's interesting you say that. At the very end, they went back. I'll come to this at the end. In 2000, he actually went back to visit the town and met a man there who was a child at the time who said, you saved my father from typhus. And Lozovsky said it wasn't real typhus. It was mine typhus.

So either the child misunderstood being a child or possibly you're right maybe the patients must have thought they actually had typhus at least some of them perhaps um so they they just quietly kept uh administering this killed strain of the typhus bacterium to various people in the villages right to keep up the appearance of the epidemic yeah yeah and did everything else they could to sort of give it the outward appearance of a true epidemic lozowski kept track of how many cases he was sending to the german lab so that it would mimic the progress of a real typhoid outbreak typhus outbreak and uh to avoid drawing attention to themselves they sometimes referred some of their injected patients to other doctors in the area which i think was clever too so they would they would inject someone that's a good point so they knew he test positive and then refer him out to some other doctor who left it to him to send in the sample because otherwise it would be samples

coming just from one office yeah so from you got to say to say from the Germans' point of view, this all looks pretty convincingly like a real typhus outbreak. But because of this penalty that was constantly hanging over them, Lazowski spent three years with a cyanide pill at the ready as he worked to save the lives of these other Polish villagers because he figured he'd rather die at his own hands than face this penalty that the Germans would impose on him. He said, I was afraid, but I controlled it. Now you might be thinking, wait a minute, three years? If this went on for three years, wouldn't the Germans get suspicious that this supposedly deadly epidemic wasn't actually killing anyone?

And the answer to that is, unfortunately, yes. By late 1943, the Germans were getting suspicious because the mortality rate was so low, so the local Gestapo chief notified the health authorities and created a commission to investigate, and they actually brought two carloads of soldiers to the town. And the way that Lazowski responded to this was, I think, clever also. He took of the people in these 12 villages who had been injected with the dead typhus

bacterium, he found the oldest and the sickest looking of them and gathered them together into filthy huts to wait for these soldiers to come and inspect them. And then he invited the commission members to examine them and warning them that poles are dirty and ridden with bugs and this is all very scary and dangerous. And at the same time, he had the town throw a lavish party for the whole committee. And what happened is what he hoped would happen. The senior members of the committee chose to stay and enjoy the party and just dispatch two junior members out to go and undertake this dangerous task of actually confirming these people had a deadly contagious disease. Right, because they'd be risking possibly typhus themselves. Exactly.

So those two, whoever they were, these two poor men, did a very cursory examination, took blood samples from two of the patients and left quickly. Of course, the blood samples came back with a false positive, so it looked like they had typhus, and Lazowski never heard from the Germans again. So that little crisis is averted. Near the end of the war, a German soldier who Lazowski had treated finally told him that the Germans were on to him and were planning to kill him. So Lazowski finally, after three years of this, escaped with his wife and his daughter. And as he looked back, he saw the same soldier shooting women and children in the village. Oh.

So he got away just in time. Lazowski, after the war, lived with his, he and his family lived with relatives at first. They settled in Warsaw as the German occupation ended. And then in 1958, they immigrated to the United States. And Lazowski became a professor of pediatrics at the State University of Illinois. Even then, for most of his adult life, he remained quiet about any of this. He was afraid he'd get in trouble somehow, even after all of this had blown over. And he's apparently just a very humble man. When he did speak about it, he always made sure that Matulewicz received credit for his part in the story.

Finally, he retired from practice in the late 1980s and wrote an article with Matulewicz finally about all this that had happened. And in the 1990s, he published a book called The Private War that became a bestseller in Poland. As I said, in 2000, he returned finally to his hometown in Poland for the first time to participate in a reunion

and they gave him a hero's welcome with several days of ceremonies and celebrations, and they were reunited with past patients, including this one who thought he'd remember that he'd cured his father. He said of the reunion, I felt very uncomfortable. I was just trying to do something for my people. My profession is to save lives and prevent death. I was fighting for life. He died finally at age 93, just in 2006, in Eugene, Oregon, where he had lived for the past three years. At age 90, he had said, people said I'm a hero.

I just found an opportunity to do something good. We're moving into that time of year when people are working on figuring out what to give for gifts. So we want to remind you to consider the Futility Closet books. The books are a little different than the podcast in that everything in them is short. So both books are filled with hundreds of quirky oddities and curiosities, plus offbeat inventions, intriguing quotes, and brain-teasing puzzles. Perfect for anyone who enjoys small bites of mental candy. Look for them on Amazon and discover why other readers have called them, a fascinating compendium of interesting bits of information,

and fun books that can really be enjoyed by all. In episode 79, Greg told us about how Quaker Oats ran a promotion in 1955, where they gave away deeds to square inches of land in the Yukon in their boxes of cereal. Several listeners wrote in to tell us about similar schemes. Ben Snitkoff wrote, Your story about the Yukon Territory ownership reminded me that I own a part of a small island in Maine, dubbed Hawaii 2 by the Cards Against Humanity folks. Perhaps having learned something from the Yukon debacle, Cards Against Humanity specifically granted a license to the land

to people who signed up for their holiday promotion. Each person got one square foot 144 times as much as the Quaker Oats promotion. You do a lot more with a square foot than with a square hand. I guess you could because you could at least maybe stand on it if your feet aren't too big. What Ben is referring to, what this whole thing was, was part of a seasonal promotion called 10 Days or Whatever of Kwanzaa, and it was run by the company that made the party game Cards Against Humanity.

The purpose was, as they put it, to capture your attention and money. Part of the proceeds did go to a nonprofit group called the Sunlight Foundation, which promotes governmental openness and transparency. And how it worked was that if you sent them $15, they sent you 10 mystery gifts in the month of December 2014. So it's over now, as far as I know,

so you can't do this now. The final gift in that series was a license to a square foot of a six-acre private island in St. George Lake in Maine. It's reported by other sources that they were able to purchase the island for $20,000, and they then sent licenses to the 250,000 participants in the promotion. licenses to the 250,000 participants in the promotion. The real name of the island is Birch Island, though Hawaii 2, as they dubbed it, has been noted to now appear on Google Maps. Apparently, a friend of one of the company's co-creators works for Google. Ah.

Ah. The license that people receive says that you can do anything you want with your square foot as long as it doesn't violate any laws. And that's the catch because apparently there are quite a number of local laws regarding what can and can't be done on the island. There are all these laws involving firewood, for example. You can't bring in your own firewood and you can't cut any branches off of any trees to make your own firewood, but you can pick up dead twigs on the ground for firewood if you want. Yeah, you don't need a very big fire to...

I guess you don't, to fill your square foot. And you can also, you can name your square foot. And the company sent out little flags that you could plant on your square foot, but you're not allowed to put anything other than your flag on the island. So that also kind of limits what you can do there. So you can just visit it. You can visit it. And it's unclear for how long these participants will have any rights

to their little parcel of land because the license terminates if they sell their ownership. So you can't get too attached to it. Charles Reagan sent in a story that NPR reported on in 2010 on inch vesting in Detroit. A real estate developer named Jerry Paffendorf bought a vacant lot in East Detroit for $500, named it Loveland, and then sold 10,000 one-inch square microplots for a dollar apiece. So we're back to the little one-inch squares again. These microplots were bought by almost 600 people who received deeds that aren't actually legally valid. So the owners don't get to vote,

but they also don't have to pay taxes. So they're fake deeds, I guess. But you can say you own land in Detroit. You can say you own one square inch of Detroit, yeah. And the goal seemed to be to create a community of people who were invested in trying to find ways to help Detroit because that's a city that has been in terrible decline in recent years. One of the owners of the microplot said, because Loveland is physically located in Detroit, it takes those 500

inch vesters and it ties us to Detroit, which means that the development of Detroit is now of critical importance to hundreds of people who don't live or work in Detroit. I see. So that was apparently the goal. There was a fair amount of cynicism at the time as to what the developers' motives actually were, with some people suggesting it was just a money-making scheme on his part. I mean, if you think about it, he bought a plot for $500, and then he broke it into 10,000 microplots that he sold for a dollar apiece. So, you know, there was some money probably made there. And I couldn't find a lot of follow-up on this story to see if it ever did actually have a significant impact on Detroit,

to see what positive effects ever did come from this. And Detroit did continue to decline after this to the point that it had to declare bankruptcy in 2013. But, I mean, I'm not blaming the guy for it. Perhaps there might have been some local benefits from the project. The one specific reference I was able to find was that Loveland Technologies had developed an app for what they called Blexting, which was to allow

residents to report blight in their neighborhoods to help city planners better map and then hopefully deal with the most severely run down areas of the city. But that's the only specific example I was able to find of anything concrete that was done. So we don't really know.

With the whole scheme, yeah. Okay. It's still interesting that so many people thought of... So many people thought it'd be cool to own a bit of Detroit. Yeah. I mean, some people bought as many as 1,000 of these plots. Oh, really? So they actually owned like a little significant part of Detroit.

Yeah. Listener Nick Hare wrote, your story about the Yukon reminded me of Alice's Meadow, a 1980s protest against motorway development in which a field was split up into thousands of tiny plots of land to make the compulsory purchase prohibitively expensive. According to Wikipedia, it worked, but wouldn't today because the loophole's been closed. Keep up the good work. As Nick says, this situation was a deliberate ploy in the 1980s that was designed to prevent the destruction of an area of woodlands and wetlands in Oxfordshire, England. The Department of Transportation planned to route a motorway through the area, and conventional protests and public inquiries hadn't changed their minds on this. So Joe Weston, a sociology student and a member of the group Friends of the Earth, managed to come up with the tactic of buying a small field that was on the intended route,

and he and his group then subdivided that into 3,500 small plots, and they resold each of them individually. So now you've got 3,500 owners owning this little field. That the transportation department then has to deal with. Individually, right. Quoted in The Guardian in 2009, Weston said, The plot owners were anonymous, and if the government wanted to compulsorily purchase the land, each owner could, in theory, have forced a public inquiry and taken the case to the high court. That's kind of clever.

Yeah. I mean, how do you even think of something like that? You know, I don't know. I mean, it just came to him, apparently, as they were mulling over, like, what could they do? What could they do? Weston said, the response was amazing. We were successful in getting the route changed, and this produced the biggest bend on any motorway in this country, which is something I saw

repeated a couple times about this story. So they just went around it. Yeah, they had to go around this whole area, which I mean, I don't know if that's something to be proud of that you created this enormous bend in the motorway, but they really did manage to save what was an environmentally important area. But now that loophole has been closed, so it couldn't be done again. Yeah, yeah. The Guardian article also included an interview with the site manager of the area for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who explained that the reserve that was created in the area was expanded beyond this small field, and he said of his recent visit to it, it was fantastic, with red shank piping away curlews and the tumbling flight of lapwings. The otter has come back, and there are 50 brown hares on the moor.

This is such a large area without roads for southeast England, and none of this would have been possible with an eight-lane motorway running through it. Though, as you were saying, and Nick said, you can't do this anymore. They've changed the rules to make it much more difficult, so don't try it. But I wonder if those people still own their little tiny plot to land in that. Very possibly. You know, I don't know. Or own their little tiny plots of land in that. Very possibly. You know, I don't know. Or whether they gave it back to this reserve that's been created.

I don't actually know. Because then you'd own a little wildlife. That's true. That would be cool. Bill Quayle wrote in about another case with a similar theme that was initiated by the rock musician Manford Mann. In 1974, if you bought the Manford Mann's Earth Band album called The Good Earth, you received a coupon that you could send in to register for the rights over one square foot of land in Wales. So the inner sleeve in the album stated that if you sent in the coupon,

a plot of land would be registered in your name, but I couldn't find any details about what exactly that means for you. Yeah, maybe you can plant a flag on it. I don't find any details about what exactly that means for you. Yeah. Maybe you can plant a flag on it. I don't know. But from what I was able to find out, the land is actually in the upper reaches of a remote Welsh hillside, rather difficult to get to, and some members of the band never even saw it. But The Guardian reported in July of this year

that there have been some positive effects of the whole project. They interviewed Andy Taylor, the founder of the Manford Man Fan Club, which I didn't even know existed. See, you learn all kinds of things. And one of the thousands of owners of these little plots. And Taylor admits that he was initially quite cynical of the whole thing,

but he actually went to check out this 10 acre area in Wales and was amazed by what he found. He said, all these other hills have been planted with regimental lines of conifers by the Forestry Commission, and it's the one natural piece of land in the middle of it. So he was kind of

impressed with what actually it had accomplished. Yeah. The Guardian reports that Taylor has since actually gotten to know Mann, who is actually still touring with his band. Another thing I didn't know. And Taylor says that Mann would bite your ear off if his Welsh Hill side was dismissed as a publicity stunt. Taylor says he believed he was making a statement for the environment. It's a great album, a great idea, and it was meant very genuinely by Manfred at the time. He adds, I'm frequently asked which is my square foot,

but I haven't got a clue. So I guess you can't plant a flag on it. So thanks so much to everyone who wrote in to us. And if you have any questions or comments, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Okay, it's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle today. Greg is going to present me an odd sounding situation and I have to try to figure out what's going on

asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Larry Miller. Okay. A man contacts his local library to inform them that he has left a book that he borrowed from them at work and would not be returning it. The library immediately waived all the fees.

Why? Ah, is the book like in outer space because he's an astronaut no oh come on that would be a great guess that actually has a pretty good puzzle um okay sorry okay he left a book at work i'm assuming that the book is now inaccessible like something like an astronaut and it's out in outer space so it's a submarine no no down in a mine no okay is the book still presumably intact um it's like if he was a firefighter and burned up in a fire or something you know um okay so the book is presumably not destroyed but it's inaccessible um it might be destroyed it depends on how you define that okay oh wow

that's just very mysterious all right so obviously his occupation is important yes right um and the book is now inaccessible he is no longer where he was when he left the book at work that's right um so would you say he has a service occupation, like a fireman or a policeman? Yes. Sort of that, sort of an occupation? I'd say so. But not an astronaut. Is he in the military?

No. Is he like a fireman or policeman? No. Okay, is the book in another country? No. Is the book still on Earth? Yes. I'm really hung up on that one. I want the book still on Earth? Yes. Yes, it is. I'm really hung up on that one.

I want the book to be orbiting the planet. Okay, is it underwater? Yes. Deep underwater? Yes. Okay, but he wasn't on a submarine, you said. That's right. Who else goes deep underwater?

Hmm, not in the military. I'm blanking on who is goes deep underwater? Um, hmm. Not in the military. I'm blanking on who is a deep sea diver. No. Um, is the book in a specific place like the Mariana Trench, like some specific place that I need to understand? Um, actually, yeah, that might help. Yes.

Ah, okay. Is it, would you say it's in one of the major oceans one of the oceans of the world no but it's in a big body of water not necessarily depends what you mean by that like a body of water like a sea or a bay

no but it's underwater in an aquarium wow down in a swimming pool But it's underwater in an aquarium? No. Wow. No. I hadn't even thought about that. Down in a swimming pool. Okay.

It's underwater, but not like in a sea or a bay or an ocean. In a river? Yes. Ah. Okay. Oh. Oh. Is it underwater by mistake?

Like something capsized or... Something like that. Or a boat wrecked or a ship wrecked or... Not that, but something similar. Something like that. So it's not like he deliberately took a book underwater with him. That's right. To read on a submarine or something.

Okay. So he was involved in some kind of accident or mishap, you would say. Exactly. Okay. Is the time period important? Sure, yes. Oh, he was on the... No, he wasn't on the titanic because that's a notion

no otherwise like yeah the library's gonna like charge him the overdue fees for surviving the titanic disaster oh the time period's important oh and is the country important or the otherwise oh so i was just thinking this was contemporary but it's not it's it's it is it is contemporary reasonably yeah reasonably contemporary i mean so but do I need to know more specifically, like a specific year? Yes, that might help. And it's underwater. It's a river, so this wasn't like the World Trade Center disaster or something. No. Is this some disaster that I should know that Perhaps, yes. A specific disaster that made news,

apparently. Yes. Okay. Involving a river. Was it in the United States? Yes. Okay. There was a specific disaster involving a river. Oh, some kind of flooding? No.

So it wasn't, not like a major storm, like Katrina? Right. No, you were close before with something like a shipwreck or a capsize. Like a shipwreck or a capsize. Okay. So does it matter what he, he was on the river, let's assume? No. He was not on the river. He was above the river?

Yes. He was above a river with a book. Yes. Okay, he was above the river. So do I need to know in what manner he was above the river? Yes, that would help. Like tightrope walking or, oh, in an airplane? Yes.

Oh, oh, it's Sullenberg. Is that it? He went down in the New York River with the plane and he had a library book with him. I see this light go on in your eyes. Larry writes, this is a true story. Oh, seriously? The man in question was Captain Chesley Sullenberger, pilot of U.S. Airways Flight 1549, which crash-landed in the Hudson River after striking a flock of Canada geese shortly after takeoff in January 2009.

By the time Captain Sullenberger realized that he'd left a library book aboard and informed the library he was already a national hero, later Mayor Bloomberg replaced the book when presenting Captain Sullenberger with the key to the city. And just for the record, the book, which he left in the cockpit, he left it in his luggage in the cockpit. The book was Just Culture, Balancing Safety and Accountability. Oh, wow. That's really cool. And nobody died. Right.

Yeah, that's a good one. The library book was lost, but no lives were lost. So thank you, Larry. That's an excellent puzzle, Larry. Thank you. And if you'd like to send in a puzzle for us to use, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's another episode for us. If you're looking for more Futility Closet,

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