Futility Closet - 112-The Disappearance of Michael Rockefeller

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from a registry for clown faces to a museum on the moon. This is episode 112. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1961, Michael Rockefeller disappeared after a boating accident off the coast of Dutch New Guinea. Ever since, rumors have circulated that the youngest son of the powerful Rockefeller family

Starting point is 00:00:35 had been killed by the headhunting cannibals who lived in the area. In today's show, we'll recount Rockefeller's story and consider the different fates that might have befallen him. We'll also learn more about the ingenuity of early sportscasters and puzzle over a baffled mechanic. Michael Rockefeller had a unique pedigree. He was the youngest child of Nelson Rockefeller, who was the governor of New York and later vice president under Gerald Ford. And he was the great grandson of the richest man in the world, John D. Rockefeller, which made him an heir to the family's oil, real estate, and banking fortune. He was somewhat unusual as a rich man's son. He studied history and economics

Starting point is 00:01:15 at Harvard, but after he graduated, he took up anthropology and went to Dutch New Guinea with an expedition from Harvard's Peabody Museum to study the natives in the interior. This was in March 1961. And found that he really liked it there. I sort of get the feeling that if you're the scion of a family that's that rich and powerful, that you have to go to New Guinea to be treated as a regular person, and he kind of liked that. Anyway, he kind of fell in love with that area, and when the rest of the expedition left New Guinea in September, he stayed behind to study the Azmat region in the south, which is a flat,

Starting point is 00:01:46 muddy coast with a lot of rivers. He was interested in particularly the artwork there. On November 8th, 1961, he and a Dutch anthropologist named René Wassing were maneuvering their catamaran through the mouth of a river on the coast when rough seas swamped the boat and knocked out their outboard motor. They had with them two native guides from the Asmat who immediately said, we have to get out of here right away, which was true. The guides finally just jumped overboard and swam for the shore because they knew what was going to happen, but promised to send back help as soon as they could get someone to explain what had happened,

Starting point is 00:02:24 which is what they did. Rockefeller and Wassing stayed with the boat and began to bail it, but at dawn, Wossing estimated they were about three miles off the coast at that point, but couldn't quite be sure. It was probably actually a bit more than that. And he thought they should just wait for help to come. But Michael told him, I think I can make it, meaning I think we ought to try to swim for sure. It was a relatively unfrequented part of the area. They didn't know how long they'd have to wait, and Michael apparently was kind of impatient or impulsive and just wanted to get to help as soon as he could. Wassing disagreed with that. He said the number one nautical rule is to stay with the boat. That is both the safest thing to do and also it's the easiest thing for rescuers to see if you swim in the ocean toward the shore it's much harder for them to find you but michael argued that they should try it he

Starting point is 00:03:30 said it's high tide now and they're as close as they're going to be right at that moment which was true even though they were a few miles off the shore so they discussed this for some time and finally wassing just refused to go and but wassing said later that michael's quote restless nature made it impossible to endure our drifting around so at about 8 a.m michael tied two empty gasoline cans to his waist to serve as an improvised life belt and then slipped into the water and started swimming for the shore wasing watched him for as long as he could until he said they were just three dots just michael in these two cans that he lost sight of him after about half an hour. The guides, as I said, during this time overnight, had reached the river shore and gone inland and summoned help,

Starting point is 00:04:11 and that reached Wassing. A Dutch warship picked him up on Monday afternoon. No trace of Michael Rockefeller was ever found. Despite a two-week search by planes, helicopters, ships, and thousands of locals, they enlisted this huge force of people to look for him. So he was just never seen again? Never to this day. No one knows what happened to him. Rescue party searched the land while ships and Papuan canoes crisscrossed the waters and planes searched from the air. They looked for him in every way they could, but never found any trace of him.

Starting point is 00:04:37 Did they find the gasoline cans? They found one gasoline can that sort of resembled the type of gasoline can that he had used, but it's not even certain that that's the same one. Yeah, that would be hard to identify a specific gasoline can. And that's it. And there are a lot of good reasons to be worried. He was 23 and a strong swimmer, but A, there's a whole long list of things here, unfortunately, to list.

Starting point is 00:04:59 He was right that he was swimming against the outflowing tide. He set out at high tide, which means the tide was ebbing all day long. He set out at 8 a.m. and it was ebbing until 4. So to reach the shore, it's estimated he would have had to swim 6 to 10 miles over 24 hours against strong tides for much of it, and through waters that were known to be infested with sharks, sea snakes, and saltwater crocodiles. So there's good reason to think he never made it as far as the land. But even if he did, there's no clear boundary there between the land and the ocean. There's not a beach as such. The ocean just merges sort of indistinguishably into a mangrove swamp.

Starting point is 00:05:37 There's a mud flat there that a life photographer familiar with the area said, I've been told that a man falling down into the mud cannot get up without help and mike certainly didn't have any the swamp itself is dense thickets of mangrove bushes and roots and goes on for quite a while there's no hard soil there's nothing you would actually call land for 10 miles and remember he started out having spent 24 hours right without food already in crisis uh the deputy governor general of dutch new guinea said it'd be very hard to spot him and that he'd have very little to live on quote a little bit of raw fish and shrimps nelson rockefeller his father and his twin sister mary flew halfway around the world to aid in the search at san francisco as they were departing for this

Starting point is 00:06:22 nelson said i doubt if i can help in the search, but we hope to find our son well and healthy. Nelson Rockefeller was having a terrible year. He'd started out hoping to angle for the GOP presidential nomination in 1964, but just a few days before Michael disappeared, he'd announced that he's getting a divorce from his wife because he'd been discovered in an affair. And then a few days after that, his youngest son vanished in New Guinea. So this was just an awful year for Nelson Rockefeller, but he appeared in the area just to be of whatever service he could be. He and Mary, Michael's twin sister, stayed in Asmat for a total of 10 days. That's when they found the red gasoline can floating near the shore, but as I say, that's not necessarily proof of anything.

Starting point is 00:07:05 The Dutch didn't hide their pessimism about Michael's prospects. The people who gave up hope soonest were the ones who knew this area the best. They said Michael's only chance was to have made his way inland through this deadly swamp country and to meet up somehow with friendly natives. But even that was sort of problematic. One Dutch officer said, the swamps are treacherous. Some of the natives are still vicious. The area is notorious for tribal clashes. And that's why I think, apart from the fame of Michael's family, the story has remained alive, is that the Asmat had until recently, until five or ten years recently, been practicing headhunting and cannibalism. And the thought is that if Michael made it to shore, it's possible he met up with some of them and that they killed him. The official cause of his death was drowning. Basically, the Dutch authorities decided it was unlikely that he'd ever made it even that far. But the rumors persisted. Perhaps he'd been killed by headhunters on the shore or kidnapped and kept prisoner by them,

Starting point is 00:07:56 or he'd gone native and was hiding out in the jungle deliberately. As I say, there's no physical evidence of any kind, period, so it's hard to make any judgments about any of this. But that's an interesting enough theory that that's why I think the story has remained alive all this time. In December 1961, this is just a couple weeks after his disappearance, two Dutch missionaries began to hear rumors and started to think that Michael had made it to shore but been killed by villagers. Some of them said they'd found a white man at the mouth of a river swimming on his back, stabbed and took him to the coast and killed him they said he wore what they described as shorts that ended high on the legs and had no pockets which some people think means they were referring to underwear which michael was wearing during his swim um they gave the locations of his head and bones or what they

Starting point is 00:08:39 said were those locations which they said had been divided among the people and they said they'd done this they had killed him as a reprisal because of the killings of a Dutch patrol almost four years earlier, which is true. In 1958, several village leaders had been killed by a Dutch patrol during an altercation there. It was just sort of confused, and the Dutch patrol thought they were in danger and had fired shots and killed several of the villagers. And the whole culture of the Asmat for centuries had been one of just constant reprisals and tit-for-tat warfare among themselves. So this theory goes that they encountered a white man and killed him as a reprisal for this 1958 killing of some of their village leaders. That's what's said. That's how the theory goes. that's how the theory goes one of these two dutch missionaries named van kessel wrote to the dutch authority saying it is certain that michael rockefeller was murdered and eaten by otsjena that's the name of the village he said they did not deny the murder though they also said tatsji

Starting point is 00:09:34 is talking nonsense there's a couple things to say about this one it's certainly you can't say that it's certain in the absence of any evidence that he was killed but also when you ask the asthmat about this even today what they tend to say is, I don't know anything about that. If you ask them about Michael Rockefeller, that's what they say. And if you press them, if you say, you won't deny it outright, they won't. And people take that to mean that they're hiding a secret. But it seems to me this is only honest. If you ask me right now, if some of our neighbors out there, you said, we think one of them may have killed someone 50 years ago and covered it up. I'd say, I don't know anything about that. And if you said, aha, you won't deny up, I'd say, I don't know anything about that.

Starting point is 00:10:05 And if you said, aha, you won't deny it, I'd say, no, how could I ever do that? How could I claim to know that to a certainty? I can't tell you that. Even if you said, we think the whole neighborhood was in on it. They had killed him, they ate him, they distributed his bones and agreed to cover it up. I'd say, I can't help you. I can't, truly, I can't tell you that didn't happen. So when the Osmots say, I don't know anything about that,

Starting point is 00:10:23 I think they're just being honest. It doesn't mean they're hiding something, it seems to me. Also, if you look at the investigations, the questions that the missionaries asked the villagers, the questions, it seems to me, are leading questions. They asked, was he wearing glasses? What kind of clothes was he wearing? The villagers asked for tobacco,

Starting point is 00:10:40 and the missionaries would withhold it unless they agreed to tell their stories to the authorities, which it seems to me is tantamount to saying, if you tell the right stories to the authorities, I will give you tobacco. Similarly, Van Kessel told the villagers he'd pay three steel axes for Michael's head and two for his femur, and the warriors refused this. It seems to me there are conflicting arguments here. One of the other arguments that people use to claim that Michael survived or that he may have come to grief at the hands of cannibals is that there were reports at the time that Michael himself had stirred up interest in headhunting and cannibalism among these people. The Dutch colonists had sort of been trying to stamp that out and convert them to Catholicism, and there weren't reports of headhunting and cannibalism for maybe five or ten years up to this point.

Starting point is 00:11:22 But Michael was interested, among other artworks, in carved and painted human heads, which is what they used to create when they were doing this. And he would offer them gifts in return for those. And this argument goes that that stirred up interest, you know, sort of a trade in those heads. There was demand for them now, and so they wanted to get them. The deputy governor general of the area said, A few weeks ago it was reported to me that members of the headhunter tribe approached the area administrator for permission to go headhunting, quote, for one evening only, please, sir. Meaning they needed a head so they could get these steel axes.

Starting point is 00:11:53 So they wouldn't ordinarily have gone headhunting, but they wanted to now. Yeah. And that was kind of held against Michael and held it up as an argument that maybe they were more active headhunting at that moment, ironically, than they would otherwise have been. This official said, This was because Michael was offering ten steel hatchets for one head. We had to warn him off as he was creating a demand which could not be met without bloodshed. The headhunter tribes have been pacified, but occasionally bloodshed occurs. Just for the record, Robert Gardner, who is the official at the Peabody Museum,

Starting point is 00:12:22 who led the first Harvard expedition that spring that Michael had gone on, denied the danger. He said there hasn't been any headhunting for five or ten years, but there are plenty of skulls available. So he didn't make much of that charge. But in any case, it seems to me that if you're willing to say that offering a steel axe, offering a gift in return for a painted skull would influence the villager's behavior, then you can't turn around and say that offering a gift in return for a story would right if you say right look i'll give you a steel axe if you tell me that michael rockefeller was killed by villagers at least some of them would be tempted to say sure that he was and they don't care one way or the other i mean you know yeah i don't think they understood quite what had happened or why it was so important or even what was necessarily wrong

Starting point is 00:13:05 with that. I'll get to that a bit later. Anyway, I think to their credit, the governor of Dutch New Guinea relayed all this to the minister of the interior and added, in my opinion, some reservations need to be made. No evidence has been found yet, and therefore there is no certainty yet. Van Kessel, one of these Dutch missionaries, was considered a rogue who was in conflict with his superiors, and there was tension between him and the Dutch government. So they were taking, I think, what he said with some grain of salt, even at the time. And also, for the record, for all their certainty, the missionary stories were secondhand. No villager ever made an outright confession to either of them. And as I seem to keep saying, there's no physical evidence of any

Starting point is 00:13:41 kind. Also, it's important to note that no Osmot had ever killed a white man and that would have been important it's unprecedented i mean they would kill each other within the same culture but uh if they had discovered michael and killed him there was there was no precedent for that before and it would have been significant i think the osmot actually produced a skull which they said belonged to michael baracafella but a forensic pathologist ruled that this was quote most probably not of european origin and when they actually called off the search for michael the missionaries charges were known which i think kind of cast a certain light on it that they they thought little enough of these charges that they still went ahead and called off the search for michael it was they didn't think that was going to lead

Starting point is 00:14:22 to anything they didn't have a lot of hope that it was accurate, I guess. The writer Carl Hoffman in 2014 published a book called Savage Harvest where he looked into all this. And he said he'd heard several stories about men from Ulch and Epp killing Rockefeller after he swam to shore. He said as he was leaving one of the villages for the last time, he saw a man act out a scene in which someone was killed and stopped to videotape it. And the man said, we must keep this secret. Don't tell anyone about this. But despite Hoffman's book, no remains or proof of Michael Rockefeller's death have ever been discovered. And even he makes the point that all this happened 50 years ago. So if there are any remains of Michael Rockefeller in New Guinea,

Starting point is 00:14:57 they're under 50 years of mud now. And apparently human bones are so common there anyway, that it would take DNA analysis to prove that any of them belonged to michael uh michael wore among other things he had uh he wore glasses with distinctive heavy frames and at one point um hoffman was trying to track those down and finally they gave him some glasses that were just modern wraparound sunglasses he said the glass has been a bold attempt at making a fast buck you get the feeling that they don't quite understand why this is all so significant to the people who are asking about it. And they're just either trying to please them or just give them what they're asking for. Finally, it should be said that even if the Azmat were somehow known to have killed him, the way this is often framed in popular accounts is that he was murdered by cannibals. And I think two things.

Starting point is 00:15:43 We have to remember that they were there first. They were practicing this culture in that area for centuries before the European colonists arrived and tried to impose Western notions of justice and morality. But also that even in the Western eyes, the notion of murder in particular has a legal meaning. To murder someone officially, you have to take their life and know that it's wrong at the time and i think even if michael had made it to shore and been killed by the villagers they could have taken his life but it's not at all clear whether the question whether they knew it was wrong would have any meaning in those circumstances you know what i mean even if they suppose we knew somehow magically that he had made it to shore and that they killed

Starting point is 00:16:21 him and if we somehow had it on film and knew exactly which individuals had done it and hauled him into court and convicted him and subjected him to some punishment, it's not clear what that punishment would mean to him. Their notions of right and wrong, and it's just a bit simplistic and I think ethnocentric to say that these are just evil people who killed him knowing it was wrong

Starting point is 00:16:41 and then covered it up. Right. As if they're just criminals. Their way of life was totally different from that. But I guess that goes along with the theory that this was done as a reprisal for an earlier killing. So in that case, if it was done for vengeance. But that's different from a crime. It's different from thinking that it's morally wrong and needs to be covered up.

Starting point is 00:17:00 They would have seen it, I think, perhaps more as warfare. I don't pretend to be an expert in this at all, but it just seems a bit simplistic to look at it through entirely Western eyes and say that they're all just criminals who are covering up something that they knew was wrong. Right. Or so it seems to me. So in the absence of any evidence or any reason to think otherwise, it seems most likely that the decision the Dutch came to in 1961 is probably the right one,

Starting point is 00:17:23 that he set out, unfortunately, to undertake a swim that was just too much for him and died of exposure, exhaustion, or drowning. Or was eaten by a sea creature. Right, or any number of other unfortunate ends. He was declared legally dead in 1964, and he would be 78 today, which seems unlikely that this mystery could last that long. So I think whatever trouble he got into, he's out of it now. This episode is brought to you by our patrons and by Harry's. For too long, you've either paid too much for a comfortable shave or you've settled for a low-priced but low-quality razor. Harry's offers something you've never had before, a great shave at a fair price. Harry's makes its own We'll be right back. They make just one razor with all you need for a close, comfortable shave. Five German-crafted blades, a flex hinge, and a lubricating strip.

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Starting point is 00:18:55 Plus, there's a special offer for fans of this show. Harry's will give you $5 off your first purchase with promo code CLOSET. Go to harrys.com right now and look for the Truman set. That's h-a-r-r-y-s.com. Enter code CLOSET at checkout to get $5 off and help support this show. Stop compromising. Give Harry's a try today. In episode 109, I discussed how Ronald Reagan had to invent part of a baseball game that he was broadcasting based

Starting point is 00:19:25 on information being telegraphed from the stadium. Greg and I hadn't known that radio sports broadcasts were sometimes based on telegraphed reports and found the whole story quite novel, but apparently this was a whole thing in radio broadcasting for two or three decades, as I learned after hearing from a couple of other listeners. Gillian Brent tweeted at us, Read those blind commentaries. This is how overseas cricket was broadcast in the 1930s, and included a link to a YouTube video from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The ABC explained that starting in 1934,

Starting point is 00:19:58 radio broadcasters in Sydney would attempt to recreate cricket games that were being played in England for their Australian audiences. The ABC called it synthetic cricket and shows in their video the radio commentators receiving detailed reports by telex and then broadcasting the play-by-play descriptions of the game complete with sound effects. The announcer would hit the desk with a pencil to mimic the sound of the cricket bat hitting the ball, and they would add in the sound effects of crowds supplied by records. We'll have a video in the show notes for anybody who wants to see how synthetic cricket was produced. It's great.

Starting point is 00:20:32 I had no idea they did this. Yeah, it actually was really cute to watch the guy, like, banging the desk with his pencil. And it's also earnest. From what I was able to find out on the history of sports reporting by Telegraph, it goes back at least as far as the 1890s, when Telegraph reports of sporting events were sent to places like saloons and pool halls. And this seems to have been particularly occurring in the U.S. and Canada. Many consider what we now call sports broadcasting to have actually first started in 1911 in Lawrence, Kansas. More than a thousand people gathered in Lawrence to watch a reproduction of a University of Kansas

Starting point is 00:21:09 versus University of Missouri football game that was being played in Missouri. The results of the plays were being sent by a telegraph wire that had been set up by Western Union at the spot where the game was being played. Each play would be announced to the crowd in Kansas and displayed on a large model of a football playing field. And it's reported that the crowd responded as though they were actually watching the game live, including doing the special University of Kansas cheer. That would be really, honestly, really exciting at the time. Apparently it really was. Because before that, I guess it was just all you had was newspaper reports, you know,

Starting point is 00:21:43 the next day. Yeah, you'd have to wait for somebody to come back from the game and tell you what had happened. Yeah. Radio broadcasting of baseball began in 1921 in the U.S. And similar to the cricket broadcasting in Australia, in many cases, the radio stations would receive information about the game via telegraph. And then the broadcaster and an engineer would recreate as much of the game as they could. And this practice continued all the way up into the mid-1950s, and I found an article by Big Jim Williams describing how he had helped recreate baseball games for radio in the early 1950s. Williams described how the sportscaster at the station

Starting point is 00:22:20 would strike a baseball bat hanging from the ceiling with a wooden ruler to duplicate the sound of hitting a ball and would use a baseball glove in his left hand and a ball in his right hand to replicate catching a ball. Williams was responsible for the other sound effects used in the broadcast and used a small speaker behind the sportscaster to sound like the ballpark's PA announcer announcing things like currently at bat is and he would also add in recorded voices of vendors in the background, shouting things like, get your peanuts here, and a selection of recorded crowd noises,

Starting point is 00:22:50 such as clapping, cheering, and boos. Williams mentions that they ran disclaimers at the beginning and end of each broadcast, indicating that they were not live at the stadium, but that despite that, they frequently received calls from listeners asking if they were actually at the ballpark. Such calls were usually being made to settle arguments or bets about whether the broadcasts were live at the stadium or not, and apparently, says Williams, most of

Starting point is 00:23:14 these calls came from bars. Williams tells about one game where the telegraph operator came into the control room with a telegraphed report that he had just typed out and said that it made no sense at all. According to the report, a team had just made four outs, retired, and then come straight back up to bat again. Similar to Ronald Reagan's dilemma when the wire had gone dead on him, Williams says our confused sportscaster wasn't sure what to do. He began sweating, ad-libbing about the weather, the crowd, the players, the crowd, his kids, the crowd, his World War II experiences, and making up stories about the ballpark's peanut vendors and arguments or fights in the stands, anything to kill time.

Starting point is 00:23:56 The standard ploys when there were problems with the wire were to say that there was a rain delay or even a dust storm and to put on some music while waiting for the situation to clear up. So Williams started playing music while the station telegrapher tried and tried to call the telegrapher at the stadium. And apparently when the stadium's telegraph operator finally did answer the phone, they discovered that he was drunk. That accounted for the really strange reports. According to Williams, the radio station's telegrapher was reduced to begging for information from a reporter covering the game for a local newspaper, and after about 20 minutes of the music-filled rain or dust storm delay, they were finally able to finish their broadcast. Also on this topic, Peter Salstrom wrote and said,

Starting point is 00:24:40 I too thought the puzzle in episode 106 might be referring to Ronald Reagan's story of announcing a baseball game during a time when the telegraph wire had gone dead. So when you mentioned this in episode 109, I thought you might find it interesting to know that Walter Cronkite actually tells a very similar story about football and actually hints that Reagan may have stolen the story from him. He also provides some interesting background about why these broadcasts by wire were so popular. And Peter very helpfully sent a section of the famous newscaster Walter Cronkite's 1997 autobiography, A Reporter's Life, in which Cronkite describes announcing college football games for a radio station in Kansas in the 1930s.

Starting point is 00:25:27 As Reagan had described, Cronkite explains that a telegraph operator at the stadium would send very abbreviated reports of the results of each play, which Cronkite would then fill in with his imagination to give long, detailed, and colorful descriptions of what might actually have happened during the play. and colorful descriptions of what might actually have happened during the play. Cronkite said, The announcer's skill at doing this and the phony excitement he could generate on demand were the keys to success. Cronkite describes how he and his co-announcer, Moreland Murphy, would find out which local fans would be attending away games and would get from their wives descriptions of what they'd be wearing to the games.

Starting point is 00:26:01 He said, We got from the colleges in advance the description of their halftime shows and what the band would be playing. At halftime, Moreland and I described local Kansas Citians in the stands and all the halftime color, while Moreland, at the studio console, played the band recordings. During the game, Moreland was brilliant at the sound effects. For the kickoff, he blew a whistle and slapped a football with a stick.

Starting point is 00:26:22 That was a pretty good imitation of a kicker at work. And his recorded sound effects of cheering crowds were highly effective. We did such a good job that the Federal Communications Commission suggested that perhaps we should give a few more notices than required that our broadcasts were by telegraphic reports. Cronkite noted that the Western Union service was pretty reliable, but as others have reported, would go down for a few minutes on occasion. Cronkite wrote, these were rare and of short duration, a couple minutes tops. I filled in by simply calling a timeout, who I figured was counting. When the wire came back, the sending operator quickly filled us in on anything that had happened on the field. No problem. Except that for

Starting point is 00:27:00 one day for Cronkite, it was a problem. And that was during a very momentous Notre Dame versus Southern California game. After the wire went down and stayed down for some time, Cronkite felt that he had to resume announcing the game. Notre Dame had had the ball when the wire went dead, so Cronkite had them slowly move down the field with it in small increments. He said, Now they were getting near the Southern Cal 20-yard line, and I knew I couldn't get them inside the 20. That would make the papers the next day and expose my fictional game. He said, half an hour. It was the longest and dullest quarter in the history of organized football. Cronkite goes on to say, about the same time I was doing football at KCMO, there was a fellow doing Telegraph's baseball reports in Des Moines. His name was Ronald Reagan. Many years later, at some occasion at the White House, President Reagan and I were exchanging stories and I told him of my long game. A year or so after that, I was chatting with some group

Starting point is 00:28:05 about that Trojan Irish broadcast and one of my listeners said, hey, you know, I was at the White House a couple of weeks ago and President Reagan tells a story just like that about having to fill in when the wire went down during a baseball broadcast. I won't say the President of the United States

Starting point is 00:28:19 stole my story, but... And that's how Cronkite ends it, so we can fill in our own conclusions. So thanks to everyone who writes in to us, and if you have any questions or comments for us, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:28:36 And if there is any chance of my mispronouncing your name, please tell me how to avoid doing so. to avoid doing so. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give 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. A person calls an auto mechanic complaining that their vehicle accelerates just fine after ignition, but shakes really badly for the first several minutes, then smooths out, and then a few minutes later the engine just dies. The mechanic consults with a co-worker, but neither of them

Starting point is 00:29:13 can do anything for the vehicle. The caller is nonetheless delighted. Why? Okay. All right. um all right um did the caller truly have a problem with their car no uh oh was the vehicle actually a car no okay that's okay okay um okay uh hmm so i have to figure out what the vehicle is is it a mode of transportation yes an airplane some kind of plane some kind of aircraft yes some kind of aircraft uh a rocket like a rocket ship yes i'll say yes yes uh um one that you would leave earth's orbit in you would leave earth's you would leave Earth on this rocket ship? Actually, yes, you would, yes. It's amazing to me how quickly you go to even something that outlandish. But go to outer space. I mean, I'm trying to figure out why you're giving me these

Starting point is 00:30:16 qualified answers. Would you go to outer space in this rocket ship? Yes, yes, yeah. Oh, okay, because I thought it was... No, I didn't mean to qualify. I was just astounded that you made that much progress. Oh, oh, because I'm thinking it's like a rocket ship on an amusement park, like a rocket or something. No, you have it. An actual rocket ship.

Starting point is 00:30:29 Okay, so is the rocket ship behaving normally? And they were just calling back to talk to, I don't know, NASA or ground control or whoever you talked to and... Yes, it was behaving normally. But try to figure out who was calling and why. Who was calling and why? Somebody on the rocket ship is calling no yes oh okay wait somebody on the rocket ship is initiated the call yes okay and they were just happy that they were able to talk to ground control or whoever or do i have to figure out who they're talking figure out who he was calling who he was calling so he's calling a specific person yes did this really happen yes oh goodness

Starting point is 00:31:10 um does it matter what year it is specifically uh not really no um okay was he calling a famous person yes is that why he was kind of? Because he got to talk to a famous person? Basically, yes. Did he get to talk to the president? No. He called... Did he get to talk to a famous celebrity? It's an auto mechanic who he calls. He actually calls an auto mechanic? Yes. Somebody in a rocket or a spaceship calls an auto mechanic? Yes. But a famous auto mechanic? Yeah. You were actually

Starting point is 00:31:46 nearly there. How many famous auto mechanics do you know? Well, all I can think of is click and clack, but is that, I mean... That's it. Seriously, because that's

Starting point is 00:31:53 who I thought of, and I'm like, that can't be it, but seriously, that's it? Larry writes, this is a true story. In 1997, astronaut John Grunsfeld called

Starting point is 00:32:00 into the NPR show Car Talk from the space shuttle Atlantis during mission STS-81. He described the sensations of acceleration and turbulence experienced by astronauts during a shuttle launch as a joke. Anonymously, not explaining what he was. He said it was just a government vehicle and then he described the sensations.

Starting point is 00:32:14 That's really funny. The hosts of Car Talk, Tom and Ray Maliazzi, were genuinely in the dark when the call started but quickly caught on. And I actually looked this up. I'll put a transcript of it in the show notes. He says, I work for the government. He just described it as a government vehicle. He says, the twice that I've driven this thing off the line, when I first started up, it starts great. It accelerates really, really well, and it runs incredibly rough for the first two minutes. This is one of those puzzlers. After the first two minutes, after this really rough ride, there's kind of a jolt, and then it runs smooth, but only for about six and a half minutes, and then at that point, the engine dies. He said he tried it with two different vehicles of this make and had exactly the same problem with both. So they basically figured out who he was. I was going to say, click and clack, figured that out.

Starting point is 00:32:50 That's pretty good for them. Funny thing is he did the same thing a few years later. He called in again, again anonymously, and asked about sticking bolts on what he called a 19-year-old vehicle. He said he was using snap-on tools, which the government had bought for him, all of which was true. It turned out the 19-year-old vehicle was the Hubble Space Telescope, which we had just been repairing. So I'll put that up in the show notes. Thanks very much, Larry, for sending that in.

Starting point is 00:33:11 Thank you, Larry. 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. If you like our podcast and want to help support it so that we can keep on making it, please consider becoming a patron to help support the show. The show is a big commitment of time to research and produce each week, so we're really grateful to everyone who has pitched in to help us keep it going. If you want to help, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the Support Us page on the website.

Starting point is 00:33:43 If you're looking for more quirky curiosities, you can check out our books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample more than 9,000 obluctating trantles. At the website, you can see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 112-The Disappearance of Michael Rockefeller

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