Futility Closet - 124-D.B. Cooper

Episode Date: October 3, 2016

In 1971 a mysterious man hijacked an airliner in Portland, Oregon, demanding $200,000 and four parachutes. He bailed out somewhere over southwestern Washington and has never been seen again. In today's show we'll tell the story of D.B. Cooper, the only unsolved hijacking in American history. We'll also hear some musical disk drives and puzzle over a bicyclist's narrow escape. Intro: In 1973, Swedish mathematician Per Enflo won a goose for solving a problem posed 37 years earlier. Established in 1945 by a sympathetic actor, the Conrad Cantzen Shoe Fund will reimburse working artists $40 toward a pair of shoes. Sources for our feature on D.B. Cooper: Ralph P. Himmelsbach and Thomas K. Worcester, Norjak: The Investigation of D.B. Cooper, 1986. Kay Melchisedech Olson, The D.B. Cooper Hijacking, 2011. Associated Press, "First D.B. Cooper Clue Discovered," Jan. 18, 1979. Associated Press, "Clue to D.B. Cooper's Fate Found by a Washington Family on Picnic," Feb. 13, 1980. Farida Fawzy, "D.B. Cooper: FBI Closes the Books 45 Years After Skyjacking Mystery," CNN, July 14, 2016. Christine Hauser, "Where Is D.B. Cooper? F.B.I. Ends 45-Year Hunt," New York Times, July 13, 2016. FBI, "D.B. Cooper Hijacking" (retrieved Sept. 18, 2016). FBI, "Update on Investigation of 1971 Hijacking by D.B. Cooper" (retrieved Sept. 18, 2016). David A. Graham and Juleyka Lantigua-Williams, "D.B. Cooper's Final Escape," Atlantic, July 12, 2016. Peter Holley, "The D.B. Cooper Case Has Baffled the FBI for 45 Years. Now It May Never Be Solved," Washington Post, July 12, 2016. Listener mail: Listener Mike Burns sent these photos from the Museum of World War II in Natick, Mass.: A coal torpedo with instructions. Playing cards concealing maps. A baby carriage rigged by the French Resistance to conceal sabotage equipment and a radio. Brian Dewan's song "The Cowboy Outlaw," about Elmer McCurdy. MrSolidSnake745's Musical Floppy Drives on Facebook. Star Wars' "Imperial March" on eight floppy drives. "In the Hall of the Mountain King," from Grieg's Peer Gynt, by Sammy1Am. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Philip Ogren. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music 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 we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page 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 the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities, from a goose-winning mathematician to a shoe fund for actors. This is episode 124. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1971, a mysterious man hijacked an airliner in Portland, Oregon, demanding $200,000 and four parachutes. He bailed out somewhere over southwest Washington and has never been seen again. In today's show, we'll tell

the story of D.B. Cooper, the only unsolved hijacking in American history. We'll also hear some musical disc drives and puzzle over a bicyclist's narrow escape. In episode 95, we did a lateral thinking puzzle about a hijacker who requests multiple parachutes, and a number of listeners wrote in to ask us to tell the story of D.B. Cooper. So here it is. On November 24th, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a man approached the ticket counter of Northwest Orient Airlines at Portland International Airport in Oregon. The man was almost aggressively nondescript. He was a middle-aged American white man about six feet tall wearing a business suit and carrying a briefcase, just instantly forgettable. He said he wanted a seat on the next flight to Seattle and paid for it with a $20 bill

and gave the name Dan Cooper. They asked him if he wanted to check his briefcase, and he said no, he'd take it with him. The whole transaction took less than two minutes. That was air travel in 1971. I also thought he paid for it with a $20 bill. It's kind of amusing. It was basically just a hop across the state border. It wasn't supposed to be a very long flight.

He kept to himself. He had to wait for about an hour while waiting for the plane and just looked out the window. And when the plane arrived, he took seat 18C in the rear. Normal flight time to Seattle was 25 minutes. During taxi, a stewardess named Florence Schaffner took a seat close to the man and told him that his briefcase should be stowed under his seat. And he handed her a note. She thought at first that he was just trying to pick her up, and she put the note in her purse, but he leaned close to her and said, Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb.

He said, Tell your captain I'm taking charge of this plane. These are my demands. Let him read them and then bring this note back to me. Understand? I want it back. So she did this. She took it up to the cockpit and showed it to the pilots, who radioed the Seattle Center and Northwest Airlines headquarters, saying they'd been hijacked. The man said he wanted $200,000 in a knapsack in Seattle by 5 p.m. plus two parachutes. In today's money, that's about $1.2 million. He said the money had to be in negotiable American currency, but he didn't care what denomination it was given to him in. Schaffner, the stewardess, gave the note back to him, and he opened the attache case to reveal several red cylinders, a battery, and a tangle of wires. She went back up to the cockpit and told the pilot about this,

who told the authorities. The stewardesses didn't want to alarm the other passengers, who didn't really understand what was going on, so they went ahead and served drinks, which is what they normally would have done. He ordered a bourbon and water and paid with a $20 bill and tried to tip the stewardess who rejected this. Air piracy is a federal offense, so the FBI had jurisdiction in this case. Northwest, the airline had decided to cooperate, and it was FBI policy then as now to honor that decision. If someone tries to extort money from you and you just decide to pay it, they'll let you do that. They'll try to catch the guy later, but they won't interfere with the transaction. The co-pilot, Bill Radishak, said later,

he appeared to be as rational as someone could be who would do something like that. Because he did not appear to be emotional, we felt we could keep the situation in hand if we went along with his requests. The hijacker changed his demand from two to four parachutes, and he said he wanted the plane refueled while it was in Seattle. He said that as soon as his demands were met, he'd release the passengers. And he also requested meals for the crew, although he didn't tell anybody where they would be going. This was for the day before Thanksgiving. This is a relatively empty flight. There were only 36

passengers on the plane, although it had a capacity of 126. And there were six crew members. At the FBI's request, Northwest used $20 bills for the ransom. That was for two reasons. One is to show Cooper that they were cooperating because $20 bills would be easy to pass out in the world, but also they'd be easy to spot and they'd slow him down. $200,000 in $20 bills weighs 21 pounds. So he had this big heavy knapsack to lug around. And a microwave, sorry, a microfilm photograph was made of each bill, including its serial number, so they could trace them later on. Yeah. Cooper was initially told that military parachutes would be supplied, and he insisted instead on civilian parachutes, apparently knowing that military chutes of the type they were

suggesting would open automatically after about 200 feet. Civilian chutes would allow him to free fall for as long as he wanted. The authorities speculated that he wanted four chutes instead of two so that he could take a hostage, or at least that he could keep them off guard by worrying that that's what he was going to do. Right. In the end, he didn't use all four. The hijacker insisted that the plane remain aloft until the ransom demands had been met, until they had the money and the parachutes ready for him.

As they prepared to land, he said he wanted to be in a lighted area away from the terminal, and he wanted the money and the parachutes waiting for him. They touched down in Seattle at 5.45 p.m. in heavy rain and began fueling the plane. At Cooper's request, a stewardess named Tina Mucklow retrieved the money and the parachutes from outside the plane where they were waiting. Cooper checked the money and then said he'd allow the passengers to leave the plane. Most of the passengers hadn't even considered the possibility that they'd been hijacked and weren't aware of what had happened until they got off the plane. As the last of them left the plane, the stewardess called out, have a nice Thanksgiving.

But as the passengers came off the plane, they checked them off the flight list and found that the only remaining person on the list when everyone had come off was Dan Cooper. So they knew that's who it was. Incidentally, he never called himself D.B. Cooper. The name he gave was Dan. Somehow in the early reporting of this in the media, someone had used the name D.B. I think that was one of the people they'd interviewed about this or investigated in the early going. And somehow that name stuck, but he never used the name D.B. Cooper. He said he wanted to go to Mexico, which seems strange now that he had four parachutes.

And he said he wanted them to fly with the landing gear down, flaps at 15 degrees, and the rear stairway lowered, and he wanted to remain below 10,000 feet. The co-pilot told him that in that configuration, the maximum range of the 727 was 1,000 miles, which is well short of the 2,200 air miles to get to New Mexico City. So they looked at the alternatives and decided to suggest stopping at Reno, Nevada, and Cooper accepted that as the first leg, and then Yuma as the second stop, and basically hopping across the southwest toward Mexico City just stopping to refuel as they went along. That's the plan they set on. Cooper said he'd keep one of the stewardesses, Tina Mucklow, with him until they took off. At 7.37, they took off for Reno. Unbeknownst to Cooper, there was one Air Force jet flying below the plane and another

above it, both ordered to keep out of sight. With the flaps, landing gear, and rear stairs down, the optimum speed for the airliner was 170 knots, which is almost stall speed. It's hard to fly a plane fast in that configuration. And that made it hard for these Air Force jets to fly slow enough. They're not designed to travel, so they had to sort of snake back and forth just to keep going at all. So they weren't able to see much as it turned out. Cooper and Mucklow, the stewardess, were alone in this big empty rear cabin, and he told her to go to the cockpit and on her way to draw the curtain between first class and economy. He said, and don't come back. As she drew the curtain, she glanced at him and saw him tying something around his waist. Twice, the crew tried to contact Cooper on the airplane's intercom system. She just went up to

the cockpit and just waited with them where they all were, because they'd all been forbidden to come back and check on him. But when they tried to reach him on the intercom, he didn't respond. They tried again a third time and said, is everything okay back there? Anything we can do for you? And got no response. But according to the cockpit indicator, he got the stairs down at 742 p.m. And a few moments later, he came on the interphone from the rear flight attendant station and said, no. That was 8.05 p.m., and that is the last anyone has ever heard of D.B. Cooper. He's never been seen or heard from again. At 8.12 p.m., Flight 305 reported, we're getting pressure oscillations in the cabin. He must be doing something with the stairs. At this point,

they were a few miles north of the Oregon border, flying over some of the most rugged terrain on the continent. A track of the airplane kept by FAA controllers in Seattle plotted the jet over the town of Ariel, Washington, not far from Mount St. Helens, which was to erupt nine years later. Incidentally, the town of Ariel has a party every year in his honor to this day. So they just kept going. They didn't know whether he was still aboard the plane, but they'd been ordered to keep flying to Reno, Nevada, so they just went ahead and did that and landed there. When they landed, Cooper was gone, as were the bank bag and two of the parachutes. A third parachute had been opened in the cabin, and two of the nylon shroud lights had been cut from the canopy.

It's thought he used those to tie the money bag to his waist. And the fourth chute was just in the cabin intact, so he hadn't used the other two parachutes. There followed one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. Authorities began looking in a 28-square-mile area south of Lake Merwin near Ariel, Washington, by helicopter, on foot, and with patrol boats. Many thought he might have dropped into Lake Merwin, which is an artificial lake formed by a dam on the Lewis River, but no trace of Cooper, the loot, or the briefcase was found. This was in late November already, and it was getting too cold to do a real thorough search, but with the spring thaw in early 1972, the search began anew with FBI agents plus 200 U.S. Army troops as well as Air Force pilots,

National Guard troops, and civilian volunteers. The troops covered every three to five feet of the area on foot, and they used eight Army helicopters to scan from the sky. They searched the area for 18 straight days in March and another 18 straight days in April. One of the area on foot and used eight Army helicopters to scan from the sky. They searched the area for 18 straight days in March and another 18 straight days in April, one of the most intensive manhunts in Pacific Northwest history, and found absolutely nothing. At the end, the Army operations officer for the hunt told reporters, Cooper isn't where we searched. Either he got away alive or he's at the bottom of the lake, or the FBI's calculations of where he jumped aren't correct. But I have no doubt that this is where he dropped. Because we know so little about Cooper, it's easy to imagine that he was this diabolical genius who thought of everything, and certainly a lot of what he did was very

intelligent and shows a lot of advanced planning. To begin with, the timing of all this was smart, I think. In America, traditionally Thanksgiving falls on a Thursday and everyone takes off Friday, so you get a four-day weekend. So this would give him, if he committed the crime on Wednesday evening, it gave him four days to get back to his regular life, whatever that was, and just resume it without arousing suspicion. He seemed to know a lot about aircraft. When he was buying his ticket for this flight, he confirmed that it was a 727, and it turned out that the 727 was the one jetliner from which a person could bail out. Boeing spokesman John Wheeler said it would be a very safe drop. He'd be away from flaps and other engines and would go straight down. In other aircraft, you'd run the risk of running into exhaust from the engines

or jumping into a wing or some other control surface. And here, you could just drop out, jump straight off the rear stairs and not encounter anything else. And this is the kind of thing that would be much harder to research in the 1970s without Google and the internet. Yeah, that seems significant. So, yeah. So where did he get this knowledge from?

In fact, the rear stairs in particular seems important. Boeing hadn't even told its own flight crews that you could fly with the rear stairs down. The pilot of this very plane didn't know you could fly with the stairs down, and Cooper somehow did. Another, just while I'm dropping clues here, a couple things that just struck me while I was researching this as being important. As I said, he wanted the plane to just fly in circles until they had the money and the parachutes ready for him to come down and pick up. He wanted to spend as little time on the ground as possible. So they spent some time just circling over Puget Sound. At one point, he looked down

from the window and remarked to the stewardess, he said, looks like Tacoma down there, which shows that he recognized the city from the air. Also, and I think even more significant, he remarked to her at one point that McCord Air Force Base was approximately 20 minutes driving time from the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, which it was. That seems that's something that most people wouldn't have known, not even Seattle residents, unless they were connected somehow to aviation in that area, which seems important, but no one's ever been able to make anything from it. And he knew the difference between military and civilian parachutes, which I don't think most people would. He was estimated to be in his mid-40s when this happened in 1971, which would make him about the right age to have been a World War II veteran, so possibly he was a flyer or connected with aviation somehow. No one knows. So that's what he got significantly right,

but he made some serious mistakes as well. For instance, to begin with, the whole plan really doesn't make sense. He had no way of knowing where he was. He was just jumping out of the back of an airliner in darkness, in overcast skies, in fact, during a rainstorm. And this is long before the advent of commercial GPS. So if he was trying to jump and land at a certain point or to meet, for instance, an accomplice that would help him make a getaway. He had no way of knowing where he's going. So like he could have landed in the lake, you know, for all he was going to know what he was going to do.

I think it's safe to say he couldn't have known where he was going to come down. Also, and even more worrisome, he didn't seem to know much about parachutes. They had given him four, which is what he requested, two primary chutes and two reserve chutes, but he wound up choosing the worst two. Of the two primary chutes, he took the older of them, which wasn't steerable, and he cannibalized the good one, which was a highly maneuverable skydiver's model. And that just doesn't make any sense unless it just shows his inexperience. With the reserve chutes, he made an even worse choice. He had two reserve chutes to choose from. One of them was perfectly good and left that one behind. The one he took was actually inoperable.

In their haste to get parachutes for him, the authorities had grabbed a training chute with a ripcord that didn't work, and that's the one he took. It was marked clearly as such, and an experienced skydiver would have recognized that and left it alone, but he took it, which shows that he couldn't have had much experience with jumping. Also, he jumped in a suit and wearing loafers. The plane was flying at 10,000 feet that night, and the temperature outside the plane was minus 7 Celsius. He jumped in a 200 mile per hour wind which would have blown his shoes off and dropped the wind chill

to minus 57. Wow. A local parachutist said, there's not enough money in the world to get me to duplicate that jump. The winds, the rain, darkness, plus not knowing where he was,

it's inconceivable that the skyjacker could land uninjured. Even if he did manage to land safely, he'd be at a random point in the wooded mountains of southwestern Washington in a rainstorm at night in late November, barefoot and wearing a suit and carrying 21 pounds of money. And that's the best case. That's if he doesn't land in a

river or break his legs. Right, because they didn't see that he had like supplies with him, like survival supplies. He may have had, I guess, instruments or something in his pockets, but this is 1971. He can't have had much. Not like a whole backpack full of stuff. The FBI fielded hundreds of calls about this, but the FBI chief investigator, Ralph Himmelsbach, says that for every concerned citizen who tried to help, there may have been tens or even hundreds who cheered Cooper for beating the system. One Woodland, Washington resident was quoted as saying, most people here have a Robin Hood attitude. He didn't hurt anybody, And if he took the trouble to plan this thing out so thoroughly, well, good luck to him. Most of the people around here kind of hope he makes it. Which Himmelsbach says doesn't make any sense.

He wasn't stealing from the rich. He was stealing from an airline. And he wasn't giving to anybody. He either needed the money or just wanted it. But he's not anyone's hero. He's not being charitable. Himmelsbach himself called Cooper a rotten, sleazy crook. He was just basically a thief is what Himmelsbach thinks. Cooper a rotten sleazy crook. He was just basically a thief is

what Himmelsbach thinks. He just stole in a very spectacular way. In air searches, Hopes originally hinged on spotting a parachute, but one officer pointed out he thought of everything else. He sure wouldn't overlook hiding those chutes. And in fact, World War II flyers were taught to bury their parachutes if they bailed out over enemy territory, and the parachute was never found. Make of that what you will. Eventually, they started focusing in Lake Merwin for the searches, but eventually they flew the entire route covered by the airliner. They distributed the serial numbers to the banks and other places where he might try to pass the bills that they'd given him. And in fact, in 1973, they just made the

whole list of serial numbers public. Northwest Airlines even offered a bounty to anyone who could turn in one of the bills, and no one ever did. And they looked for people who went missing in November 1971, as he would have if he died in the fall. None of that turned up anything. In fact, in the 45 years since all this happened, only two significant clues have ever come to light. In 1978, an elk hunter found an interior emergency sign on the flight path of the plane,

its emergency warning normally posted near the rear exit. It's thought that either Cooper was leaning on that as he jumped or it just blew off in the wind. Authorities at the time called that the first probable tangible piece of evidence that had surfaced in the case. An FBI spokesman said the area where it was found had been searched by agents twice in the past and they'd missed it. More significant than that, in 1980, 8-year-old Brian Ingram found three bundles of weathered $20 bills under a layer of sand as his family picnicked along the Columbia River, five miles northwest of Vancouver, Washington. This was a gigantic piece of luck and really a fluke. He was digging a fire pit and got down about six inches and just found these $20 bills,

where it wasn't even close to where they had been looking for Cooper. They apparently had just washed down the river, and he happened to dig in exactly the right place. The FBI identified the cache through the serial numbers. In fact, it didn't go anywhere, and in fact, in a way, it's bad news because it showed them that all their earlier searches may have been in the wrong place. As I said, one theory was that Cooper had fallen into Lake Merwin on the Lewis River near Ariel, but the Lewis enters the Columbia downstream from where the money was found. So they had been searching further south and apparently Cooper may have wound up. That's a bit speculative. It's hard to know what actually happened. The FBI maintained an active investigation into this case for 45 years, during which time the case file grew to more than 40 feet long.

And just two months ago, in July 2016, it said that it's no longer pursuing leads in what it called one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in its history. This is reasonable. Conscientiously, they have to follow every tip that's given, but most of the tips are just someone who had an idea or some speculation about when it might have happened, as opposed to having actual physical evidence. In order to solve the case, the FBI needs to prove culpability beyond a reasonable doubt. And at this point, that means actually having physical evidence of either the parachutes or the money. Or a body, I suppose.

Cooper appeared to be in his mid-40s in 1971, which would make him about 90 years old now, even if he had lived. So there's just diminishing returns in trying to pursue the case. Many investigators believe he never survived his fall to Earth at all. It's important to say, though, that the case is still open. If someone does find some physical evidence, they definitely do want to hear from you. So apart from the few $20 bills that eight-year-old Brian Ingram found in 1980, none of the rest of the money has ever been found or spent. 9,706 $20 bills are still out there somewhere. The FBI chief investigator, Ralph Himmelsbach, who spent decades on this and is now retired, said that he regretted

not catching Cooper, but he said, I take great satisfaction from being 99% certain that Cooper never got a chance to spend a dime of that money. Special Agent in Charge Frank Montoya Jr. told CNN, we would love to have solved this, there's no question about it, to see justice served, and it doesn't feel good to acknowledge that this is the only unsolved skyjacking in American history. But that happens sometimes. Either we're not able to solve it, or too much time passes before it can be resolved. There are a lot of mysteries out there, and this is going to be one of those. This episode is brought to you by our patrons and by Harry's. I've mentioned Harry's before.

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which comes with a razor, a five-blade cartridge, and shaving gel. That's free when you sign up for a shave plan. You just pay shipping. Plus, there's a special offer for fans of this show. Enter code CLOSET at checkout to get a post-shave balm added to your order for free. Go to harrys.com right now and enter code CLOSET at checkout to claim your free trial set and post-shave balm. That's harrys.com code CLOSET. It turns out that there is a place where you can go and see some of the creative World War II escape aids and espionage devices that we've discussed in some different episodes. Like our feature in episode 76 on how the British Secret Service would hide escape tools in board games that the Red Cross would deliver to prisoners in Nazi prison camps.

Listener Mike Burns wrote and said, My family visited the World War II Museum this summer in Natick, Massachusetts. The museum is amazing and has such a collection, most of which is hands-on, that we will definitely be going back again just to try to take it all in. Perhaps the best discoveries of the day were when we found the exploding coal with instructions, a cloth map, tiny compass, and razor blades from Red Cross packages hidden in games, and playing cards with map sections hidden in them. And longtime listeners of our show

might recognize all of those as things we've talked about on the show. So it was interesting to hear that there's this collection of them all in one place. All in one place, yeah. Yeah. Mike sent a link to the website of the Museum of World War II,

which claims to have the most comprehensive collection of documents and artifacts on display anywhere in the world. They say that they have over 7,000 World War II artifacts on display and more than 500,000 documents and photographs in their research archives. And for those who don't think they'll be getting to Massachusetts in the near future, the museum has photos and descriptions of some of their displays on their website. So we'll have that link in the show notes, as well as some of the photos that Mike took and sent in for us to share. We also have a couple of odd musical updates to report. James Allen Spock wrote and said, in episode 118, you gave a detailed history about the late Elmer McCurdy, whose body was eventually discovered in a California funhouse. A slightly altered version of the story was made into a song by musician Brian Duan called The Cowboy Outlaw. And James sent a link to a YouTube video of the song, which contains lyrics such as,

They thought they bought a dummy, but they really bought a man. He was sprayed a special color to help him look a fright, and they hung him from a gallows neath an ultraviolet light. That is a perfect song, a perfect subject for that kind of song. Well, it seems kind of obscure to write a song about, because if you don't actually know the story, it's not going to make a lot of sense. And I guess it never would have occurred to me that somebody would have written a song about it, but it reminded me a bit about that we found out that there was a song that had been written about the three Swedish men who attempted to balloon over the North Pole in 1897.

We were kind of surprised to find out that that was in a song, too. I guess there's a song about everything. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're a songwriter, you need something to write about if you don't want to write the 1,000th song about love and heartbreak, right? You have to find another topic. And so it also turns out that not only do people write songs about rather odd topics, but apparently people play songs using rather odd things for instruments. After listening to episode 120, Chris Lear sent us an email with a subject line of bizarre things to do with computer hardware, which certainly got our attention. Chris said, I just listened to your latest podcast and the part about turning CPUs

into transmitters reminded me of a project I was impressed by years ago, which turns out to be still going. The concept is making music using floppy disk drives. The drives themselves are now more or less museum pieces like cassette and VCR tapes, but my generation remembers them well. What we never did was try to turn them into musical instruments, but this guy has done just that. And Chris sent a link to a Facebook page for a Mr. Solid Snake 745, whose description reads, I make my floppy drives play music for you. We'll play a bit of what Chris says is Mr. Solid Snake's signature tune,

played entirely by a group music played on disk drives that you can check out. But it turns out he isn't the only disk drive musician. There are actually a few others. And for those who appreciate more classical music, here is Sammy I Am's In the Hall of the Mountain King, played by Floppy Drives. drives. Chris said, I love this sort of thing, but I've been messing with computers since the days of the ZX Spectrum, which was huge in the UK in the 1980s. My children, having never heard the buzz of a floppy disk

and not having quite the same nostalgia for electronic beeps, are not so impressed. We'll have full videos of the songs in the show notes in case you want to hear more or actually see the disk drives making their music. And thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. We learn so many fascinating things from our listeners. If you have any questions or comments

for us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. And extra bonus points to you if you tell me how to pronounce your name. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me a strange sounding situation and I have to try to work out what's going on asking only yes or no questions. This one's from listener Philip Ogren. Okay. He says, Hi, I came up with a lateral thinking puzzle on my own

while cycling to work the other day. Despite being sternly warned not to by her friends and family, a cyclist wears earbuds every day on her way to work. She does this, of course, so that she can binge listen to the Futility Closet podcast archives. Of course. One day, a low visibility day, she is cycling to work and is distracted by a particularly compelling lateral thinking puzzle. She doesn't notice broken glass on the road in front of her

until moments before cycling over it. To avoid a flat tire, she swerves quickly into the middle of the road and goes around it. When she gets back to the edge of the road, she looks up, sees a sign, and realizes that she is in immediate and grave danger. She narrowly escapes death by quickly swerving off the edge of the road and into the ditch. How did she know she was in danger? Oh, no. Okay. Okay.

An almost fatal puzzle, but luckily nobody managed to die. I would have felt so bad if somebody died listening to the Futility Closet podcast. Okay. All right. So you said she sees a sign. Yes. And the sign let her know that she was in danger. That's right. All right. So you said she sees a sign. Yes. And the sign let her know that she was in danger. That's right.

All right. Does this matter where she is in any way other than she's on a road, I presume? No, that's it. She's on a road. And I don't need to know anything more specific about the location than that? No. Okay. Does it matter what kind of bike she's riding?

No. Do I need to know anything about the road itself? No. Okay. And this is a road that you would have automobiles on, what I would think of as like a road or a street? Yes. Okay. So I don't need to picture anything specific about the road or street?

That's correct. Okay. Hmm. She's an adult human female. She's a hermit crab. Yes, she is. adult human female she's a hermit crab yes she is adult human female hermit crab listening to futility closet on your butt riding a bicycle um okay she sees a sign is this a sign like a standard road sign um that's too hard of a question to answer. Yeah. Semi-standard road sign? Okay. A sign as in there's like a pole or a stick in the ground with a sign on top of it? Like a stop sign has like a pole and then a sign? Would it

be that kind of sign? I'm going to say no. No. Was it a sign affixed? Well well it's got to be affixed to something um a sign affixed to a non-movable object like an overpass uh as opposed to like a sign on the back of a truck or something but the sign on the truck would move and the sign on the overpass would not yeah no this wasn't the sign wasn't moving. The sign would not move. Or the sign wasn't moving. Okay, the sign wasn't moving. Yeah. Would the sign, would you expect the sign to move? No. No. I'm trying to keep this simple but still accurate, so let's say no. No, the sign wouldn't move.

it so let's say no the sign wouldn't move okay um was it the kind of sign where uh you can change the words on it because it's done with lights and so you can put up warnings for very specific situations um that kind of sign not precisely but you're on the right track uh i'm on the right track that That's all I could think of. So presumably, so what's written on the sign could change? Yes. But it's lower tech than, say, lights? No. No.

Okay. Does it have lights on it? Yes. Is it a stoplight? No. No. No. Like a crosswalk kind of light? No.

So it's a sign that has lights on it. Okay. But maybe it's not as flexible as what I'm picturing, like where they put up specific warnings of specific events. Is it less flexible than that? You would expect to see only a limited number of things show up on this sign? No, I wouldn't say that. Oh, okay.

It's just all I'm saying is it's not the kind you're talking about that's intended to display messages for motorists. But it could display a variety of messages. Yes. Yes, it could. And it's done in lights? The messages would show up in lights? Yes. I'm getting really hung up on this sign.

Should I move off onto something? No, no, no. The sign is what you need. The sign is what I need. So there's a message on the sign in lights. Okay. Is the sign in some specific location that I need to know about? Like it's at a ballpark or at an exit?

No. It's just by the side of the road. You've seen one of these. I've seen one of these. Does it have anything to do with construction or work that's going on? No. No. Would I expect it to have numbers on it?

Yes. Numbers and letters? Yes. I would expect to see both on this sign yes you're saying so very very well i don't want to mislead you not all of the text is variable put it that way okay oh was it one of those that tells you how fast your speed is yes um uh okay so she saw a very high number and knew that something was going very fast behind her? Yes, that's it. Oh, wow. Philip writes, the sign she saw was a speed limit sign that also displays your speed by radar. Instead of displaying 16 miles per hour, the speed she was going, the

sign read 70 miles per hour, the speed of the car behind her. Wow. Philip writes, this is not a true story. I thought of this puzzle while going about 21 miles per hour and seeing such a sign, and it read 25 miles per hour, which made me think, hey, there must be a car behind me. That's a really good puzzle, all the more so because the person was listening to Futility Closet. That's our first Futility Closet-based lateral thinking puzzle. So thanks, Philip, for sending that in.

Yes, thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to use, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's our show for today. Futility Closet is supported primarily by our wonderful fans. While we do have some advertising on the show, it doesn't cover the big commitment of time that it takes to make the podcast each week. If you would like to help support the show, please see the support us section of the website, where you can make a one-time donation or learn

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Our music was written and performed by Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.