Futility Closet - 161-The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

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 H.G. Wells' Perseverance to Robert Louis Stevenson, Underwater. This is episode 161. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1971, high school student Juliana Kupka fell two miles into the Peruvian rainforest when her airliner broke up in a thunderstorm. Miraculously, she survived the fall, but her ordeal was just beginning. In today's show, we'll describe Juliana's arduous trek through the jungle

Starting point is 00:00:44 in search of civilization and help. We'll also consider whether goats are unlucky and puzzle over the shape of doorknobs. Thanks to listener Jamie Craven for suggesting this one. This whole story is incredible. Juliana Kupke is a German national, but she grew up in Peru. She's the only child of two German zoologists who worked at a natural history museum in Lima. When she was 14 years old, her parents moved deep into the Peruvian rainforest where they set up a biological research station called Panguana, and she fell in love with the jungle. She learned everything she could about the plants and the animals living there. Their house had no running water, and they had to shake poisonous spiders out of their boots in the morning. It was kind of a rough life, but she really loved living in the jungle

Starting point is 00:01:27 and learning about it. She lived there for 18 months and was homeschooled by her parents, but eventually the educational authorities decided they didn't approve of that arrangement, and she was required to leave the forest and go to a school in Lima, several hundred miles away. She took her final exams there and graduated in December 1971. Her mother came out to collect her and bring her home for the Christmas holiday. Juliana wanted to attend her graduation ball on December 22nd, so they agreed they'd fly home on Christmas Eve. As it turned out, all the flights were booked except for Lanza, which is a small airline that had already lost two airplanes in crashes. They were down to their last plane. By coincidence, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog

Starting point is 00:02:05 was in the terminal that day trying to get to the jungle to shoot scenes for his film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. He fought to get a seat on the plane but was unsuccessful, which is a good thing because if he'd succeeded, he would be dead now. I mention him here because he's going to be involved. He took a very strong interest for obvious reasons in this whole story as it unfolded and in Juliana too. Juliana and her mother were angry because this plane was seven hours late, but finally they took off headed from Lima to Pucallpa, which is a short flight that normally takes only about an hour. They sat in the next to last row, and Juliana chose the window seat so she could look outside. The first 30 minutes of

Starting point is 00:02:40 the flight passed normally. The crew gave them sandwiches half an hour after takeoff, and they were expecting to land just in about 20 minutes or so. And then they flew into a storm front, a big black cloud. Juliana saw a blinding white light over the right wing, and the plane went into a nosedive. She later said, I could see the cockpit, and there was terrible crying from the people and the very deep roaring of the engines, not a normal sound, much louder. Her mother said, now it's all over, and then she was alone. She was still strapped into her seat, but she said the plane simply wasn't there anymore. She was flying, spinning through the air at an altitude of about 10,000 feet,

Starting point is 00:03:15 or about two miles, or three kilometers. It was quiet, except for the rushing of the air. The aviation authorities later worked out that what must have happened is that lightning had struck a fuel tank and the plane had broken apart. Juliana happened to be sitting at one of these breaking points and she and her seat had simply drifted free of the plunging airplane. Werner Herzog, who later made a documentary about all this for German television, said she did not leave the airplane. The airplane left her and she says that captures it exactly. She remembers falling and the seatbelt squeezing her and being perfectly

Starting point is 00:03:45 aware of what was happening. Before she could feel fear, she lost consciousness. Later, she came to again, still falling, but upside down now, watching the jungle spin up below her. The treetops reminded her of heads of broccoli. She woke up underneath the three-seat bench. Her seatbelt was unfastened now, so she must at some point have woken up and released herself from it and then crawled under the seat for shelter from the rain. It had been pouring, and she was covered with mud. The first thing she saw were the crowns of the jungle trees. Her first thought was, I survived an air crash.

Starting point is 00:04:14 How she survived is not clear. She thinks it could be a combination of factors. One is that thunderstorms often have strong updrafts. If that was the case, that might have helped to slow her fall. Also, she is what's called a wreckage rider. She fell down attached to a piece of wreckage to this seat, and that the wind resistance might have helped to slow down her descent. Because she remembers spinning, some people think that the seat with her attached to it might have been spinning like a maple seat

Starting point is 00:04:38 as it came down. Also, the trees where she landed were particularly dense, so she would have struck those upside down, but then may have bounced or tumbled down to the jungle floor right side up, and so the seat could have helped to break her fall. No one knows because she was unconscious when she landed. She had lost her glasses, and her left eye was swollen shut. Through the other eye, she could see only through a narrow slit, but she was remarkably unscathed for such a long fall. Her right collarbone was broken, but the bone hadn't come through the skin, and her left calf was badly gashed, but it wasn't bleeding at all. Her watch told her it was 9 a.m., so she must have been unconscious for the whole afternoon and night. The plane had gone down around 1.30 p.m. the previous day. It took her several tries to get up. Probably she had a severe concussion. She was wearing one

Starting point is 00:05:25 sandal and a thin sleeveless mini dress, and now she's in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. She couldn't know this at the time, but the largest search operation in the history of Peruvian air travel had begun to search for the missing plane. But the jungle had just swallowed it up. The pieces of the four-engine turboprop had fallen over an area of 15 square kilometers, and no one could find a crash site. The jungle seemed simply to have swallowed the whole airplane. Juliana herself, on the ground, couldn't see any sign of the crash. There were no broken branches above her, and she saw no other wreckage. She searched for her mother for a full day, but she couldn't find any survivors at all. Eventually, she found a bag of sweets, which she ate,

Starting point is 00:06:00 and the remains of a holiday cake, which the rain and mud had ruined. She left that behind. She could hear search planes overhead, but she realized they would never be able to see her through the jungle canopy. Anyone else might have panicked. I certainly would have. But strangely, Juliana's life had trained her for this moment. She had landed only about 30 miles from Panguano, her parents' research station, and she knew this forest.

Starting point is 00:06:20 She said, I felt no fear because it was the same environment I knew from home. She didn't know where she was, but she recognized the forest that she'd spent 18 months in. She said later, my parents showed me from an early age that with calm and methodical thinking, you could master almost any situation in which you end up in nature. She reasoned that if the search planes couldn't find her, she would have to make her own way to civilization. In the jungle, her father had told her that following water will bring you to other people. She found a spring and followed it. If her father was right, the spring would lead to a creek and then to a river,

Starting point is 00:06:49 which would eventually lead her out to human settlements. Interestingly, she says that she was later accused of abandoning other survivors by leaving the area, but she says she saw no other people, and if she had, she would probably have stayed with them, and in that case, they would have perished together because the searchers would never have found them in time. As a child, Juliana said, I learned a lot about life in the rainforest, that it wasn't too dangerous. It's not the green hell that the world always thinks. She made her way carefully downstream, walking sometimes in the water because the undergrowth is just so thick. She was careful always to step first with her shod foot. Remember, she only has one shoe.

Starting point is 00:07:22 Eventually she ran out of candy and she had no other food, but she knew that the water of the creeks was clean and safe to drink. She says she was never hungry, though she gradually grew weaker. Day after day, she worked her way downstream, walking during the day and huddling by the shore at night, where she was plagued by insects and drenched with rain. This was the rainy season. On December 28th, her watch stopped, so it became harder to keep track of time. Occasionally, she came across wreckage from the plane. She saw a blackened turbine at one point, and on the fourth day, she came across another three-seat bench like the one she had come down on.

Starting point is 00:07:53 This one held the bodies of two men and a woman. They had been rammed headfirst into the earth. She later wrote, the impact must have been so hard that it drilled itself three feet deep into the ground. This was the only contact she had with any other passengers. She was afraid that the woman in the seat might be her mother, though she realized later that this was impossible because her mother had been sitting right next to her. She looked at the woman's toenails and saw that they were polished and felt relief her mother had never polished her toenails.

Starting point is 00:08:17 Eventually, as she worked her way down the creek, she heard the call of a certain bird, a crested chicken, a call that she heard often at home in Panguana. She knew that this bird nests only near open stretches of water, so she thought there might be a river in that direction, and she left the creek and set out through the dense jungle, and to her great relief, she came out at a river, which was wide enough finally to reveal clear sky overhead. She wrote, I was very proud of myself. But by this time, the searchers had largely given up. They still hadn't found the crash site, and it seemed increasingly unlikely that anyone could have survived. She saw a single search plane, and that didn't see her. After that, there was nothing.

Starting point is 00:08:53 And while the river was large, it didn't seem to have been settled by people. The animals she saw seemed unusually tame, and there were fallen trees in the water that would have prevented navigation by boats, which all seemed to show that people didn't live in that region. So her journey wasn't over. She had to keep heading downstream. Here again, her experience in the jungle served her well. She knew, for example, that stingrays rest on the river bottom, so she prodded the bed ahead of her with a stick as she walked along through the shallows. Eventually, she just swam to the middle of the river, knowing that stingrays wouldn't venture there and that piranhas, which were also in the river, are not dangerous in moving water. She passed some caimans, which are alligator-like reptiles that were dozing on the riverbank, and they slid into the water directly toward her as

Starting point is 00:09:33 she passed, but she knew that they were fleeing her. Caimans, just their instinct is to get into the water, even if that means moving toward the thing that they fear, and she knew this, and they just swam harmlessly under her. If they had scared her into the jungle, or even if she'd stopped traveling down the river, she would have died. She learned later that the entire river was uninhabited. At about this time, she examined a cut on her arm and discovered that a fly had laid its eggs in the wound, and it was now full of maggots a centimeter long. She was afraid she might get blood poisoning and lose her arm, but she had no way to remove the maggots. She'd once owned a dog that had become infested with the same maggots, and her father had had to drive them out with gasoline.

Starting point is 00:10:09 She later discovered a second-degree sunburn on her back. The skin was already peeling off. When she was under the canopy, the sun couldn't get to her, but now in the middle of the river, she was just baking all day long. But there was nothing for it. She just had to keep going. Throughout all this, she says she felt no pain or hunger and was strangely confident that she'd make it. Her leg wound still hadn't bled at all, and her broken collarbone didn't hurt. She found out later that she was in shock this whole time. Yeah, I was going to say that it sounds like she was in shock, although she's functioning at a very high level. Amazingly high.

Starting point is 00:10:38 She's 17 years old. But she was getting weaker and falling into apathy. She considered catching and eating a frog. She kept seeing these little poison arrow frogs occasionally. They are poisonous, but she knew that the poison was too weak to kill an adult. She couldn't catch any, though, although she tried. And it turns out that maybe just as well, in her weakened state, they might actually have killed her. On the 10th day, she finally found a boat on the riverbank that was new and in full working order. There was a beaten trail leading from the river 15 or 20 feet up the slope to the bank with visible footprints on it. She left the river

Starting point is 00:11:08 and tried to climb the bank, but she found that she was so weak that it now took her hours to get up that distance. At the top, she found a shelter, a hut without walls, in which she found the boat's outboard motor and some gasoline. Even in her desperate state, she said she didn't want to take the boat because she didn't want to steal it. But she used the gasoline to drive about 30 maggots out of her arm wound. She was so weak now that she simply lay in the hut. She wrote later, I had always thought that it would be agonizing to starve, but I wasn't in any pain. I was so apathetic and weak that I didn't really care anymore.

Starting point is 00:11:37 She slept well that night, and in the morning she wasn't sure whether to wait for the boat's owner or to try to keep moving. Her mind told her to keep going, but she didn't have any strength to get to her feet. She decided to rest for one more day, and the moment she made that resolution, three men walked up. They were surprised to find her and at first seemed frightened. They explained later that they thought she was a water goddess, a figure from local legend who was a hybrid of a water dolphin and a blonde, white-skinned woman. She learned later that her eyes were blood red. The change in pressure when the plane broke apart had broken the capillaries in her eyes, and even her irises are red, so her eyes just look like bloody sockets. She told them, I'm a girl who was in the Lanza crash. My name is Juliana, and they hurried to help her. They were native lumbermen, and they'd heard about the crash

Starting point is 00:12:18 on the radio. They told her the airplane had not been found, nor any survivors. They gave her some food, but she found that she couldn't eat much because her stomach had shrunk. The next day, they took her in the boat to a district downriver where she could get medical care. They had discovered her just in time. She could never have managed this trip by herself to get that far. Even in Tornavista, this district, she kept her presence of mind. At one point, a nurse wanted to give her penicillin, but she remembered that her father was allergic to it, and she herself didn't know whether she'd inherited his allergy, and so she declined it. Amazingly, after all of this, she still thinks to do that. As the doctors examined her, they discovered other injuries.

Starting point is 00:12:52 She'd strained the vertebrae in her neck, she'd fractured her shin, but not badly, and she'd torn her ACL, a ligament in her knee. After her wounds had been cleaned and disinfected, an American pilot volunteered to take her to a mission in Yaranocha, where she could get better care and recover comfortably. And there she finally started her recovery. She wrote, I'm hovering in a state that I can't describe. To this day, after so many years, I find it hard. It's the way you might feel after handling a very urgent matter for which you have to be in top form, and afterward you fall into a void. You're neither upset nor happy about what you've achieved. You simply feel nothing. Remarkably, it was only in the hospital that her body began reacting to her injuries. Her knee swelled up and a 104-degree fever set in. An orthopedist couldn't believe that she'd walked

Starting point is 00:13:33 for 11 days through the jungle on a torn ACL. He said medically, that's actually completely impossible. She described the route she had taken through the jungle, and rescuers followed these backward and finally discovered the wreckage of the plane. So without her description, it might never have been found. Certainly, if she had stayed where she had originally fallen, she would have died in the jungle because they never would have reached her in time. Journalists descended on the hospital. One even impersonated a nurse to try to get to see her, and her father finally made an exclusive deal with the German magazine Stern to get some peace for them, and she gave her story to them. She was famous overnight and received hundreds of letters from all over the world.

Starting point is 00:14:12 Some of the letters were simply addressed, Juliana, Peru, but they still found their way to her. She wasn't offered any therapy, as counseling wasn't common in those days. She said she had to deal with the emotional trauma on her own. She suffered nightmares, survivor guilt, and grief at her mother's death. She reacted by bottling up these emotions, and she says it took her 10 years for her mother's death to sink in. Even a year after her rescue, the attention overwhelmed her. She thought, it's like dogs hunting me. So she disappeared for four decades. She got a doctorate in biology and is now a librarian at a zoological library in Munich. She reemerged in 2000 to make a documentary about her experience with Werner Herzog, which I recommend. They retraced her route through the jungle and examined the plane wreckage, and she just describes what she did on the whole ordeal. It's called Wings of Hope. I'll put a link in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:14:53 She also published a book about the experience in 2011 called When I Fell from the Sky. Today, she has a remarkably normal life and has dedicated herself to trying to preserve the rainforest that sustained her after the crash. She says that her ordeal taught her that nothing, above all not life, can be taken for granted. She wrote, We talked about H.H. Holmes, America's first documented serial killer, in episode 144 and covered some updates to his story in episode 156, including that his body was to be exhumed in order to be DNA tested to determine if it really was Holmes who was in that grave. John Burns wrote, Greg, Sharon, Sasha, love the podcast. After listening to the recent updates on HH Homes, I did some digging to see if I could locate anything further.

Starting point is 00:15:49 I did come across some more info that I wanted to share just in case you hadn't yet heard these details. And John sent in several pieces of information related to homes, including that someone has placed a geocache near Homes' unmarked grave. a geocache near Holmes' unmarked grave. Geocaching, for those who haven't heard of it, is a sort of a treasure hunting game using GPS coordinates and clues that you have to figure out in order to locate a hidden object. In this case, GPS coordinates are given to Holmes' grave, and information from other gravestones in the area is used to work out the coordinates to the nearby hidden geocache. Based on what I could see on this, it looks like this geocache was placed in 2013, and John notes that the most recent person to report finding the geocache on June 11th

Starting point is 00:16:31 didn't note seeing a hole or recently disturbed earth, although the exhumation was supposed to have started in early May, so not sure what to make of that. Holmes was supposed to have been buried under 10 feet of cement, so you would think that trying to get through that would have created a bit of a mess. John also notes that the body has to be returned to the grave within 120 days, so I would have thought that they would have left the grave open for that. I guess maybe those GPS coordinates might just be mistaken, like maybe that's not really where his grave is? Yeah, I guess that's a possibility. I mean, the site looked kind of authoritative, and they seemed to be pretty sure that they knew where his grave was. I would think that that would be knowledge that could be tracked down somehow. But you're right, maybe the geocache site is just wrong about where his grave is. Well, but even if it's wrong, there's an open grave somewhere.

Starting point is 00:17:19 There should be. Someone would have noticed that. Yeah, and I think it's known what cemetery he's in. Yeah. John tried looking into when the results of the DNA testing were expected to be announced, which was something I hadn't been able to find when I was looking for that information. John found an article in a local newspaper on the exhumation and DNA analysis that's going to be done by the Anthropology Department of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and the article said, the results of the DNA analysis will presumably be featured in an upcoming television program as the University of Pennsylvania Museum personnel were unable to comment for this story due to a production company holding exclusive media rights. The

Starting point is 00:17:59 production company did not respond to a request for comment. The History Channel had a 2013 episode on Holmes, and it appears that they're The History Channel had a 2013 episode on Holmes, and it appears that they're going to be producing an upcoming episode on him that will include this testing, but there's no word on when. Various experts that were interviewed for several articles on the topic all seem to feel fairly strongly that it's rather implausible that Holmes did escape the hanging, which would mean that after all this digging and testing, it will likely show that it really is Holmes in the grave after all, which I think would be a bit of a letdown for a TV show. I also thought that it was kind of an odd thing that a production company could hold the exclusive rights to information on who is or isn't buried in a grave, but apparently they

Starting point is 00:18:39 can. And I guess they're counting on having this big reveal beyond their show whenever that's going to be. So they're just having to wait to see what the results are to see whether it's worth putting together a shocking... I guess. I mean, there's just no information about what's going on with this. That would make sense. Yeah. Okay, puzzle spoiler alert here. Okay, puzzle spoiler alert here.

Starting point is 00:19:06 Karsten Hammond wrote in about the way ages are counted in Asian cultures that was first addressed in a puzzle in episode 152 with some follow-up in episode 155. And Karsten said, I lived in Chengdu, China for a year in high school, and what you have spoken about so far on the podcast regarding the ways that those in China count age rings true with my experiences there. It was in 2007 2007 and perhaps things are changing. It was typical then for anyone answering a question regarding their age to respond with the number of calendar years they had lived in, not the number of years that have elapsed since

Starting point is 00:19:35 their birthday, as you have elucidated on the podcast. The interesting piece of the puzzle I thought you may be interested in is that people in China do not traditionally ask each other, how old are you? The more polite way to ask a person their age is to say, what is your zodiac sign? The response is, I am a snake or a monkey or what have you. So if you reply, I'm a monkey, the questioner immediately knows that you are 24, 36, 48 or 60 years old, given the 12 year cycle of zodiac signs. 48 or 60 years old, given the 12-year cycle of zodiac signs. This what is your sign question is regarded as much more polite and seems to be the default age question for older generations, especially when asking adults. While I lived there, I was amazed at how everyone, even my teenage peers, seemingly intuitively could translate someone's sign into their age, while I had to do awkward 12-year calculations or else look it up. Additionally, before I caught on, sometimes when I asked someone their age, they would respond without hesitation with their sign instead of their age. And Karsten sent a link to a TED Talk by

Starting point is 00:20:37 Xiaolan Xue on the Chinese zodiac and its influence in that culture, which he said also addresses something that we had covered in another puzzle, that in episode 130, about birth rates in Asian countries being tied to the zodiac. Shui says that in 2012, the year of the dragon, birth rates in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan increased by 5%.

Starting point is 00:20:59 There was a significant increase in cesarean sections in January 2015, which was the last month before the year of the goat started, according to the Chinese calendar, and goats are considered unlucky. Tigers are also seen as undesirable due to their volatile temperaments, so significant declines in birth rates are seen in those years, too. So they're giving birth prematurely just to get them... Just to get them, right. Born before the year of the goat or the tiger. They didn't want them to be unlucky or have volatile temperaments.

Starting point is 00:21:28 Yes, that is not amazing. Shui says, though, that this actually might be a benefit to people born in these supposedly undesirable years, as they will face much less competition in their lives, having a smaller cohort to compete with. She says that looking at the list of the Forbes top 300 richest people in the world, that the goat and the tiger, the two most undesirable animals, are actually at the top of the chart, doing better even than the dragon, which is considered to be a very strong animal.

Starting point is 00:21:56 That's interesting. So that would be funny if it has almost the opposite effect. Yeah. Shwayne notes that the belief in this zodiac affects many people's decisions, such as who to marry, when to give birth, and which investments to pursue. She says, As China plays such an important role in the global economy and geopolitics, the decisions made based on the Zodiac and other Chinese traditions end up impacting everyone around the world. Whether they know it or not. Whether they know it or not, yeah.

Starting point is 00:22:35 And Justin Davis also wrote in about the Asian age counting and let us know that they really do count ages in Korea in the way that we had described in the puzzle and in episode 155, and that it really can be pretty confusing to Americans. Justin said, my brother and his wife and their daughter moved to Korea two years ago to teach English. My niece goes to school in Korea and the subject of how old she is can be confusing to me. At the beginning of this year, she was five by American standards, but was considered seven by Korean standards because you are one at birth and gain your new age rank at the beginning of the year rather than on your birthday. As she is rapidly assimilating into Korean culture, I often hear from her and her parents that she is seven or that she is in a class with the seven-year-olds. But to me,

Starting point is 00:23:18 she is five. Then later in the year, she turned six by American standards at her birthday, but she remained seven by Korean standards. When people ask me how old she is, I often have to pause and think about it as she has been called five, six, and seven all within the span of a few months. Very confusing. Funnily enough, my brother and I have discussed in the past how you could be considered two almost instantly after birth if the timing was right, just as you described in your puzzle. And I'm glad that Justin wrote in and said that, because when I first heard that puzzle about a child who'd been born yesterday being called two years old, I wondered just how accurate that really could be. And it turns out it can be accurate.

Starting point is 00:23:59 In episode 159, Greg told us about the prolific mathematician Paul Erdős and how people calculate an Erdős number, which is a measure of how closely connected someone is to someone who has authored an academic paper with Erdős. And several of our alert listeners wrote in to let us know about a more complicated and whimsical version of this. As one example, Peter Salstrom wrote, I enjoyed your discussion of Paul Erdős and the associated Erdős number. You mentioned its similarity to the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but wasn't sure if you were also aware of the related Erdős-Bacon number.

Starting point is 00:24:34 This number is calculated by adding someone's Erdős number to their Bacon number and is an interesting but mostly irrelevant shorthand for identifying figures who are prominent in both mathematics and cinema. And for those who aren't familiar with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, a Bacon number is the number of links through acting roles by which someone can be connected to the actor Kevin Bacon. It's interesting to see what some people's Erdős Bacon numbers are, and in some cases, the components of the sum are a little surprising. For example, Stephen Hawking has a score of 6, and that's from a Bacon number of 2

Starting point is 00:25:07 and an Erdős number of 4, meaning that Hawking is more closely linked to the actor than to the mathematician, and that's through a link with John Cleese. Actors Colin Firth and Natalie Portman both have an Erdős-Bacon number of 7 because it turns out that both of them are listed as co-authors on different neuroscience papers,

Starting point is 00:25:26 which was a bit of a surprise to me. And Bjarn Jada let us know that some people take this whole idea even one step further with Erdős Bacon Sabbath numbers, which adds in a connection to the English rock band Black Sabbath. There's an amusing website devoted to this, which shows you various celebrities such as Mr. Rogers and Albert Einstein and their paths of connections to Erdős Bacon and Black Sabbath. I was actually quite surprised at the small number

Starting point is 00:25:56 of links they seemed able to use to get from Mr. Rogers or Einstein or even Thomas Edison and end up at Kevin Bacon or Black Sabbath. So thanks so much to everyone who writes into us. We really appreciate your feedback and comments. And if you have any you'd like to send, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an intriguing situation,

Starting point is 00:26:30 and I have to try to puzzle out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. Oh, this is from listener Alon Shaham. Okay. In 2010, Pitkin County, Colorado, required that all doorknobs in the county be round. Why? Oh, okay. And this really did happen? Yes.

Starting point is 00:26:51 Okay. Was this because some tragedy had occurred and so now they were going to prevent future instances by having round doorknobs? I don't know if I'd use the word tragedy, but yes. Okay. Something bad had occurred and they thought, okay, if we have round doorknobs, this bad thing won't happen again? Yes, that's fair to say. Okay. All right. I've established a reason, a motive.

Starting point is 00:27:15 Okay. Round doorknobs. Hmm. All doorknobs. On all doors? I'm sorry. Was it all doorknobs on all doors? All exterior doorknobs. Oh, it all doorknobs on all doors? All exterior doorknobs.

Starting point is 00:27:25 Oh, all exterior doorknobs. Okay, so doors that would allow people to get out of the house, is that thinking? Versus getting into the house, or does it not matter? No, getting in. Getting in as opposed to getting out. The doorknob you would use to get into a house has to be round. Okay, so was this to somehow make it easier for people to get into the house, like some kind of first responders? No.

Starting point is 00:27:51 No. Not like firemen or anything like, okay. No. Was it to make it easier for other types of people to get into a house? No. Okay. Was it to make it easier to get out of a house? Make it harder to get into a house yes

Starting point is 00:28:07 okay um harder for like burglars to get into a house no harder for some class of people people oh maybe it's animals okay was it people the expression on my face i was be very careful to be perfectly neutral. So they were trying to prevent animals from getting into the house. Yes. And it's easier for, say, bears to get into it. You can't have gotten that from my expression. Yes, that's it.

Starting point is 00:28:37 Pitkin County is bear country, and apparently bears have trouble turning round doorknobs. Oh, no. Word to the wise. And that's not the case with the lever variety, apparently. Well, that would be easier for a bear, yeah. A bear can and apparently do occasionally go into people's houses. Kevin Wright, the district wildlife manager for the Colorado Division of Wildlife, pressed for the new rules.

Starting point is 00:28:57 He's responsible for euthanizing bears that break into homes. He said, if over-regulation means saving a few bears' lives, I'm perfectly willing to do that. Oh, I didn't realize they were trying to save the lives of the bears. Yeah. Now I'm much more in favor of it. So we're saving bears here on Futility Closet. Thank you, Alon, for sending that. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us, and we really depend on the support of our listeners.

Starting point is 00:29:29 While we do sometimes have some advertising on the show, the bulk of our support actually comes from our fantastic patrons. If you would like to help support the show and get bonus material, such as extra discussions, outtakes, and peeks behind the scenes, then check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the support us section of the website. If you're looking for more quirky curiosities, check out the Futility Closet books on Amazon, or browse around the website to read more than 9,000 sapid ephemera. At the website, you can also see the show notes for the podcast with the links and references for the topics in today's show. If you have any questions or

Starting point is 00:30:04 comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by the astounding Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 161-The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

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