Futility Closet - 187-A Human Being in the Bronx Zoo

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 10,000 quirky curiosities from Joyce's thunderclaps to a Morse code mystery. This is episode 187. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. The Bronx Zoo unveiled a controversial exhibit in 1906, a Congolese man in a cage in the primate house. The display attracted jeering crowds to the park, but for the man himself, it was only the latest in a string of

Starting point is 00:00:38 indignities. In today's show, we'll review the sad tale of Oda Benga and his life in early 20th century America. We'll also delve into fugue states and puzzle over a second interstate speeder. On September 8, 1906, visitors to the Bronx Zoo found a surprise. A human being was exhibited in an iron cage at the monkey house. He wore white trousers and a khaki coat but no shoes, and his teeth had been chipped into sharp points. As many as 500 people at a time crowded around the cage to look at him as he attended to his pet parrot, shot arrows at a bale of hay, and wove mats from bundles of twine that were placed in his cage. The New York Times sent a reporter, and the following day an article appeared with the headline, Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes.

Starting point is 00:01:26 It read, The zoo capitalized on the publicity by moving the man from the chimpanzee cage to a larger structure at the southwestern end of the primate house. moving the man from the chimpanzee cage to a larger structure at the southwestern end of the primate house. They also gave him an orangutan named Dohong and littered his cage with bones to suggest cannibalism. And they added a sign which read, The African pygmy Otabenga, aged 23 years, height 4 feet 11 inches, weight 103 pounds, brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa by Dr. Samuel P. Verner, exhibited each afternoon during September. In another article, the New York Times reported,

Starting point is 00:02:09 the pygmy was not much taller than the orangutan, and one had a good opportunity to study their points of resemblance. Their heads are much alike, and both grin in the same way when pleased. The Samuel P. Verner mentioned on the sign was Samuel Phillips Verner, an African explorer and former missionary who had brought Benga from Africa. That was a sad story. Werner had gone to Africa to collect some pygmies for the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. The fair would be celebrating American imperialism and progress, and it planned to display the natives of some new U.S. territories, such as Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico.

Starting point is 00:02:41 Some scientists wrongly thought that pygmies represented the lowest form of human development, and Werner was sent into the Congo with a sort of shopping list. One pygmy patriarch or chief, one adult woman, preferably his wife, two infants, and four more pygmies, preferably adult but young, but including a priestess and a priest or medicine doctors, preferably old. He didn't manage to get all of these, but he did find Otabenga on March 20, 1904. We don't really know the circumstances because Werner told many different stories. He said variously that he'd rescued him from cannibals, that he'd freed him from government troops, and that he'd exchanged him for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth. It is known that the area where he'd found him was

Starting point is 00:03:18 the site of a well-known slave market and a lot of human trafficking, but we don't know exactly what happened. In any case, Benga's life up to this point had probably already been very hard. Congo Free State was ruled by Leopold II, the king of Belgium, who had plundered it for resources between 1885 and 1908 and had killed, mutilated, and enslaved 10 million of Benga's people. Modern stories about Benga often say that he was 23 years old, had been married twice, and had children, but we don't really know this for certain. The records give several different ages for him, and Werner told so many different stories that we don't really know the truth with any confidence. It's also not clear why Benga chose to go with Werner back to the United States. At different times, Werner claimed that he'd asked

Starting point is 00:03:55 to come, that he was in danger of being enslaved, and even that he'd threatened to commit suicide if he was left behind, so we don't know that either. But he did go. On May 11th, he boarded a steamer with Werner and eight of his young male countrymen, and on June 25th, they all arrived in New Orleans. At the World's Fair, they were displayed along with 2,000 Native Americans, including, incidentally, Geronimo, the famous Apache chief who was a federal prisoner of war. There were also more than 1,000 Native Filipinos on a 47-acre reservation, Tlingit tribes from Alaska, and other so-called primitive people.

Starting point is 00:04:24 The Congolese were enormously popular from the start, but people regarded them more with complacent condescension than intelligent curiosity. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an article saying, Red Pygmies and Black, the dwarf tribesmen concerning whom less is known than of any other people on the face of the earth, they come to St. Louis the first of their kind who ever visit the Western Hemisphere. In particular, people seemed fascinated with their sharpened teeth. That was actually a common practice among young males in the Congo. The author Pamela Newkirk says it's really no more noteworthy than earrings in our own society. But the white audience decided it meant they were cannibals, and Werner stopped correcting people when they said this. So people started believing whatever they chose, as they

Starting point is 00:05:01 generally do. The Columbus Dispatch ran the headline, A New Race of Africans Discovered and Brought to America. Among them are cannibals and one little fellow who narrowly escaped being the central attraction at a cannibal feast. More than being stared at, the Congolese were prodded and harassed. One of Otabenga's companions said to a reporter, When a white man comes to our country, we give them presents. The Americans treat us as they do our pet monkey. They laugh at us and poke their umbrellas into our faces. They appeared before up to 20,000 people at a time, performing what were billed as cannibal dances. At first, they enjoyed the novelty, but they grew tired of being poked and pinched, and they were forced to live in the cold on the fairgrounds where spectators would throw bricks and rocks at their tent to make them come out. They told Werner they

Starting point is 00:05:42 wanted to go home. There were some delays, including an outbreak of chickenpox in New Orleans, but by spring 1905, he got them all back to their home in Africa. But Werner said that as he was making his goodbyes, Benga asked to return to America with him. Here, as everywhere, Werner gave several different accounts of what happened, but in this case, it's not hard to imagine that Benga really did come willingly because his own people were still suffering genocide. The two of them arrived at Ellis Island on July 30, 1906, and set up at the Belclair Hotel on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It looks as though Werner's biggest problem at this point was that he was broke.

Starting point is 00:06:13 He needed to go south to raise some money, and he needed a place to put Benga and two chimpanzees while he did it. So he approached Herman C. Bumpus, the director of the American Museum of Natural History, who agreed that Benga could stay in a guest room at the museum while Werner went to St. Louis. Werner said Bumpus should feel free to take Benga home with him if he liked, but he added, do not spoil him. My experience with his race is that it is easy to do this. Still, I err on the side of kindness always. Apparently, Benga had the run of the museum while Werner was gone, which must have been an odd sight. He was well-behaved at first, but apparently began to feel confined. At one point, he tried to escape the museum by hiding in a crowd, and reportedly he

Starting point is 00:06:48 threw a chair at the head of Florence Guggenheim, the philanthropist. Bumpus wrote to Werner, Ota Benga, restless, chimpanzees need attention, when can you reach New York? We don't know what Werner was up to in this period, but we know he wrote at least one bad check, because on August 18th, the sheriff visited Bumpus with a warrant for his arrest. On August 27th, Werner snuck into town and collected Benga through a side door in the museum. Then, if his own story is to be believed, he tried to get temporary shelter for him at the Salvation Army and at a police precinct before he placed him at the zoo, which is where we came in. Incidentally, Werner's racism here made his problem harder than it needed to be. The police just told him, well, just place him with a colored family. He's a person. Just treat him like a person. And Werner

Starting point is 00:07:29 said he couldn't do that in as much as the little African savage would not have understood them any more than he would a white person. He also said that Benger required care because he was, quote, not fully responsible for his acts, which implies that he wasn't capable of rational, thought, or civilized behavior. Werner had approached the zoo's director, William T. Hornaday, asking whether he could temporarily house a chimpanzee and two reptiles that he'd brought back from Africa. But when they met, he revealed that he also had a native of Congo. Hornaday was receptive to this. He'd already considered displaying Native Americans on park grounds to illustrate their home life,

Starting point is 00:07:59 and he thought a pygmy would be an exciting novelty for his visitors. He was right about that. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers paid 25 cents each to see Benga at the park, almost double the normal attendance. He'd appear at 2 p.m. with a bow and arrow, a new target made of clay, and his pet parrot. Occasionally he was allowed to roam a forest in the park under the eyes of rangers, but then he was returned to his cage. When questioned, Hornaday pointed out that humans had been exhibited recently at so-called human zoos in Europe, although he admitted that these people hadn't been mixed with animals. He said Benga is in the primate house because that's the most comfortable place we could find for him.

Starting point is 00:08:32 He said he planned to keep him on display until late fall, possibly until spring. A local minister, Robert Stuart MacArthur, was outraged. He said the person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as he does the African. Instead of making a beast of this little fellow, we should be putting him in school for the development of such powers as God gave him. He said he'd contact the city's black clergy to organize a protest. The black clergy held an emergency meeting on Monday morning and visited the zoo that afternoon. They found Benga outside his room with Dohong the orangutan. The Reverend James H. Gordon, who is superintendent of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn, said, We are frank enough to say that we do not like this exhibition of one of our own race with the monkeys.

Starting point is 00:09:09 Our race, we think, is depressed enough without exhibiting one of us with apes. We think we are worthy of being considered human beings with souls. Hornaday said, I am giving the exhibition purely as an ethnological exhibit. Werner, for his part, said that neither he nor the part profited by the exhibit. He said, If Otabenga is in a cage, he is only there to look after the animals. If there is a notice on the cage, it is only put there to avoid answering the many questions that are asked about him.

Starting point is 00:09:33 The ministers approached the mayor and the secretary of the zoological society, but neither would see them. But they engaged a lawyer and got some backing from a wealthy white businessman. When the zoo got wind of this, they removed the sign outside Benga's enclosure, but they didn't back down. Attendance was up, and they were getting photo requests from various publications and some expressions of support. As the controversy grew, Benga's presence was causing more and more trouble in the park. By Sunday, September 16th, he was free of his cage and had the run of the park among 40,000 visitors. The New York Times wrote, some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at him. He hit several of them, The New York Times wrote, Werner had gone to North Carolina. Apparently, he was still evading legal and financial troubles.

Starting point is 00:10:12 Hornaday wrote to him saying that Benga had become, quote, quite unmanageable, but felt he couldn't punish him because now that would be seen as cruelty. Benga was now threatening to bite his keepers when they tried to return him to the monkey house. Hornaday wrote, By Monday morning, after a full week, Hornaday was saying he wanted to unload Benga on the colored orphanage. He complained that Werner had said he was going to leave Benga at the zoo only temporarily. He told the New York Sun he promised to come back and get this pygmy creature and take him away back to Congo or Timbuktu. The

Starting point is 00:10:42 further away the better, and he hasn't come, and we don't know where to find him, and we are just about ready to take to the psychopathic ward. On September 24th, Benga took his clothes off in the hot afternoon. When they sprayed him with a hose, he threatened his keepers with a knife, and it took three men to subdue him. The New York Tribune ran the headline, Benga Tries to Kill. It had now been two and a half weeks since Benga had been on public view, and increasingly public opinion, or at least the media, was turning against the display. Finally, on September 28th, Werner reappeared and escorted him away from the zoo. Benga, in an amazing show of nobility and forbearance, asked to say goodbye to the attendants. He gave them his arrows, and he gave the bow to the chief keeper.

Starting point is 00:11:18 He'd been on display for 20 days. Altogether, the exhibition had doubled the park's attendance compared to the previous year. 220,800 people had visited the park in September, and nearly all of them had seen Benga. From the zoo, Benga was put into the care of James Gordon, who ran the Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn's Weeksville section, the largest and most affluent African-American community in the city. There, he was surrounded by elite African-Americans who wanted to show that blacks could be fully integrated into American society as respectable citizens. He had his own room, and he ate with the staff in the kitchen. On his first day, he'd already learned a surprising number of English words and was being taught to write his name,

Starting point is 00:11:51 and in his first week, he was smoking a pipe, shaking hands, and saying, how do you do? In 1909, he was sent to a farm on St. James, Long Island that the orphanage had just purchased, and he worked there for $10 a month, which is the equivalent of about $256 today. His life at this time seems to have been very lonely. He was still 6,000 miles from home and much older than the orphans he'd been placed with. Actually, returning to Congo would have been very difficult. Pamela Newkirk says that at his pay rate, it would have taken four months to earn enough to buy a third-class ticket from New York to Liverpool,

Starting point is 00:12:20 and from Liverpool he'd still have to find his way to Africa. Werner had taken the government steamer, and Benga almost certainly wouldn't have had access to that. In 1909, Gordon wrote to Werner, he has a bank account and is saving his money to go back home or to do whatever is thought for him. He said the educational project had, quote, proved to be a failure given Benga's age. He wrote, it was simply impossible to put him in a class

Starting point is 00:12:39 to receive instruction from a literary point. I've done the best I could in trying to develop him from every standpoint, and I find that the only thing to do is to let him work. Eventually, he was sent to the Virginia Theological Seminary and College in Lynchburg, Virginia, which trained Black Baptist ministers for posts in the United States and Africa. He lived with the widow of the seminary's former president in a large house surrounded by woods and overlooking a valley. Outside the classroom, he made many friends among the neighborhood boys, teaching them how to make spears and bows, gather blackberries, spear fish, hunt and trap, forage roots, and gather honey. He recalled for them how he'd once hunted elephants.

Starting point is 00:13:12 He had his teeth capped, took the name Otto Bingo, did odd jobs, and worked in a tobacco factory. But by 1916, his mood had grown darker, and the advent of World War I made going home seem even more impossible. It had now been 10 years since he'd left Congo. He had lost interest in his excursions in the woods with neighborhood boys, and he had no known intimate relationships. In the late afternoon of March 19th, he built a fire and danced around it, chanting words whose meaning no one knew. That night, he recovered a gun he'd apparently hidden in a hayloft and fired a bullet through his heart. Most of his death certificate had to be left blank. No one in Lynchburg even knew his name. When he learned of the suicide, Werner, in a rare moment of understanding, wrote that Benga, quote, probably succumbed only after the feeling of utter

Starting point is 00:13:51 inassimilability overwhelmed his brave little heart. He lies today in an unmarked grave in the White Rock Cemetery in Lynchburg, and there's now an international movement afoot to send his remains back to Congo, where he'd always wanted to return. Casper is a sleep brand that continues to revolutionize its line of products to create an exceptionally comfortable sleep experience, one night at a time. With three mattress models, the original Casper, the Wave, and the Essential, Casper mattresses are perfectly designed to soothe and cradle your natural geometry, and the breathable design helps you sleep cool and regulates your body temperature throughout the night. Plus, it's delivered right to your door in a small, how-do-they-do-that-sized box, with free shipping and returns in the U.S. and Canada.

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Starting point is 00:15:05 for $50 off your mattress purchase. Terms and conditions apply. Several listeners wrote to us about the story of Albert Dada, the compulsive wanderer from episode 182. Tom Barron wrote, Hi Sharon, Greg, and Sasha. Listening from episode 182. Tom Barron wrote, Hi, Sharon, Greg, and Sasha. Listening to episode 182, I was reminded of more recent cases of fugue states, disappearances, and sometimes muddled identity I've read about, some of them similar in some ways to Albert Dada.

Starting point is 00:15:37 While I was listening, I thought specifically about Agatha Christie's disappearance in 1926, although some aspects of that situation seem to have been called into question. And Tom then lists several cases from the Wikipedia page on fugue state or dissociative fugue, such as Jody Roberts, a reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune, disappeared in 1985, only to be found 12 years later in Sitka, Alaska, living under the name of Jane D. Williams. While there were some initial suspicions that she had been faking amnesia, some experts have come to believe that she genuinely suffered a protracted fugue state. And Jeff Ingram appeared in Denver in 2006 with

Starting point is 00:16:16 no memory of his name or where he was from. After his appearance on national television to appeal for help identifying himself, his fiance Penny called Denver police identifying him. The episode was diagnosed as dissociative fugue. Ingram has experienced three incidents of amnesia in 1994, 2006, and 2007. Tom said, This material makes me wonder if perhaps stories like Albert's and psychological or neurological conditions that produce such behavior are more common and more recent than we think. Are there distinctions I'm missing between Albert's story and these more recent ones? In any case, from the routine, comfortable perspective of my suburban life, such disruptions

Starting point is 00:16:58 seem terrible to me. I can only imagine the pain and confusion of the people involved and their family members. I can only imagine the pain and confusion of the people involved and their family members. I think in Greg's story, he perhaps didn't explain explicitly enough the diagnosis that Dada was given. Dada was diagnosed with what has been called fugue state, psychogenic fugue, or dissociative fugue. Psychogenic means having a psychological origin rather than a biological or neurological one, and dissociation refers to a separation of some parts of the mind or of some mental processes, such as identity or memory, from the rest of a person's consciousness. The current psychiatric diagnostic classification system considers fugue to be a rare subtype of dissociative amnesia, which is the inability to

Starting point is 00:17:43 remember important personal information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness and can't be accounted for by a physical cause, such as brain injury or substance use. Fugue is characterized by sudden unexpected travel coupled with amnesia that causes at least some level of confusion about one's identity or the assumption of a new identity. The prevalence of dissociative fugue has been estimated at 0.2%, but it may be more common in times of war or natural disasters, as it often seems to be triggered by stress or trauma.

Starting point is 00:18:17 As Tom suggested, fugue can be very disruptive and bewildering, and rather frightening for both those who experience it and their loved ones. A fugue can last from a few hours to several months or even longer. During a fugue, people may act normally or appear only mildly confused. If the fugue is brief, they may appear to have simply missed some work or to have come home late. But when fugues last longer, the affected people might travel quite far, assume a new name and identity, and even begin a new job, seemingly unaware of any change in their life. When the fugue ends, patients report that they can suddenly find themselves in a new situation with no memory of how they came to be there or what they've been doing over the last period of time. A fugue state usually isn't recognized

Starting point is 00:19:00 until someone suddenly snaps out of one and then realizes that they don't know where they are or what's been going on for them. I wonder if there's some people who just never snap out of it, just adopt a new life. Oh, wow. And then we wouldn't know, huh? And are never found by the people who are searching for them and just, you know, I guess die relatively sooner, just one way or another, just adopt a new life and just keep it. I suppose that is possible, especially if they know that there have been some that have lasted for years. Then I suppose, how would they know what the longest one has been if nobody does snap out and ever figure it out?

Starting point is 00:19:33 Hmm. There are a number of examples of known or suspected feud cases, both throughout history and more recently, and Tom mentioned the one that concerns the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie. Christie disappeared for 11 days in 1926. Her mother, with whom she'd been close, had died a few months earlier, and her husband was having an affair with a woman named Nancy Neal. On the day that Christie disappeared, he had left their home in Berkshire to reunite with his mistress. Before leaving in her car, Christie had written several confused notes, saying variously that she was going on holiday to Yorkshire and that she feared for her life.

Starting point is 00:20:09 The next morning, her abandoned car was discovered with the headlights on and the bonnet up in Surrey, near a lake in which one of her fictional characters had drowned. Inside the car was found her fur coat, a suitcase with her belongings, and an expired driver's license. coat, a suitcase with her belongings, and an expired driver's license. The police dredged the lake and organized thousands of volunteers to search the surrounding countryside. The celebrated crime writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers attempted to help, with Doyle, who was into the occult, taking a glove of Christie's to a medium, and Sayers visiting the scene of the disappearance, which she later included in her novel, Unnatural Death. Some questioned whether the whole incident was a publicity stunt,

Starting point is 00:20:49 while others suspected Christie's unfaithful husband of murdering her. Sounds like a movie. Yeah, actually. Or something that Agatha Christie could have written herself, right? But eventually it was discovered that Christie had checked herself into a health spa in Yorkshire under the name of Teresa Neal, the same last name as her husband's mistress. Despite several people at the spa thinking that they recognized her,

Starting point is 00:21:12 she stuck to a story that she was a bereaved mother from Cape Town until her husband finally showed up to identify her. Christy apparently never discussed the incident, so while it has all the hallmarks of dissociative fugue, we can't be positive that's what it was. Some have suggested that she had a car accident and suffered from amnesia due to head injury, while others thought that perhaps the whole incident was deliberately carried out as a revenge on her husband. There are those, though, such as the Christie biographer and former doctor Andrew Norman, who do feel strongly that Christie did indeed experience a fugue state.

Starting point is 00:21:47 It's funny that this struck me when I was researching the Dada piece as well, that I understand there's the amnesia component and the travel, but those seem like very different things. It's odd that they go together. Well, I guess that's why it's a rare form of the amnesia coupled with the travel, but I think people think that people under a certain amount of stress in their own lives are just trying to escape. And so the most complete way to escape is both to forget your own life and go someplace completely else and physically escape.

Starting point is 00:22:16 Yeah, that makes sense. So it seems to be sort of an anxiety or a stress response. Penny wrote, I just listened to your podcast about Albert Dada and his compulsion to travel and walk places. I wanted to write to say that I've encountered this compulsion in the course of my career working with people who have disabilities. I've only seen it very rarely, but it comes up in some people who have bipolar disorder type one. They'll start experiencing mania and with it comes a compulsion to walk and walk and walk, to go somewhere, anywhere, and they're unable to stop themselves. This is really awful

Starting point is 00:22:50 to go through. It's terrifying, and they'll walk until their feet are bloody or they otherwise physically can't continue. It was unsurprising to me that Mr. Dada had had a head injury. He was probably experiencing a number of other symptoms from that that weren't carefully documented, but from your description, he had poor impulse control and serious memory issues, and appropriate help was not available to him. And Penny raises several good points here. Dada's symptoms did overlap with those of several other disorders. For example, Gabrielle Biscara suggested that Dada's case sounded similar to obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD, saying, I've noticed in people with OCD that when they get anxious, this is accompanied by a huge headache

Starting point is 00:23:30 and the overwhelming desire to get away from whatever environment they are in and walk fast and far. I wondered if the wanderer, upon hearing about distant places, became anxious to the point where it triggered an attack and the compulsion to walk and travel far. So there are similarities of some of Dada's symptoms to mania or OCD, as described in what you were saying about that, just get out of where you are. But those disorders wouldn't cause the significant amnesia that was also an essential part of Dada's case. On the other hand, some of Dada's symptoms don't seem to match the usual understanding of dissociative

Starting point is 00:24:05 fugue either, and at this historical distance, it's really hard to be completely sure of his diagnosis. As Penny said, it's likely that he may have had some other symptoms too that just weren't documented, so making a definitive diagnosis could be really tricky. And Penny's point about Dada's head injury is also important. As Sofia Hauck de Oliveira wrote about a woman who has similarities to Dada, but her situation is clearly of neurological origin. She's famous today as an ultramarathoner, for example, as the first woman to complete the Yukon Arctic Ultra. She's like Dada in that she started walking and then running as a compulsion of sorts, as it was the only way she could avoid a seizure setting in if she felt it coming. She also had a lobectomy as an epilepsy treatment,

Starting point is 00:25:00 which unfortunately resulted in a loss of her ability to estimate time and distance. On the other hand, this was a real advantage for her ultramarathons. I could imagine how someone with her particular mix of brain anomalies could end up in a situation like Dada's in a different time and place. I wonder if he was alive today if he would be a keen ultramarathoner himself. Van Deren suffered from epilepsy for many years, enduring as many as two to three seizures a week, and apparently in her case, running would activate the part of her brain where her seizures usually started, and keep the cells there active enough to not accept the abnormal electrical activity that would cause a seizure. So she began running whenever she felt the aura of an approaching seizure and would sometimes run for hours. In 1997, Van Deren had part of her right temporal

Starting point is 00:25:42 lobe removed, and that ended the seizures for her. Unfortunately, the surgery also caused some neurological problems, on top of the neural damage that she already had from the hundreds of seizures she'd had to that point. So, for example, she now has a poor sense of time and various memory issues, and it seems that she may also process pain somewhat differently than most people. Altogether, she now seems to have tremendous endurance and finds that running even great distances that would exhaust most people gives her a feeling of both freedom and invigoration, which, as Sophia noted,

Starting point is 00:26:14 gives her some great advantages as an ultramarathoner, enabling her to win, for example, the 2008 Yukon Arctic Ultra, where she spent nearly eight days pulling a 50-pound sled 300 miles through temperatures as low as 50 degrees below zero. So that's another case that shows some significant similarities to Dada's. Yeah. We also received some interesting emails that address another facet of Dada's story, that of the cultural aspects of his diagnosis and the little epidemic of compulsive wandering that seemed to be sparked by his case. But that was more than I could cover in one listener mail segment,

Starting point is 00:26:50 so tune in next week for that one. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us, and as always, extra thanks to those who give me tips for pronouncing their names. If you have anything you'd like to add to the conversation, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to present him with a strange sounding situation and he has to work out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle was sent in for me to read specifically to Greg by Martin Bentley, who said, i thought that you might like to turn the tables on greg and ask him this which is essentially the same question as the puzzle in episode 177 this was what i was guessing is the answer before your inspired

Starting point is 00:27:35 lateral leap so this is the same puzzle you gave to me a while ago a man is traveling in a car and is recorded on a state trooper's radar gun traveling faster than is allowed on roads in the state. Before the man stops, he crosses the state line and is then clocked by another state trooper still going faster than the posted speed limit on the road. The man crosses back over the state line at a similar speed where he is met by the first officer who gives him a high five. What is going on? All right. I remember the answer. I guess we shouldn't say what the answer to the

Starting point is 00:28:05 original puzzle was. And it's not the same answer, I promise. So the man crosses the state line. Yeah. Going faster than is allowed on roads in the state. And then crosses back over the state line. Yeah. Where he's clocked by another state trooper still going faster than the posted speed limit. Right, no, but... Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:21 And then returns to the original trooper who gives him a high five yeah um basically meaning that he's not in trouble with the law correct by car do you mean a automobile sure and okay does this have anything to do with geography like the shape of the border or anything like that no um so a man one man driving one car, driving on a road, crosses a border, and then crosses back, and there's a trooper on either side of the border, both of whom observe him. Clock his speed. And both of them know that he's exceeding the legally posted speed limit. Right.

Starting point is 00:28:58 Is the man's occupation important? Don't know. Trouble answering that question. possibly yes possibly uh is that but not necessarily i don't know how to ask this is the situation important like the first thing i think is this is like a movie set or something and it's been yeah there's it's a specific situation going on here okay so the the well is that the case then are the police officers actually law enforcement officers they are okay but they sort of condone what he's doing because this has been set up in advance and they understand what's happening correct is the man testing something that's close

Starting point is 00:29:35 and you know what i mean something like that yeah that's that's along the right line does this have to do with safety? No. Like testing vehicle safety? Nothing like that. And you say the man's occupation might be somewhat important. Like I thought he was a stuntman or something. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure. The occupation could be important or it could be irrelevant. I don't know his occupation.

Starting point is 00:30:00 Okay. But this could be something somebody would be doing as part of their occupation but not necessarily not necessarily okay but it's not just some random thursday where they just spot this guy for the first time right right no they knew in advance that this was going to be happening and they condone it like you said well the two things i can think of are that it's some kind of fiction which it sounds like it's not or it's some kind of safety test or just testing of vehicles or equipment or something. No, no, that's a little off. That's kind of the right ballpark, but not quite the right ball field.

Starting point is 00:30:39 Does it have to do with, is the time period important? No. You said the actual location is important? Right. Is the weather important? No, no, no. You said the actual location is important. Right. Is the weather important? No, no, no. You said there aren't really other people involved in these three people. Correct.

Starting point is 00:30:50 And the man's occupation might not be important. Right. Is the man himself a police officer? Probably not, but I don't know his occupation. Is there something more to the situation? They need to know something about the condition of the road or... No.

Starting point is 00:31:11 Is he doing anything else apart from just driving out and back? No, he's just driving out and back faster than the speed limit. That's germane. But that's it? Yeah. I don't need to know more about the car?

Starting point is 00:31:24 Nope. Nope. You don't need to know more about the car? Nope. Nope. You don't need to know the destination. It wouldn't be a driving test if he's exceeding the speed limit. Right. Right. He's deliberately exceeding the speed limit, and that's important. Is he fleeing something or chasing something?

Starting point is 00:31:40 No. No. But it's also important that the troopers are clocking his speed. They're like, that's important to the situation. His goal is to exceed a certain speed. Yes. Is this like a very high speed? Yes.

Starting point is 00:31:57 Like he's setting some kind of land speed record? That's it. Yes. Martin said, they are making a land speed record attempt that was successful from Wikipedia. The land speed record is standardized as the speed over a course of fixed length averaged over two runs. Two runs are required in opposite directions within one hour. So the original puzzle like fit the requirements. Exactly. Martin added, I am not aware of any record attempts that have gone over a state line. So this question is hypothetical.

Starting point is 00:32:25 But still, it's amazing. But it could have gone over a state line. So thanks to Martin for showing us how to make one puzzle do double duty. And if anyone else has a puzzle they'd like to have us try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if you like, you can do as Martin did and indicate in the subject line who you would like to have read the puzzle. you like, you can do as Martin did and indicate in the subject line who you would like to have read the puzzle. Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us, and we really depend on the

Starting point is 00:32:51 support of our listeners. 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 on some of the stories, outtakes, peeks behind the scenes, and updates on Sasha, the furriest podcast mascot we know, then check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the Support Us section of the website. While you're at the site, you can also browse through Greg's collection of over 10,000 trivia tidbits. you can also browse through Greg's collection of over 10,000 trivia tidbits. Check out the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books, and see the show notes for the podcast with the links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and

Starting point is 00:33:40 performed by the ever amazing Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 187-A Human Being in the Bronx Zoo

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