Futility Closet - 212-The Lost Treasure of Cocos Island

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 multiplying cats to godly dogs. This is episode 212. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Cocos Island in the eastern Pacific was rumored to hold buried treasure worth millions of dollars, but centuries of treasure seekers had failed to find it.

Starting point is 00:00:33 That didn't deter Auguste Gisler, who arrived in 1889 with a borrowed map and an iron determination. In today's show, we'll follow Gisler's obsessive hunt for the treasure of Lima. In today's show, we'll follow Gisler's obsessive hunt for the treasure of Lima. We'll also marvel at the complexity of names and puzzle over an undead corpse. 350 miles southwest of Costa Rica, in the eastern Pacific, lies a small island of nine square miles with 300 waterfalls and hundreds of unusual species. Jacques Cousteau called it the most beautiful island in the world, and Michael Crichton may have used it as a model for Isla Nublar, the site of Jurassic Park. But that's not why it's famous. It's famous because it's reputed to contain hundreds of millions of dollars in buried

Starting point is 00:01:19 treasure, which has never been found despite centuries of searches. The largest fortune that's said to be on the island is the so-called Treasure of Lima. In 1820, the Peruvian capital was on the verge of revolt, and to safeguard the city's treasure, the viceroy asked a British trader named William Thompson to take it to Mexico for safekeeping. The treasure was loaded onto Thompson's ship, but during the voyage, he succumbed to temptation, turned pirate, cut the throats of the guards and the priests, and threw their bodies overboard. Then, according to the story, Thompson and his men buried the treasure on Cocos Island and agreed to split up and lie low until it was safe to return for it.

Starting point is 00:01:55 Unfortunately, their ship was captured and all the men, except Thompson and his first mate, were hanged. Those two agreed to lead the Spanish to the treasure, but on Cocos Island they escaped into the jungle. An original inventory of the treasure of Lima included 113 gold religious statues, one of which was a life-size Virgin Mary, 200 chests of jewels, 273 swords with jeweled hilts, 1,000 diamonds, 150 chalices, and hundreds of bars of gold and silver. Whether that's accurate, and whether it's still on the island or ever was, are all open to question. Thompson stayed in hiding, and in 1841

Starting point is 00:02:30 he befriended an Irishman named John Keating and gave him a map showing exactly where the hoard was located. Keating was said to have retrieved some gold and jewels from the treasure and to pass his knowledge on to others. That was enough to start a legend that circulated around the world. It even seems to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson, who mentioned Cocos Island in a letter he wrote in 1881 while writing Treasure Island. The treasure of Lima is only one of several treasures that are said to be on the island. The Portuguese pirate Don Pedro Benita marauded the same waters in the early 1800s and reportedly buried his own treasure on Cocos. According to one reckoning, in one excavation was buried 300,000 pounds of silver and silver dollars. In another cave was

Starting point is 00:03:10 deposited 733 bars of gold, each in size 4 by 3 inches and 2 inches thick. Another cache contains 273 gold-hilted and bejeweled swords, precious stones, and several kettles filled with gold. But of course, the record of its exact location has been lost. Eventually, Benito was captured by the British man-of-war magician, and 81 of his men were hanged. The magician visited Cocos Island and recovered a part of the treasure, but most of it, the story goes, is still there. And there are stories of still more treasure. The island was discovered in 1526, but it wasn't until 1832 that Costa Rica claimed it. In between, pirates stopped there regularly to get fresh water and wood for repairs, and it became a station for British whaling ships. During that time, a British sailor, Captain Bennett Graham, is said to have buried a further 350 tons

Starting point is 00:03:56 of gold that he'd plundered from Spanish ships. With all that alleged loot to be found, it's not surprising that the island attracted frequent visitors. Some of them were famous. Franklin Roosevelt explored Cocos with a group of friends in 1910. In the 1920s, Sir Malcolm Campbell, the British racing driver, also visited. And Errol Flynn searched for treasure in the 1940s. Other visitors included the American mobster Bugsy Siegel and Felix von Lückner, the dashing German naval officer we profiled in episode 75. The legend even turns up in In Cold Blood, Truman Capote's 1966 book about a quadruple murder in Kansas. One of the killers, Perry Smith, mentions that he has a map and the whole history of a treasure buried on Cocos Island. He says, no fooling, this is authentic. It was buried there back in 1821. Peruvian bullion,

Starting point is 00:04:40 jewelry, $60 million. That's what they say it's worth. Of all the people who sought the Coco's treasure, by far the most dedicated was a German sailor named August Gisler. Gisler came from unremarkable circumstances. He was born in 1857, the third of 11 children of a middle-class knife manufacturer in the German city of Remscheid. His father wanted to pass down the business through the family, and his eldest son followed that expectation. But August ran away to sea. After some wandering, he bought a small sugar plantation in Hawaii, where his neighbor turned out to be another German immigrant named Bartels. One day Bartels showed him a treasure map that he said had belonged to his father-in-law, a Hawaiian who'd been a sailor as a young man. It was a map of Cocos Island and indicated that the treasure

Starting point is 00:05:22 of Lima was buried at a depth of six feet in a small bay in the northwest. It's not clear why the treasure bug bites some people and not others, but it certainly bit August Giesler. He immediately sold his plantation, and on May 18, 1888, he sailed for San Francisco with Bartels and Bartels' 11-year-old son. When they arrived in Costa Rica's main port, Punta Arenas, they learned that the treasure was hardly a secret there. In fact, many people had already dug up the island in their searches for it, including the spot where they had proposed to dig. But Giesler had faith. He wrote to his family, there's absolutely no doubt that the gold is on the island. Because if such masses were found, it would become known. There's supposed to be 20 to 25 million dollars worth, and that couldn't be kept secret.

Starting point is 00:06:01 Whether we will find it is a big question. I'll hope for the best, and then no member of our family will ever have to work again, that much is certain. Bartels and his son eventually grew discouraged and went home, but they left the map with Giesler, who was still afire to find the gold. He decided that if Punta Arenas was full of treasure hunters, that was just more evidence that there was treasure to be found. Everyone must be looking in the wrong place. In fact, he realized, if the treasure was as large as everyone said it was, he'd never be able to remove it on his own. He'd need a crew of at least 10 men and a ship large enough to transport many tons of gold and precious stones. He had no money himself, but he persuaded 14 merchants and dockside workers in Valparaiso to set up a company with him. For every $100 they invested, he promised, they would get

Starting point is 00:06:42 $20,000 if the treasure was found. He wrote to his family, well, as I say, if all goes well, we're made. If not, we must accept the fact. He charted a 350-ton bark, the Wilhelmina, and he and the 14 shareholders dropped anchor in mid-March 1889 in Chatham Bay on the island's north side. This was Gisler's first time on the island. After a first look around, he compared the area to Bartle's treasure map, which indicated a point several hundred yards inland with the words, Here we buried a very valuable treasure in 1821. In the pouring rain, he and the others cut their way through the bush and felled a palm tree at the indicated spot. There was nothing there.

Starting point is 00:07:17 They cut down four more trees, but there was no treasure there either. After a month of hunting, their supplies were running low, and 10 of the 14 shareholders wanted to go home. The other four, including Giesler, chose to stay. They divided their remaining provisions into 14 shares and brought four of them ashore. Then the 10 unhappy shareholders departed, promising to return within three months with fresh supplies. The four who remained continued to dig up coconut palms, starting near the point indicated on the map, but searching farther and farther afield. Their friends returned with tools and provisions, but the renewed efforts still turned up nothing. After three months, they all returned to Valparaiso. They returned in October 1890, landing in Wafer Bay

Starting point is 00:07:55 further down the coast, with even more tools and provisions. After four more months of fruitless digging, Giesler concluded that his map didn't give a precise location of the treasure. In the year that followed, he acquired two more treasure maps, from the Costa Rican government and from the son-in-law of John Keating, who claimed to have the map passed down by William Thompson. But these led nowhere as well. It had now been five years since he'd left his sugar plantation. He'd gone through all his savings and all his shareholders' capital, and he had nothing to show for it. In their 1960 book The Lost Treasure of Cocos Island, Ralph Hancock and Julian Weston write,

Starting point is 00:08:28 It is our considered opinion that there are three stages through which a man must progress before he becomes the ultimate, the dyed-in-the-wool treasure hunter. The first, naturally, is the educational or indoctrination period. This involves a softening-up process wherein all his faculties are remolded to fit the new character. It is the result of a diet of treasure stories. If he can get hold of some secret information, then, or a hitherto unknown angle on some particular treasure story, he is hooked and impatient for the second stage. This is a period when he will spend money, time, and energy proving his clues in search of the treasure. If the search is successful, then his expenditures are justified. But if all his efforts are in vain, and the treasure continues to elude him, then his search becomes more frantic with each failure. This,

Starting point is 00:09:09 the frantic period, is the third stage. When treasure maps failed him, Giesler concluded that he couldn't trust maps. He decided instead that he needed to search the whole island systematically, setting up residents there and combing it from one end to the other for the rest of his life if need be. He decided to form an agricultural colony on the island. Nearly anything would grow in that climate, and a small group of people could support themselves indefinitely. And while they weren't tending crops, he could direct his colonists in searching for the treasure. In May 1894, the Costa Rican government agreed to grant him the western half of Cocos Island, the area where the treasure was generally assumed to be, and to divide the eastern half into parcels for potential settlers. Giesler went back to Germany, where he borrowed some money

Starting point is 00:09:49 from his siblings and married a woman named Clara, about whom very little is known. And he found six families to join him in establishing a German colony on Cocos Island. On December 13, 1894, they landed on the island with lumber and building materials from New York and seeds, hen, ducks, and turkeys from Panama. They set about building houses and clearing land to plant sugarcane, bananas, vegetables, and coffee. The following spring, another four families joined them, as well as three single men. It seemed things were finally looking up. Cocos was now inhabited by more than 50 people. The government granted Gisler citizenship in Costa Rica and appointed him governor of Cocos Island, and they arranged that a supply ship would call at the island once a month. But it didn't last. Island

Starting point is 00:10:29 life wasn't the paradise that the settlers had hoped for. The soil was muddy, and they were plagued by rats and insects, and the island's remote location made commerce difficult. Within a few months, the first settlers had returned to the mainland in the supply ship. Three years later, the last three families left, and the supply ship stopped its visits. Here again, Gisler might have given up. Altogether, he'd spent 10 years hunting for treasure and had found nothing. But he'd invested too much of himself now to turn back. He would spend the next seven years alone on the island with Clara, searching single-mindedly for the treasure. In 1904, the writer Hervé de Montmorency visited them there and saw the marks of Gisler's obsession. He wrote, no one can possibly find the treasure without his assistance, for he knows every marked

Starting point is 00:11:07 rock on the island, every bearing, and every clue. No one, moreover, can search for treasure legally without his sanction. Gisler had turned into a sort of voluntary Robinson Crusoe. On the uplands he grew coffee, and in the valleys he grew tobacco, sweet potatoes, limes, and pineapples. He had caught some wild pigs and domesticated them. For materials, he had turned to the rubber plant and the island's largest tree, the ironwood. He used fiber from the bombaxfera to make brushes, brooms, and ropes. Its juice gave him tannic acid to tan the pig's hides and ink to maintain his journal, which he wrote with the quill of a frigate bird. Coconut oil gave him light. On two occasions, he traveled to the mainland in boats he'd built from the island's timber,

Starting point is 00:11:46 using a water wheel of his own construction, fashioning sails from bedsheets and lines from the fibers of banana trees. But he found he couldn't raise any more capital for his project and had to return empty-handed. At the end of de Montmorency's visit, Gisler and his wife accompanied him back to the mainland. De Montmorency wrote, There must be a subtle attraction in this solitary home, for as the lofty peak of Mount Iglesias became lost to view in the mists of sunset, the tears welled up into the eyes of the governor's wife. Shortly after Auguste and Clara returned to the island, their crops died, and the rain spoiled Auguste's ammunition so that he could

Starting point is 00:12:19 no longer hunt. He patched up his little boat and set out for the mainland again, promising Clara that he'd be back in six weeks. But this time a storm drove him off course. Instead of landing at Punta Arenas, he wound up on the coast of Panama, several hundred miles to the south. It took him nearly six months to get back to the island, and when he finally reached Chatham Bay, he learned that Clara had fallen and broken her arm on the very day he'd left. She had splinted it herself with sticks and lianas and had learned to set traps with the other arm to catch animals to eat. That, finally, was enough. On November 6, 1905, Auguste and Clara took the unreliable mail boat to Punta Arenas.

Starting point is 00:12:53 They never returned to Cocos Island. In 17 years of searching, Auguste had found an old gauntlet and 33 pieces of gold, minted between 1773 and 1799. They eventually settled in New York, where they lived with two of Auguste's sisters. Even after Clara died in 1925, he still clung to his dream, hoping that someone might advance him enough money to find his fortune. He wrote, the treasure is on the island, but it will take money and a good deal of effort to unearth it. I have gone through many hardships and dangers, and perhaps she'll have to do so again, but this will not keep me away. Perhaps she'll have to do so again, but this will not keep me away.

Starting point is 00:13:25 But it eluded him to the end. He died on August 8, 1935, at age 78. He left a will that divided his precious island among 13 relatives, friends, and financial backers. But even this was taken from him. The government ruled that since he had neither found the treasure nor established a permanent settlement, the island was not his to give, and Costa Rica reclaimed it. The island is still there, of course, as is the treasure, if there is one. As of 2016, an estimated 400 expeditions have visited Cocos Island, hunting for it. Some stayed a few days, some for several years. Most remain near the bays in the north,

Starting point is 00:13:57 but some brought heavy machinery and explosives into the interior. None have found anything, and it seems increasingly likely that none ever will. In 1978, the island was named a national park, and in 1997 it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2002, it was named a National Cultural and Historical Treasure. Today, you need a permit from the Costa Rican government to hunt for treasure on Cocos Island, and the only human residents are park rangers. The government believes that no treasure exists there. Possibly the treasure of Lima was never buried there at all, or possibly one of the many hunters actually found it and managed to

Starting point is 00:14:28 remove it quietly. There's no evidence either way. In the Costa Rican National Museum in San Jose hangs a section of a coconut tree that Giesler discovered near Chatham Bay during his ceaseless ransacking of the island. It bears an inscription that was already very old when Giesler discovered it. In legible English letters two inches tall, it reads, The bird is gone. Theon Wright, who led his own failed treasure hunt in the 1960s, wrote, This piratical artifact, for whatever it is worth, probably expresses more accurately than anything else the answer to the mystery of Cocos Island and its treasures.

Starting point is 00:15:16 We often say that Futility Closet would not still be here if it weren't for the support of our listeners, and that really is the case. We appreciate all the different ways that many of our listeners help the show, but the backbone of our support is our Patreon campaign, as that gives us an ongoing source of support so that we can commit to the amount of time that the podcast takes to make. Patreon also gives us a good way to share some extras with our show's supporters, like outtakes,

Starting point is 00:15:39 peeks behind the scenes, extra discussions on some of the stories, and updates on Sasha, our very special podcast. You can learn more about our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the support us section of our website for the link. And thanks so much to everyone who helps keep Futility Closet going. We got a lot of updates on the discussion from episode 207 about software that couldn't correctly handle some people's names. Justin Gores, who has a rather scary-looking last name that apparently got Americanized at some point so I was able to easily pronounce it after all, wrote,

Starting point is 00:16:23 Hi Greg and Sharon and Sasha. I'm a long-time pre-podcast reader, now long-time podcast listener, medium-time podcast supporter. Keep up the awesome work. I just finished episode 207, and it has spurred me to expand even further on the discussion from episode 202 about the difficulties people with unusual names have when dealing with software. What you were observing is that handling names correctly in software is a very, very hard problem. As a software developer, the hardest parts of the work come from dealing with unexpected

Starting point is 00:16:56 situations that don't fit nicely into one model or another for data storage. Name handling has an absolute ton of these quirks. To wit, an acquaintance of mine, Patrick McKenzie, aka Patio11, has compiled a list of falsehoods programmers believe about names, which you may find amusing. And here are some of Justin's favorites from the list, with a few that he has mildly rephrased. And as Justin reminds us, remember these are falsehoods, so they're stated as things developers believe to reminds us, remember these are falsehoods, so they're stated as things developers believe to be true, but which are actually false. People have exactly one full name. People use only one name at a time. People's names will never be more than n letters long for

Starting point is 00:17:38 any value of n. People's names do not change. People's names do not contain numbers. People's names use only one alphabet. People's names have an order to them, or there is only one system of ordering that will cover all possible ways people order them. People's names are never in Klingon. I think that one might have been a bit facetious, but you never know. People's names will never contain naughty words, so we can reject those without making people angry. People's names are assigned at birth. People have names at all. Oh, wow. And Justin said, as Patrick puts it, I have never seen a computer system which handles names properly and doubt one exists anywhere.

Starting point is 00:18:21 I guess I never thought about that. It's terribly important, obviously, but there's probably almost no rule that doesn't have an exception. I think that is actually true. And I want to thank all of our listeners that wrote to let us know about this falsehoods list. A number of them wrote in about it. I actually had come across it in my research for episode 207, but the list is now eight years old, and I wasn't sure how relevant it still was. I guess I was just hoping that maybe things had improved significantly since it had been written. But several programmers besides Justin wrote in to say that this list is actually still quite relevant. And looking at the list of falsehoods, it's really easy to see why it can be such a

Starting point is 00:18:59 challenge for programmers to get it right. So for example, both the assumption people's names are case sensitive and people's names are case insensitive are both wrong, at least some of the time. So it does seem that almost any assumption at all that you try to make about names when you're constructing web forms or databases, any assumption will end up just not being universal. And you can't just ignore the problem by omitting the name. Obviously, that's essential. It's pretty important, yeah. Jack Reed sent an email about this same list of programmers' beliefs, and he also included a link to a whole set of falsehood lists. One of these, entitled Personal Names Around the World, is a rather helpful introduction to some of the ways that names can differ in different cultures, in ways that would have

Starting point is 00:19:45 important implications for designing software. As one example, the traditional Chinese name Mao Zedong would likely violate several assumptions that American programmers might have. As is common in a few cultures, in this name, Mao is the family name and Dong is the given name, so calling this person Mr. Dong would not be appropriate. If you are being formal or polite, you would use the honorific with the Mao, and if you are on familiar terms with the person, you would likely call him Zedong, even though Dong is considered to be his given name. In this example, the Z is a generation name, meaning that it would be shared with siblings and cousins, but not parents. And traditionally, it would be used with the given name.

Starting point is 00:20:26 So this is just one example of the many different rules that different cultures can follow with regards to names, so you can start to see the difficulties that programmers are facing. Yeah, that's fascinating. I didn't know any of that. And it's just not something that an American might even think about when designing a web form. Yeah, yeah, that's right. If you were just really sort of provincial about it, there's sort of some conventions that are relatively safe within this country.

Starting point is 00:20:51 Within one culture, right? But not across cultures, not even within this country, but within a culture. And reading through personal names around the world made me realize just how many assumptions are actually still built into forms. Like I had been hoping that maybe these things were outdated, but no. So for example, many forms ask you to enter a

Starting point is 00:21:11 first name in one box and a last name in another. And I'd never thought about it before, but there are a lot of assumptions right there, even in using terms like first name and last name. And having people split their names into different boxes can cause problems. So for example, as Bob Ogden wrote, consider the plight of mononyms, people who have a single name. There are many ways that you can have this occur, but for a start, if you are Javanese, you are most likely to have one name. Right, so besides celebrities like Madonna or Drake, there do seem to be several cultures in which mononyms are common, and there just won't be enough names for two boxes. There are also cultures where people have many parts to their names.

Starting point is 00:21:53 A Brazilian, for example, can have two given names and four family names. Traditional Arab names may also contain numerous parts. How does a person with seven or nine parts to their name fit that into two boxes? Some people have names that are just too long to fit into the allotted spaces, no matter how many spaces you seem to give them. And others may have ones that are too short. Many systems don't allow you to use just a single letter as a name, as it's assumed that then the person is trying to get away with just using an initial. But as John Nickerson, one of the several computer programmers who wrote to us, said, My own wife's maiden name was the single letter O from Korea,

Starting point is 00:22:32 which often caused problems with travel booking systems and other software by being too short. The family's usual solution was to double it to OO, although that wasn't without its own follow-on problems. I guess all of this was less of a problem years ago before, you know, you lived your whole life online and were forever filling out forms. Right. Although I suppose paper forms could still create a certain amount of problems, although on a paper form you can fill out whatever you fill out, and on a computer form you might

Starting point is 00:23:01 be told, eh, that doesn't compute, or that doesn't qualify, you have to do it again. Yeah, and maybe it's less rigid because you can talk to a human being and maybe work out some informal compromise. And now it's sort of a lot more rigorous. Yeah. As I mentioned in episode 207, erroneous assumptions about addresses can also cause headaches. And I gave the example that Stanislav Stankovic had written

Starting point is 00:23:25 in about the problems with the slashes in Serbian addresses. Bill Cornelius wrote to let us know that he lives on an unpaved country road and doesn't have a standard U.S. post office address, which programs often insist on. He said, I have a P.O. box, but that doesn't count as a street address. Therefore, my data is incomplete. Stanislav and Bill might be interested to know that similar to the falsehoods programmers believe about names, there is a lengthy falsehoods programmers believe about addresses, which helpfully includes counterexamples for the numerous false assumptions. In one example of how screwy addresses can be in ways that I'm sure completely break computer forms,

Starting point is 00:24:05 there is an apartment building in Palo Alto, California where apartments 1 and 001 are on different floors. Similarly, software programs generally expect, sometimes erroneously, that all addresses

Starting point is 00:24:20 will include a building number, that there will be only one building number, not, for example, a street number and then a number to indicate a building number, that there will be only one building number, not, for example, a street number and then a number to indicate a building group, that the number will be a whole number, that the building name won't contain a number, and that the street name won't contain a number.

Starting point is 00:24:36 And that last one made me smile, is we actually have a street in Raleigh called Six Forks Road. I hadn't ever wondered before if that sometimes confuses web forms. One of the examples on the list of confusing address issues that I particularly liked was that there's actually a town called Street in Somerset, UK. And I could just imagine the confusion that that might cause with both programs and people. And lastly, on the broader subject of

Starting point is 00:25:03 names, Graham Marshall wrote, Hi all. The part about names made me think about the closest futility closet story I have had in real life. I went to board a flight from Canberra to Sydney around 18 years ago. My boarding pass was rejected by the scanning machine. There was quite a bit of confusion with the gate staff because the reason given was that I had already boarded. After a flight attendant went backwards and forwards between me and somebody else on the plane several times, the problem was identified. There was another person on the flight with exactly the same name, including middle name, and exactly the same date of birth, including year. So when I showed up, the computer said I had already boarded. I did get on the flight,

Starting point is 00:25:43 but I didn't try to find where my doppelganger was sitting and introduce myself. It was too scary to think about. Love the podcast. I am a Patreon supporter. So thank you, Graham. And thanks to everyone who writes in to us. If you have anything to add to any of our discussions, please send us an email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if anyone has ever had any difficulties pronouncing your name, you can safely assume that I will too, and I'll appreciate any guidance that you send. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd-sounding situation, and I have to figure out what is actually going on, asking only yes or no questions.

Starting point is 00:26:31 This is from listener Jamie Cox. A dead woman is found in someone's backyard. It is obvious to those who found her that she had fallen from an airplane. Yet when the plane landed safely, the incident was recorded with zero fatalities. Why? Was she a stowaway? No. That's a good guess. When the airplane landed safely,

Starting point is 00:26:55 the incident was recorded with zero fatalities, meaning the plane wasn't recorded to have had, the plane trip wasn't recorded to have had, the plane trip wasn't recorded to have had fatalities. That's right. Was she a real woman? I mean, a real woman. Like a, depends how you mean that.

Starting point is 00:27:17 I don't know, like a mannequin or a doll. Okay, a real woman fell from an airplane. Yes. Would you say she had started off inside the airplane? Yes. And then she fell from it. Mm-hmm. Did she die?

Starting point is 00:27:39 No. That's why the airplane didn't have, the airplane trip didn't have a fatality recorded against it because. Because there were no fatalities. There were no fatalities. She died after she ended up on the ground? No. Well, you said a dead woman. I thought you started off with a dead woman.

Starting point is 00:28:01 A dead woman is found in someone's backyard. A dead woman is found in someone's backyard. But yet she didn't die. That's right. She's dead, but she didn't die. Just checking this carefully here. Right? Is that correct?

Starting point is 00:28:17 Yes. I'm answering carefully. You're answering carefully. Did she die at any point? Yes. Okay. So she died and then was dead. This is such a classic lateral thinking puzzle. Okay. A non-alive human woman was found in somebody's backyard.

Starting point is 00:28:39 Yes. Oh, oh. Had she died like a long, long time ago time ago i mean way before she was found yes like she she'd been dead for a really long time when she was found this isn't recent yes basically yes and and but why why wasn't the airplane credited with the fatalities is that have just have to do with because this happened such a long time ago? It wasn't that long. Oh, it wasn't that long.

Starting point is 00:29:09 I'm picturing like the 1930s or something. You're very close. So she fell out of the plane. Was she like skydiving or something? No. Would you say she fell out? Yes, I would. Did she jump? No. Was she pushed? No. Would you say she fell out? Yes, I would. Did she jump? No.

Starting point is 00:29:27 Was she pushed? No. Does it matter what kind of plane it was? Was it a specific kind of plane? No, it doesn't matter. Does this really happen? Yes. I'm asking questions all over the place here because I'm a little befuddled. Okay, so a woman was inside

Starting point is 00:29:42 a plane and then was no longer inside a plane and fell to earth. Okay. So a woman was inside a plane and then was no longer inside a plane. Yes. And fell to earth. Yes. And eventually died, but there was some period of time between the falling to earth and the dying? No. Oh, she was dead when she fell out?

Starting point is 00:29:57 Yes. That's it. Oh, it was like a corpse. Yes, exactly. Like a corpse was being transported. Oh, wow. I didn't see that at all. Jamie writes, on June 12th, 1972, an American Airlines DC-10 suffered an in-flight emergency over Windsor, Ontario, when the rear cargo door burst open in flight. In spite of serious damage to the flight controls, the plane landed safely and no one was killed.

Starting point is 00:30:15 The dead woman was traveling in a casket in the cargo hold, which fell out when the door burst. The observers on the ground knew she didn't die in the fall because she was already in a casket. The observers on the ground knew she didn't die in the fall because she was already in a casket. Jamie adds, there was a letter to the editor in the March 2018 Air and Space magazine, which was a follow-up to the above story. Keith Radford wrote, I walked into the backyard and saw what looked like a coffin embedded several inches into the wet ground. One end had broken open and a woman's leg was sticking out. In front of the house, a big piece of metal was also stuck in the ground. It looked like an airplane door.

Starting point is 00:30:46 A number of suitcases and their contents were scattered around. So Jamie writes, so in spite of someone being dead, I think you can count this one among your non-fatal lateral thinking puzzles. Ah, yes. I forgot to ask, did she die before she fell out of the plane? Which is the one crucial question. It really was. So thank you, Jamie, for that puzzle. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported primarily by our awesome listeners. If you'd like to contribute to our celebration of the quirky and the curious, please check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset. Or see the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Thank you. and see the show notes for the podcast, with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:31:51 All the exceptional music that you hear in our shows was written and performed by Greg's talented brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week. you

Futility Closet - 212-The Lost Treasure of Cocos Island

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