Futility Closet - 268-The Great Impostor

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 a pyramid for Newton to a rhyme for Wasp. This is episode 268. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Ferdinand DeMara earned his reputation as the great imposter. For over 22 years, he crisscrossed the country, posing as everything from an auditor to a zoologist. In today's show,

Starting point is 00:00:37 we'll review DeMara's motivation, morality, and techniques, and the charismatic spell he seemed to cast over others. We'll also make Big Ben strike 13 and puzzle over a movie watcher's cat. In October 1951, the Canadian press reported a dramatic story. A heroic surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy had single-handedly treated 16 wounded Korean soldiers aboard a pitching destroyer. In one case, he had removed a bullet that had lodged a quarter of an inch from the victim's heart. All 16 men had survived, and the doctor, Joseph C. Sear, was being commended by the Navy.

Starting point is 00:01:17 The public may have been impressed to hear this, but one person who was absolutely flabbergasted was Joseph C. Sear, who had been practicing quietly from his office in New Brunswick. Sear recognized the imposter, the two had met earlier that year in Augusta, Maine, and apparently the man had used his credentials to join the Navy. After he was discharged, the imposter sold his story to Life magazine and revealed an almost unbelievable career as a human chameleon. His name was Ferdinand de Mara, and he'd been born into unexceptional circumstances in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1921. He'd had a Catholic upbringing and was devout as a boy. The family were well-to-do, but when he was 11, they lost their money and the bank took

Starting point is 00:01:56 their house. Whether that was the cause of everything that followed isn't clear, but his reduced circumstances limited his ability to go places and control things, and he felt that keenly. Whatever the reason, in high school he ran away from home to join a Trappist monastery in Rhode Island, then joined the Army and the Navy, going AWOL from each. And then he embarked on such a whirlwind series of impostures that I can't even summarize it completely here. Over 22 years, he was a psychology professor, a deputy sheriff, a philosophy dean, a hotel auditor, a law student, a civil engineer, a hospital orderly, a zoologist, a prison warden, a high school teacher, and a surgeon. And those are just the high points. His biographer wrote in 1959, he has very likely been in more Catholic orders and institutions than any Roman Catholic alive today.

Starting point is 00:02:41 In many of these cases, he was stealing the identities of real people, a skill that he cultivated into a science and could apply almost arbitrarily. He resolved to steal the identity of Cecil Boyce Hammond, a biologist from Purdue, when he overheard a student praise him on a bus. He drew another man's name from an Iowa State College catalog that a sailor happened to leave behind at a serviceman's club. When asked why he had done all this, he said, rascality, pure rascality. But there was no mischief in his deceit. As he took each new job, he applied himself conscientiously until he was discovered and then left willingly and often regretfully. In nearly all cases, the employers declined to press charges, both to avoid embarrassment and because they were genuinely sad to see him go.

Starting point is 00:03:22 If anything, he seemed to feel badly about what he was doing. He told Life, in this little game I was playing, there always comes a time when you find yourself getting in too deep. You've made good friends who believe in you, and you don't want them to get hurt and disillusioned. You begin to worry about what they'll think if somebody exposes you as a phony. By all accounts, DeMar was extremely intelligent and had an exceptionally strong memory. He seemed capable of doing any job he tried his hand at, so it's not clear why he didn't just follow the ordinary course in life. His father said he was, quote, bright to the point of genius. Things came easily to him, and he read constantly. There was nothing bad in him.

Starting point is 00:03:54 He always wanted to help others, especially those who were suffering. He said, I love the boy, but I don't know him. He's good, and he's kind, and he has a really brilliant mind, but I've never been able to understand him. I don't think anybody else understands him either. Part of the problem seems to be that he felt a contempt for convention. He wasn't rebellious, but he had no automatic respect for authority. As a young man, he had worked in a home for aged priests in Montreal. He said, after what I learned and saw there, I never felt uneasy in the presence of a bishop.

Starting point is 00:04:21 I felt he was probably no better than me, but just disguised it better and had better connections. And he saw little value in formal schooling. When a Catholic order in Chicago sent him to DePaul University for a crash course in graduate theology, he passed it with straight A's. He said, that experience really changed me. No matter how I might feel, I still can't work up any respect for acquired learning. I can for character, but not learning. A man with a good mind who trusts it can learn anything he needs to know in a few months. In his case, that seems to have been true. At Gannon College in Erie, Pennsylvania, he taught courses in general, industrial, and abnormal psychology. Asked whether he had any qualms about teaching these subjects to college students, he said, why? I just kept ahead of the class. The best way to learn anything is

Starting point is 00:05:01 to teach it. So maybe he wanted to prove that he could skip conventional training and succeed by his own devices, an odd kind of ambition. He once said, every novice carries a bishop's miter in his tunic. The best insight I've been able to find is from his biographer, Robert Crichton. He felt that Damara's main enemies were boredom and a sort of Walter Mitty fantasy life. He wrote, any job that Damara can legitimately expect to hold is far beneath him. If he tries working in a hospital, it isn't long before he finds himself peeking into the operating room, dreaming of the feel of a scalpel in his hand, knowing once more the overwhelming and urgent sensation of men's lives depending on your knowledge and skill, dreaming with a far-off look of the challenges that could await him.

Starting point is 00:05:38 When the dream passes, the sense of empty boredom in his real station becomes intolerable and the blood of the imposter begins to flow once more through his veins. It is never very long after such a dream that he goes. Plus, it must be said, all of this was fun. One observer at North Haven, Maine, where DeMauro was arrested for posing as a schoolteacher, said, By God, you know, all of the time he was out here, I always had the feeling that he was laughing at us. Not hard, you know, or nasty, but laughing like he was enjoying a great big secret all his own. Oh, don't tell me he was having a real lot of fun posing. By now it may have occurred to you that our main source for this whole tale is an admitted fraud. How do we know that it all really happened? I had the same skepticism, but as far as possible it's been followed up. Crichton

Starting point is 00:06:19 spent a full year on the road with Damara, retracing his adventures all over the country and confirming the facts to wherever he could. He even followed up his book about Damara, The Great Impostor, with a second book describing their time together. And Life magazine fact-checked as much of Damara's story as it could for its feature article in 1952 and said it stood up. For me, the hardest part to believe is his stint as a surgeon in Korea, but here we have a statement by the Royal Canadian Navy. Quote, all the medical authorities in the United Nations forces in the Far East with whom Damara came in contact have testified as to the extensiveness of his knowledge of medicine and surgery

Starting point is 00:06:51 and nothing has occurred to indicate, either to RCN authorities or to the authorities of other forces in Korea, that he did not possess the competence of a fully qualified medical man. It seems he could learn anything quickly, and 20 years of serial imposter turned him into an expert in human deception. One surprising principle that served him well is to tell as little of the truth as possible. He said, I am a superior sort of liar.

Starting point is 00:07:13 I don't tell any truth at all. So then my story has a unity of parts, a structural integrity, and this way sounds more like the truth than the truth itself. Two of his maxims were, nothing is more vulnerable and unreliable than the truth itself. Two of his maxims were, nothing is more vulnerable and unreliable than the truth, and as long as a lie seems like the truth, it works like the truth, and thus it becomes the truth. He worked this idea into a rule he called DeMara's Law for Passing, or the Invisible Past. He said, almost all impostors I have found cut out a picture of what they think they should look like, and then they begin piling up mounds of plausible-sounding information behind

Starting point is 00:07:44 that silhouette. Say they're supposed to come from Saginaw. What do they do? They learn the name of the high school, of some streets, all sorts of information. When someone mentions Saginaw, they leap right in, spouting information left and right. This, they feel, proves they must be genuine. But I say, once they mention anything definite, they're now on record. I never mention anything. Don't be too obvious about not mentioning anything, but always leave them with a shadow. If you meet someone who does come from Saginaw, you've got to change the conversation or let him do the talking, which if you lead him the right way, he will do. It really works. Wherever I have left, people are always suddenly amazed to find they don't know one damn thing about me, where I was supposed to come from and have been,

Starting point is 00:08:21 although they all thought they did, that is, until the police began asking for specifics. This good-natured evasiveness served him well even in professional situations. to come from and have been, although they all thought they did, that is, until the police began asking for specifics. This good-natured evasiveness served him well even in professional situations. Crichton once asked him how he was able to fool his fellow faculty members when he taught at a university. He might be able to fool the students, but how did he convince specialists that he knew their subject? DeMara said, never win an argument. If someone challenged him, saying why Descartes never made any such statement, DeMara would say, he didn't? Well, what's your version, doctor? Then when the explanation came,

Starting point is 00:08:48 he'd look enraptured and say, I never really thought of it that way before. Would you mind very much if I made a few notes? The colleague would come away thinking of him as perceptive and open-minded, and DeMara would just go about his business. In the Canadian Navy, he was able to pose as a doctor by getting a senior medical officer to help him unwittingly. He went to him and said, I've been asked by some people to work up a rule-of-thumb guide for the people in lumber camps. Most of them don't have doctors handy, and they're pretty isolated. Could we get together a little guide that would pretty well cover most serious situations? The officer liked the challenge and spent two days putting together a guide for the amateur diagnostician,

Starting point is 00:09:22 and DeMara just followed that for the rest of his Navy career. together a guide for the amateur diagnostician, and DeMar just followed that for the rest of his Navy career. He prescribed a lot of antibiotics, and if that didn't work, he'd maneuver the patient to one of the six or seven other doctors and say, what do you think of this one, Bill? That doctor would give his own opinion, and DeMar would always take it. Generally, he said that in posing as a doctor, he found that many cases simply resolve themselves. He said, the seriously sick know they're sick, and so do you, those you send to a hospital. The rest are all going to get better sooner or later, and anything you do for of an existing person, and that meant assembling a collection of official documents. He learned to interview influential people and steal some stationery when they weren't looking. Then he could write official-looking records to document his identity.

Starting point is 00:10:05 He turned ordering a college transcript into an art. He told Life magazine, Believe it or not, if you give me ten days, I can produce a complete transcript of anybody's college record. The key was to approach twice. First is what he called an innocent bumpkin, sending a simple letter on ordinary stationery in which he naively requested the transcript directly. He'd follow that up with what he called official paper, writing to the college registrar on stationery that he'd stolen from some hiring authority. This pattern looked so convincing that no one thought to doubt it. He said it makes it easy for the person being requested to comply. By the time you make the actual pitch, they aren't surprised. They're sitting around waiting for it. In general, he found it paid to be audacious. If

Starting point is 00:10:41 he was asked to list a reference, he said, I have always found it pays to use the biggest names. People are reluctant to bother important people on routine matters, and they don't expect a fraud to use such obvious names. Similarly, if he wanted a job, he'd write to the head of the company. He said, always go to the top, where they can make decisions where they are accustomed to make decisions. They not only work fast, but they don't have second thoughts about how someone up there might like it. They're far more liberal in understanding up top in any organization. They hire the underlings to protect themselves. Once inside, he had two core principles. One was that, quote, in any organization, there is always a lot of loose, unused power lying about which can be picked up without

Starting point is 00:11:16 alienating anyone. The second rule is that if you want power, you should avoid encroaching on the domains of other people. It's better to start new projects on your own. Don't try to advance within a committee. Start a new one. He said, that way there's no competition, no past standards to measure you by. How can anyone tell you aren't running a top outfit? And then there's no past laws or rules or precedents to hold you down or limit you. He called this expanding into the power vacuum. When people did begin to suspect that he was a fraud, he fell back on the principle that the burden of proof is on the accuser. His doubters would have to prove that he wasn't who he said he was, and he would feign outrage at being doubted. He said, like the famous Marshall Fosch, whom my father admired,

Starting point is 00:11:59 My left is under attack, my right is crumbling, the center cannot hold. Excellent, I attack. That's my theory, too. He said he wasn't caught more often because even when people grew suspicious, quote, they don't want to be un-nice. Most Americans would rather be liked than right. It must be said, too, that he seems to have had some special appeal or charisma that let him get away with all this. During their time together, he even proposed to deliver Robert Crichton's baby to spare him having to pay for his own doctor. He said he'd delivered babies in the past for Navy personnel.

Starting point is 00:12:22 Crichton found himself strangely compelled by the offer and put it to his wife, who pointed out that Damara didn't have a medical license. Crichton said that he hadn't had a license in his earlier medical career either and added, it's just that, well, it means so much to him. She said she wouldn't consider it, but Crichton found that he put off breaking this to Damara to avoid hurting his feelings. They did allow him to babysit their daughter when she was a toddler. For someone who spent two decades deceiving people, DeMara came away

Starting point is 00:12:45 with an astounding amount of goodwill. When he was arrested in North Haven, Maine for posing as a high school teacher, a delegation from the community pleaded for him. He'd even served as a scout leader and Sunday school superintendent during his time there. The state police officer who arrested him said, this guy didn't just assume the names or the titles like most imposters. He lives the lives and does the jobs. Even the judge seemed to agree, telling DeMara on each occasion, deliberately or otherwise, you were doing some good. He was found guilty of getting his teacher's certificate dishonestly but given a suspended sentence. A fellow teacher said, I hope DeMara can come back. After all, what has he done but use someone else's name? And all the good he has done must certainly outweigh the bad.

Starting point is 00:13:22 But DeMara refused to go back. He said, I wouldn't want my children to be taught by a known imposter. The only jail term he ever received was six years in the brig for deserting the Navy, and that was reduced to 18 months for good attitude and behavior. His rehabilitation was considered so effective that the Army dropped its desertion charges as well. O.B. Ellis, the head of the Texas prison system where DeMara had masqueraded as a deputy warden, said, I can't deny it, and I don't see why I should. O.B. Ellis, the head of the Texas prison system where DeMara had masqueraded as a deputy warden, said, I can't deny it, and I don't see why I should. B.W. or DeMara, or whatever it is you call him, was one of the best prospects ever to serve in this prison system. His future was bright, if not almost unlimited. I can say this, if he could only appear again with some legitimate

Starting point is 00:13:58 credentials, and somehow this past was wiped out, I'd be proud to hire the man again. Some of DeMara's good deeds show their effects to this day. At the Brothers of Christian Instruction, where he presented himself as a zoologist in 1951, DeMar had pressed the school to expand its junior college into a full-time formal four-year college. They did, and it still exists, operating now as Walsh University in North Canton, Ohio. DeMar pointed out that even the revelation of his misdeeds might have done some good. He told Crichton, I don't mean to be boasting, but my lurid example has been instrumental in getting colleges and businesses to change their sloppy ways of handling confidential information and

Starting point is 00:14:33 records. In other words, your privacy and your records are safer today because of me. His last job was taken in his own name. He served as a religious counselor at Good Samaritan Hospital in Orange County, California. They knew about his past but accepted him anyway. One co-worker said, at first I was very skeptical, but he sort of grows on you. He finally had to stop work when he lost both legs due to complications from diabetes. At the end, when he looked back over his life, it's hard to know what he saw, whether he was proud of what he'd done or felt some private misgiving. Though the implorers he'd deceived had all seemed to find him trustworthy and competent, he once told Crichton, I'm a rotten man. When he died at age 60 in 1982, his doctor told the New York Times, he was about the most miserable, unhappy man I have ever known.

Starting point is 00:15:15 Over the last few weeks of his life, all he said was he wished he could die and go to heaven. In episodes 253 and 260, we discussed how tweets and other electronic communications can travel faster than the seismic waves of an earthquake. Karsten Hammond wrote, faster than the seismic waves of an earthquake. Karsten Hammond wrote, Thought you would be interested in this tangential riff on the whole earthquake slash Twitter issue. And Karsten sent a link to a Londonist video from 2014, which shows a woman named Vicky Pipe standing on Westminster Bridge to test the theory that you can hear the chimes of Big Ben faster on an FM radio than in real life. There's a BBC microphone in the tower next to Big Ben, and since radio waves travel faster than the speed of sound, in theory you should be able to

Starting point is 00:16:11 hear the chimes just a bit sooner on the radio than you would hear them using just your ears. At the time of the video, Radio 4 was broadcasting the first bong of the chimes live at 6 p.m. and midnight, so someone standing on Westminster Bridge with a radio could test the theory for themselves, as Pipe did, and laughingly discovered that she could indeed hear the bong a split second sooner on the radio. Unfortunately, if anyone would like to test this out for themselves, extensive repair work was started on the clock tower in 2017, and so Big Ben is mostly silent these days except for occasional events such as New Year's Eve and Remembrance Day and is not expected to resume its usual tolling schedule until 2021. I'm trying to imagine what that would actually be like.

Starting point is 00:16:53 It would be strange. Yeah. Tolling the radio and hear it on the radio before just the natural sound reached your ears. Yes. Yes, the woman recording it, Vicki Pipe, I mean, she just, she found it really, yeah, she was just laughing. So this difference between the speed of sound waves versus radio waves could also allow for someone to possibly hear Big Ben chime 13 times at midnight, back when it was chiming regularly. A BBC Three video from 2010 shows that if you're 1,360 meters from the clock and have a buddy holding a walkie-talkie near Big Ben, you'll hear 12 chimes on your walkie-talkie and then one more from the clock itself. As at that distance, the sound waves from the bell are about four seconds behind the radio waves.

Starting point is 00:17:43 And this amusing fact has occasionally been used in fiction. For example, in an episode of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, a 1960s British science fiction TV show. In an episode of the show called Big Ben Strikes Again, first broadcast in 1967, the Mysterons, which are basically enemy extraterrestrials, plan to destroy London by hijacking a truck carrying an atomic device. The truck's driver, who was unconscious during the hijacking, awakens not knowing where he is, but he hears Big Ben striking midnight on his radio and he hears 13 bongs instead of 12. And this anomaly turns out to be a crucial factor for discovering the location of the atomic device, which the Mysterons set with a 12-hour detonation countdown,

Starting point is 00:18:29 as you do when you're planning to blow up a city and you want to make for a suspenseful episode of television. That's a fantastic idea, though. Isn't it? I mean, it works with the story, but just the idea of hearing 13 bongs. Yeah. And I also, I came across like a Sherlock Holmesian kind of story about a woman who was kidnapped. And in a recorded message to her family, she mentions that she's so scared that she actually thought she heard 13 chimes of Big Ben on the radio at midnight, and Sherlock Holmes II uses this information along with some other clues to help figure out where she's being held. That's really clever. While researching this topic, I learned a few things about Big Ben that I had been rather unaware of as an ignorant yank. While the name Big Ben is commonly used for the four-faced clock in its

Starting point is 00:19:10 tower, it is actually the nickname of the largest of the tower's five bells. The enormous bell, which it is believed was originally meant to be called Royal Victoria, is officially called the Great Bell, and there are a couple of different stories about where the name Big Ben came from, but no one actually knows for sure. The tower that houses Big Ben and the gigantic clock was officially named, not too surprisingly, the Clock Tower, but was renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012 in honor of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. The original 16 imperial ton bell was cast in August 1856 and was brought to London with some ceremony and carried across Westminster Bridge in a carriage drawn by 16 white horses. Since the clock tower wasn't yet fully completed, construction on it ran five years behind schedule, the bell was tested

Starting point is 00:19:58 in a garden at the Palace of Westminster where it cracked beyond repair in October 1857. A 13.5 imperial ton replacement bell was cast in April 1858. It took 30 hours to winch this bell up to the belfry in the clock's tower, and Big Ben rang out for the first time on the 11th of July, 1859. But in September of that year, that bell also cracked and was then not used for the next four years as a solution to the problem was sought. Eventually, a small square was cut into the bell to keep the crack from spreading, and the bell itself was turned a quarter turn so that a new, lighter hammer would now strike a different area. So the bell heard today is still this cracked version with a slightly different tone than it originally had.

Starting point is 00:20:45 I didn't know any of this. That must have been so vexing. Yeah, I can imagine. Very expensive, too, I think. The lateral thinking puzzle from episode 260, and maybe not a spoiler alert as I won't give away the actual solution, was about how someone could be younger than someone else who has existed for a shorter amount of time. Alan Davidson from New York City wrote,

Starting point is 00:21:07 Hello, Futility Closet. I listened to the lateral thinking puzzle about a girl who was younger than her cousins but had existed for a longer time than them and immediately thought of a different answer, in vitro fertilization. I had a co-worker who had two children through IVF. They were conceived the same day and born several years apart. The IVF procedure creates many embryos and the extras are stored for later in case the parents want another pregnancy in the future.

Starting point is 00:21:33 If the puzzle narrator's daughter had been conceived via IVF but remained in embryo storage until after her cousins had been conceived and born the traditional way, she would arguably have existed for a longer time despite being younger. Please pet Sasha for me and keep up the good work. That makes sense. Sure.

Starting point is 00:21:51 And Franz wrote, Dear Sharon, Greg, and Sasha, While listening to this week's lateral thinking puzzle, I thought I had the solution right away because I myself am aware of a similar situation. But it turned out to be a different solution. Here's my solution. I was born on the 16th of July, 1992, at about one o'clock in the morning. A classmate from school

Starting point is 00:22:12 was born on the 15th of July, 1992, at about eight o'clock in the evening. But while my classmate was born in Germany, I myself was born in Japan. So you've got, of course, the whole time difference thing going on. While being at the same time a day older than me and celebrating his birthday a day earlier than me, my classmate is also about two hours younger than me. And that works out because Japan is seven hours ahead of Germany. So when Franz's classmate was born in Germany on the 15th at 8 p.m., it was currently 3 a.m. of the 16th in Japan, or two hours after Franz's birth, making the classmate both one day older and two hours younger than Franz, depending on how you reckon it. That makes a great puzzle in itself. That

Starting point is 00:22:56 would make a great puzzle in itself. And I wondered about people who are like, they're born in one country but moved to another in a completely different time zone, and then your age is always a little bit off. And I wonder if there might be like legal implications like when it becomes super important if you're actually 18 or not if you commit a crime or something like that you can imagine situations that'd be really important and ashley eastman who says that her last name is pronounced just like the inventor ge Eastman, and yes, my elderly grandfather is confident we are related, wrote about another topic from episode 260, that of a listener who had written in about her cat that could open doors.

Starting point is 00:23:33 Purrs and headbutts to Sasha. Listening to the listener mail on episode 260 brought a smile to my face. My family had a Siamese mixed cat named Sammy. One day, a few years ago, my family and I came home from vacation. We pulled up to our house and discovered that the front door was opened. Dad went in to see what was up, and nothing, no one inside. Well, except the cat. We unloaded and brought everything in and shut the door but didn't lock it.

Starting point is 00:23:58 Then lo and behold, we watched Sammy the cat jump and hang on the lever-handled door and open it. Dad got to change the doors to regular knobs after a few more times of the door being opened by Sammy. We are coming up on the one-year anniversary of his passing over the Rainbow Bridge. Love you, Bubba. Thanks for bringing a tearful smile to my face. Losing a pet is always so hard, and Sammy sounds pretty special. But I'll say again that we are in big trouble if Sasha ever figures out this trick for herself, and that's two cats we've heard of now that were able to open doors for themselves.

Starting point is 00:24:33 Thanks so much to everyone who sends us email. We really appreciate hearing your follow-ups, comments, and feedback. So if you have any of those to send to us, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. And yes, I do still appreciate pronunciation help. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to give him an interesting sounding situation,

Starting point is 00:25:00 and he has to try to work out what is actually happening by asking yes or no questions. This puzzle was sent by Neil deCarterette and his kitty Nala. A person is watching a thriller on TV. Every time there's a dimly lit scene, the person looks at their cat. Why? For some reason, I thought there should have a cat in it. I guess because you said it's from both of them. Yes. Yes. Nala helped write this, clearly. Okay. You said every time there's a dimly lit scene, he looks at his cat. Yes.

Starting point is 00:25:29 To see how the cat's going to respond to the... No. No. Okay. By dimly lit scene... Okay, so he's watching this at home, I guess? Yes. I'm imagining then, are there other lights on in the room?

Starting point is 00:25:45 Yes. I'm imagining then, are there other lights on in the room? Yes. I mean, what I'm trying to get at is when the screen is dim, does the whole room go dim? No. So like a mouse comes out of a hole when that happens? No. No, nothing like that. I like the thought, though.

Starting point is 00:25:58 So the dim lighting on the screen doesn't have anything to do with the cat's immediate surroundings. Right. The dim light on the screen does not affect the cat in any way or the room. But the cat, he's looking for a response? No. No. He is not.

Starting point is 00:26:14 No. He looks at the cat. He looks at the cat. But not to see the cat's response to what's on the screen. Right. Is that fair? Right. Not to see the cat's response at all.

Starting point is 00:26:24 Do I need to know more about the movie or like you know would that help me to know like when the certain when when the screen goes dim is there more i need to know about what's happening in the movie at that time no just that it's dim yes is it that he somehow has like he's looking for a spare moment to take his attention away from the movie and for some reason that correlates with the dimness on the screen. That would be a very surprising answer. Looks at the cat. Would it help me then to figure out why he's looking at the cat?

Starting point is 00:26:52 Maybe. Not sure this is the best line of questioning. Okay. So do I need to know more about the movie then? No. Did you tell me what kind of movie it is? It's just a movie. He said it's a thriller, but it's...

Starting point is 00:27:04 Is that important? No, it's just a movie. He said it's a thriller, but it's... Is that important? No, it's just, it's a movie that has some dimly lit scenes. Is he just diverting his attention from the screen because he doesn't want to see what's on it? No. Do I need to, all right. Looks at the cat. Is the cat alive?

Starting point is 00:27:19 Yes, let's presume the cat's alive. Is the cat doing something I need to know about? No. The cat's just like maybe lying there. Yes. Like in his lap or something. That's possible? The cat is not in his lap. The cat's just like maybe lying there. Yes. Like in his lap or something. That's possible? The cat is not in his lap. The cat's in the room.

Starting point is 00:27:28 Yes. Doing nothing. Let's say the cat is doing nothing. And the cat's not watching the, I don't know if the cat's ever watched a movie. The cat has not watched the movie. Is there anyone else there? No. Just the man and the cat?

Starting point is 00:27:38 Let's say it's just the man and the cat. Did this happen to Neil? Is this true? He didn't say that it was. So I'm guessing he made it up, but maybe it is. All right. So let's just do this then. He's watching the movie.

Starting point is 00:27:51 The screen goes dim at a particular moment. Sure. He looks at the cat, which is doing nothing. Yes. And then I guess at the end of the dim scene, he looks back at the TV or the whatever it is he's watching? Yes. Okay. Is it ever the case that the whatever it is he's watching? Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:28:06 Is it ever the case that the cat does something when he looks at it? Maybe not. Perhaps not. Perhaps the cat's sound asleep. And it's not that he's diverting his attention. Why would you look at a cat if you're not looking to see behavior and the cat may even not be doing anything? You've forgotten to ask about a major line of questioning that you should tend to ask about in lateral thinking puzzles. Is he dead?

Starting point is 00:28:29 That doesn't work. That should have been my first question. Is the location important? No. Is the time period important? No. Is this true? I guess it is.

Starting point is 00:28:39 Don't know. Don't know. I asked all the people involved. Is his occupation important? No. And usually you ask is there anything else about the man that i need to know well but okay is there obviously there is yes there is uh does he have like a condition or yes like a health condition yes that oh so he's

Starting point is 00:28:58 trying to avoid being influenced by the dimness of the screen no No. I mean, like, I don't know what quite that would be, but the dimness of the screen, like the change in light brightness could affect a neurological condition or something like that? No. But that's more vaguely on the right track than anything else. Would he get the same outcome if he just looked at the wall or something instead of the cat? Yes, yes. So he's just taking his eyes off the screen? Yes. Why would you do that? And wall or something instead of the cat. Yes, yes. So he's just taking his eyes off the screen. Yes. Why would you do that?

Starting point is 00:29:26 And it's a condition of some kind. And it's not that he's doing it to take his eyes off the screen. He's doing it for another reason. For putting his eyes... And it doesn't have to do with his eyes. But he looks at... He looks at someplace other than the screen. Let's say he looks towards the cat.

Starting point is 00:29:42 That's probably more correct than looks at the cat. Is he avoiding pain? No. Is he avoiding the triggering of some condition? No. This has nothing to do with his eyes. Why would you... But you're saying he looked at the cat. So normally he's looking towards the TV.

Starting point is 00:30:00 And when a dimly lit scene comes on, let's say he looks towards the cat instead of towards the TV. But why would you do that on only a dim scene? And it has to do with some of his abilities not being up to everybody else or more typical peoples. of his abilities not being up to everybody else's or more typical people's is it that he is it that he you know it doesn't make any sense that he's not able to to discern what's on the screen when it's too dim not that he can't but there's some things that you just can't discern as well on the screen when it's too dim colors no um motion i mean what else is in a movie besides moving shapes? You can't see people's faces as well when the scenes are dim.

Starting point is 00:30:50 So he's just diverting his eyes so he can listen better? Yes. And to distinguish who's talking? No. He's deaf in his left ear and relies on lip reading when he can see the actor's mouths but when the scene is dark he turns his head to the left so that his right ear is towards the tv so that you can hear better and the cat just happens to be on his left that makes sense thanks to neil and nala for that puzzle which indirectly involved a kitty if anyone else has a puzzle for us to try animal involving

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Futility Closet - 268-The Great Impostor

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