Futility Closet - 285-The Grasshopper Plagues

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 11,000 quirky curiosities from an earthquake rose to a perplexing pirouette. This is episode 285. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In the 1870s, new farmsteads on the American plains were beset by enormous swarms of grasshoppers sweeping eastward from the Rocky Mountains. The insects were a disaster for vulnerable farmers,

Starting point is 00:00:37 attacking in enormous numbers and devouring everything before them. In today's show, we'll describe the grasshopper plagues and the settlers' struggles against them. In today's show, we'll describe the grasshopper plagues and the settler struggles against them. We'll also delve into urban legends and puzzle over some vanishing children. In July 1874, a 12-year-old girl named Lily Marks watched a darkness sweep across the sky above her family's Kansas farm. She heard a whirring, rasping sound, then saw a moving gray-green screen between the sun and earth. A child in Jefferson County called, they're here, the sky is full of them, the whole yard is crawling with the nasty things. And a settler in Edwards County wrote, I never saw such a sight before. This morning, as we looked up toward the sun, we could see millions in the air. They looked like snowflakes. What they were seeing were

Starting point is 00:01:29 grasshoppers, which normally ranged along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Grasshoppers are solitary creatures, but when certain species concentrate densely, they can begin to swarm together and are known as locusts. This year, a hard winter followed by a dry summer had created an ideal breeding ground, and they came streaming eastward in astonishing numbers. Grasshopper plagues weren't uncommon. Jesuit missions in California had reported them as early as 1722, but as they poured eastward in 1874, they encountered something new, the farms of hopeful new settlers on the Great Plains. After the Homestead Act of 1862, the end of the Civil War in 1865,

Starting point is 00:02:09 and the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, the American population had undertaken a great migration westward, and that took them into the domain of the locusts. These settlers typically arrived with only a few personal possessions, work animals, and enough seed to get their first season of crops into the ground. In order to survive, they needed a good result from that first planting. So a plague of locusts was almost literally the worst thing that could happen to them. For five years in particular, from 1873 to 1877, grasshoppers descended on these homesteads each summer in unthinkable numbers,

Starting point is 00:02:44 devouring their crops and laying millions of eggs that would renew the nightmare when they hatched. A typical swarm could eat 50 tons of vegetation in a day. The U.S. Entomological Commission estimated the damage to agriculture west of the Mississippi in those years at $200 million, more than $100 billion in today's money. And the attacks themselves were terrifying. An approaching swarm could darken the sky and brought on an ominous feeling of disaster. An Iowa farmer wrote, One afternoon I was coming from Primgar in company with some neighbors when the largest and darkest cloud of hoppers we had ever seen passed between us and the sun.

Starting point is 00:03:20 The landscape grew hazy and things seemed so unreal we could hardly believe our senses. Daylight vanished, the air lost its warmth, and stars were visible. As they descended, there was a strange whirring sound in the air that one settler likened to thousands of scissors cutting and snipping. One wrote, At our place they commenced coming down at about one o'clock in the afternoon, at first only one at a time, here and there, looking a little like flakes of snow, but acting more like the advanced skirmishers of an advancing army. Soon they commenced coming thicker and faster, and they again were followed by vast columns or bodies looking almost like clouds in the atmosphere. They came rattling and pattering on the houses and against the windows,

Starting point is 00:03:59 falling in the fields, on the prairies, and in the waters, everywhere and on everything. By about four o'clock in the afternoon, every tree and bush, buildings, fences, fields, roads, and everything except animated beings was completely covered with grasshoppers. A New York Times reporter wrote, nothing can describe the thorough and utter devastation of this grasshopper plague in Kansas. The insects seem to work together and swoop down upon a town, beating everything before them. The air is literally alive with them. They beat against the houses, swarm in at the windows, cover the passing trains. They work as if sent to destroy. The plague of locusts in Egypt, as depicted in the Bible, is the only account that can graphically describe the grasshopper

Starting point is 00:04:40 plague in Kansas. They clung to people's hair and crawled down their collars and up their pant legs, tree limbs bent under their weight. Another settler wrote, my younger brother and I were in school. At about two o'clock, the great cloud of grasshoppers came down. We rushed out of school and started home. We had to hold our hands over our faces to keep them from hitting us in our eyes. In Minnesota, Laura Ingalls Wilder was caught barefoot. In her book On the Banks of Plum Creek, she wrote that she had to step on grasshoppers and they smashed squirming and slimy under her feet. Once the insects landed, they began to eat. An editor in Yankton in the Dakota Territory wrote, the insects came down at midday upon fields that gave promise of moderate harvests and gardens in fair condition. In a short time, all were literally

Starting point is 00:05:25 covered by myriads of the voracious insects, which devoured and destroyed every green thing, even the leaves on the trees and the grass on the prairies. They ate holes in the family washings hanging in the open air and injured many of the tents in which newcomers had made their temporary homes. G.C. Moody watched a stream of locusts attack his cornfield near Yankton. Quote, the grasshoppers invaded the field like a living river pouring upon it. They literally covered the corn. The stream stretched away to the south and west as far as one could see in either direction, and the flutter of their wings created a roaring noise that was almost deafening. Not a ten-thousandth part of the stream lighted in my field, but covered the country for miles

Starting point is 00:06:04 and miles. They devoured the tender leaves and newly formed ears of corn and never ceased their A Kansas settler wrote, falling upon a cornfield and converting, in a few hours, the green and promising acres into a desolate stretch of bare, spindling stalks and stubs, covering each hill by hundreds, scrambling from row to row like a lot of young famished pigs let out to their trough, insignificant individually but mighty collectively. They sweep clean a field quicker than would a whole herd of hungry steers. Imagine hundreds of square miles covered with such a ravenous horde, and you can get some realization of the picture presented last year in many parts of Kansas. Elsewhere in Kansas, Mary Roberts wrote, there was a watermelon patch in our garden, and the melons were quite large and long. They were not ripe, so we could not save them,

Starting point is 00:06:58 but by the evening of the second day they were all gone. I think we found one or two pieces of rind about the size of the palm of our hand in the whole patch. Such enormous appetites they had. In a few days, they had eaten every green thing. They soon had every twig on every tree or bush eaten off, and the trees were as bare as in midwinter. Desperate pioneers tried covering their crops and shrubs with bedsheets, blankets, quilts, shawls, even old winter coats and burlap sacks. But if the grasshoppers couldn't worm their way under these, they would eat through them. Mary Lyon wrote, The cabbage and lettuce disappeared the first afternoon, and by the next day they had eaten the onions. They had a neat way of eating onions. They devoured the tops and then ate all of the

Starting point is 00:07:38 onion from the inside, leaving the outer shell. And they didn't stop at crops. They chewed into horses' hides. They ate paper, bark, and leaves. They covered the wooden handles of shovels, rakes, and hoes, seeking the salt from the farmer's sweat. In Utah, there were reports that they ate window blinds and paint, decayed fence posts, and wooden siding. They ate wool off the backs of live sheep. In Missouri, one witness said they'd been seen eating dead bats and birds. They even stopped railroads. One witness in Canning in the Dakota Territory recalled that the bodies of crushed grasshoppers formed such a slick mess on the track that the engine spun out and couldn't pull the train.

Starting point is 00:08:15 The sound of their feeding was likened to a grass fire, a low crackling and rasping. They ate even each other. If one was killed, the others descended on the body, seeking protein and fat. Mary Lyon of Kansas wrote, The garden was soon devoured, and when all of these delicacies were gone, they ate the leaves from the fruit trees. They invaded our homes, and if our baking was not well guarded by being enclosed in wood or metal, we would find ourselves minus the substantial part of our meals,

Starting point is 00:08:40 and on retiring to bed, we had to shake them out of the bedding and were fortunate if we did not have to make a second raid before morning. Their numbers were literally mind-boggling. In Utah, railroad grader Milando Pratt wrote, the Great Salt Lake pickled them in its briny waters by the hundreds of thousands of tons, then cast their carcasses ashore until a great wall of these inanimate pests was formed for miles along the lake's shore. They put forth a great stench and cast the aroma of this slowly melting putrid wall upon the windward breezes to be wafted earthward toward our suffering camp. In Plattsmouth, Nebraska in 1875, meteorological observer Albert Lyman Child watched a single gigantic swarm pass over his head for five

Starting point is 00:09:22 continuous days. After conferring with other observers, he estimated that that swarm covered 198,000 square miles, or half a million square kilometers, more than the combined areas of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. He wrote, This is utterly incredible, yet how can we put it aside? If he was right that the swarm was a quarter to half a mile deep, then it contained an estimated 12 trillion insects, the largest locust swarm in recorded history, a single voracious enemy that weighed 27 million tons. Even after the grasshoppers had moved on, their devastation remained. The water in the ponds, streams, and open wells

Starting point is 00:10:05 was brown with their excrement. Chickens, turkeys, and hogs that had eaten the insects tasted so strongly of grasshopper that they couldn't be consumed. And the visitors had left a last horrible gift. Millions of eggs deposited an inch underground. One Minnesota farmer took a shovel into his fields and found egg pods everywhere he dug. He counted 150 eggs per square inch and wrote, at this rate there will be 940,896,000 eggs to the acre, or the nice little pile of 6,586,272,000 on seven acres of my farm. Twenty years earlier, two settlers in Utah had made a similar calculation, estimating that their four acres contained 2,973,696,000 eggs. In his book Locust, entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood notes that if even 1% of those eggs had produced adult locusts,

Starting point is 00:10:57 that totaled 30 million, or one locust for every person in the country at the time. These eggs would hatch in the spring just as the tender growth of new crops was appearing. One woman wrote, one day the whole earth began to crawl and move. Grasshoppers by the millions were hatching, pale, sickly-looking white bugs at first, and once more they mowed down all of God and man's work. The new grasshoppers were wingless for six to eight weeks and formed roving bands of incredible size. One witness saw them cross two tributaries of the Missouri River, each 100 feet wide by sheer force of numbers. Quote, the rivers were crossed at numerous places by the moving armies, which would march down to the

Starting point is 00:11:34 water's edge and commence jumping in one upon another till they would pontoon the streams so as to effect a crossing. In the face of this onslaught, the stricken farmers tried everything. When the first swarms descended, they fired guns at them, clanged pots and pans, raised arms and voices, burned smudge pots and straw. Nothing worked. There seemed no way to keep the insects from landing in the fields. So they tried to drive them into the air again by swinging ropes, beating them with flails, even just shaking the plants. But against numbers this great, nothing could succeed. So the farmers began to attack the new hatchlings. They tried crushing them, burning them,

Starting point is 00:12:09 poisoning them, drowning them, and burying them. They raised chickens to eat them. They tried prayer, and they tried dynamite. Again, there were just too many of them. In Kansas, Lily Marks watched her father and a hired man dig a trench along their fence line, fill it with sticks and leaves, and set it afire. The insects crawled in and extinguished it with their sheer bulk. She wrote, think of it, grasshoppers putting out afire. For many of the settlers, this disaster spelled ruin. They'd invested everything they had in their first crop and had no resources left to sustain them. An 1874 report said that just one family in 10 had emerged from the latest attack with enough provisions to last through the winter. The New York Times wrote,

Starting point is 00:12:48 In the West, where the new settlers had staked everything on the chance of a bounteous yield, all is lost, and some of them, dispirited, ruined, are trying to scrape money enough together to get out of the country. In 1876, Congress called the Rocky Mountain locust the single greatest impediment to the settlement of the country. Congress called the Rocky Mountain locust the single greatest impediment to the settlement of the country. Governments did what they could to arrange help for the farmers, issuing bonds to relieve them and launching appeals for contributions from the East. And they suspended residency requirements so that farmers could leave their land temporarily to work elsewhere and recoup their losses. The Army distributed clothing, blankets, and shoes. In 1877, Nebraska passed a Grasshopper Act, declaring the locusts

Starting point is 00:13:26 a public enemy and requiring every able-bodied male to work toward eliminating them at hatching time. Other states offered bounties for bushels of locusts, and farmers began to switch to more resilient crops. For reasons that still aren't certain, as the region began to recover, the locusts themselves gradually disappeared. One settler wrote, all of a sudden, one fine day, a person could see little dark whirlwinds here and there, which after a while turned into dark clouds, and lo and behold, it was the grasshoppers leaving in the same manner as they had come several years before. The air grew so thick that the sun could not be seen, and the grasshoppers were gone. Another recalled, one day they all left. I don't know as I have seen a grasshopper here since. There were still periodic outbreaks through the late 19th century,

Starting point is 00:14:10 but the last live Rocky Mountain locust was seen in Manitoba in 1902. It's not clear what had happened, but it seems possible that the humans had won their battle inadvertently. By introducing agriculture to the plains, they had changed the environment that had supported the locust swarms. The plowing of the prairie and the introduction of cropland in place of prairie grasses had been enough to disrupt their life cycle. The locusts might have survived by taking sanctuary between outbreaks in the fertile river valleys of the Rocky Mountains. But again, inadvertently, that's exactly where the homesteaders chose to establish their farmsteads, putting an end, accidentally, to the locust plagues. If this is right, Jeffrey Lockwood, the entomologist, writes, The most spectacular success in the history of entomology, the only complete elimination

Starting point is 00:14:53 of an agricultural pest species, was the result of unplanned, uncoordinated, and unintentional human activity. The agriculturalists who arrived in the river valleys of the West managed to drive their most severe competitor to extinction in a matter of a few years, leaving North America the only inhabited continent without a locust species. With time, the worst years of the grasshopper plagues passed into the lore of the Great Plains, but the swarms remained indelible in the memories of the settlers who had lived through them. In 1896, Cyrus Carpenter, a former governor of Iowa, wrote, Persons who are not conversant with this invasion can hardly

Starting point is 00:15:29 realize with what anxiety the people scanned the heavens for several years after. The great body of the invaders were generally preceded a day or two by scattering grasshoppers. On a clear day, by looking far away towards the sun, you would see every now and then a white-winged forerunner of the swarm which was to follow. Years after they had gone, there was a lurking fear that they would return, and if there were any indications of their appearance, people would be seen on a clear day, standing with their hands above their eyes, peering into the heavens, almost trembling lest they should discover the forerunners of the white-winged messengers of destruction. Futility Closet really relies on the support of our listeners because we just wouldn't be able to commit to the amount of time that the show takes to make if it weren't for the donations and pledges we get. If you'd like to contribute to

Starting point is 00:16:28 our celebration of the quirky and the curious, you can find a donate button in the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or if you'd like to support us in a more ongoing way, you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll also get access to outtakes, more information on some of the stories, extralateral thinking puzzles, and peeks behind the scenes of the show. You can check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the link at our website. And thanks again to everyone who helps support Futility Closet. We heard from a few listeners about the story in episode 282 about people reporting being gassed with some sort of anesthetic agent and then robbed in Europe.

Starting point is 00:17:16 Percy's owner wrote, one possible explanation is that the first one or two supposed incidents were made up and then a kind of mass hysteria took over. People can be susceptible to suggestion. So the story about being gassed and being robbed gets around. Then other people in caravans find that things are missing and since they can't account for why, they remember that they have heard that roving bands of people are gassing and robbing people. So that had to be what happened, as opposed to they simply misplaced the thing that was stolen or it was pickpocketed earlier or even that someone broke into their caravan while they were away and took the missing items. The human mind is interesting. And Alex Balmans wrote,

Starting point is 00:17:54 your discussion about tourists being gassed and robbed awoke some dim memories. In fact, I know of people who claim that this happened to them. I don't know how familiar you are with European patterns of tourism, but in short, each summer, there is a huge movement of tourists from the north of Europe to the south, especially the Iberian Peninsula and the south of France. Although cheap flights are taking a growing number of people, a lot of people still go by car, leading to interminable columns of cars,

Starting point is 00:18:20 and especially caravans, on the French highway system in the summer months. To save money and or time, some people sleep in their campers or cars in the parking and rest areas along the highways. This has attracted thieves, as these cars tend to be parked somewhere secluded but still easy to spot and reach. By the time the tourists wake up and see that something is amiss, the thieves can be literally hundreds of kilometers away along the highway. I have heard of the purported gas attacks in this context. In fact, the people I'm talking about were South Americans touring Europe on a budget, and they were sleeping in their car along the highway when they got robbed.

Starting point is 00:18:54 Their defense was, we couldn't do anything because we were gassed. If we hadn't been, surely we would have woken up and raised the alarm. At the time, this struck us as an easy excuse. And this fits in with what Percy's owner was suggesting, that the story of sleeping gas attacks gets used as an easy defense or an assumption of, oh, that must be what happened. And I could see that you could maybe talk yourself into thinking that, yeah, you did feel kind of groggy or had a kind of funny headache. I guess if you're a really enterprising thief, you could start gassing people now because no one would believe you're a victim. I hadn't thought about that.

Starting point is 00:19:30 Charles Hargrove wrote, your most recent podcast had updates about gassing in Europe and said that you had found stories dating back to 2000. I can push it back farther than that. In the summer of 1991, I had just graduated college and backpacked around Europe with some classmates. While we were there, we were warned about taking sleeping cars on trains in Italy because there were thieves who were gassing compartments and then robbing all the sleeping passengers. We, of course, never met anyone who had it happen to them. It was just one of those stories that you heard. It sounds like the classic urban legend of Jan-Harald Brunvand. We made it out of Italy with all our stuff, having to only deal with one attempted pickpocketing. And Charles then

Starting point is 00:20:10 followed up with, a little googling shows that it is a fairly common rumor. Rick Steves even seems to give it some credibility. Other people in the comments seem pretty dubious of the possibility though. So there was a fair amount for me to unpack in what Charles sent. First, I hadn't heard of the possibility, though. So there was a fair amount for me to unpack in what Charles sent. First, I hadn't heard of the stories of people being gassed on trains, but Charles sent some links showing that this rumor has been around for many years. And second, I didn't know who Rick Steves was, but it turns out that he's an American travel writer and a media personality who calls himself on his website, America's most respected authority on European travel. calls himself on his website, America's Most Respected Authority on European Travel.

Starting point is 00:20:50 Steeves has written a number of travel guides, has a syndicated newspaper column, and has had a travel series on public television since 2000 and a public radio travel show since 2005. And on his website, in an article on night trains, he says, while you'll hear stories of entire train cars being gassed and robbed in Italy, Spain, and countries farther east, it, extremely rare would still imply this has happened. And for those who can remember the discussion of this topic from episode 282, the likelihood of an entire train car being gassed would probably be even lower than extremely rare. And then third, I wasn't familiar with Jan Harold Brunvand, so I learned that Brunvand is an American folklorist who is best known for popularizing the idea of the urban legend.

Starting point is 00:21:39 An urban legend is a modern story of obscure origin with little to no supporting evidence that is presented as true. The term urban legend was originally used by folklorists, and the Oxford English Dictionary has a reference to the term being used in print back in 1931. Brunvond, who was a professor of English at the University of Utah, is credited with popularizing the term through a series of books that he wrote, the first of which was The Vanishing Hitchhiker, American Urban Legends and Their Meanings, published in 1981. I had never thought before about what exactly makes something an urban legend, but Charles's email piqued my interest, and I learned that the term refers to a more specific kind of phenomenon than I had realized.

Starting point is 00:22:19 The sources that I looked at described urban legends as a type of folklore or a class of rumor. I looked at described urban legends as a type of folklore or a class of rumor. They usually contain elements of humor, moralizing, horror, or danger, and are often intended to serve as entertainment, a type of warning, or a way to deal with situations that provoke uncertainty or anxiety. An urban legend is usually presented as having directly happened to the narrator, or to someone they know, or a friend of a friend, or as having been seen in the media, so as to give it more credibility. Another important factor is that urban legends are persistent, significantly more so than other types of rumors. I saw one published article that argued that the persistence of urban legends is a macro phenomenon, in that while some individuals will become skeptical or stop believing a particular legend, they are continually replaced with new believers, thus perpetuating the legend in a culture.

Starting point is 00:23:09 Also contributing to the persistence of urban legends is that their peripheral details will be changed to better fit in with different places or times while still retaining their same core ideas. Urban legends considerably predate the Internet, but they are certainly helped nowadays in their spread by it, maybe even more particularly in the case of stories where people feel that they need to warn others. However, traditional media may also still play a part, and you can certainly find stories about, for example, the supposed sleeping gas attacks by thieves in mainstream media outlets such as The Guardian. media outlets such as The Guardian. In Brunvon's book, The Vanishing Hitchhiker, he points out that we usually associate folklore and legends with less modern societies, but that while we tend to be unaware that that's what they are, they do exist within our own culture, and that we can learn a lot about our current culture by studying such stories. As he says, the legends we tell, as with any folklore, reflect many of the hopes, fears, and anxieties

Starting point is 00:24:05 of our time. I hadn't thought about this, but there must be an epidemiology of legends. I mean, some of these are more virulent than others because they have certain qualities. I mean, it's just one of these things that you just hear and you don't really think about much, but it turns out there are people who actually study this. Yeah, I mean, with perfect information, you could draw a whole diagram about how one spreads. Yeah. And just in case it's not all an urban legend, Greg Bell sent us an obvious mad caravan gasser explanation. Hello, futiliteers. Everyone involved in these stories is so fixated on esoteric anesthetics that would be completely impractical to obtain and use. I kept shouting my answer at my podcast player,

Starting point is 00:24:45 but since that didn't work, I'll email my speculation instead. It almost has to be simply carbon monoxide. CO poisoning matches the symptoms exactly, headache, confusion, groggy, difficulty waking, and is trivial to produce in massive quantities by making combustion happen in an inefficient manner. The reason it's so obvious to me is that any home using natural gas for heat should already have one or more CO sensors to guard against this very thing. A furnace flue can get blocked and fill up the house with CO at night, risking suffocation

Starting point is 00:25:14 of the occupants who would experience difficulty waking and reacting, thus the piercing alarm. So just get carbon monoxide detectors for your RVs, folks, and rest easy. Cheers and thanks for an always entertaining show. So the Mayo Clinic and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do note that the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning include headache, dizziness, weakness, confusion, and possible loss of consciousness. So Greg just might be onto something here. And having a CO detector is probably just good, sensible advice anyway.

Starting point is 00:25:44 Yeah, I guess, though, they're probably not required for care events. I don't know. I guess it would depend on the local laws. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. If you have any comments, feedback, or updates to add, please send those to podcast at futilitycloset.com. 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 work out what's going on asking yes or no questions. This is from listener Moxie LaBouche. In 1987, as many as 7 million American children vanished. In fact, many seemed to disappear on the same day. There was no great natural disaster,

Starting point is 00:26:26 no mass migration, and no surge in child kidnappings. What happened? Had they never existed in the first place? Yes. Uh, okay. Seven million children who hadn't existed. Had somebody or some group of somebody thought they existed erroneously? So it's not like this whole thing was fictional? Right. Right. Okay.

Starting point is 00:26:52 So, because those fictional children would be children that never existed, like if it was something to do with a movie or a story or something. Yes, that's right. Okay. So seven million children that were thought to have existed were they thought to have existed by like some governmental agency yes okay were these like duplicate records no and by children do you mean they were thought to have been human children

Starting point is 00:27:22 yes american citizens or it doesn't matter? American citizens, and it does matter. And it does matter. Or most of them. But they didn't exist at all. Right. It's not like they just weren't American citizens. Okay.

Starting point is 00:27:39 So 7 million American children were believed to have existed by a governmental agency. Yes. But they were wrong. Yeah, that's right. And when the governmental agency figured it out, they deleted the records of them. And that's what you mean by the children vanished? That's very close. It wasn't the government's error.

Starting point is 00:27:59 It wasn't the government's error. So was there any kind of fraud involved or crime? Yes. Wasn't the government's error? So was there any kind of fraud involved or crime? Yes. So was somebody trying to defraud the government by creating children that didn't exist or pretending to create children that didn't exist to get like welfare benefits or something? No.

Starting point is 00:28:20 For schools, for like school records? No. Why would you pretend okay was this would you say it was a one actor or a small group of actors that had created these seven million children no ah so would you say it would have been it could have been like millions of people who were all doing the same kind of fraud thing yes okay so they were all acting sort of individually yes and all doing some the same thing um would these were these putative parents that were doing this yes okay were they actual parents like they were just pretending they had more kids than they did or it doesn't matter? It doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:29:07 Okay. So a whole lot of people were pretending to be parents of children that didn't actually exist. That's right. But it wasn't like for welfare. I'm trying to think what other government, like was it for like some kind of government benefit like that? Like food stamps or housing or something like that that you needed a kid to qualify for. You're just dead on target. You're just not quite there yet.

Starting point is 00:29:30 You get extra money. Oh, for taxes. That was really fun watching you solve that. 1987 was the year that the IRS began to require Social Security numbers for anyone over the age of five who was to be claimed as a dependent on federal income taxes. That year saw a 9% drop in the number of dependents claimed, producing $2.9 billion more in tax revenue. About 66,000 taxpayers had claimed to have four or more dependents in 1986 and claimed none in 1987. So people could just pretend they had kids and the government had no way to check. Apparently up to 1986, they just took your word for it. Oh my gosh. More than 11,000 families had claimed seven in 1986 and zero in 1987. Oh no, seven imaginary kids. Anyway, thanks Moxie.

Starting point is 00:30:17 Thank you. And if you have a puzzle you'd like to send in for us to try, you can send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. for us to try, you can send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported entirely 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. While you're at the site, you can also browse through Greg's collection of over 11,000 bite-sized distractions. Check out the Futility Closet store, where you can find penguin-adorned clothing for any

Starting point is 00:30:55 non-imaginary kids you might have. Learn about the Futility Closet books, and see the share 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. All of our music was written and performed by Greg's amazing brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 285-The Grasshopper Plagues

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.