Futility Closet - 316-A Malaysian Mystery

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 symphonic efficiency to spectrograph hygiene. This is episode 316. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1967, Jim Thompson left his silk business in Thailand for a Malaysian holiday with three friends. On the last day, he disappeared from the cottage in which they were staying. In today's show, we'll review the many theories behind Thompson's disappearance,

Starting point is 00:00:42 which has never been explained. We'll also borrow John Barrymore's corpse and puzzle over a teddy bear's significance. In March 1967, four friends were staying at a cottage in the Cameron Highlands of Central Malaysia. On Easter Sunday, they attended church services in the morning and then had a picnic lunch afterward. Then they returned to the cottage and, at about 2.30 p.m., three of them lay down for an afternoon nap. They had assumed that the fourth, an American businessman named Jim Thompson,

Starting point is 00:01:20 would as well, but he seems to have chosen to sit in the sun. A little after 3 o'clock, his hosts, T.G. and Helen Ling, heard an aluminum deck chair being placed on the veranda. A moment later, they heard footsteps going down the gravel path to the road. Thompson's friend Connie Mangskow couldn't sleep and did some packing. She and Thompson planned to depart for Singapore the following morning. When she emerged from her room about 4.30, she found Dr. Ling reading in the living room. He said that Thompson must have gone for a walk. His suit jacket was hanging over the back of a chair on the veranda. He couldn't have planned to be gone long. He left behind his cigarettes and lighter and the pills he took for some painful

Starting point is 00:01:58 gallstone attacks. The Cameron Highlands was the leading resort in Malaysia, established by the British in the 19th century to escape the summer heat of Kuala Lumpur. Among its amenities was a network of jungle trails to indulge the English passion for walking. Thompson hadn't napped. His bed had not been turned down or even lain on. Mrs. Ling was sure that the footsteps she'd heard had been European rather than Asian. She insisted she could tell the difference. The Lings had heard no voices before or after that. After the steps, they'd heard nothing at all. They hadn't bothered to look out the window because they knew Thompson was an avid walker.

Starting point is 00:02:33 He'd taken solitary walks on both his former visits to the cottage. They expected him back for tea at five, but by six o'clock he still hadn't turned up. At 6.30, darkness fell. Dr. Ling drove down the hill to the golf club, but they said they hadn't turned up. At 6.30, darkness fell. Dr. Ling drove down the hill to the golf club, but they said they hadn't seen Thompson that afternoon. By 7.30, they were actively worried. Temperatures would drop into the 40s overnight. Dr. Ling went to the police. They said they'd alert the local villages, and if Thompson hadn't turned up by morning, they'd organize a full-scale search party. Thompson's disappearance drew special attention because he wasn't just any American tourist. He was one of the most famous Americans in Asia. He'd been born to a prominent

Starting point is 00:03:09 family in Delaware, graduated from Princeton, and worked as an architect in New York City. When the war broke out, he joined the army and served as an operative in the Office of Strategic Services in North Africa, Italy, and France. He'd arrived in Thailand just after the war's end and, rather than return to America, decided to make a new life there. He'd arrived in Thailand just after the war's end and, rather than return to America, decided to make a new life there. He focused on silk, which at the time was an unregarded cottage industry struggling against cheaper textiles from Europe and Japan. He encouraged the remaining weavers to use better looms, bright dyes, and exotic designs that would appeal to the American market. He hawked the new silk himself to tourists

Starting point is 00:03:45 in the lobby of Bangkok's Oriental Hotel. He took suitcases full of silk to America, where they impressed the editor of Vogue, and he supplied Thai silk for the 1951 Broadway musical The King and I and the film version five years later. By the mid-1960s, his Thai silk company was regarded as one of the great success stories of post-war Asia. Thompson was dubbed the Silk King of Thailand and was so well known that a letter addressed to Jim Thompson, Bangkok, found its way to him in a city of three and a half million people. That was the man who disappeared on a Malaysian holiday in 1967. The official search for him began early the next morning. The police were joined by British soldiers on convalescent leave, hotel guests, and friends, so that eventually a hundred people were looking for him. The jungle terrain was wild and thick, and no one knew what direction he might

Starting point is 00:04:33 have gone. The searchers stumbled into one another, mistaking each other's shouts for Thompson's. They hoped to find some clue quickly because their own activity was marring the paths. Some looked overhead for wheeling vultures. They found nothing. As it happened, one of the searchers was journalist Jack Foisey of the Los Angeles Times, who'd happened to be on holiday at the Highlands, so the next morning the story was on front pages around the world. Everyone tried to believe that Thompson couldn't be in real trouble. He loved walking, he had extensive experience in the jungle, and the Highlands was a celebrated resort where walking was one of the main forms of recreation. On Tuesday, the search expanded to a size never seen in Malaysian history. About 325 policemen

Starting point is 00:05:14 were involved, including members of the Malaysian Field Force Police, and they were guided by about 30 aboriginal people who lived in the jungle and knew its trails and dangers. Helicopters joined the search from above. Because of the thick jungle, they couldn't see much even from a low altitude, but it was hoped that if Thompson were lost or injured, he could make a signal. The official search lasted 10 days. On the 4th, the hope of finding him in the jungle was waning, and by the end of the 5th, it was effectively gone. The greatest number of people had searched in the first three days, combing the jungle with unprecedented thoroughness, and when they found no clues, they began to think he couldn't be in the highlands at all, dead or alive. And the parade

Starting point is 00:05:52 of soothsayers, mind readers, clairvoyants, dowsers, astrologers, and palmists began to offer their own explanations, a parade that began but didn't end. Rumors began to spread of conspiracies, foul play, and Thompson's wealth. Maybe he hadn't gone for a walk at all. Maybe someone had beckoned him from the road or been waiting there just out of sight of the house. But who and why? Charles Sheffield, managing director of the Thai Silk Company, authorized a reward of $10,000 for any information leading to Thompson's recovery. Eventually, this rose to $25,000. By the end of the summer, the mystery had mostly faded out of the newspapers, but it was still discussed over dinner tables. The Thai silk

Starting point is 00:06:29 company kept paying Thompson's salary into his bank account, and both the Malaysian and the Thai authorities were still pursuing every lead. No one came forward to claim responsibility for the disappearance. By 1970, three years of intensive investigation had failed to turn up even one positive fact that hadn't been known on the evening of the first day. They had only managed to determine things that hadn't happened, and there were very few even of those. The theories fall into four broad categories, that Thompson met some accident in the jungle, that he was involved in some political intrigue, that he was kidnapped for ransom, and that he killed himself.

Starting point is 00:07:03 The first to consider is the jungle. It's known that Thompson liked walking alone, off the beaten track, and at a fast pace. The jungle in the Malaysian highlands is rugged, full of ravines, and alarmingly good at hiding things. Shortly before Thompson disappeared, the wreckage of a U.S. Air Force C-47 was discovered by chance in the Cameron Highlands. It had lain there since 1947 and was only a few miles from a well-traveled road. In January 1968, an American schoolteacher and three of her students vanished on a hike in the jungle. After three days and four nights, a group of aboriginal people found them three and a half miles from the main house of a large tea plantation. Thompson was alone and wearing a short-sleeved shirt, light silk trousers, and loafers.

Starting point is 00:07:45 He had no food, matches, or other survival equipment. He had taken a jungle survival course during the war, but that had been 20 years earlier. People suggested countless possibilities. Maybe he'd had a bronchial or gallstone attack. Maybe he'd injured himself and was lying out of sight in a ravine or a cave or had wandered out of the search area. Maybe he'd fallen into an animal trap and the hunters had panicked and buried his body. Maybe he'd been attacked by a tiger, a leopard, or a boar. The animal might have dragged him away, perhaps to a cave. When skeptics pointed out that such an attack ought to have left clues, others suggested that he'd been swallowed

Starting point is 00:08:19 by a python. Pythons don't swallow grown men. Nope, no reason to let facts get in the way of a good explanation, right? In a search of 10 days, no clue of any kind was found in the jungle. No one had ever gone for a walk there and disappeared so completely. Lost guests at the highlands normally turned up within a day. The Thai Silk Company sent down an Englishman named Richard Noon, an acknowledged expert on the jungles of Malaysia. He spoke the language of the people who lived there, and he had their trust. He spent two days in the jungle exploring the trails and talking to the people. When he came out, he said, I am fully convinced that Mr.

Starting point is 00:08:53 Thompson is not lost in the jungle. That takes us to the next class of theory, political skullduggery. During the war, Thompson had served in the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, and now he was a prominent American in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. With those ingredients, you can make up almost any theory you like, and people did, more than I can even summarize comprehensively. Maybe Thompson was an undercover agent kidnapped by communists. Maybe he was involved in a planned coup in Thailand. Maybe his opposition to the war had made him some dangerous enemies.

Starting point is 00:09:24 Maybe he'd befriended communists during the Japanese occupation of Thailand. Maybe his opposition to the war had made him some dangerous enemies. Maybe he'd befriended communists during the Japanese occupation of Thailand. Maybe he was being brainwashed to speak out against the American bombers based in Thailand. Maybe he was on a secret mission to capture the secretary general of the Communist Party of Malaya. Maybe he'd become a rogue arms dealer selling caches that the United States had left in Southeast Asia. As long as your theory starts with the word maybe, you're welcome to add it to this list. The sheer number of suggestions shows that none of them was uniquely compelling. Typically, someone would come forward with a vaguely plausible story, ask for money to follow it up, and then disappear.

Starting point is 00:09:58 The stories could take some bizarre turns. One informant ended up insisting that Thompson had dyed his hair red and was posing as a fortune teller living in a market area near Ipoh. Another said Thompson was being held in Cambodia in a two-story house with a wagon wheel leaning against it. William Warren, an American expatriate who knew Thompson in Thailand and is the most prolific author on this subject, says that the political abduction theories tend to founder on the question of why. They don't explain why the principles would have acted in the ways they did, and they don't explain why Thompson would have been dangerous or useful to them. Thompson's own politics were personal.

Starting point is 00:10:34 He was more interested in people than in abstract ideologies. He was prominent in the region, but as a businessman rather than a political figure, and as a foreigner he would have been of little use in propaganda. He had little interest in Thai politics, he had few contacts in those circles, and he rarely commented even privately on shifts in power. One of his friends said, if Jim Thompson was a spy, one has to wonder what sort of information he could possibly have passed on, as he was so isolated from the people in power and therefore from any alleged secrets. Well, then maybe Thompson had been abducted for some non-political reason. Maybe he was kidnapped for ransom. This theory is liable to the excellent

Starting point is 00:11:10 objection that no one ever asked for a ransom or even claimed the reward for information, which rose eventually to $25,000, remained on offer for 10 years, and carried a promise of immunity from prosecution. That was enough to convince the Malaysian authorities, but there are additional reasons to question the kidnapping theory. For one thing, the cottage was at the top of a hill at the end of a dead-end road at a resort in central Malaysia, a difficult spot from which to abduct someone. It would have been easier and surer to kidnap Thompson in Bangkok or even Singapore. Further, the Ling's bedroom window overlooked the road.

Starting point is 00:11:44 They might easily have witnessed an abduction, as might anyone who was walking or golfing at the resort that Sunday afternoon. Even beyond that, it's not clear what a kidnapper's plan could have been. Thompson seems to have left the cottage on impulse. What if he hadn't decided to take a walk? What if his friends hadn't decided to take a nap or had even come with him? None of these factors could have been foreseen. Others have suggested that Thompson had connived in or even instigated his own abduction for some reason, but the same objections still apply. It was likely to be witnessed. A responsible kidnapper would have taken Thompson from his hotel room in Singapore the following day or from Penang two days earlier. One theory I quite like is that Thompson was kidnapped by accident.

Starting point is 00:12:24 There were known to be several gangs in Singapore that abducted wealthy Chinese for ransom. In this theory, one of these had targeted not Jim Thompson, but his host, Dr. Ling, who was napping inside the cottage. The kidnappers had seen a man leave the house and abducted him. Thompson and Ling would have looked somewhat similar, especially from behind. Afterward, the kidnappers discovered not only that they'd got the wrong man, but that the man they'd got was both important and famous, and amid the ensuing publicity, they'd panicked and killed him.

Starting point is 00:12:52 This is possible, but it's open to the same objections. The cottage is an awkward place to abduct someone, and the reward should have tempted someone to talk. The last general theory is that Thompson took his own life. There just doesn't seem to be any reason to suppose that's what happened. His health wasn't perfect, but it wasn't unusually bad, and he'd resolved to address the gallstone attacks with a relatively simple operation shortly after he returned to Thailand. Beyond that, he was still extraordinarily active and hadn't appeared despondent. His doctor and friend Einar Amundsen said, he was a man very interested in his work.

Starting point is 00:13:24 I don't think there was anything in his mental outlook to make him do a thing like that. The last people to see him, Connie Mangskau and the Lings, agreed. A family member added, if he were going to commit suicide, he would never have done it in a way that would cause so much inconvenience to others. He wasn't that kind of man. Those are the four chief theories, and there's no evidence for any of them. What's left? Maybe he was eliminated by business rivals. Maybe he was hit by a car and the driver hid the body. Maybe he'd arranged his own disappearance so that the Thai weavers could take ownership of their own company.

Starting point is 00:13:55 Maybe he'd been using the company as a front for drug trafficking. One acquaintance was sure that he'd seen Thompson in Tahiti two months before the disappearance. Another woman was sure that he'd been spirited away on a Norwegian ship bound for Hong Kong. The bottom line in all of this is that there's no evidence. Of all these many theories, most are possible, many are plausible, and one of them is probably even right. But without evidence, there's no way to decide among them, and Jim Thompson managed to disappear without leaving any clues at all. The best guess may still be the original one, that Thompson had gone for a walk in the jungle and met some accident there. The search had been

Starting point is 00:14:30 energetic but not infallible, limited by the incredibly difficult geography of the highlands. A member of the local police had said it would take a full regiment of men working for about a month to thoroughly search the jungle around the resort. The actual search was considerably smaller than that, and after the first week it was largely sporadic. After five days, one police official had told a reporter that he thought there was little hope that Thompson would be brought out alive. As a result, people may have turned too quickly to explanations involving political intrigues or kidnapping. The American historian Edward Van Roy said, The attempt to prove a conspiracy theory behind the disappearance of Jim Thompson is just a storm Van Roy said, That's where it stands.

Starting point is 00:15:14 Thompson was declared legally dead in 1974 after the seven-year interval required by Thai law. His business today is stronger than ever. It's grown into one of the flagship luxury brands in Thailand, and his home in Bangkok is now a museum that exhibits his collection of Asian art and antiques to thousands of visitors a year. In Malaysia, the Cameron Highlands Resort now operates a Jim Thompson mystery trail that retraces the fateful walk he's believed to have taken 53 years ago. In episode 72, we reported on some famous people who had some rather odd things happen to their corpses after their deaths, such as Jeremy Bentham's corpse being preserved and

Starting point is 00:16:02 kept in a friend's office until it was eventually moved to University College London. As we covered in that episode and some follow-up in episode 76, Bentham's corpse would actually attend special events at the college. Vadas Gintotas wrote, Evidently, Errol Flynn, W.C. Fields, and Sadakachi Hartman stole John Barrymore's corpse for one more night of drinking. All the best. John Barrymore was a highly acclaimed actor in the first part of the 20th century, and his granddaughter Drew Barrymore recently confirmed long-standing rumors that John's corpse was taken from the morgue for one last escapade after his death in 1942. Drew was on an episode of the YouTube series Hot Ones, which apparently involves

Starting point is 00:16:45 celebrities being interviewed while trying to eat increasingly spicy chicken wings. According to Wikipedia, as the wings get hotter, the guest typically begins to display the effects of eating the spicier wings, and the interview becomes less focused on the guest and more so the struggle to finish the wings. I don't particularly like watching people being tormented, so I only skimmed some of the episode and in the later parts of it, Drew is clearly in extreme distress and having great difficulty focusing on the questions she's being asked. She says that Scarlett Johansson had warned her that being on the show would be like giving birth, but that she had had a c-section, so she wasn't prepared for how bad

Starting point is 00:17:25 it would actually be. That tells you a lot. Anyway, early in the episode, Drew was asked by the host whether it was true that her grandfather's body had been stolen from the morgue by actors W.C. Fields and Errol Flynn and art critic and poet Sadakachi Hartman, so that they could prop him up against a poker table and throw one last party with the guy. And she answered that not only was it true, but there have been what she called cinematic interpretations of the event, such as in a Blake Edwards film called SOB. She went on to say enthusiastically, Yes, they did. And I will say this. I hope my friends do the same for me.

Starting point is 00:18:04 That is the kind of spirit I can get behind. Just prop the old bag up. Let's have the last few rounds. And I think death comes with so much morose sadness. And I understand that. But if it's okay, just for me, if everybody could be really happy and celebratory and have a party, that would be my preference. That would be my preference. Drew didn't give any further details about the event involving her grandfather, but both a Newsweek article that Vadis helpfully linked to and Wikipedia claimed that it was actually actor and director Raoul Walsh who borrowed the corpse. The Newsweek article states that Walsh told the funeral home director that they needed to bring John's body to an older relative who was homebound so that she could pay her last respects, and that after Walsh was told it would be illegal to remove the corpse,

Starting point is 00:18:50 his bribe of $100, worth about $1,600 today, did the trick. As this story goes, the body was brought to Errol Flynn's house and propped up in a chair for a drunk Flynn to find when he returned home. Newsweek reports that Flynn was so frightened that he ran out to his car to try to flee when Walsh popped out to explain the joke. Although both Flynn and Walsh apparently confirmed this version of the story and it's included in Flynn's memoirs, actor Gene Fowler, who was a close friend of John Barrymore, claims that it didn't happen. I found this all a little confusing as this story

Starting point is 00:19:25 involving Walsh didn't really match up with the one that Drew was asked about. And she wasn't asked what her knowledge of the event is actually based on. So I think maybe it's a little hard to judge what actually did happen. Yeah, yeah. It's a very colorful story. Now I want to know what really happened. Yeah. Well, I mean, it had happened way before her birth even. So I'm not sure. I mean, family legend, she didn't really say what she was basing it on. how fans at sports games can also sometimes generate enough vibrations to be picked up on seismographs. Romy Higgins from the UK sent a possible puzzle as a follow-up on this topic. I thought that it would probably be too difficult to guess as a puzzle in our required time frame,

Starting point is 00:20:17 but that it made a great follow-up. Romy said, In 2001, British scientists were disappointed that an earthquake didn't happen. Why? This is based on an experiment that took place in 2001 where scientists asked a million British school children to jump up and down for a minute in an attempt to trigger an earthquake. The monitors didn't pick up anything close to what we'd consider an earthquake, but squiggles were detected around the country. I remember taking part in this event in my primary school playground. I would have been

Starting point is 00:20:44 eight years old, and I think we were all slightly hopeful that it would work. We did break a Guinness World Record, though. Some articles on the event are here. Keep up the good podcasting. And odd as it sounds, about a million schoolchildren across Britain did jump up and down at the same time in a massive experiment designed to kick off Science Year, a government-funded program to promote science among students. Researchers hoped to be able to measure the impact of the children's jumping on seismometers, though they weren't expecting it to register more than three on the Richter scale, with Dr. Ted Neild from the Geological Society of London saying before the event, Britain is hit by magnitude 3 earthquakes all the time, but you do not ever notice it.

Starting point is 00:21:26 A BBC article at the time entitled Earth Does Not Move for Science reported that the experiment failed to make the impact scientists had hoped for and that at the headquarters of the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, scientists noticed nothing untoward on their monitoring screens, but that there had been intriguing squiggles registered in at least some places. However, both Reuters and the Los Angeles Times reported that the children succeeded in causing an earthquake and that the organizers of the giant jump event said it had been a success. And both quoted Nigel Payne, the director

Starting point is 00:22:01 of science here, as saying, we got some kind of result at every single seismometer around the country, though he acknowledged that we generated something like a hundredth of a serious earthquake. One undisputed result, as Romy mentioned, was that the event was recorded as the greatest simultaneous jump in history by the Guinness Book of Records. Oh, that's good. So they did get something from it. by the Guinness Book of Records. Oh, that's good.

Starting point is 00:22:24 So they did get something from it. The puzzle in episode 264, another spoiler here, involved the dangers of arsenic-containing wallpaper, and I had a follow-up to this topic in episode 270, particularly with regard to Napoleon Bonaparte. Wayne Scott sent an email with the subject line, and included a link to a blog post on Strange Company for the newspaper clipping of the day from August 26th. The clipping was from August 2nd, 1907 from the Owensboro, Kentucky Messenger Inquirer and read, Poseyville, Indiana, April 1.

Starting point is 00:23:00 Zach Watson of Wadesville has undergone a peculiar experience. Zach Watson of Wadesville has undergone a peculiar experience. On March 15, two years ago, his wife was seized with convulsions and died in a few hours. He soon remarried and last March, a year almost to a day from the death of the first, Mrs. Watson, the second wife, died of the same disease. Then he married the third time and yesterday his wife died of the same illness and almost in the same manner. Expert physicians were cabled, but their services were of no avail. Thus it is Mr. Watson has buried three wives in three successive March months. The case is attracting attention because of its striking peculiarity. Mr. Watson is postmaster at Wadesville and is a highly respected citizen.

Starting point is 00:23:42 And then an article in the Shreveport Times a few days later on April 11th read, Evansville, Indiana, April 10. It has just developed that the death of Mrs. Zach Watson, living near New Harmony in Posey County, Indiana, was caused by wallpaper that contained poison, and not by spinal meningitis, as first thought. Two of the former wives of Mr. Watson died of the same cause. The wallpaper in the parlor at Watson's home has been examined and found to contain a virulent poison. When brushed or shaken, a fine mica-like substance falls from the paper in a cloud. It was to prevent the mail clerks and postal employees from being poisoned that the government

Starting point is 00:24:21 recently forbade the mailing of souvenir postal cards covered with this preparation. The death of Mr. Watson's wives occurred in March, just about house cleaning time, and each was taken violently ill shortly after. The last Mrs. Watson was taken ill immediately after having cleaned the parlor. And I don't even know what to say about this story. I think almost every part of it is just rather mind boggling to me, including that the man managed to marry three wives in three years. Like I'm having trouble imagining the mindset of the third Mrs. Watson, but also just how horrible for all of them. Yeah, that would look almost like foul play. I mean, I noticed in the first story, they said he

Starting point is 00:25:01 was respectable. It looks like he had three successive wives who were all poisoned in short order. Yes. And that's why I'm thinking, like, if you were going to be the third wife to marry him in three years, and you know your first two predecessors died in strange circumstances. It's kind of surprising, too, that he got through it. I guess they were saying sort of because they were cleaning this, they were more exposed to it. Yeah. And, I mean, you could imagine that he was at work and they were home cleaning the house,

Starting point is 00:25:28 you know, kind of thing. Yeah. That's awful. The whole story is just mind boggling to me. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We're sorry that we can't always read all the email that we get on the show. But we always do appreciate getting your follow ups and feedback. So please send any that you have to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me a strange-sounding situation, and I have to figure out what's happening, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Hanotsula.

Starting point is 00:26:05 Three people enter a room. One of them brings a teddy bear. All three of them sit down, wait for a while, and then all of them look at the teddy bear at a specific moment. They are delighted to see everything is fine. Why? All right. Are any of them children?

Starting point is 00:26:23 No. So these are three human adults. Yes. One of them brings a teddy bear. Yeah. I'm thinking of a canary in a coal mine. Like you bring the canary because if something happens to the canary, then you have to be worried that you're not going to be okay as a human. Is it something like that?

Starting point is 00:26:43 That if something goes wrong with the teddy bear, then they're in trouble'm gonna say yes to that are they on earth no they're in space yes uh what would happen to a teddy bear in space that was the first thing i could think of is like they brought a teddy bear into space to see like what would happen to a teddy bear in space is it is it to tell something about the pressure, that the pressure's still okay? No. Well, if they were lacking oxygen, I think they would know that without looking at a teddy bear. I'm trying to think what could happen in space. Okay, is there something specific about this teddy bear?

Starting point is 00:27:20 No. Just a generic teddy bear? Yes. So, okay, are they actually like in a vehicle? Yes. Some kind of vehicle. So they're not like floating in space or, you know, on a moonwalk or fixing something outside of the spacecraft.

Starting point is 00:27:38 They're in the spacecraft. Correct. And they go into a room specifically, you said? Did you say? The three of them went into a room? No, they're in the vehicle. I'm sorry. Okay, so they're in the spacecraft.

Starting point is 00:27:50 Does it matter what kind of spacecraft it is? Not really. Okay. And one of them brought a teddy bear, and you said they sat there for a while? Yeah. And watched, and all looked at the teddy bear to see if they could see the teddy bear? No. To see if anything had changed about the teddy bear?

Starting point is 00:28:09 Not exactly. I can't quite answer that. Okay. Did the teddy bear change in any way? I have to say no, but I don't want to mislead you. Did their perception of the teddy bear change? No. I don't want to lead you down the wrong path okay is this a dead

Starting point is 00:28:28 not dead but a non-living teddy bear yes okay okay well if they brought a live animal that would make a lot more sense to me all right this is a stuffed bear they looked at it at a specific time you said like a specific time because they were waiting for a specific amount of time to pass no they were waiting for a specific event to occur i'll say yes okay they were waiting for a specific event to occur and then once it occurred they looked at the teddy bear yes and i'm just still trying to think what would you need to check you couldn't tell yourself if anything was wrong once they hoped it had need to check on the teddy bear? You couldn't tell yourself if anything was wrong. Once they hoped it had occurred, they looked to the teddy bear to confirm it.

Starting point is 00:29:10 To confirm that an event had occurred. Yeah. And they could tell that an event had occurred by looking at a teddy bear. Yes. As opposed to all the great instrumentation you would have in a spacecraft, you're going to check the teddy bear. I'll say it doesn't have to be a teddy bear. Any object? Yes.

Starting point is 00:29:37 That you would visually look at? I mean, within certain limits, yes. And again, it's not just to check their vision, to see that they can see. That's correct. It's like, wow, I can see the teddy bear. Because you could see the other people. They wanted to... Okay.

Starting point is 00:29:56 Should I figure out what the event is? Yes, that would help. Splashing down into the water. No. Anything about returning to the earth. No. Leaving the earth. Anything about the journey off the earth or into space.

Starting point is 00:30:13 I'll say no. Landing on something else. No. Gosh, what events occur in space? Docking with something. No. Rendezvousing with something? Or something blasting off, like a module or something blasting off from the ship?

Starting point is 00:30:31 I'm trying to think how to help this without just giving it to you. Okay. Have they traveled to a specific spot or relative to something else or traveled something, places, traveled? Yeah, reached a certain point in the... Journey? Career of the journey, yeah. Okay, so they reached a specific point in the journey? Yeah, and they need to confirm that they really have.

Starting point is 00:30:53 And seeing a teddy bear or some other object is going to confirm that for them? Yes. See, I keep thinking they want to make sure they're not dead, but that doesn't make any sense. Like, the best way to check you're not dead is to see if you can see a teddy bear. This happens after they've reached orbit. Uh-huh. So they take off and go up through the atmosphere and arrive at... Okay.

Starting point is 00:31:18 And they're still strapped into their seats. Okay. When they look at the teddy bear. Oh, to see if it's floating! Yes. I can't tell what's a safe hint. Hunter writes, the three people are astronauts. Since early spaceflight, toy and stuffed animals have been used in the launch vehicle to indicate zero-g while the astronauts are still strapped to their seats. It has turned into a tradition to take one on the trip. Robert Perlman, a space historian and the editor of CollectSpace.com,

Starting point is 00:31:45 told Mashable, the tradition of carrying small toys as weightless indicators dates back to the very first time a human was launched into space. Yuri Gagarin launched on Vostok 1 with a small doll, and a tradition was born. I think that's a wonderful fact.

Starting point is 00:31:59 That is, like, truly delightful. Thanks, Anna. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle to send to us, especially if it involves teddy bears, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our incredible listeners. If you'd like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious,

Starting point is 00:32:21 you can find a donate button in the support section of the website at futilitycloset.com or you can join our Patreon campaign where you'll not only support our show, but also get more discussions on some of the stories, extralateral thinking puzzles, outtakes and peeks behind the scenes.

Starting point is 00:32:37 You can find our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see our website for the link. At our website, you can graze through Greg's collection of over 11,000 delightful distractions, browse the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books, 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 00:33:03 All our music was written and performed by Greg's phenomenal brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 316-A Malaysian Mystery

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