Futility Closet - 324-The Bizarre Death of Alfred Loewenstein

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 uncertain diary to a self-annulling verdict. This is episode 324. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1928, Belgian financier Alfred Lowenstein fell to his death from a private plane over the English Channel. How it happened has never been explained. In today's show, we'll describe the bizarre incident, which has been called one of the strangest

Starting point is 00:00:41 fatalities in the history of commercial aviation. We'll also consider whether people can be eaten by pythons and puzzle over an enigmatic horseman. In the early evening of July 4th, 1928, two limousines arrived at Croydon Airport on the southern outskirts of London. A chauffeur opened the door for a stocky 51-year-old man of medium height, Alfred Lowenstein, a Belgian financier who would be flying tonight from Croydon to Haran Airport in Brussels. Lowenstein went into the terminal building long enough to make a call to Canadian banker Herbert Holt to make a dinner appointment for the following week. While he did so, the rest of his party boarded the monoplane that was warming up on the tarmac. They were Lowenstein's valet,

Starting point is 00:01:30 his secretary, two stenographers, a pilot, and a mechanic. It was a fine evening for flying, warm, still, and almost clear. They took off shortly after six o'clock, and onlookers saw Lowenstein wave and smile from the plane. The pilot headed southeast toward Brussels. The plane was almost brand new. Lowenstein had owned a fleet of small aircraft over the years and had long coveted this model, a Fokker F-7A. He'd had it fitted out as an office with an upholstered chair at the front of the cabin, which had been soundproofed so the stenographers could take dictation. The plane encountered no turbulence and climbed to cruising altitude, 4,000 feet, then proceeded at 110 knots, crossing the coast near Dover and heading into the English Channel.

Starting point is 00:02:14 Soon after this, Lowenstein marked his place in his book, got to his feet, and went to the rear of the cabin, apparently to use the lavatory. As he went, he smiled and exchanged a few words with the secretary. The rear compartment contained a toilet, a washstand, and the plane's only exit. When ten minutes had gone by and Lowenstein hadn't returned, the valet conferred with the secretary and went to see whether he was all right. He knocked on the door of the rear compartment and got no reply. When he opened it, he found, to his shock, that there was no one there. The compartment was empty. The only other exit was the plane's outer door. It appeared that Alfred Lowenstein had fallen 4,000 feet into the English Channel. This would have been a horrifying shock in any event,

Starting point is 00:02:56 but in Lowenstein's case it had global repercussions. Alfred Lowenstein was the third richest man in the world. The son of a Brussels banker, he had amassed an immense fortune through shrewd investments and won a reputation as the Belgian Croesus. He owned an estate in Leicestershire, a castle in Brussels, eight villas in France, and a stable of thoroughbred racehorses. He was so rich that his valet had a servant. In the cabin, there was consternation. When the pilot understood what had happened,

Starting point is 00:03:23 they were approaching the French coast, only five minutes from the nearest airfield. But for reasons he never explained, he descended to a beach dead ahead, where he brought the plane down on the smooth, wet sand below the high water mark. As it turned out, the beach he'd chosen was under the control of the French military. The passengers were arrested and questioned, first by a battalion adjutant, and then by the police. Strangely, though they admitted they'd lost their employer over the channel, they resisted for half an hour, revealing his identity, saying they had no authority to do so. The secretary finally admitted that it was Alfred Lowenstein. But, the adjutant said, believe me, it could not have been play-acting. It would have been impossible for those on the aircraft to have acted as they did

Starting point is 00:04:03 if Monsieur Lowenstein had not met with some terrible fate. The two girl typists were in tears, the valet was greatly affected, his teeth chattered with fright, and perspiration poured from the brow of the secretary. It was obvious to me that something dreadful had happened. One police inspector said, This is a most unusual and mysterious case. We have not yet made up our minds to any definite theory, but anything is possible. The passengers were driven to Calais, where they spent the night at a hotel. Lowenstein's disappearance brought financial disaster to

Starting point is 00:04:34 investors across Europe as shares in his companies plunged on the exchanges. Hundreds of individual fortunes were wiped out and whole industries were shaken at the news. But within 24 hours, the French police had ended their inquiries. The official explanation was that since the incident had occurred outside the three-mile territorial limit, it was not their concern. The Belgians and the British eventually took the same position. In the absence of facts, rumors began to sprout up. Perhaps Lowenstein wasn't really dead. A French fisherman said he'd seen a parachute descend to the water where a yacht had sailed to meet it. Another said that when the plane had landed on the beach, Lowenstein had been driven off in a car. And yet another said that he'd never

Starting point is 00:05:14 been on the plane at all. When word of the disappearance reached Lowenstein's wife, she traveled from Brussels to Calais, arriving at the hotel about 5 a.m. The proprietor described her as forlorn and distraught, dressed entirely in black. She ordered the pilot and the mechanic to take the aircraft back to England and then to charter a tug to search for her husband's body, and she offered a reward for its recovery. Two hours after she'd arrived, she was in the car on her way back to Brussels, leaving the secretary, valet, and stenographers to follow by train with Lowenstein's four suitcases. She retired to her room and the doctor's care. Since the French police weren't pursuing the case, no examining magistrate had been appointed, and the pilot and the mechanic were free to go. They searched the channel for two days and found

Starting point is 00:05:58 nothing. In the immediate absence of a body, speculation arose that Lowenstein had faked his own death. One rumor said he'd engineered his disappearance to escape the consequences of financial irregularities in his businesses. Another said that he'd been having an affair with a female inmate at a French insane asylum, and that the two had eloped together. He could have paid the other passengers to maintain a consistent cover story, and left to begin a new life elsewhere. Bolstering this theory were rumors that Lowenstein had withdrawn half a million dollars from his bank before leaving London, and that the plane

Starting point is 00:06:29 had been seen landing elsewhere before it returned to the beach where the French authorities had found it. An Imperial Airways pilot said he'd crossed the channel 800 yards behind the Fokker and had not seen a body fall, and further rumors held that a ferry had crossed the channel in the middle of the night and released a mysterious passenger on the English coast. But the New York Times wrote in an editorial, although he loved to live spectacularly, Captain Lowenstein had nothing to gain and everything to lose by such folly. He could never reappear in financial circles, and for him, the financial game was the whole pleasure and absorption of his life. The question was put to rest on July 19th, when a fishing vessel found Lowenstein's body floating face down 10 miles northeast of Cap Gris Nez. It was wearing a watch engraved with his name.

Starting point is 00:07:14 A private autopsy was performed for the family. It determined that Lowenstein had died in the fall. He'd been alive when he'd hit the water, but every bone in his body was broken. The doctors found no poison in his system and declared that his death had been accidental. The family buried the remains. So what happened? The first theory is that Lowenstein had stepped out of the plane by accident. When he'd put down his book and gone to the rear of the cabin, he'd stepped through a windowless interior door and closed it behind him. That put him in a cramped compartment.

Starting point is 00:07:44 On his left were the toilet and washstand, and. That put him in a cramped compartment. On his left were the toilet and washstand, and on his right was the plane's exterior door. Behind him was the door he'd just come through, the one leading back into the cabin. The accident theory says that when Lowenstein finished using the washstand, he had somehow confused these two doors. Instead of stepping back into the cabin, he'd stepped into the sky. The trouble is that these two doors look nothing alike. They're set in different walls, and the exterior door was fitted with a window, which at the time looked out on the English Channel. Stenographer Paula Bidilon said, there was only

Starting point is 00:08:14 one door leading out of the plane, and naturally none of us thought it possible he could have made a mistake. But he was very absent-minded when he had big problems on hand. He was often abstracted. That's pretty abstracted, but in Lowenstein's case, it's not impossible. Arriving in Philadelphia on one recent visit, he'd walked so close to his plane's propellers that they'd knocked off his hat. It was only when an onlooker shouted, duck, that he jumped out of danger. Other suggestions in this line are that turbulence had struck at a moment when Lowenstein was off balance, and that he'd become airsick and had opened the door to get some air. The trouble is that that door lies right behind

Starting point is 00:08:49 the wing propeller, which puts tremendous pressure on it while the plane is in the air. We know this from practical experiment. Today, an accident such as Lowenstein's would be investigated by an agency such as Britain's Civil Aviation Authority or the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. No such organization existed in 1928, so the skies were briefly filled with intrepid young men trying to open the doors of Fokker monoplanes. Generally, they found it extraordinarily difficult. On July 5th, Flying Officer George Terrell wrote to the Toronto Daily Mail and Empire, Any person wishing to get out of the door, which opens towards the motors,

Starting point is 00:09:29 would have to push a piece of woodwork roughly 10 square feet in area against a slipstream of 120 miles an hour, assisted by the backwash of two 150 horsepower motors. The backwash of these alone is enough to knock a man down when standing on the ground. Even if a man could get it open, a super strong man, as soon as the pressure was released, the door would slam shut. His body would be caught and held fast in the closing door. The same difficulty would have stopped him from jumping on purpose if he'd wanted to. No one could see any reason for him to end his life, and nothing in his behavior suggested he was contemplating this. Also, he was a devout Catholic and might have been denied a religious burial if he'd taken his own life. In any case, his rheumatism had lately grown so bad that he'd had to be lifted from his horse

Starting point is 00:10:08 after riding, and the experiments had shown it would take two strong men to open the door while the plane was in flight. Flying Officer Terrell added, furthermore, as soon as the outside door was opened the slightest bit, everyone inside would be aware of it. A blast of wind would blow through the cabin. It is impossible, supposing a man did leap from the machine, that the passengers in the inside cabin should not know something had happened. That's important. The other passengers said they had not heard any noise or noticed anything out of the ordinary. In the words of the Toronto newspaper, if Lowenstein could not get out by accident or design without the persons inside feeling the blast of air,

Starting point is 00:10:44 their accounts of what happened become interesting. So maybe he was murdered. Maybe someone wanted Lowenstein dead and had enlisted the other passengers to overpower him and throw him to his death. Who would have organized such a crime? Certainly Lowenstein had enemies. He's been described as critical, abrupt, sensitive, and difficult. An ostentatious speculator with a finger in every pie in Europe. But none of his opponents in the business world seems to have had enough to gain to undertake his murder. And within his companies, his flamboyance was a positive boon, building confidence and holding the public's attention. His partners would have been sorry to lose him. His wife, too, seems to have had no reason to want him dead. There was no love in their marriage,

Starting point is 00:11:23 but they weren't on bad terms. She didn't attend his funeral, but she wasn't short of money and doesn't appear to have had a lover. Conceivably, the whole thing could have been engineered by some anonymous villain. The Times of London reported that certain people had profited by Lowenstein's death through judicious stock trades and through insurance policies that had been bought against his death, but the story doesn't name the beneficiaries and it seems impossible to identify them now. Regardless of who might have wanted him dead, it appears that actually killing Alfred Lowenstein would have been hard to accomplish given the circumstances. The Fokker F7A has only one exit, and that opens out of a rear compartment that measures only five feet by four, with little headroom. If Lowenstein was put out the door, four men would have had to

Starting point is 00:12:04 fit into this space, Lowenstein himself, another the door, four men would have had to fit into this space. Lowenstein himself, another man to hold him, and two more to hold open the door. If nothing else, traces of some struggle should have been evident, and inspectors found none. Even if all this had succeeded, the organizer of the killing would have had to ensure the permanent cooperation and silence of all six people who remained on the plane, and it's not clear what they had to gain. And I'll throw in my standard objection, the spectacle in all this. If I wanted to engineer someone's death, I'd do it in some low-key, unremarkable way, not in a bizarre incident that would draw headlines and scrutiny around the world.

Starting point is 00:12:35 Which is a really good point. You don't want to do something so spectacular that everyone's going to be paying attention to it. That people are still talking about a hundred years later. In a 1987 book on Lowenstein's death, author William Norris suggested that someone might have removed the exterior door while the plane was in flight by reaching out through a window and unfastening the hinges. In that scenario, once Lowenstein was in the rear compartment,

Starting point is 00:12:58 the others removed the exterior door, and then the pilot banked the plane to pitch Lowenstein through the opening. That would explain why the pilot had then chosen to land on the beach rather than proceed to the airfield. The conspirators needed time to replace the missing door, perhaps with a spare that they'd concealed in the luggage compartment. Obviously, this would have required the cooperation of everyone on board. Norris suggests that the mastermind might have bribed them all into silence, perhaps by threatening them with legal consequences. In England in 1928, the penalty for murder was hanging, and that extended to accessories before and after the crime. Norris thinks that the threat of this jeopardy might

Starting point is 00:13:33 have been enough to keep everyone silent, but there's no direct evidence that this is what happened. And that, I'm afraid, is that. Alfred Lowenstein fell from his airplane, and it would seem he must have fallen accidentally, deliberately, or at someone else's hand. But it's hard to think of an actual scenario that makes any sense. Whatever happened on that July evening must have been unusual, but nearly a century has passed now, and a solution seems farther than ever out of reach. The plane itself is gone. After Lowenstein's death, it was sold to another owner, who made a forced landing in

Starting point is 00:14:02 the Sudan in 1929. All that remained of it was sold back to Fokker for use as spare parts. The main story in episode 316 was about American businessman Jim Thompson mysteriously disappearing in Malaysia in 1967. No trace of him was ever found, despite quite extensive searches for him. One of the very many theories advanced over the years was that Thompson had been swallowed by a python, and Greg mentioned that unfortunately for that theory, pythons don't swallow grown men. Alan Ricks had some very interesting follow-up to that, saying, reticulated pythons have been known to eat people. I

Starting point is 00:14:50 unfortunately clicked on a video a few years ago that showed a captured python cut open to reveal a consumed man. More recently, a woman checking her crops. Reticulated pythons are the largest pythons, but Burmese pythons are the heaviest, and they have been measured up to 18 feet, easily able to swallow a human, at least theoretically. I live in Florida, where both types have been introduced, and they have become quite a problem for our native creatures, and even livestock and pets, especially in South Florida. There are python bounties here, and people make their living capturing and killing them. Famously, 15 years or so ago in the Everglades, a 13-foot Burmese python fought and tried to consume a 6-foot man-sized alligator. It won, but the alligator burst out of its stomach, causing the death of both creatures.

Starting point is 00:15:36 The wiki page for reticulated pythons has a section called Danger to Humans with a list of documented attacks and a few swallowings. Reticulated python's range extends through South Asia and into Malaysia. If you're ever being constricted by a pet constrictor snake or you want to help someone that is, spraying the snake with cold water will get them to release and won't hurt the snake. I have had a ball python for 20 years and she just didn't like this one guy once and bit him and constricted around his arm. Ball pythons are only four feet long or so. And I used the sink hose and she released without having to pry or hurt her. And Greg asked Alan, what do you think about that theory to explain Thompson's disappearance?

Starting point is 00:16:16 The search started 15 hours after he'd last been seen. Could an engorged python travel far in that time without leaving signs of its passage. To which Alan replied, no, I don't think it would have traveled very far at all. A large python would take over a week to digest an antelope, and during that time it would be very sluggish and vulnerable. If it swallowed prey too large, it would be unable to move at all and would regurgitate it. In all the modern examples of people being swallowed, the snake was usually quickly found as it was unable to stay undetected. I find it hard to believe that there was an extra large python that overpowered and consumed him and was also able to evade detection for the entire digestion period and then only

Starting point is 00:16:55 did it the one time. But the possibility isn't zero. In 2017, a 25-year-old man who worked harvesting palm oil on a plantation on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia went missing. Searchers found an engorged 23-foot python, and when the snake was killed and cut open, inside it was the whole, fully clothed and booted body of the missing man. The snake was reported to be a reticulated python, and these and Burmese pythons kill their prey by constricting it before swallowing it, so the victim likely wouldn't have been alive when he was consumed. And then in 2018, a very similar story was reported about a 54-year-old woman on nearby Muna Island. A search

Starting point is 00:17:36 for the missing woman had found her sandals and machete and a bloated 23-foot-long python lying about 100 feet away. This snake was also killed and cut open, again revealing the fully intact body of its victim. Articles that I read on these events, such as from the BBC and National Geographic, noted that while pythons have been known to sometimes swallow rather large animals, such as crocodiles, hyenas, and cows, cases of pythons consuming humans are extremely rare. Apparently, we're a bit difficult to swallow because our shoulder blades aren't collapsible. As Alan mentioned, the Wikipedia page for reticulated pythons does have a list of reported attacks on humans, although it calls the

Starting point is 00:18:16 2017 Indonesian incident the first fully confirmed case of a person being eaten by a python. It also lists the 2018 incident as well as one from June of this year, again on Sulawesi, when a 16-year-old boy was reported to have been killed by another 23-foot-long python. In this case, the snake was killed with a machete while it was coiled around the boy, but the boy unfortunately had already died. It's thought that deforestation caused by the palm oil industry may be affecting the python's usual prey, resulting in attacks on humans. I did find it a bit odd that all three of these Indonesian pythons were reported to be 7 meters or 23 feet long. According to

Starting point is 00:18:57 Wikipedia, that would be larger than typical for a reticulated python, as it says that reticulated pythons with lengths more than 6 meters, 19.7 feet, are rare. Although the page does note that one of the largest scientifically measured specimens from East Kalimantan, Indonesia, was measured while anesthetized and was found to be 6.95 meters or 22.8 feet. It can be a challenge for pythons to manage rather large prey. Wikipedia states that as a rule, the reticulated python seems able to swallow prey up to one quarter its own length. So it would take an unusually large python to be able to consume many full-grown men. As Alan mentioned, in 2005, a 13-foot Burmese python in Florida attempted to swallow a six-foot alligator, but the snake

Starting point is 00:19:45 apparently burst open from its overly large meal, so they do need to be careful to not get overly ambitious. And thanks to Alan for all of that somewhat gruesome but definitely interesting information and the very helpful links he included. For those who don't mind gruesome, there will be links to YouTube videos of the Indonesian man being found inside a python in the show notes. And I guess we can now say that it's pretty unlikely that Thompson was eaten by a python, especially as in the couple of cases that are documented, the engorged snakes were found rather nearby. But I suppose that we can't absolutely positively rule it out. Yeah, that would explain, if that's what happened, that would explain why he was able to disappear so entirely. Without a trace at all.

Starting point is 00:20:26 Yeah. It doesn't explain how they didn't find an enormous engorged snake, but hey, maybe they missed that somehow. Yeah. The puzzle in episode 316, spoiler alert, was about why three people were looking at a teddy bear, with the answer being that they are astronauts, and there is a tradition of using toys, such as stuffed animals, to indicate zero-g while the astronauts are still strapped into their seats. Victoria Sluka wrote, Hi Greg and Sharon. In your most recent episode, the lateral thinking puzzle was about the use of stuffed animals as zero-g indicators on space flights. Although this used to be a little-known secret, the wonders of modern technology are making it easier for us all to experience this quirk of space travel. On May 30th of this year,

Starting point is 00:21:10 10 million people worldwide spent their time in lockdown watching live the first-man launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule. The stream included great views of the two astronauts, Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken, as well as occasionally a shot of their Zero-G colleague, a stuffed dinosaur. The dinosaur, a sparkly apatosaurus named Tremor, can be seen strapped into a seat during the pre-flight checks and the launch, and then casually floats into frame when Behnken releases its seatbelt in low-Earth orbit. Tremor joins other recent space flight stuffed toys, including a plush Earth used as a zero-g indicator on a 2019 unmanned SpaceX launch, and another dinosaur sewn by astronaut Karen Nyberg for her

Starting point is 00:21:52 kids while on the ISS in 2013. So that was really cute. Both Behnken and Hurley each have a son, both of whom are dinosaur fans. The two boys offered up all their dinosaur toys, and sparkly Tremor was the one picked to go into space. And we'll have a photo in the show notes of a floating Tremor that Victoria sent. And apparently the SpaceX's Crew-1 flight in November used a baby Yoda as the zero-g indicator. I wonder who, did the astronauts themselves get to make that decision? I wonder how they choose. Well, the astronauts chose the Tremor, the

Starting point is 00:22:26 sparkly dinosaur. I can't remember who got to choose the baby Yoda. I imagine there might be impeditives. It's part of all the crew. I think they all get a vote in it. I wonder, too, what happens to them after the mission's over. Well, I'm imagining that Tremor went back to whichever boy owned him, right? He was somebody's toy. Aspal wrote, Dear Sharon and Greg, Here is one more story about dolls in orbit in response to the riddle from episode 316. The East German cosmonaut, Zygmunt Jan,

Starting point is 00:22:54 brought along on his flight a Sandman doll from the German children's TV show. I'm not sure if they used that as the zero-g indicator during launch or if it was just stowed during ascent. The Sandman had gotten his own doll-sized spacesuit with a gap in the visor for his rather impressive goatee. The Soviets had another doll, a female called Masha, and the Sandman and Masha were married on the spot. Only the authors of the TV show didn't like that, and so the marriage is non-canon. The Sandman is still single, visiting another family each evening at 17.50

Starting point is 00:23:25 for 10 minutes of TV for young children and sending them off to sleep at 6. Apparently, the spontaneous orbital wedding was shown live on TV for the grown-ups, but instead of using it for the Sandman TV show, the Sandman was sent to TV studio Uzbekistan to meet Masha there, have a cup of tea, and leave again, very much still unmarried. According to Wikipedia, The Sandman, or Sandmenschen, is a German children's bedtime television show that uses stop-motion animation and is based on a Hans Christian Andersen character. It's also reported to be the longest-running television series in history, running since November 1959. There actually had been an East German and West German version of the show until the reunification of Germany in 1990, after which the West German version was

Starting point is 00:24:11 discontinued in favor of the East German one. And Zygmunt Jan, who was the first German to travel into space, took a toy Sandman with him when he flew on board Soyuz 31 in August 1978 to the Soviet space station Salyut 6. In an interview with Spiegel International in 2011, when the interviewer assumed that he'd brought the toy with him as a good luck charm, Jan answered, it was actually a very official assignment. I was supposed to shoot footage for a children's program while in orbit. To that end, the Zandmenschen even wore his own spacesuit, specially made, but things didn't go according to plan. When asked what went wrong, he explained, as Aspal had said, that one of the

Starting point is 00:24:50 Soviet cosmonauts had also brought a toy figure with him, and he said, we had fun pretending to marry the two dolls, but our silliness backfired. East German television couldn't really present children with a married Zandmenschen, so the footage was never broadcast. So no official bride for the Sandman, but he did get to travel into space, and Aspal sent some very helpful links, including one to a German language article that has a great photo of Jan and the Soviet cosmonauts on the Salyut 6 with both the Sandman in his little spacesuit and his wife only while in space, Masha. And we will, of course, have that link in the show notes. I think it's great that there's a canon now.

Starting point is 00:25:27 Someone has to keep track of all this. What's canon and what's non-canon? Somebody will write a book someday. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We always enjoy learning so many new things from our listeners. So if you have anything that you'd like to add, please send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com. that you'd like to add, please send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:25:53 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 try to work out what is going on, asking yes or no questions. This is from a short story by Ambrose Bierce. During the American Civil War, a group of Union troops arrives at a hill with a stone wall at its top. After some conferring, they send forward a single horseman who rides up to the wall and then back and forth along it. What is he doing? Okay, I'm trying to picture this. Does it matter how long the wall is? No.

Starting point is 00:26:23 Does it matter anything about the wall's location other than that it's on the top of a hill? No. Trying to understand why there's a wall on the top of a hill. Does that matter why there's a wall on the top of a hill? Okay. So the group of Union soldiers comes to a wall at the top of a hill. Come to the foot of a hill. Come to the foot of a hill.

Starting point is 00:26:42 And they can see at the top that there's a wall. Yes. Is the wall opaque, meaning that nobody would be able to see through it? Yes. Okay. And they send a single horseman up to ride back and forth along the wall on the side that they're on? Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:26:58 And why would the horseman do that? Does it matter what time of day it is? No. And you said none of the location matters. Does it matter where the Confederate army is? Yes. Are there any Confederate troops on their side of the wall? Oh, are they trying to sound like there's a lot of union people on the other side of the wall? Like they have the guy gallop up and down trying to sound like multiple people or something? I hadn't thought of that. No, that's not it. Darn. That's a good guess. Okay.

Starting point is 00:27:26 So are there any Confederate soldiers on their side of the wall? By their side, you mean? The Union, where the Union group is. No. No. There are Confederate soldiers on the other side of the wall. Yes. And they know that for sure?

Starting point is 00:27:38 No. They're trying to discover if there are Confederate soldiers on the other side of the wall. Yes. Is somehow what the horseman is doing is somehow going to lead to their discovering if there are Confederate soldiers on the other side of the wall? Yes. Okay. So how by having, does it matter what speed the horse rider is going at?

Starting point is 00:28:00 Not particularly. Is the horse or the soldier doing anything else that I need to be aware of? I think I can say no. Okay, so he's not occasionally firing a gun or holding something up that would be seen above the wall or anything, making noise in any kind of way? No. Specifically? He himself can see over the wall. He can see over the wall, but he can't tell if there are Confederate troops there. No, he can. He can, but his friends at the foot of the hill can't see beyond. Say it's a low stone wall.

Starting point is 00:28:33 So is he riding back and forth a specific number of times in some kind of code to tell them how many Confederate troops are on the other side of the wall? No. Is he somehow conveying information to are on the other side of the wall. No. Is he somehow conveying information to the people at the bottom of the hill? No. He's only trying to gather information. That's not what he's trying to do. That's not what he's trying to do. He has the information he needs that he wanted to find out, which is how large the Confederate Army is on the other side.

Starting point is 00:29:05 On the other side of the wall. Yet he's continuing to ride the horse up and along the wall? He doesn't have the technology in the Civil War to communicate. Like if this happened today, you could just— Right. Well, that's why I was thinking there's some kind of code, but— No. No.

Starting point is 00:29:18 He has no way to communicate what he knows back down to the foot of the hill. He can't just ride the horse back down the hill. He can, and at the end of the story, that's what he winds up doing. But at the moment... In the meantime... But you said he's not riding the horse in a way that's intended to communicate

Starting point is 00:29:32 with the people at the bottom of the hill. That's right. But if he succeeds in what he's trying to do, the knowledge will get to his friends at the... Is he trying to make the Confederates reveal themselves in some way? Yes. Can the Confederates see him?

Starting point is 00:29:48 Yes. Does he want them to shoot at him? Amazingly, yes, that's it. The story is called A Son of the Gods. The horseman's job was to find out whether a Confederate army was hiding behind the wall. By the time he could see them, he had no way to communicate with his own army, so he paraded before the wall to induce them to fire at him and reveal their numbers. The Confederates realized this and held their fire until he compelled them to shoot by racing back toward his own lines.

Starting point is 00:30:13 The story is fiction, but this appears to be something that Bierce actually witnessed during his own time in the Union Army. And as you can hear, I've become kind of obsessed with this whole story. If this actually happened, I always can imagine a more courageous thing than to ride Wow. Ride out alone to an army and try to get them to shoot you. Oh my gosh. So if anyone knows anything more about this, I'd be glad to hear from you. Yeah. Wow. I mean, that's just fascinating. We are always on the lookout for more lateral thinking puzzles. So if you have one that you'd like to send in for us to try, please send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:30:44 and for us to try, please send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet would not still be here without the support of our incredible listeners. If you'd like to help us keep bringing you your weekly dose of the quirky and the curious, please check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the support a section of the website at futilitycloset.com. If you become a member of our patron community, you'll also get more discussions on some of the stories, extralateral thinking puzzles, outtakes, and peeks into some of what goes on behind the scenes of the show. At our website, you can graze through over 11,000 compendious amusements, browse the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books,

Starting point is 00:31:25 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. Our music was written and performed by the exceptional Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 324-The Bizarre Death of Alfred Loewenstein

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