Radiolab - Fu-Go

Episode Date: April 25, 2019

This week we’re going back to a favorite episode from 2015. During World War II, something happened that nobody ever talks about. This is a tale of mysterious balloons, cowboy sheriffs, and young children caught up in the winds of war. And silence, the terror of silence. Reporters Peter Lang-Stanton and Nick Farago tell us the story of a seemingly ridiculous, almost whimsical series of attacks on the US between November of 1944 and May of 1945. With the help of writer Ross Coen, geologist Elisa Bergslien, and professor Mike Sweeney, we uncover a national secret that led to tragedy in a sleepy logging town in south central Oregon.  Check out pictures of the ghostly balloons here.  Special thanks to Annie Patzke, Leda and Wayne Hunter, and Ilana Sol. Special thanks also for the use of their music to Jeff Taylor, David Wingo for the use of "Opening" and "Doghouse" - from the Take Shelter soundtrack, Justin Walter's "Mind Shapes" from his album Lullabies and Nightmares, and Michael Manning for the use of "Save".   Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From. W. N. Y. C.

See? Yeah. Hello. Today we wanted to bring back a story that's one, I mean, one of my personal favorite stories that we've done. This particular story, we aired in 2015, so a lot of you may not have heard it. And it goes like this. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Robert Krollwich.

This is Radio Lab, and today, my name is Peter Lang Stanton. My name's Nick Farago. Well, we're going to get a story from two reporters. I'm a freelance filmmaker. Freelance reporter? Writer slash radio producer. Too many slashes. It's a story that goes back about 70 years.

It all feels like unreal in some way. But there's something about the story that just you hear it and you can't help think about now. Yeah. Should we start with air currents or like with... I mean, I want to start with, can we go to Thermopolis, Wyoming? Because that was one of the first really well-documented landings. Thermopolis, Wyoming. Well, it's the first week of December in 1944.

This is Ross Cohen. He's a historian, and he wrote a book that's pretty much the definitive account of the story you're about to hear. Anyhow, Thermopolis, Wyoming, December 1944. And there are three miners at a place called the Highline Coal Mine, which is outside of Thermopolis. They step outside the mine, one eve. It's just about dusk. And just as they step out of the mind, they hear this whistling sound over their heads. And then a moment later, there's a tremendous explosion, and they see this rising cloud of dust about a mile away across the valley.

They turn and look, it's dusk, and so in the fading twilight, they can't be sure exactly what they're looking at. But above them, there's sort of this fluttering white circle. just floating there. They made sense of it by thinking it was a parachutist. They watched this parachute as it's drifting away from them. They get in their car and they chase after it until eventually they lose sight of it in the darkness. Right around that same time,

about 500 miles away in Colorado, a boy and his dad are working in the barn when they hear an explosion. They run outside and in their yard. There's just this smoldering crater. In Wyoming, a nine-year-old boy playing in his front yard, here's an explosion. All throughout the winter of 1944, in Burwell, Nebraska, these strange parachute things. Native residents hear a loud explosion.

Just start appearing in the skies all over America. Napa, California, lame deer, Montana, 20 or so miles from downtown Detroit. Over farms, Nogales, Arizona. Slipping behind hills, Rigby, Idaho. Everybody who sees these things. All of them have different explanations for what they're. They think they're witnessing. They think it's a plane crash or an oil tank exploding.

The U.S. military sends out an APB to local police stations saying, we need information. What are these things? Try again. Testing, testing. There we go. Okay. Cool.

Enter Sheriff Warren Hyde. My name is Marion Hyde. Warren Hyde actually died in 1989, so... I'm the oldest son of Sheriff Hyde. We talked to his son. He had a presence about him that he kind of commanded a room. Sheriff Hyde was a big guy. Black wavy hair, brought up the shoulder, narrow at the hip.

Stetson, gun on his hip. And one day, he's at his office north of Salt Lake City when his phone rings. From what I understand, a dry farmer called him. Said there's this strange contraption in my field. Some kind of balloon parachute-looking thing floating around. So he jumped in the car and went hell-bent for leather out into the Blue Creek area. There's this crazy story where he'd rush. rushes out to this farm to investigate.

Hopes out of his car, rips off his belt with his 38 pistol, because a man can't run with a 38 pistol on his waist. And took off after the balloon. Here's what he sees in that field. It was, I mean, if you look at a picture of this thing, it's this huge globe, 30 feet in diameter. Oh, wow. Paper white, and then coming down from this globe

are these thick 40-foot ropes. And at the bottom, attached to it is a heavy metal. is a heavy metal chandelier with bombs hanging off the bottom. And Sheriff Hyde, he sees this thing, runs out into the field, grabs onto the ropes to maybe tie it down, but just as he grabs it... Augusta wind comes by. Lifts him up off the ground.

Like he was papered all. And so he's dangling from the ropes of this thing. The balloon is above him. The explosives are below him. And it takes him across this canyon. and he's holding on just dangling from it, still trying to wrangle it like some bucking bronco. He lands again, he tries to tie it to a juniper bush or something,

but the wind catches it again and goes back over the canyon. Back to the first side? Back to the first side. And they started to float around the field. He kept wrestling this balloon for a long time. He's nauseous from being spun around on this balloon. His vision's getting blurry. His hands are becoming raw from the rope,

but he feels this sense of duty. that the government wanted one of these balloons. It's his territory, so he's got to take it down. That's right. He finally lets himself free fall so he can grab it again, so his weight will jerk the balloon to the ground. Wow. Then finally the balloon came down in kind of a little ravine where a sagebrush were growing,

and a root had been exposed on the side of the ravine from a sagebrush. And he hooks his arm around this route. Then he was able to hold the balloon without being carried into the air. So he actually captured the thing? Yeah. Jay Edgar Hoover wrote him a personal letter of things. They end up shipping all of the evidence off to the Aberdeen military research facility. Where they had gathered all this different evidence from all over the country.

And after looking at this stuff for a while, they were able to tell that... Apparently this bomb was not of any particular American make and matched known characteristics of Japanese bombs. So it's Japanese. Yeah. But it's impossible to send a balloon across the Pacific Ocean at this point. I mean, it's never, never been done. I mean, it's basically an intercontinental ballistic missile. So they're trying to figure out where it's coming from.

They thought maybe they were being launched from submarines. Maybe they were coming from beaches in North America, from saboteurs. There was even speculation at one point that maybe they were coming from Japanese internment camps in North America. Ah. Ah. Then... Two days before Christmas, 1994... In Alaska, a native Alaskan trapper tracks one down.

And it has two sandbags still attached to the bottom-most ring. And that turns out to be the key to the mystery. Sand? Yeah. Well, it's not just sand. There's a lot in there. My name is Elisa Bergson, and I am a forensic geologist. We called up Elisa to help us understand this next part.

What happened was the sand from the balloons was sent to Washington, D.C., to some scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey. Right away. They discover that there's no coral. So, you know, finding no coral, you know, you're talking cold water now. They look at the diatoms. Marine bivalves. Microscopic fossils. Mullusks.

Minerals. By compiling all of these different characteristics. Put that all together. Where would you find these diatoms? These minerals that you wouldn't find coral. though all those different pieces of information. All together. The geologists are able to determine that there are two or perhaps three beaches in the world.

That fit all of these qualifications. Where they believe this sand could have come from. And all of which are on the east coast of Honshu, the largest of Japan's four main islands. You can get that kind of specific from sand? Yep. That kind of specific. Pretty incredible. All right. So they came all the way from these particular beaches on the coast of Japan. Yeah.

It's like thousands of months. miles across the Pacific Ocean. And why would the Japanese choose to deliver bomb payloads by balloon? It's a strange choice. Particularly after Pearl Harbor, you know, it's like we know already know they can do planes. Yeah, they got planes. Yeah, why balloons? Well.

Now it can be told. History in the making. It grew directly out of the Doolittle raid. Back in April of 1942. United States Navy aircraft carrier Hornet steams westward across the Pacific. Jimmy Doolittle and his raiders took off from an aircraft carrier, deep in the Western Pacific. And dropped bombs on Tokyo and Yokohama and Kobe and a number of other cities across Japan.

Greatest surprise raid in the history of aerial warfare. Now, they didn't do a lot of damage physically. But it was such a shock to the Japanese to think that their homeland could be invaded, that these planes could actually fly over the imperial palace, the home of the emperor. Do Little went over the palace? I didn't realize that. Yeah. He went all the way down.

town in Tokyo. Oh yeah, right over the city. And so immediately after the Doolittle Raid, an order went out, it was just find a way to bomb America. Now, Japan's Navy is stretched so thin at this point in the war. There's no way they can pull off something like the Doolittle Raid. They didn't have aircraft carriers that could get their planes close enough to the U.S. mainland, but what they did have was the wind. Today we call this the jet stream. That name didn't come along until after the war. At that point, we barely knew about the jet stream. But prior to enduring the war, the Japanese did extensive research into these winds. Okay, so in 1924, there's this meteorologist named Wasaburo Oishi,

and he goes to the top of a mountain, and he releases a bunch of these little paper weather balloons. And he discovers that at about 30,000 feet up, there's this river of fast-moving air, speeds up to 175 miles an hour, carrying anything in its mist, pollen, insects, all the way to North America within days. And after the Doolittle raid, they thought maybe if we were to release a bunch of balloons

in just the right place at just the right time, maybe this jet stream of air could push these balloons across the Pacific Ocean. So this is Tetsko Tanaka. She was interviewed in this independent documentary called On Paper Wings. In 1944, she says she was a teenager when the Japanese military came to her school and basically turned it into a factory. She and hundreds of other schoolchildren were conscripted to begin making this special kind of paper out of mulberry wood called...

Washi, handmade, Japanese traditional paper. This is Mahoshina, who now works at the No Burrito Institute in Japan. Huge amount of paper was required. Maho says that girls would work 12-hour days, making thousands, tens of thousands, of these sheets and gluing them together. Why didn't they have adults in the factories? They were all fighting the war, or what?

Young girls' hands are they good for the balloon bomb? The girls had a certain dexterity for the neighbor making? The nimble fingers. I think I read that somewhere. And after they finished producing the balloons, And after the balloons were strapped with bombs, they were shipped off to those beaches and just let go. People from the Japanese side watching them take off said they looked like huge jellyfish swimming through a pale blue sky. These perfectly silent vehicles, the only sound was the rustling of the paper as they took off.

How many were launched? From November 1944 to April 1945, they launched 9,000 balloons. Wow. Now, the engineers in Japan who designed this faced a very serious problem. Once they got the balloons up into the jet stream and they were cruising along,

they're floating at speeds from 50 to 100 miles an hour. But every night, temperatures are going to fall to minus 40 centigrade. And the fixed volume of hydrogen inside that envelope is going to contract, the balloon is going to lose altitude, drop out of the jet, jet stream and down into the ocean altogether.

So to solve this, says Ross, what they did was this. They took 32 sandbags, hung them on the balloon, and then connected those sandbags to an altimeter. Set to a preset minimum, such as 30,000 feet. In the nighttime, when the balloon loses altitude, the altimeter will engage, trigger a fuse, which cuts off one of those sandbags, and drops it into the ocean. And now the vehicle will re-ascend. back into the jet stream. Because it's lighter.

Because it's lighter. So these balloons, they're riding the jet stream, and then every night they start to descend. But then, off would go a sandbag, and they'd go back up. And whenever they cooled off enough to drop, same thing. Drop, then rise, drop, then rise over and over, 32 times until every sandbag was gone. Once all the sandbags have been dropped,

now you have only the bombs remaining. and the bombs are held in place with the exact same mechanism as the sandbags, and now by the very same system, the bombs are the last to go. And presumably the balloon is now somewhere over North America. Oh, I see. So it's a sandbag countdown. 30, 29, 28, 4, 3, 2, 1, I hope I'm in Oregon. Right.

And when it was in Oregon or wherever, the idea was that it would drop its last bomb, float away, in basically self-destruct. They, I guess, figured it would be more terrifying to have bombs raining down silently from above with no calling card at all than with a Japanese calling card. And as the last sandbag is dropped, now only the central payload is left.

This is audio from a declassified Navy instructional video made about these balloon bombs in 1945. In the event one of these units is found, do these two things to render it harmless. It explains the soldiers how to, what to do if they find one of these bombs and how to diffuse the bomb. But I think the most interesting thing about the video is this text that's written in huge block letters right at the bottom of the screen.

It says, do not aid the enemy by publishing or broadcasting or discussing information. Information can be a powerful tool. It can be a powerful tool for good and a powerful tool for evil. This is Professor Mike Sweeney. And I'm a historian of wartime censorship. And he says that immediately after those first balloons landed, There are a few stories that appear in the local newspapers in the far west. Stories about a Japanese attack on the mainland of the United States.

Time and Newsweek even picked it up. Saying, we're not sure what these are, but are these Japanese spies coming in on these balloons? Is this a large-scale attack? What is going on? And then... Very shortly thereafter. Just three days after those Time and Newsweek articles. The Office of Censorship initiated a press...

blackout. This blackout on news. They sent out memos and telegraphs to all the major wire services. The UP, the AP, and the INS saying, keep any news of these Japanese balloons off the wires and out of print. Any stories about these bombs will have to be approved by the appropriate authority of the U.S. Army if you wish to publish or broadcast news about them. And why would they want to keep this secret? So the government's ideas about why a balloon bomb should be censored, in particular the Army's ideas, Number one, to avoid panic. These things are instruments of terror, right? You can't be afraid of something you don't know exists.

Number two is avoid helping Japan. It was thought then that if we printed exact coordinates of particular bomb landings, that this would help Japan better target the bombs. And what do the reporters think about this? They grubbled sometimes, but they complied. Really? Yep. Everyone in the news industry was as patriotic as the rest of the country.

is the vast majority of journalists supported the war. And of course, if you screwed up and you sent out a story that got American lives killed, you could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Furthermore, can you imagine what your listeners would do if you were the radio station identified as killing 100 American sailors? So the newspapers and radio stations kept their mouths shut, which meant that most Americans never even heard this was happening. And more importantly, the Japanese weren't really hearing about whether their bombs made it or not.

So they probably concluded that it was basically a failed experiment, which largely it was. Of the 9,000 released, virtually none caused any damage and certainly not any terror. Except for this one balloon. That's coming up. Hi, this is Will calling from Northumberland, England. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding. of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.

Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Boomerad. I'm Robert Crowich. This is Radio Lab. We continue now with our story from reporters Peter Langstanton and Nick Farago about the 9,000 or so balloon bombs of Japan sent to America in 1944 and 45 that rained down on American soil and created nothing, really. Nothing happened. No damage, no terror, nothing.

But then we get to this tiny little town called Bly. To me, there's no place like old Bly. Bly is this sleepy little logging town at the base of Gierhard Mountain in South Central Oregon. A lot of pretty scenery. And Cora Connor, who you just heard, was born and raised there. You know everybody, and they're just like a big family out there. In the 40s, when Cora was a young girl, there were about 700 people living there. Yeah, but we did all kinds of fun things.

had a fish fry up at Dog Lake, huge catfish fry up there. The whole town stayed all night, went back home the next day. In the winter, the canals would freeze over, and we'd have bonfire and ice skating parties. It was a fun place to live. Can you tell me about the morning? Was it a Sunday? Let's see, what happened. I was trying to think. Saturday, I think. May 5th, That's all I can remember. Yep, that was May 5th. May 5th, 1945. But it was a beautiful day.

The sun was shining bright. And the Reverend Archie Mitchell and his wife, Elsie, who was five months pregnant with her first child. Knew them very well. Sunday school. I went to church occasionally up there. They took their Sunday school class out for a picnic. There were five children that went along on that trip, ages 11 to 14.

And one of the kids... We called him Dickie. He had a crush on my son. sister who was a little younger than me. And they wanted her to come on this picnic. So they came by and stopped the pastor and his wife stopped, and the kids all piled out. They stopped before they went up. Yeah, trying to talk and convince my mom to let my sister go, or both of us or whatever.

But mom didn't want us to go because Saturday was our chore day. And my day to work the switchboard, which usually made me pretty angry, but that was my job. And she said, no, no way. Well, my sister didn't really want to go because she really wasn't encouraging this relationship too much. Yeah, Dickie, yeah.

No. So Archie and Elsie and the five kids get back into the car. They drove up to Gearhart Mountain. A couple miles up a logging road, they passed some Forest Service guys working on the road. They go a little further

to where the road comes near a creek. And Archie pulled the car around and parked. The kids jumped out of the car and started running down toward the creek. Greek. Elsie, who was pregnant, as I mentioned, and she was feeling a bit car sick. She jumped out to get some fresh air and to chase after the kids, while Archie went around to the trunk of the car to get out the fishing poles and the picnic baskets, etc. One of the children saw something on the ground, a large canvas, white, gray balloon of some kind spread out on the ground, called the the other children to come have a look. The children and Elsie apparently gathered in a tight circle around the balloon. Archie later reported that while he was getting the picnic basket

out of the trunk, his wife called to him, honey, come look at what we found. He turned and just took a few steps toward them. And at that moment, we'll never know exactly what happened. But apparently one of the children reach down to pick up the device, the bomb detonated. All five children and Elsie Mitchell were killed instantly. The Forest Service guys down the road were close enough to hear the blast. They come running when they hear the explosion and they see Archie Mitchell has run to the site and his wife's clothes were ablaze and Archie was kneeling over his prostrate wife beating up the fire with his bare hands. There's no wind.

On our last day in Bly, we went to visit the site where the bomb went off. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's just a chain, this little fenced off area. It's a little pen. And there are these tall pine trees. It's just huge cuts in the tree. Was there shrapnel cuts in the tree? Yeah.

Yeah, they still... This hasn't... It has not healed. Erie place. Of course, I didn't know what was going on. This is Cora Connor again. At the time she was at her job watching the switchboard, when... The guy that was working up there for the Forest Service

come rushing into the telephone office, and I mean, he was scared, pure white and scared. And I thought, my God, what's going on? What's happening? And he came in and made the call to Lakeview. The naval base in Lakeview. And about a half an hour later, this big imposing military... guy comes in. He was all metals and all in full

uniform, you know. And he must have made it. It seemed like in a blink of an eye. And I thought, my God, what has happened? And then when he talked over the phone, I knew what was going on. He said they'd had a bomb explode up there with casualties. And then

he talked to me. He said, you not talk to anybody about anything that you've heard here. Not your mother, not anybody. He says, now you're not to leave of this office. By then I was just jelly. I was so terrified.

He leaves and the word is trickling around, spreading around town. They knew something had gone wrong. And they gathered at the phone office because the phone office knows everything in the whole valley. And they knew I knew what was going on.

And that's when it all hit. Pretty soon there was a crowd outside. Screaming and yelling at me. And, yeah, we know you know what's going on. You better come out and tell us. We're coming in there, and you're going to tell us what's happened. And...

People are your neighbors and things like that? People, yeah. They know, yeah, because Bly's a very tiny place. I probably knew every one of them. I was about, you can imagine, the state I was in. And Mr. Patsky. Dickie's father, Dickie was the boy who had a crush on Kor's sister. I can tell you exactly how he has dressed that day.

He had on a red and black checkered hunting shirt and his red hunting cat. At the time, all he knew was that his son was missing. He stood out there and he shook his fist and he yelled and he scared me to death, threatening to come in and all that. He says, you know what's happening. Let us know what's happening. And I couldn't do anything. I sat there all day 16

you know it really really tore me apart I was just in a complete fog for days now I never talked too much about it no

within a day or so the military told most of the town what actually happened that day and then a short time after that a big army truck. Well, there was two big army trucks. They stopped right out in front of our house. We wondered what was going on.

You know, your little town like that, anything different, everybody goes to the window and makes a look. And here come. Okay, this is awfully hard for me. A woman and a little kid jumped out of the back of that truck. She was Japanese. They were on their way to the Tule Lake. The Japanese internment camp nearby.

and she's screaming and crying and praying. Please, we need water. We need water. It was hot. It was really hot that day, and they were in a canvas-covered truck jammed in there. And I grabbed a pitcher, a bucket, or whatever was there in the kitchen, filled it with water, and stuttered out the door. By that time, they were throwing rocks at that lady and her kid.

People in that town were so terribly upset, and they were throwing. on rocks at her. And mom wouldn't let me go. And I screamed and cried at my mother because she wouldn't let me go. She says, you can't go out there. They'll throw rocks at you. I won't let you go. And today's day, that picture is in my mind. And I prayed to the Lord to forgive the people that were doing that and try to, I can't accept it. There's no, nothing can make me accept what happened. I thought that was the most horrible thing in the world. People could do. A woman and child. They had nothing to do with the bomb, nothing to do with the war, nothing. It's still hard. How can people be that way? It upset me so horribly bad. I didn't want to talk

about it. I couldn't talk for 40 years. It's weird. Like, it's a kind of weird, scary symmetry to this whole thing? Like, the Japanese military was trying to create terror, right? Right? Mm-hmm. Like what they felt after Doolittle. And so they wanted to make the situation where, like, bombs were falling silently from the sky. We couldn't even tell where they were coming from, almost like the gods were dropping them. But we kept it quiet, so nobody panicked.

Except by not saying anything, at least in this one small instance, it created exactly the situation that the Japanese military wanted. I mean, not on the scale that they wanted, but, like, in its effect, it's like a concentrated version of the thing they were trying to create. but that's the... That's the problem. That's not a problem. Five is a sacrifice in war. What is it? Five, six people.

Yeah. There were 125 million people in America then. I think there actually might have been a little bit more than that. Well, you can see what it would have been like. Listen to this story. You could see what it would have been like if this story had been well known and had been told from person to person. if everybody was looking up and wondering where the next strange thing was coming from. Well, there might have been panic, but those kids wouldn't have tucked on the balloon.

That's the choice. Because they would have known, yeah. Hey, I'm sorry to jump in here. I just know that we don't have Ross much longer, and I want to respect your time. Does I produce for any males who worked with Nick and Peter on this, on the story? Before they kick you out, the only last question I kind of was had on my list is, like, why is it that we don't know about this? Like, I've never heard of this before. I don't know, Robert, if you've heard this before.

Never. Like, why the hell is this not a thing we know? I think it's directly an outgrowth of that censorship policy. At the end of the war, the war department destroyed all of the evidence. They didn't want any evidence of these balloons just out there in general circulation. This is one of those footnotes to the war that, you know, at the end of the war, just never. people forgot about something that they didn't know about anyway. Wow.

Ross, are there any more out there? That is a very interesting question. It's estimated by the War Department that of the 9,000 release, they thought that maybe 7 to 10% of the total would have survived the trans-oceanic crossing and arrived in North America. That's 900. 300 are confirmed as having arrived. in North America. So that means there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, that arrived in North America

but were never accounted for. In the 10 or 12 years immediately after the end of World War II, a couple dozen of these things were found. Several in Oregon in 1948, one in Alaska in 1955, one in Idaho in the early 1960s. And then the recoveries stopped. Were they live, like the one in Oregon? If you touched them, would they blow off? Some of them were. Some of them were. Some of them were. Now here's the fascinating part. Last October, October of 2014, I kid you not. Dave was ahead of me and he'd stopped and said, I think I found a bomb. A couple of loggers in Lombie, British Columbia, who were doing some survey work, found the remnants of a Japanese balloon that had been on the ground for 70 years. We definitely work in remote areas and, you

In general, we don't see much except trees and rock, but there are those odd special days where you see things that no one else gets to see. This happened just a few months ago. I tell you, if you're hiking, if you're out in the woods in the Pacific Northwest, watch where you step. By the way. Fugo F-U-G-O, that's the code name in Japan for these weapons. They were called F-U-G-O. It's also the name of Ross Cohen's book. The Curious History of Japan.

balloon bomb attack on America. Thank you to Peter Lang Stanton and to Nick Fragge for their reporting and extensive reporting. Yeah, big thanks to them. Big thanks to them. Also, thanks to Ilana Sol, whose documentary on paper wings was a big source for us. You heard those Japanese voices in the middle of this story. That came from her documentary. Also, we have original music this hour from a couple of folks, Jeff Taylor, Michael Manning, David Wingo, Justin Walter.

We had production support from Annie Mills and Damiano Marquetti. and if you want to see these balloon bombs, we have some incredible pictures on our website, radiosabb.org. One more thing. Since this episode first aired, we got some sad news. Cora Connor, the woman you heard telling the story of, you know, being 16 and operating a switchboard at the Blythe telephone office,

well, she passed away in December 2016 at the age of 87. She was a member of the Klamath County, Historical Society in Oregon, and she continued telling the story of the Bly Blaine Blume Blame Blame Blam throughout her life. I'm Chad Ibn Ron. I'm Robert Crowicz. Thanks for listening. To play the message, press to start of message. Hi, this is Alyssa Zeller Feinberg, calling from factory, home of the Ruth Vader-Ginsberg action figure in Goanus, Brooklyn. Radio Lab was created by Dad Abramrod and is produced by Soaring Wheeler. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. This is Lectenberg is our executive producer.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Havte, Tracy Hunt, Nora Keller, Matt Kulty, Robert Krollwich, Annie McEwan, Latif Nessar, Melissa O'Donnell, Sarah Kari, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Shima O'I, Audrey Quinn, and Neil Donuts. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. Bye-bye. End of message.