Outfoxed

Science often leads us to do very curious things. Today's stories only help prove that point.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
It was February of nineteen fourteen, and a chill had
fallen over Aurora, Illinois. It was a cold that went
deeper than the snow covered streets and isolated rivers, straight
to the city's heart. A young woman had been murdered,
and the details were straight out of an Edgar Allen
Poe's story. The victim was a twenty year old named
Teresa Hollander, and she had been killed while crossing the

(00:58):
cemetery of Saint Nicholas Church. The murder weapon a gravesteak.
According to newspaper reports, the small metal plaque had been
pulled from the earth and used to bludgeon Teresa to death.
When her father found her frozen body the next morning,
her eyes were wide open, staring up in a final
expression of horror. It was this fact, oddly enough, that

(01:20):
gave investigators hope. Recent scientific discoveries suggested that the human
eye was capable of recording images, much like a camera.
Since Teresa's eyes were open in the moment of death,
it stood to reason that the last thing she ever
saw was likely the face of her attacker. If the
image could be replicated, investigators would have the killer dead

(01:41):
to rights. Now, most people hearing this story today would
be quick to write this off as foolishness. An eye
is not a camera, they would reason, and they don't
record images. But that's not entirely true. Eyes and photography
have a lot more in common than you might think.
Both have a mechanism for controlling how much light is
let in, a lens to focus that light, and a

(02:03):
sensor to capture images. In a traditional camera, the sensor
is celluloid film coded in an emulsion of light sensitive
silver halite crystals. Briefly exposing the emulsion to light results
in a latent image, which is treated with chemicals to
create a photograph. Now, for our eyes, the sensor is
the retina, a structure made up of tiny rods and cones.

(02:25):
Hitting the retina with light produces electrical impulses that travel
through the optic nerve to our brain, and as you
might guess, we don't have any way of hacking our
brains to pull those images out, especially after death. But
here's where things get interesting. In eighteen seventy six, a
German physiologist discovered that the rods in our retinas contain

(02:45):
a purplish red pigment. It's called rhodapsin, and it turns
white when it's exposed to light, and then it darkens
again soon after the light is removed. It's not too
different from the way the images are recorded on traditional
film stock, although it does fade fairly quickly, but that's
not all. Shortly after rhodapson was discovered, another researcher named

(03:06):
Wilhelm Kuhn conducted a series of experiments using the eyes
of frogs and rabbits. He successfully managed to freeze the
rhodapsin at the moment of death, effectively recording the last
thing the animals saw before it died. His most famous experiment,
although also most gruesome, involved an now by no rabbit.
After spending several minutes in total darkness, it was made

(03:28):
to stare out a barred window and then promptly decapitated.
The rabbit's eyes were immediately removed and dissected, and the
retina was washed with a chemical solution and photographed. The
resulting image, which Kuhn called an optogram, is blurry but readable.
It's a clear white space at the center that looks
very much like the barred window the rabbit saw in

(03:49):
its final moments. Naturally, Kuhn's next task was to replicate
the experiment with humans, but this was easier said than done.
In eighteen eighty, he dissected the eye of a convicted
murderer moments after he was beheaded by a guillotine. Even then,
the best he was able to produce was a bunch
of squiggly lines. Some people thought that it looks like
a guillotine blade or the steps of an execution platform,

(04:11):
but I think those are a stretch at best. So
here's the rub. Rhodapsin can hypothetically be used to capture
some aspects of the last images that we see before
we die, but the images are far too blurry and
simplistic to be used for forensic purposes. Even if you
were to somehow remove and process the eyes moments after death,
you still couldn't capture something as detailed as a human face.

(04:36):
That didn't stop detectives from using optograms in murder investigations,
like the case of Teresa Hollander, the girl murdered in
the Aurora Graveyard. During the autopsy, her eyeballs were removed
and photographed. The resulting optogram was used as evidence in
the trial of her former boyfriend, Anthony Petris. The optogram
itself from that trial has been lost, but it must

(04:57):
not have been all that convincing, because Anthony was found
not guilty. Nevertheless, the practice captured the imagination of the public,
and many people came to believe that optograms were a
genuinely effective tool for catching criminals. They appear as plot
devices in the works of several nineteenth century authors, including
Rudyard Kipling and Jules Vern. Meanwhile, real life criminals started

(05:20):
blindfolding their victims or removing their eyes after death to
avoid getting caught, and in at least one case, an
optogram was successfully used to bring a killer to justice,
not because science worked, but because the culprit assumed it did.
When detectives told the murderer that his face had been
recorded by the victim's eyes, he confessed on the spot,

(05:41):
so you might say that truth is in the eyes
of the beholder, and while science is generally our best
tool for catching criminals, sometimes it takes a bit of
fiction to get the job done. When it comes to

(06:07):
strange ways of undermining foreign regimes, nobody beats the CIA.
In the nineteen sixties they tried to get Cubans to
believe that Fidel Castro was the Antichrist, and in two
thousand and five they created an Osama bin laden action
figure with paint that chipped away to reveal the devil's
face underneath. The plan, as I understand it, was to
give them to Afghan children to turn them against him,

(06:29):
but the CIA never went through with it. But World
War II saw the CIA at its most creative or
maybe unhinged, depending on how you look at it. It
was called Operation Fantasia, a whimsical name for an otherwise
hair brain scheme. It came to fruition in nineteen forty
five after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. But the goal
of this mission wasn't to take out the enemy directly. Rather,

(06:52):
the idea was to shatter their morale, using their own
beliefs against them. And it was all thanks to a
businessman named Ed Salinger had operated an import export business
in Tokyo and therefore was familiar with certain intricacies of
Japanese culture. Oh and he also happened to be a
master of psychological warfare working for the OSS in America.

(07:13):
He knew that the Japanese people were superstitious and would
react strongly to seeing an evil spirit in real life.
According to Salinger, the Japanese were deeply afraid of kitsune
or fox spirits. But how is he supposed to create
such an entity. One plan involves spraying a fox like
musk and amplifying artificial animal cries where Japanese could hear them,

(07:35):
But that plan was quickly dismissed in favor of an
even stranger one, a plan that involved actual live foxes.
Salinger decided the best course of action was to release
a bunch of foxes into the woods to frighten the Japanese.
In his outline for the operation, he wrote, the foundation
for the proposal rests upon the fact that the modern
Japanese is subject to superstitions, beliefs in evil spirits, and

(08:00):
unnatural manifestations which can be provoked and stimulated. He tested
his theory by gathering thirty foxes and letting them loose
in a public park. But he didn't just release them haphazardly.
He wanted to make sure that they could be seen
even in the dark, so he grabbed his brush and
a can of paint and gave the red and white
vulpines a coat of green to make them pop. This

(08:23):
paint had a unique quality a glowed in the dark
thanks to a little ingredient called radium. This was the
same kind of paint that had mutilated and killed the
Radium Girls in nineteen twenty eight. They would lick the
brushes to a fine point and then apply the luminescent
coating to clockhands and dials. Salinger, though, gave the foxes
an unhealthy glow before unleashing them into Washington d C's

(08:46):
Rock Creek Park, only a few miles from the White House.
This was a popular spot for hikers and birdwatchers, so
it was almost guaranteed that a few unsuspecting individuals would
witness the glowing fox's firsthand, and they did. The National
Park Police started getting reports of leaping, ghost like animals
that were terrifying locals. It looked like Salinger's plan was

(09:08):
going to be a success. But how was the US
supposed to get the foxes all the way to Japan.
One idea was to drop them off the coast and
let them swim to shore. The oss, however, was skeptical,
so Salinger conducted another test. He and a few colleagues
loaded a few foxes onto a boat and navigated to
the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, but the animals in place,

(09:30):
The scientists tossed them overboard and watched, and sure enough,
the foxes found their way back to dry land. The
tests proved that Salinger was right. All that was left
was to actually carry out the plan. Oh but wait,
there's more. Based on the memos and notes published at
the time, Operation Fantasia was about to get even weirder.
You see, Salinger had apparently wanted to exploit another fox

(09:53):
related superstition by gluing a skull to the head of
a stuffed fox. He wanted to symbolize the death's head
on it's crown. It was, in a sense, weaponized folklore.
The body of the animal would have been covered in
black cloth and adorned with glow in the dark paint
that looked like exposed bones, and the skull would have
been rigged with the way to move the jaw up

(10:13):
and down to strike even more fear into the hearts
of the Japanese. And that's where everything stopped. The head
of the OSS branch, in charge of Operation Fantasia, looked
at Salinger's concept and thought that it was entirely too
dumb to put into action. He shut it down and
put everyone to work on more feasible projects. Looking back,
I think it's clear that Ed Salinger just wasn't the

(10:36):
sly fox that he thought he was. I hope you've
enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe
for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was
created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.

(10:58):
I make another a war winning show called Lore, which
is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you
can learn all about it over at Theworldoflore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious.