[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hello?

ERROL MORRIS: Hello.

JAD: Hi. Is this Errol Morris?

ERROL MORRIS: I think it's me.

JAD: [laughs] Hello, this is Jad from—from Radiolab.

ERROL MORRIS: Hi. Thank you for your very, very nice but somewhat disturbing email.

JAD: [laughs] What disturbed you in the email?

ERROL MORRIS: The term "truth fascist."

ROBERT KRULWICH: You called Errol Morris a truth fascist? What were you thinking?

JAD: I was—I was trying to—I wrote him an email to try and get him to come talk to us. And I don't know why I used that ...

ERROL MORRIS: What is a truth fascist?

JAD: That was meant lovingly, I should say.

ERROL MORRIS: Ah!

JAD: It wasn't exactly the right choice of words. Fundamentalist?

ERROL MORRIS: Oh, I like it!

JAD: But really what I meant is that, like, this is a guy who's always trying to get to the bottom of things. So he made all these documentaries Thin Blue Line. Got a guy off death row, actually, in The Thin Blue Line. He made The Fog of War.

ROBERT: He made Vernon, Florida.

JAD: Yeah. But I contacted him because, you know, I'd recently seen him give this talk about this one investigation of his that for me is like the purest example of the thing that drives him, the thing that's in all of his films, this desire, a relentless desire to figure things out, to get to ...

ERROL MORRIS: Truth! [laughs]

JAD: And it all starts with a photograph.

ERROL MORRIS: One of the very, very first photographs of war, 1855.

JAD: Which war?

ERROL MORRIS: This is the Crimean War. It involved Great Britain, France, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and, believe it or not, Sardinia.

JAD: The fighting took place in what is now basically the Ukraine. The Russians were on one side, everybody else was on the other. Half a million people died. It was incredibly brutal.

ERROL MORRIS: And there's this photograph titled, "The Valley of the Shadow of Death." It's black and white. It shows a dirt road cutting through this landscape.

JAD: Just one dirt road between two hills.

ERROL MORRIS: There's nobody in the photograph.

JAD: No birds, no trees, no people.

ERROL MORRIS: There's really nothing living in the photograph.

JAD: Not even grass.

ERROL MORRIS: Nothing.

JAD: But as you stare at this road a little more closely, you realize why nothing is living in this photograph. Because this road is ...

ERROL MORRIS: Littered with cannonballs. Cannonballs everywhere.

JAD: As soon as you notice it, the photograph springs to life.

ERROL MORRIS: You imagine this fuselage of artillery fire raining down on this landscape. This is one really fascinating thing about photography. It's a time machine. There's a physical connection between that photograph and that world.

JAD: Because you're holding this piece of film that was literally ripped right out of that world.

ERROL MORRIS: But the context is gone.

JAD: And more importantly, in this case, you don't even know if that picture is true.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

ERROL MORRIS: It turns out that this photograph is one of a pair. There is a second photograph exactly the same as the first photograph.

JAD: Exact same camera position.

ERROL MORRIS: But in this other photograph, the cannonballs that were on the road are gone.

JAD: So one has cannonballs on the road and one has cannonballs not on the road, but otherwise, they're completely identical.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes.

JAD: He thought, "That's weird. Let me look into that."

ERROL MORRIS: And there was a passage in ...

JAD: And he ends up reading this essay by Susan Sontag ...

ERROL MORRIS: ... where she talks about these photographs as though it's just obvious what was going on.

JAD: He was like, "Ugh, that word."

ERROL MORRIS: Well, I don't like the word "obvious."

JAD: Susan Sontag was basically arguing that the guy who took the picture, Roger Fenton, came to an empty road, put the cannonballs on the road—he staged it.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes.

JAD: It's obvious.

ERROL MORRIS: But ...

JAD: That word ...

ERROL MORRIS: Nothing's so obvious that it's obvious. And so I started investigating.

JAD: And so began a ludicrous, obsessive, dogged—but kind of sublime—pursuit of the slippery little fact that actually inspired this whole hour.

ROBERT: So today on Radiolab we are going to wrestle with a series of seemingly simple facts that turn out to raise complicated questions.

JAD: Like what is truth? Is is just a pile of facts?
ROBERT: And how much does the fact of the matter matter?

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Back to Errol Morris.

ERROL MORRIS: I tracked down Fenton's letters from the Crimea journals, written records of soldiers who were in that area at that given time.

JAD: Didn't find much.

ERROL MORRIS: I interviewed five historians. Two ordered the photographs in one way.

JAD: Saying yes, it's obvious he posed the pictures.

ERROL MORRIS: Two ...

JAD: And this is a bit of a surprise.

ERROL MORRIS: ... ordered the photographs in the opposite way.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: They told him it is actually very possible that Fenton saw the cannonballs, took the picture, and then soldiers came along, took the cannonballs off the road to recycle them so they could fire them back at the Russians.

ERROL MORRIS: Exactly.

JAD: Was that kind of recycling a common practice?

ERROL MORRIS: Yes, indeed, it was, actually.

JAD: So he had a tie. Two historians saying he faked it, two saying he didn't.

ERROL MORRIS: And the fifth ...

JAD: Tie-breaker.

ERROL MORRIS: ... jumped back and forth. [laughs]

ROBERT: I like that you called it—tried to call him the tie-breaker, but he didn't break the tie.

ERROL MORRIS: Well of course none of these things is subject to a vote. Truth isn't something that you vote on.

JAD: At this point he says he says he was feeling a very familiar ...

ERROL MORRIS: Irritation.

JAD: He thought, you know what, forget historical interpretations.

ERROL MORRIS: What if I could, from the photograph itself, the very photograph itself, determine which photograph came first?

JAD: From just the photos.

ERROL MORRIS: So I started AB-ing the photographs.

JAD: Just sort of superimposing them on each other and flipping back and forth.

ERROL MORRIS: AB, BA, AB, BA. Et cetera, et cetera.

JAD: Nothing. And then he thinks ...

ERROL MORRIS: I know what I can do. I can start studying the shadows.

JAD: Which meant ...

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah, let's go to the Crimea. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] Are you serious?

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah.

JAD: His reasoning was, I can't study the shadows unless I know the exact direction the camera was pointing on that day in 1855, which means I need to find the exact spot where Fenton stood.

ERROL MORRIS: And I had terrible trouble finding this place.

JAD: Is it marked?

ERROL MORRIS: No! All the guides kept taking me to the charge of the light brigade, that site where Tennyson wrote about the Valley of Death. No no no no no, not the Valley of Death! The Valley of the Shadow of Death! But finally ...

JAD: A guide named Olga ...

ERROL MORRIS: She was fabulous.

JAD: ... helps him locate the spot.

ERROL MORRIS: It's completely desolate, undeveloped.

JAD: Still, after 150 years. With some trial and error, he's able to figure out that Fenton was facing north when he took those photos. And then he goes off to the Crimean War Museum and asks them ...

ERROL MORRIS: Could I borrow some cannonballs?

ROBERT: Oh, man.

ERROL MORRIS: I take the cannonball, take it out to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and I photograph it ...

JAD: ... at different times of the day, hoping that he'd be able to see subtle differences in the shadows cast by those cannonballs that could help him order the photos.

ERROL MORRIS: But, nothing.

ROBERT: Nothing?

ERROL MORRIS: There was endless questions about cloud cover, whether you could even measure the shadows on these photographs.

JAD: In fact, he now suspects that the shadows in those old pictures may not have been shadows at all ...

ERROL MORRIS: But just artifacts of how the prints were made. And on and on.

JAD: So was the trip useful at all?

ERROL MORRIS: Not so much. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] Oh, man. That's a vacation moment right there.

ROBERT: How many days—how many days did you spend photographing and examining the photographs of cannonballs on the road?

ERROL MORRIS: I was there for about a week.

JAD: And then he went home with no answer to his question, only that continuing ...

ERROL MORRIS: Irritation.

JAD: But he was like, no.

ERROL MORRIS: No!

JAD: Not done yet!

ERROL MORRIS: Look, when you investigate anything, I don't care what it is, whether it's a Fenton photograph or Abu Ghraib or the murder of a Dallas police officer, yes, complications result. Thinking causes complications, I'm sorry. But it's part of that process that we go through of trying to figure out what's out there in the world, what really happened. This is about truth. Absolute truth. And the pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity. [laughs] So yes, the Fenton photographs worried me, that I might not be able to resolve it to my satisfaction.

JAD: But then he's at a party, and he bumps into a friend of his, a guy by the name of Dennis Purcell.

ERROL MORRIS: Who is very, very good with Photoshop.

JAD: We called him up.

DENNIS PURCELL: Hello.

JAD: Turns out ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Well, I'm an optical engineer.

JAD: So he's not just good at Photoshop. He actually builds high-tech cameras. In any case, they were talking at this party ...

DENNIS PURCELL: And the Fenton picture came up.

JAD: Errol told him ...

DENNIS PURCELL: He had this problem of wondering which came first and said, "Could you take a look at these?"

JAD: Dennis takes the pictures home, puts them in his computer ...

DENNIS PURCELL: And I immediately started to compare them.

JAD: Right away, he starts noticing differences between the two.

DENNIS PURCELL: The light changed. The weather was different. Shadows.

JAD: But he comes to pretty much the same conclusion as Errol, that those things ultimately don't help. So he just starts flipping between the photos.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flipping them back and forth.

ROBERT: Back and forth between the two photographs.

JAD: On the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: Off the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: On the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: Off the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: He's doing this for hours. Off the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: On the road.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: And then he sees it.

DENNIS PURCELL: The rocks on the left-hand side.

JAD: This little group of pebbles up on the left bank. Every time he flipped back and forth ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip, flip.

JAD: Those little rocks ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Popped out.

JAD: They moved. Just a little bit. And when he zoomed in, he could see that there were five of them.

DENNIS PURCELL: Fred, George, Oswald, Lionel, and Marmaduke.

ERROL MORRIS: We named them, yes.

JAD: These five guys shifted from one photo to the next. And here's the key. In the picture where the road was empty, they were a little bit higher on the hill. When the road was full of cannonballs, those little rocks shift down.

DENNIS PURCELL: Maybe eight inches or nine inches.

ERROL MORRIS: And from the direction of that movement, you could order the photographs.

JAD: It's basically like this. You could say, some rocks fell down the hill. They went from up on the hill to down. Up goes before down. And if the up photo is the empty road and the down photo is the road full of cannonballs, well, then ...

DENNIS PURCELL: The one with the cannonballs on the road was the second picture.

ERROL MORRIS: Imagine the scene.

JAD: Fenton comes upon an empty road, but he sees cannonballs on the hill. So he and ...

ERROL MORRIS: Whoever was helping him would have walked along the sides of the road and lifted up cannonballs, moved them onto the road. In that process, they would have invariably knocked into rocks ...

DENNIS PURCELL: And rocks don't fall uphill.

JAD: They only fall downhill.

ERROL MORRIS: It's gravity.

JAD: So case closed? This has—this has been resolved?

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah. [laughs] I think it has.

JAD: So Susan Sontag was right.

ERROL MORRIS: For the wrong reasons.

JAD: She was right. Fenton staged the photograph. So in addition to being one of the first photographs of war, this is one of the first photographic lies.

ERROL MORRIS: I guess he just figured it was a better photo.

JAD: Yeah. Or, you could say ...

ERROL MORRIS: Fenton was a coward.

JAD: Maybe he didn't want to get too close to the actual fighting, so he ...

ERROL MORRIS: Put the cannonballs on the road to make it look a lot more dangerous than it would have otherwise.

JAD: Or maybe he was after some kind of ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Emotional truth.

JAD: And that's what Dennis Purcell thinks.

DENNIS PURCELL: It's obvious why he did it.

JAD: There's that word again.

DENNIS PURCELL: To make it look the way it felt. To put those cannonballs on the road is how you felt when you were there.

JAD: In which case he would argue that the second photo, the one he posed, is more authentic than the first.

ERROL MORRIS: But forget all of that. Who in hell knows what Fenton was thinking? I really don't know what his motivation was.

JAD: But isn't that kind of the question at the end of the day?

ERROL MORRIS: Do I really care whether he put the cannonballs on the road or not?

ROBERT: I hope so.

JAD: Well, I hope you do. Don't you?

ERROL MORRIS: I do and I don't.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: Why would you go through all this then?

ERROL MORRIS: I guess this is what I take from it. In flipping back and forth between those two photographs ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: He says you see the rocks move.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: And when you see the rocks move ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: ... you imagine feet kicking those rocks.

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: And when you imagine feet ...

DENNIS PURCELL: Flip.

JAD: ... kicking those rocks ...

ERROL MORRIS: You feel the soldiers walking, like really feel it. You feel them hitting into the rocks. You feel, on some deep sense, for me, the reality of that scene in a way that I would not have felt otherwise. It's almost as if you've walked through a pinhole camera into the past. That world in which the photograph, that strange, temporal, evanescent world in which we live is gone.

ROBERT: But if you can step between these photographs, you are permitted a brief trespass into something that you thought was lost.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. My father died when I was two years old, and perhaps the deepest—one of the deepest—mysteries of my life: who was he? There were all these photographs around the house. I was very, very young. I have no memories of him. There's a mystery about this man who is central to my life in so many ways but who I don't know. And who I never will know.

JAD: Errol Morris' latest book is called A Wilderness of Error. This story was taken from his book, Believing is Seeing. I also want to thank Ira Glass for helping us to connect with him.

[DENNIS PURCELL: Hello, this is Dennis Purcell.]

[WOMAN: Hi, this is Errol Morris, and he is about to read the credits for you. Here you go.]

[ERROL MORRIS: Here we go. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation ...]

[DENNIS PURCELL: ... and ... ]

[ERROL MORRIS: And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

[DENNIS PURCELL: Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]

[ERROL MORRIS: Modern world.]

[DENNIS PURCELL: More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[ERROL MORRIS: Radiolab is produced by WNYC ...]

[DENNIS PURCELL: And distributed by NPR. That finishes the credits. Bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE VOICE: End of message.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and today ...

ROBERT: We've been investigating the truth.

JAD: The fact of the matter. And this next segment, to set it up, I guess all I really want to say is that sometimes getting to the fact of the matter, a fact of the matter, the way Errol just did, that can be tricky.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: You end up finding things that you didn't expect, that are way more complicated than you expected.

ROBERT: The story begins with our producer Pat Walters.

JAD: It started for him when he was talking with an ex-CIA agent.

PAT WALTERS: So maybe you take me to what, the summer of 1981.

MERLE PRIBBENOW: Okay, so in the summer of 1981, I was being transferred from one overseas post to another.

PAT: This is Merle Pribbenow.

MERLE PRIBBENOW: And I'm a retired CIA officer.

PAT: But in 1981 Merle was still at the CIA, and he was posted ...

MERLE PRIBBENOW: Out in the sticks, out in the boonies.

PAT: Somewhere in southeast Asia.

PAT: And, and, and why were you ...?

MERLE PRIBBENOW: Oh, well that's— [laughs] I had a little disagreement with my previous chief, and I ended up in this remote jungle backwater, I guess is the best way to phrase it.

PAT: [laughs] Can you say what country you were in?

MERLE PRIBBENOW: Um, I'd rather not.

PAT: In any case, as much as Merle did not want to be there, it turned out that this little backwater was ground zero for what was about to become one of the strangest stories of the Cold War. Just to set the scene, the story happens in Laos, which is that kind of narrow country between Vietnam and Thailand. The time is a few years after the Vietnam War. Now, right after the war, the US Army left, pulled out all of our troops, and once we were gone, the communists basically took over the region, the communists being the Viet Cong and their allies in Laos, the Pathet Lao.

ENG YANG: [speaking Vietnamese]

KALIA YANG: It was May of 1975. All of a sudden the Viet Cong and the Pathet Lao had infiltrated, and they were all over our village, and I knew that the Americans had left.

PAT: This is Eng Yang. Robert and I spoke with him and his niece, Kalia, translated for us. Eng lives in Minneapolis, but in 1975, he lived in a tiny village in the mountains of Laos. He's part of the tribe called the Hmong. And Eng says as soon as the Americans left, Lao and Vietnamese soldiers showed up in his village.

KALIA YANG: There was a hundred of them. They came in cars.

PAT: And in a way, you could say they were out for revenge, because during the Vietnam War, thousands of Hmong soldiers had fought on our side, and as soon as we were out of the picture ...

ENG YANG: That's when the killing started.

PAT: Eng says it began with isolated attacks.

KALIA YANG: Villagers started getting killed in random fields.

PAT: Like, they'd just find one of the neighbors shot dead in his rice paddy one day. Or a woman would go fetch water and never come back. Before long ...

KALIA YANG: It was a village, and I know the name of the village, I know the name of the village chief.

PAT: The Pathet Lao, which, again, is the Communist Army in Laos, had gotten suspicious that these villagers may have been hiding guns in the jungle, like plotting to rebel against the government. Until one day ...

KALIA YANG: The Pathet Lao went over and slaughtered the whole village. That's when we knew that the laws of humanity had been—had been terminated.

PAT: And not long after that, Eng and his family, along with thousands of other Hmong, fled their villages and went into hiding in the jungle. This is where things stood when Merle got his assignment.

MERLE PRIBBENOW: And ...

PAT: Before he left DC and flew over to Asia ...

MERLE PRIBBENOW: I stopped in our headquarters, and while I was there, I was briefed by our desk officer ...

PAT: Who told him about what was happening. The Communist raids, the Hmong fleeing. But then the desk officer said something kind of odd.

MERLE PRIBBENOW: There had been these reports from refugees.

PAT: Refugees like Eng.

MERLE PRIBBENOW: About this yellow, these yellow droplets falling from the air.

PAT: PBS went out to the camps and interviewed some of the refugees.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: When the aircraft flew over our area ...]

PAT: They said this yellow stuff that was falling out of the sky was coming from planes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We only saw the powders fall from it.]

PAT: Some of the refugees talked about powder. Some talked about liquid.

MERLE PRIBBENOW: A yellow mist sometimes.

PAT: But they all said whatever this was, when it landed, it made people violently ill. And they all talked about how, after this stuff fell from the sky ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: When the powder reached the ground, it stuck on everything.]

PAT: It left behind these yellow spots.

KALIA YANG: Yellow drops everywhere. All over the landscape.

PAT: Eng remembers the first time he saw it. He was hiding in the woods somewhere, and somebody came running to him and said, "Eng, you have to come and see, this yellow stuff just fell on a village up on the hill." And Eng ran up the hill and sort of crashed out of the village and just stopped right there at the edge of the village.

KALIA YANG: I saw a dead cow and two dead pigs and several dead chicken, and all the people who had been exposed, they were all having stomach trouble.

PAT: Eng says people were doubled over.

KALIA YANG: Covering their stomach.

PAT: Writhing in pain.

KALIA YANG: Throwing up.

PAT: Some throwing up blood. Eng said people began to suffer from everything from diarrhea to headaches, rashes ...

KALIA YANG: There was a person, and I have the photo right here in my keeping, who had been exposed, and her eyes—her eyes were destroyed entirely.

PAT: And many people, Eng says, didn't recover.

KALIA YANG: What I saw was people dying. They wouldn't get better. They would die.

PAT: Merle says the thought in the CIA was that this might be some kind of chemical weapon.

MERLE PRIBBENOW: Right.

PAT: Did it have a name at that point?

MERLE PRIBBENOW: Yellow rain.

PAT: Yellow rain. By the time Merle got to southeast Asia, hundreds of these reports had come in.

MERLE PRIBBENOW: Hundreds.

PAT: And several thousand people had been reported killed by this stuff.

MERLE PRIBBENOW: But—but, you know, in those kind of situations, and in southeast Asia generally, you know, there are tons of rumors. You have to be careful of what you believe and what you don't believe.

PAT: And you have to rely on evidence, which they just didn't have.

MERLE PRIBBENOW: No.

PAT: Until all of a sudden ... they did. It was just a few months after Merle got there, and they started getting these reports that ...

MERLE PRIBBENOW: Refugees had collected samples off of leaves.

PAT: Some refugees had shown up with leaves covered in these yellow spots.

MATT MESELSON: Here. Here's a close-up.

PAT: This is Matt Meselson, and he's a Harvard chemist and chemical weapons expert the US government asked to help examine these samples. I went up and visited him in his office in Cambridge.

MATT MESELSON: Here are some on leaves. These are on leaves brought back. These are all dried out now.

PAT: The leaves are small, black, brittle, which only makes the spots stand out even more, because they're this incredible, bright yellow.

MATT MESELSON: They're tiny. They're two or three millimeters across.

PAT: And Matt says when scientists put these leaves under a microscope and looked inside the yellow spots, they saw that the spots ...

MATT MESELSON: Had a very high content of a toxin called T-2.

PAT: Which is a poison. And While T-2 does grow in nature, the concentrations that they found in these spots was way too high to have occurred naturally.

MERLE PRIBBENOW: Which demonstrated that this was, you know, in fact a new type of chemical weapon.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alexander Haig: We now have physical evidence ...]

PAT: This is Secretary of State Alexander Haig, in the fall of 1981.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alexander Haig: ... which has been analyzed and found to contain abnormally high levels of potent mycotoxins.]

[NEWS CLIP: Good evening.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alexander Haig: Poisonous substances.]

[NEWS CLIP: The United States said today it has evidence that chemical warfare has been waged in parts of southeast Asia.]

[NEWS CLIP: The US obtained a test sample of twigs and leaves.]

[NEWS CLIP: Chemical analysis found high levels of three toxic chemicals.]

PAT: The news of this poisonous yellow rain became an instant political crisis.

[NEWS CLIP: Refugees in camps along the Thai border have been telling for years of a yellow rain, a rain that was followed in minutes by vomiting, bleeding, and death.]

PAT: Because everybody knew the Lao and Vietnamese armies were not capable of making stuff.

MERLE PRIBBENOW: No. [laughs] Vietnam could not even make their own rifles. They were pretty backward in that sense.

PAT: Which really left only one likely suspect.

[NEWS CLIP: Circumstantial evidence points to the Russians. The Soviet Union may be engaging in biological warfare.]

PAT: The Soviets, of course, denied they were involved.

[NEWS CLIP: The Soviets said it was a slanderous accusation.]

PAT: But the US government did not believe them.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ronald Reagan: The Soviet Union and their allies are violating the Geneva Protocol of 1925.]

PAT: And in the summer of 1982, in a speech to the UN, President Reagon officially accused the Soviet Union of supplying and using chemical weapons in Southeast Asia.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, RONALD REAGAN: There is conclusive evidence that the Soviet government has provided toxins for use in Laos and Kampuchea.]

PAT: Three years later, Congress passed legislation authorizing the production of a chemical bomb called the Big Eye.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's a 500-pound bomb and it's meant to be carried on high-performance aircraft.]

PAT: And within two years, a factory in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, began churning out thousands of bombs designed to carry sarin gas.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Three, two, one, release.]

PAT: This would be the first time the United States had manufactured a chemical weapon in nearly 20 years. All this, in effect, because of the yellow rain. But before we jump ahead ...

MATT MESELSON: In November of 1982, there were two days of press briefings by the state department.

PAT: And this is where things really start to get weird. The State Department had gotten everybody together to explain that some British scientists had looked at the spots, and in addition to the poison, they had found something else.

MATT MESELSON: All the samples had a very high content of pollen.

PAT: From flowers. Which initially didn't make any sense. Like, why would pollen be toxic? But eventually the government officials came to this kind of terrifying conclusion, that in fact ...

MATT MESELSON: This was a very, very clever Communist mixture.

PAT: Somehow, the Russians had found a way to use pollen as a vector to transmit this toxin.

MATT MESELSON: If it falls right on your skin, it would intoxicate you, poison you. But if these drops should fall on a leaf or a rock, then the wind would redisperse these pollen grains, which were just the right diameter to penetrate to the depths of the lungs, thereby making it a more deadly weapon.

PAT: Matt remembers hearing that and thinking ...

MATT MESELSON: That just seemed completely bonkers to me. I knew a lot about chemical weapons, and ...

PAT: He'd never heard of anything like that before.

MATT MESELSON: No.

PAT: So he sent some of these samples around to other scientists he knew, and one afternoon, he's sitting in his lab, and he gets a call.

TOM SEELEY: I remember the phone call.

PAT: This is the guy who called.

TOM SEELEY: Tom Seeley. I'm a professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University,.

PAT: Matt picked up the phone. Tom said to him, "Hey, I analyzed the samples you sent me." And then ...

MATT MESELSON: He said, "The State Department explanation is not parsimonious."

PAT: Meaning?

PAT: Meaning this yellow stuff is not a chemical weapon.

MATT MESELSON: Then he paused, and he said, "It's bee," and then he used a four-letter word.

PAT: I think we can use that word.

MATT MESELSON: Is that all right?

PAT: Yeah.

MATT MESELSON: He said it was bee [bleep].

PAT: Bee what?

TOM SEELEY: Bee [bleep]. What we call fecal spots of honeybees.

JAD: That was their idea?

PAT: Yeah, they were like look, here's the thing. Every winter, bees kind of hibernate.

MATT MESELSON: During the winter, there are no flowers and there is no pollen and there is no nectar. There's nothing for the bees to go out and collect.

PAT: So they stay inside.

TOM SEELEY: Confined to their hives all winter.

PAT: Feeding their babies, fattening up the new worker bees for the next season.

MATT MESELSON: And since they're very fastidious, they do not defecate in their nests.

JAD: They don't poop all winter?

PAT: Right.

MATT MESELSON: So they become immensely constipated. And then ...

TOM SEELEY: On the first warm days ...

MATT MESELSON: ... they all fly out ...

TOM SEELEY: ... en masse ...

PAT: To, like, 100 feet off the ground.

TOM SEELEY: And defecate.

PAT: All at the same time.

MATT MESELSON: And it's called a cleansing flight, and anybody who cultures bees knows this.

PAT: And if you get caught beneath the situation, Tom says ...

TOM SEELEY: It feels like light raindrops hitting your arms, hitting your forehead.

PAT: So this was their theory, that yellow rain was not a chemical weapon. It was just ...

MATT MESELSON: Bee droppings.

PAT: They published this, and the government was like, "Seriously?" Even a bunch of prestigious scientists came forward and said ...

TOM SEELEY: Said it was an absurd explanation.

MATT MESELSON: Kind of crazy and embarrassing.

PAT: A) Let's not forget that this rain was toxic. And B) Honeybees in southeast Asia don't even hibernate.

MATT MESELSON: There is no winter in southeast Asia. It's the tropics.

PAT: So Southeast Asian bees never get constipated and they never do the big poop.

PAT: Those are good objections.

MATT MESELSON: No.

PAT: Matt and Tom countered by going to Thailand.

MATT MESELSON: Tom and I flew out there.

PAT: They go into the jungle, find some beehives, and one day they're staring up at a hive ...

TOM SEELEY: And in a flash ...

PAT: They see it happen. The bees shoot up into the sky ...

TOM SEELEY: And within a minute or two after that, we started to get rained upon by the bee feces.

PAT: So they tell the government, "Sorry. We think it happens here too."

TOM SEELEY: [laughs]

JAD: Wait, that's only half of it. I mean, what about the toxic part? The whole idea that these bees are pooping poison?

PAT: That is a hard one. But, while Matt and Tom were in Thailand, some labs had started retesting those original samples, because, you see, the poison had been detected by one particular lab in Minnesota at the beginning, but now that these yellow spots were such a big deal, other labs all over the world began to retest them. And they couldn't find anything.

MATT MESELSON: The British never found a trace. The Swedes never found a trace.

PAT: The way Matt sees it ...

MATT MESELSON: The analyses were wrong.

PAT: He thinks that lab ...

MATT MESELSON: The lab in Minnesota that had been doing this work ...

PAT: ... inadvertently contaminated the pollen, because this lab did lots of other work with mycotoxins.

MATT MESELSON: Large quantities of these toxins.

PAT: The government obviously wanted to be sure. They did their own retests of the samples. They didn't find anything. They sent a team to southeast Asia to verify the bees do the poop shower thing, and they do.

TOM SEELEY: And my friend, it's a good friend, [inaudible] ...

PAT: Who was part of that team ...

TOM SEELEY: ... told me that in the bar, at the end of this multi-day excursion, off the record, one of the gentlemen said, "Well, I guess we owe the Soviets an apology on this one."

PAT: Which hasn't ever happened. In fact ...

MERLE PRIBBENOW: Yellow rain is still ...

PAT: That's Merle again.

MERLE PRIBBENOW: ... in the US Army chemical corps manual as, you know, one of the possible weapons that might be used.

PAT: Oh, really?

MERLE PRIBBENOW: Yeah, it's still there. It's still there.

KALIA YANG: I have—I have a clarifying question before I interpret that. So, so they found toxins initially, and when they looked again, the toxins were no longer there?

PAT: That's right.

KALIA YANG: Okay. [speaking Vietnamese]

PAT: At a certain point in our conversation with Eng, the Hmong guy Robert and I talked to earlier with his niece, Kalia, translating for him, we explained that the evidence they'd been attacked by chemical weapons seemed …

KALIA YANG: I interpret that for my uncle.

PAT: ... a little shaky.

ENG YANG: [speaking Vietnamese]

PAT: Eng's response was, if this was just bee feces ...

KALIA YANG: How do you explain the kids dying? The people and the animals dying? That where there is this yellow thing, where there are no bees, whole villages die?

PAT: We asked Kalia to tell Eng what the scientists had told us, that the Hmong were definitely dying.

TOM MESELSON: The Hmong were under real attack. They were being fired at from airplanes and by soldiers.

PAT: But more importantly, even if they weren't killed by those direct attacks, they were on the run through the jungle. They were malnourished and drinking from contaminated streams. Diseases like dysentery and cholera were rampant. And the way a lot of people see it is that they may have misattributed some of those mysterious deaths to this cloud of bee poop that looked like it could have been a chemical weapon. But Eng says no. Not a chance.

KALIA YANG: I'll speak to what I've seen and there is no inkling in my mind that those dots were not caused by starvation, dysentery. It was chemicals that were killing my people.

PAT: So we wanted to know—and this was an honest question—did he see something that would contradict the scientists' story?

ROBERT: Did the source of the rain—was there always a plane and then rain, a plane and then rain, or did sometimes the rain happen without a plane?

KALIA YANG: We never saw—what they said was that it was always just being dropped on them, and that it was always being dropped where there were heavy concentrations of Hmong people. That's what we know.

ROBERT: Hmm. But the—we don't know whether there was a plane causing it. It was just—you just see the dots, or see the ...

KALIA YANG: You have to understand that the planes were shooting bullets and bombs every day, all the time. And so—so whether it was a bombing plane or a yellow plane, it was incredibly hard to distinguish. Everybody runs when you hear the planes, so Hmong people don't watch bombs coming down. You came out, you sneak your head out, and you watch what happened in the aftermath, and you saw broken trees, you saw yellow in the aftermath of what had been bombed. I saw with my own eyes the bee pollen on the leaves eating through holes. With my own eyes, I saw pollen that could kill grass, could kill leaves, could kill trees.

ROBERT: But he himself was not clear whether it's the bee stuff or whether it's other stuff, because there was so much stuff coming down from the sky.

KALIA YANG: You know that there were chemicals being used against the Hmong in the mountains of Laos, whether this is the chemicals from the bomb or yellow rain chemicals were being used. It feels to him like this is a semantic debate and it feels like, like there's a sad lack of justice, that the word of a man who survived this thing must be pitted against a professor from Harvard who's read these accounts.

ROBERT: But as far as I can tell, your uncle didn't see the bee pollen fall. Your uncle didn't see a plan. All of this is hearsay.

KALIA YANG: My uncle says for the last 20 years he didn't know that anything, anybody was interested in the deaths of the Hmong people. He agreed to do this interview because you were interested. And what happened to the Hmong happened, and the world has been uninterested for the last 20 years. He agreed because you were interested. That the story would be heard, and that the Hmong deaths would be documented and recognized. That's why he agreed to the interview. That the Hmong heart is broken. That our leaders have been silenced, and what we know was been questioned and again, is not a surprise to him or to me.

KALIA YANG: I agreed to the interview for the same reason, that Radiolab was interested in the Hmong story, that they were interested in documenting the deaths that happened. There was so much that was not told. Everybody knows that chemical warfare was being used. How do you create bombs if not with chemicals? We can play the semantics game. We can. But I'm not interested and my uncle is not interested. We have lost too much heart and too many people in the process. I—I think that—I think the interview is done.

JAD: Now that—that wasn't the end of the interview. They kept on talking. Robert and Pat explained to Kalia that, you know, we're reporters, we're just trying to figure out what happened. One thing I do want to make clear: we informed the Engs in advance that we wanted to talk about the controversy surrounding yellow rain. We were very clear about that. We did not intend to ambush them. But this interview troubled us. We talked about it for months, arguing back and forth about what it meant to the story, what it meant for us personally, and we decided at a certain point to bring that conversation into the studio. We're gonna play you that conversation as we originally podcast it, and then we'll have some things to say on the other end. Pat started by talking about the moment that you just heard on tape.

PAT: Somehow that moment was when the whole story changed for me.

JAD: How, exactly?

PAT: Like, I think that there was something about, like, the way that she was pointing away from the thing that we had been looking so hard at, and saying, "Stop looking at that. Look over here."
JAD: Yeah.

PAT: Like, she, like, she didn't convince me at all that this wasn't a chemical weapon, but she convinced me that we were missing something.

JAD: Yeah, what I'm hearing her say there, not having been in this interview, is, "Quit focusing on this yellow rain stuff, because when you do that, you're shoving aside the much larger story—namely, that my people were being killed."

ROBERT: Right, that's exactly what she's saying. And that is wrong. That is absolutely—to my mind, that is not fair to us.

JAD: How is it not fair?

ROBERT: It's not fair to ask us to not consider the other stories and the other frames of the story. The fact that the most powerful man in the world, Ronald Reagan, used this story to order the manufacture of chemical weapons for the first time in 20 years, if the United States were to manufacture chemical weapons again and then use them because the Russians supposedly had, then people would have died ugly deaths in the consequence of that, and that is not unimportant. That's hugely important. But it's not important to her. So should that not be important to us?

PAT: But I, yeah, but I ...

ROBERT: She's saying ...

PAT: I do think that, I don't know, I think that, until she's—until she said the things that she said at the end of that interview, I don't think that I had fully appreciated the volume of pain that was involved in that moment for them.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Yes, I thought her reaction was very balancing. But her desire was not for balance. Her desire was to monopolize the story ...

PAT: I'm not sure we can say that though.

ROBERT: Well, if you listen to the words, that's what she says ...

PAT: No, I just think that they feel like their trauma has never been fully acknowledged, and that they've attached it to this—because maybe they felt that they had to—they've attached it to this idea that yellow rain was a chemical weapon. And if yellow rain suddenly isn't a chemical weapon, that doesn't just invalidate the yellow rain, it negates their whole loss. And I think she might be right. But I also think that the scientists are right, it's not a chemical weapon. And I also think you're right that to call it a chemical weapon has big consequences, so what do you do when three truths are right at the same time?

ROBERT: This is where we stop. So that was our original conversation, and when the podcast went out, a lot of people were very upset by me in particular, so I think I want to, if I could, add just a couple of things here. First of all, clearly, it was wrong to say that Kalia Yang was trying to monopolize our conversation, because, after all, we are the editors. We choose what to put on the air. And in this case we chose. We were looking for evidence that, despite what the scientists thought, maybe there was a chemical weapon here, and we wanted to find an eyewitness to see if anybody saw a bomb open and yellow rain come out. That's what reporters do. We test truths. And that is why I was persistent.

ROBERT: I had no idea what the Yangs were gonna say, and when they got angry, I was—I was embarrassed, and when I got angry, in my conversation with Jad and Pat, that was not right, and for that, I apologize, to Kalia and Mr. Yang in particular. I have to ask questions and search for truths, but, in this case, given how much Mr. Yang had already suffered, I should have done it with more respect, and more gently.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Eleanor Womack from Brooklyn, New York. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation, and 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.]

PAT: I don't really know where Tim is, so we're just gonna try ...

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, and today we're talking about truth and facts.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Facts of the matter.

ROBERT: So recently, our producer Pat Walters and I, we were trying to get in touch with a guy, Tim Kreider.

PAT: Hello, Tim? Nope. Not there. I think if we just shout very loudly ...

ROBERT: Out the window ...

ROBERT: We wanted to talk to Tim because Tim is—not only is he a wonderful writer.

JAD: And before that a cartoonist ...

ROBERT: He has this essay which kind of gets to the heart of a very different kind of truth than we've tackled so far, and that is, can you truly know somebody, even after everything you thought you knew ...

JAD: Turns out to be wrong?

PAT: Hello, Tim?

TIM KREIDER: Yes.

PAT: [gasps] There you are. You sound great, too.

JAD: We should say, this is a story not about Tim, but about his friend, who he names Skelly, just to protect his identity.

PAT: So let's—let's try, if it's okay with you, if we could maybe just talk about Skelly as if we were just kind of hanging out at a bar, even though you're in a tiny booth ...

TIM KREIDER: [laughs] If I had a beer in this tiny room that would be easier.

PAT: Tell us how you met this guy.

TIM KREIDER: He was part of a group of friends I made when I was working a post-collegiate job going door-to-door for the environment, to knock on doors with clipboards and get people to donate.

ROBERT: Like vacuum salesman, knock-knock kind of thing?

TIM KREIDER: Yeah, you're dropped off by a van in a suburban neighborhood, and I can still faintly feel the dread of—of having to knock on your first door of the night, which was always the worst. But, you know, like—like being in the army, it was a bonding experience.

ROBERT: Especially because the knocking on the door stuff was just really, you know, a few hours a day.

TIM KREIDER: Then there's going out to the bars afterwards, which became as much a part of the job for us as anything else.

ROBERT: And one of those nights out drinking with friends, he got to talking with Skelly.

PAT: What'd he look like, by the way?

TIM KREIDER: You know I, I—he forbade me ever to draw him. I used to put my friends in my cartoons all the time, and I did that once to him and he interdicted me from doing that again.

ROBERT: So you don't want to draw him on the radio?

TIM KREIDER: [laughs]

PAT: No, he's about to.

ROBERT: Oh, he's about to. Okay, I'm sorry.

TIM KREIDER: He had this great mop of curly hair, glasses that were literally held together by duct tape. The overall effect was warmth and intelligence.

ROBERT: But from the beginning, he says, basic facts about this guy were a little hard to pin down.

TIM KREIDER: It wasn't really clear at first whether he belonged to our camp, the hippy-ish young people, or whether he was someone slightly older whose first life hadn't worked out. As it turned out, he was the latter. He had been a practicing lawyer and he had quit being a lawyer for reasons that remain unknown to me. I mean, I'm not sure it was entirely voluntary quitting.

ROBERT: But Tim says, at the time, he liked the guy.

TIM KREIDER: Yeah.

ROBERT: For one thing, women seemed to like him.

TIM KREIDER: They were charmed by him. Right away, all my girlfriends always liked him.

ROBERT: And beyond that ...

TIM KREIDER: You know, he and I were two of the readers in the group. We each always had a book with us.

ROBERT: So they began to swap books and as they got to be good friends, Skelly even showed him his writing.

TIM KREIDER: I still have it somewhere. In longhand, even. Beautiful longhand. He was clearly a sort of kindred spirit.

ROBERT: But then some questions popped up. One day, Skelly told Tim ...

TIM KREIDER: That he had written a novel, and that it had been accepted for publication.

ROBERT: Tim was like, "Wow!"

TIM KREIDER: I was excited for him.

PAT: You probably thought that, "You got published. That's amazing. I want to do that."

TIM KREIDER: Yeah. So, you know, I kept bugging him about, "Well, when's your book coming out?"

ROBERT: Skelly would say, "Well, you know, in a few months." And then the few months would pass, and Skelly would say, "Well, they just pushed it back. It's coming."

TIM KREIDER: And, you know, we had a close little group of friends, and, like all people on Earth, we talked about each other behind each other's backs, and maybe someone else sort of clued me in, like, "Tim, there's no book." I mean, maybe he wrote a book, but it's not being published.

ROBERT: Initially, Tim thought, "Well, hmm, there's probably some truth to it."

TIM KREIDER: You know, even if the truth was only the kind of truth that's contained in dreams.

ROBERT: But then there were other stories.

TIM KREIDER: One of his stories was about having been married briefly in France and having a daughter over there. And there was a time, at least one time, when he was on vacation from the environmental canvass, and he supposedly was gonna be in France, visiting his daughter who lived with her maternal grandparents there, and our boss saw him walking on Charles Street in Baltimore during that time. Obviously he was not in France.

JAD: And they were never like, "Uh, dude, someone saw you in Baltimore. Were you really in France?"

TIM KREIDER: No. We didn't say that. And, you know, I—I've met, I mean I've spent—I've logged a lot of time hanging out in bars, and you do meet pathological liars in that line of work. And, and, you know, I'm always duly impressed by their stories when I first hear them, until they pile up, and they're always able to one-up your story. You know, they've always met someone more famous than you. Something more tragic has always happened to them. And then they start to seem creepy and repellent. And all I can say is he didn't feel that way.

ROBERT: He just seemed like a really good guy who happened to lie more than most. In any case, after they left the canvassing job, they both stayed in Baltimore, and they stayed close.

TIM KREIDER: We frequently ended up crashing on the same floors together, closed down the bars together every night.

ROBERT: They'd take road trips together, blasting classic rock.

TIM KREIDER: He loved Led Zeppelin. [laughs]

ROBERT: And after a while, those stories ...

TIM KREIDER: Like, "I've published a novel," or, "I have a daughter in France," we didn't hear that stuff anymore. Our—our theory is that he did not expect that we would end up being friends for the next 20 years and he would have to maintain these stories, and, you know, we liked the guy so much that it would have been unthinkably mean-spirited to bring this stuff up. So we just sort of pretended we'd never heard it.

ROBERT: And he says they kept themselves from asking too many questions. Like, they knew he had a job at the opera house, you know, fundraising, but he was always broke, always hitting them up for money, and he was—he was—they wondered, why was he always house-sitting and spending the night at the library?

TIM KREIDER: You just never knew. You did have to— [laughs] you did have to triangulate from the few facts available. And, you know, in a way, it was fun. It was fun to speculate about and fun to tease him about—only behind his back, of course.

ROBERT: For example, Tim told us about one time he and his friend Nick were up at their cabin near the Chesapeake Bay ...

TIM KREIDER: Which is about an hour outside Baltimore, and we had had a lovely afternoon eating oysters, drinking beers overlooking the bay. And we're supposed to drive to a train station about 20 minutes, half an hour away to pick Skelly up. He's gonna take the train up there and join us. And so we break away from our pleasant set-up on the water, and we drive down to the train station to pick him up. The train comes and goes. He's not on it. And we're both a little peeved at having been torn away from our afternoon to come get him, only to be stood up at the train station. So my friend checks his cellphone to see if maybe there's a message, and indeed there is. And the message goes like this: "Hey guys, this is Skelly. I missed the train!" First of all, there's the background noises of what is clearly a bar—glasses clinking, the TV on. Unmistakably, the Mt Royal Tavern, a lowly dive near ...

PAT: How did you know it was the Mt Royal? How did you know that?

TIM KREIDER: We just knew. [laughs] And he says, "So I'm really sorry about this, but I was in a meeting that ran a little longer than I expected, and, [belches]. I tried to catch it, but I was, like, three minutes too late, but I checked, and there's another train at 7:20, gets in 7:45. I'll definitely be on that one. So hopefully y'all get this message and be there to meet me. Uh, okay, again, sorry about that. Hope I'll see you soon." And then there's 30 or 45 seconds of him fumbling to figure out how to hang up this borrowed cellphone.

ROBERT: [laughs]

TIM KREIDER: Throughout which we can hear the sounds of the bar clearly in the background. And I listened to this message, and I just smiled and shook my head and handed it speechlessly to my friend Nick.

ROBERT: Do you have any sense of what's—when you're not being told something, do you have any feeling for what you're not being told, or do you just think it's just silly details?

TIM KREIDER: No, you know, I don't—he was just a very secretive guy. And we got the sense that—I mean, he told me once, you know, "The less people know about you, the better off you are." I mean, we weren't supposed to know for a long time that he lived at home with his mother, you know, which is not unheard of, but an embarrassing thing when you're a grown man. And it became really obvious that he did, because if you called his house sometimes, you got his mother. And he had a complex cover story about how, oh, well, if the phone rang enough times at his house, it was forwarded to his mother's to pick up, which, you know, I had never heard of that. I didn't know the phone company offered that service. So, you know, we knew the deal, but we weren't gonna challenge him on it, because it so clearly was something he was embarrassed about and eager to conceal. I think he probably saw himself and was worried that others would see him as—as, you know, marginal or pathetic or loser-ish, and, you know, we didn't see him that way. We loved the guy. He was just one of us. You know, there are conditions that come with every friendship. People are weird, and most of the people who are really worth being friends with are weird, and you learn to accept that there are unspoken rules in certain friendships.

ROBERT: Until the day comes when the rules don't apply anymore. Fast forward a few years, Tim has moved to New York, Skelly still is in Baltimore with his—well, his mother had died, but he was living in the same house.

TIM KREIDER: I still saw him pretty often. He'd take the train up and we'd get some beers and some chicken wings.

ROBERT: And one day ...

TIM KREIDER: I got a phone call from a friend of mine, and he sounded very badly shaken.

ROBERT: Tim's friend said that he'd been worried about Skelly ...

TIM KREIDER: Because he hadn't heard from him for a while, and then he called work, and it turned out he hadn't been there and he knew something was wrong. So he went to his house, and, you know, I think he was able to get the door open enough to see inside, and he called in for him and he heard nothing and he forced his way in and found him.

ROBERT: Lying on the floor.

TIM KREIDER: Dead. The coroner ruled that that death was drug-related. So I went back to Baltimore right away, because I assumed there would be a memorial service and so on, and for a couple of days nothing happened at all, because he had kept his life so thoroughly compartmentalized that no one knew how to get in touch with his family, although at the last minute, the day before his funeral, we got in touch with his extended family, and they were able to send some people up.

ROBERT: Just before they arrived, it occurred to Tim, "Well, maybe we should go through his house."

TIM KREIDER: You know, and just clean up and, you know, find out if there's anything there that we should, you know, disappear before his family shows up. And we were talking to the guy who first found him, and he said, "Yeah, well, here's the thing."

ROBERT: He told them, "You guys, you can go back into that house, but I'm—I'm not going back in there."

TIM KREIDER: He had warned us, but as soon as we stepped in, it was still shocking. And terrible.

PAT: What did you see when you walked in?

TIM KREIDER: There are aspects about that that I will never tell you or anyone else, but suffice to say that as soon as you walked in, you could tell that someone had ceased living like a human being. I mean, there were heaps of things. Heaps. He'd stopped throwing things out. There wasn't electricity. There wasn't working plumbing.

ROBERT: Really, no plumbing?

PAT: At all?

TIM KREIDER: No. No, I don't think so. And words are gonna fail me here. I mean, the simplest way to say it would be to say it was clearly a place where an insane person had lived, or someone who was mentally ill had lived. I don't know if that's what to call it, because most people who are mentally ill don't know to conceal their mental illness. He was just a very gentle, decent, kind-hearted guy, but something horrible had happened. But on some level, he had understood that—I mean, it was a secret that he was keeping, and he kept it locked inside that house. And I think we were all appalled to realize that something had been so drastically wrong with him all this time, and the single most upsetting aspect of it was imagining how utterly alone he must have felt himself to be.

PAT: Did you ever have moments of feeling guilt, like I should have—I should have gotten into that place? I shouldn't have ...?

TIM KREIDER: No, the—I don't think there is anything that anyone could have done for him. I mean, he—he had so clearly determined not to let people into that chamber of his life. And the other thing is that he was so convincing in his dissembling. I mean, we really didn't think there was anything seriously wrong.

PAT: Yeah.

TIM KREIDER: He was his best and most decent and sanest self when he was in our company.

PAT: But you didn't know so much about him.

TIM KREIDER: Mm-hmm.

PAT: And I guess I just, in light of that, I wonder what it means to—to know someone, or who exactly it was that you think you knew.

TIM KREIDER: Yeah. Well, you know, the only person I knew of who ever got mad at him for telling what they would call lies were women. I mean, he was a guy, so he was not above trying to impress girls and, you know, the things he was trying to impress them with were his novel, his storied history, and often when they found out that those things were not, strictly speaking, true, they felt lied to and betrayed. And none of his friends ever felt that way, and I always felt that—perhaps this is patronizing or nasty of me—but I always felt that what those girls were really mad about was that they believed him. They'd fallen for it.

PAT: But in a sense you and your friends fell for something too.

TIM KREIDER: Well, I don't know, I mean, what I would say we fell for was the thousands of hours we spent in that guy's company, which seems to me like a more direct and reliable form of knowing than hearing facts, either made up or real. I mean, there was a day when Skelly and I drove up to my cabin to check on the place because there had been a blizzard, and there was a grove of bamboo trees there, and the weight of all the snow had bent them over the driveway so that they formed a kind of continuous arch. And we parked and we walked down through that arcade and we would tug on every bamboo tree, and it would shake the snow off, and it would suddenly spring up into the air, and it would fling its load of snow 50 feet into the sky. We did that with every tree, walking all the way down the driveway, and it was so beautiful and so much fun that we cracked up like boys.

TIM KREIDER: And I'm the only one who remembers that now. That was a moment that only he and I were there for and he's gone. He shared that with me and nobody else ever will. You're imagining it because I've described it to you, but that's not the same thing, and if you don't know someone by having experiences like that and memories like that with them, then I would submit that you cannot ever know anybody at all.

ROBERT: Thanks to producer Pat Walters and to Tim Kreider, whose book, which includes this story, is called We Learn Nothing.

[TIM KREIDER: Hi there. This is Tim Kreider. I've been asked to call and leave a voicemail recording your credits. Here they are. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenna Farrell, Malissa O'Donnell, Dylan Keefe, Andy Mills, Lynn Levy and Sean Cole. With help from Matt Kielty, Daisy Rosario and Nadia Wilson. Special thanks to Rebecca Katz, Gene Guilman, or possibly Gene Gulleman, and Paul Hillmer. That's it, if that works okay for you guys. Bye bye.]

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