Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
Speaker 1: the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
Speaker 1: of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
Speaker 1: waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: It was February of nineteen fourteen, and a chill had
Speaker 1: fallen over Aurora, Illinois. It was a cold that went
Speaker 1: deeper than the snow covered streets and isolated rivers, straight
Speaker 1: to the city's heart. A young woman had been murdered,
Speaker 1: and the details were straight out of an Edgar Allen
Speaker 1: Poe's story. The victim was a twenty year old named
Speaker 1: Teresa Hollander, and she had been killed while crossing the
Speaker 1: cemetery of Saint Nicholas Church. The murder weapon a gravesteak.
Speaker 1: According to newspaper reports, the small metal plaque had been
Speaker 1: pulled from the earth and used to bludgeon Teresa to death.
Speaker 1: When her father found her frozen body the next morning,
Speaker 1: her eyes were wide open, staring up in a final
Speaker 1: expression of horror. It was this fact, oddly enough, that
Speaker 1: gave investigators hope. Recent scientific discoveries suggested that the human
Speaker 1: eye was capable of recording images, much like a camera.
Speaker 1: Since Teresa's eyes were open in the moment of death,
Speaker 1: it stood to reason that the last thing she ever
Speaker 1: saw was likely the face of her attacker. If the
Speaker 1: image could be replicated, investigators would have the killer dead
Speaker 1: to rights. Now, most people hearing this story today would
Speaker 1: be quick to write this off as foolishness. An eye
Speaker 1: is not a camera, they would reason, and they don't
Speaker 1: record images. But that's not entirely true. Eyes and photography
Speaker 1: have a lot more in common than you might think.
Speaker 1: Both have a mechanism for controlling how much light is
Speaker 1: let in, a lens to focus that light, and a
Speaker 1: sensor to capture images. In a traditional camera, the sensor
Speaker 1: is celluloid film coded in an emulsion of light sensitive
Speaker 1: silver halite crystals. Briefly exposing the emulsion to light results
Speaker 1: in a latent image, which is treated with chemicals to
Speaker 1: create a photograph. Now, for our eyes, the sensor is
Speaker 1: the retina, a structure made up of tiny rods and cones.
Speaker 1: Hitting the retina with light produces electrical impulses that travel
Speaker 1: through the optic nerve to our brain, and as you
Speaker 1: might guess, we don't have any way of hacking our
Speaker 1: brains to pull those images out, especially after death. But
Speaker 1: here's where things get interesting. In eighteen seventy six, a
Speaker 1: German physiologist discovered that the rods in our retinas contain
Speaker 1: a purplish red pigment. It's called rhodapsin, and it turns
Speaker 1: white when it's exposed to light, and then it darkens
Speaker 1: again soon after the light is removed. It's not too
Speaker 1: different from the way the images are recorded on traditional
Speaker 1: film stock, although it does fade fairly quickly, but that's
Speaker 1: not all. Shortly after rhodapson was discovered, another researcher named
Speaker 1: Wilhelm Kuhn conducted a series of experiments using the eyes
Speaker 1: of frogs and rabbits. He successfully managed to freeze the
Speaker 1: rhodapsin at the moment of death, effectively recording the last
Speaker 1: thing the animals saw before it died. His most famous experiment,
Speaker 1: although also most gruesome, involved an now by no rabbit.
Speaker 1: After spending several minutes in total darkness, it was made
Speaker 1: to stare out a barred window and then promptly decapitated.
Speaker 1: The rabbit's eyes were immediately removed and dissected, and the
Speaker 1: retina was washed with a chemical solution and photographed. The
Speaker 1: resulting image, which Kuhn called an optogram, is blurry but readable.
Speaker 1: It's a clear white space at the center that looks
Speaker 1: very much like the barred window the rabbit saw in
Speaker 1: its final moments. Naturally, Kuhn's next task was to replicate
Speaker 1: the experiment with humans, but this was easier said than done.
Speaker 1: In eighteen eighty, he dissected the eye of a convicted
Speaker 1: murderer moments after he was beheaded by a guillotine. Even then,
Speaker 1: the best he was able to produce was a bunch
Speaker 1: of squiggly lines. Some people thought that it looks like
Speaker 1: a guillotine blade or the steps of an execution platform,
Speaker 1: but I think those are a stretch at best. So
Speaker 1: here's the rub. Rhodapsin can hypothetically be used to capture
Speaker 1: some aspects of the last images that we see before
Speaker 1: we die, but the images are far too blurry and
Speaker 1: simplistic to be used for forensic purposes. Even if you
Speaker 1: were to somehow remove and process the eyes moments after death,
Speaker 1: you still couldn't capture something as detailed as a human face.
Speaker 1: That didn't stop detectives from using optograms in murder investigations,
Speaker 1: like the case of Teresa Hollander, the girl murdered in
Speaker 1: the Aurora Graveyard. During the autopsy, her eyeballs were removed
Speaker 1: and photographed. The resulting optogram was used as evidence in
Speaker 1: the trial of her former boyfriend, Anthony Petris. The optogram
Speaker 1: itself from that trial has been lost, but it must
Speaker 1: not have been all that convincing, because Anthony was found
Speaker 1: not guilty. Nevertheless, the practice captured the imagination of the public,
Speaker 1: and many people came to believe that optograms were a
Speaker 1: genuinely effective tool for catching criminals. They appear as plot
Speaker 1: devices in the works of several nineteenth century authors, including
Speaker 1: Rudyard Kipling and Jules Vern. Meanwhile, real life criminals started
Speaker 1: blindfolding their victims or removing their eyes after death to
Speaker 1: avoid getting caught, and in at least one case, an
Speaker 1: optogram was successfully used to bring a killer to justice,
Speaker 1: not because science worked, but because the culprit assumed it did.
Speaker 1: When detectives told the murderer that his face had been
Speaker 1: recorded by the victim's eyes, he confessed on the spot,
Speaker 1: so you might say that truth is in the eyes
Speaker 1: of the beholder, and while science is generally our best
Speaker 1: tool for catching criminals, sometimes it takes a bit of
Speaker 1: fiction to get the job done. When it comes to
Speaker 1: strange ways of undermining foreign regimes, nobody beats the CIA.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen sixties they tried to get Cubans to
Speaker 1: believe that Fidel Castro was the Antichrist, and in two
Speaker 1: thousand and five they created an Osama bin laden action
Speaker 1: figure with paint that chipped away to reveal the devil's
Speaker 1: face underneath. The plan, as I understand it, was to
Speaker 1: give them to Afghan children to turn them against him,
Speaker 1: but the CIA never went through with it. But World
Speaker 1: War II saw the CIA at its most creative or
Speaker 1: maybe unhinged, depending on how you look at it. It
Speaker 1: was called Operation Fantasia, a whimsical name for an otherwise
Speaker 1: hair brain scheme. It came to fruition in nineteen forty
Speaker 1: five after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. But the goal
Speaker 1: of this mission wasn't to take out the enemy directly. Rather,
Speaker 1: the idea was to shatter their morale, using their own
Speaker 1: beliefs against them. And it was all thanks to a
Speaker 1: businessman named Ed Salinger had operated an import export business
Speaker 1: in Tokyo and therefore was familiar with certain intricacies of
Speaker 1: Japanese culture. Oh and he also happened to be a
Speaker 1: master of psychological warfare working for the OSS in America.
Speaker 1: He knew that the Japanese people were superstitious and would
Speaker 1: react strongly to seeing an evil spirit in real life.
Speaker 1: According to Salinger, the Japanese were deeply afraid of kitsune
Speaker 1: or fox spirits. But how is he supposed to create
Speaker 1: such an entity. One plan involves spraying a fox like
Speaker 1: musk and amplifying artificial animal cries where Japanese could hear them,
Speaker 1: But that plan was quickly dismissed in favor of an
Speaker 1: even stranger one, a plan that involved actual live foxes.
Speaker 1: Salinger decided the best course of action was to release
Speaker 1: a bunch of foxes into the woods to frighten the Japanese.
Speaker 1: In his outline for the operation, he wrote, the foundation
Speaker 1: for the proposal rests upon the fact that the modern
Speaker 1: Japanese is subject to superstitions, beliefs in evil spirits, and
Speaker 1: unnatural manifestations which can be provoked and stimulated. He tested
Speaker 1: his theory by gathering thirty foxes and letting them loose
Speaker 1: in a public park. But he didn't just release them haphazardly.
Speaker 1: He wanted to make sure that they could be seen
Speaker 1: even in the dark, so he grabbed his brush and
Speaker 1: a can of paint and gave the red and white
Speaker 1: vulpines a coat of green to make them pop. This
Speaker 1: paint had a unique quality a glowed in the dark
Speaker 1: thanks to a little ingredient called radium. This was the
Speaker 1: same kind of paint that had mutilated and killed the
Speaker 1: Radium Girls in nineteen twenty eight. They would lick the
Speaker 1: brushes to a fine point and then apply the luminescent
Speaker 1: coating to clockhands and dials. Salinger, though, gave the foxes
Speaker 1: an unhealthy glow before unleashing them into Washington d C's
Speaker 1: Rock Creek Park, only a few miles from the White House.
Speaker 1: This was a popular spot for hikers and birdwatchers, so
Speaker 1: it was almost guaranteed that a few unsuspecting individuals would
Speaker 1: witness the glowing fox's firsthand, and they did. The National
Speaker 1: Park Police started getting reports of leaping, ghost like animals
Speaker 1: that were terrifying locals. It looked like Salinger's plan was
Speaker 1: going to be a success. But how was the US
Speaker 1: supposed to get the foxes all the way to Japan.
Speaker 1: One idea was to drop them off the coast and
Speaker 1: let them swim to shore. The oss, however, was skeptical,
Speaker 1: so Salinger conducted another test. He and a few colleagues
Speaker 1: loaded a few foxes onto a boat and navigated to
Speaker 1: the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, but the animals in place,
Speaker 1: The scientists tossed them overboard and watched, and sure enough,
Speaker 1: the foxes found their way back to dry land. The
Speaker 1: tests proved that Salinger was right. All that was left
Speaker 1: was to actually carry out the plan. Oh but wait,
Speaker 1: there's more. Based on the memos and notes published at
Speaker 1: the time, Operation Fantasia was about to get even weirder.
Speaker 1: You see, Salinger had apparently wanted to exploit another fox
Speaker 1: related superstition by gluing a skull to the head of
Speaker 1: a stuffed fox. He wanted to symbolize the death's head
Speaker 1: on it's crown. It was, in a sense, weaponized folklore.
Speaker 1: The body of the animal would have been covered in
Speaker 1: black cloth and adorned with glow in the dark paint
Speaker 1: that looked like exposed bones, and the skull would have
Speaker 1: been rigged with the way to move the jaw up
Speaker 1: and down to strike even more fear into the hearts
Speaker 1: of the Japanese. And that's where everything stopped. The head
Speaker 1: of the OSS branch, in charge of Operation Fantasia, looked
Speaker 1: at Salinger's concept and thought that it was entirely too
Speaker 1: dumb to put into action. He shut it down and
Speaker 1: put everyone to work on more feasible projects. Looking back,
Speaker 1: I think it's clear that Ed Salinger just wasn't the
Speaker 1: sly fox that he thought he was. I hope you've
Speaker 1: enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe
Speaker 1: for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
Speaker 1: show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was
Speaker 1: created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: I make another a war winning show called Lore, which
Speaker 1: is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you
Speaker 1: can learn all about it over at Theworldoflore dot com.
Speaker 1: And until next time, stay curious.