Favorite Story Reveals & Twists

This week on SNAFU - it's the most exciting Story Reveals and narrative twists from Season 4 - Like the story of the Azores Glider with Adam Scott where we heard the tale of Robert Piche and the incredible tactics he used to save an entire plane of passengers as they ran out of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean. Or Sophia Bush’s reaction to the revelation that Pablo Picasso might have been involved in an art heist of The Mona Lisa?? Or Jon Lovett’s hilarious Survivor-adjacent ruminations on the tragic tale of the Donner Party? It’s a massive episode filled to the brim with all my favorite “SNAFU Story Reveals and Twists” See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:34Speaker 02

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• 1:07Speaker 04

  Hello, Snafu listeners. You know, I've been working in film and television for a very long time, and I just, I am so enamored with the world of storytelling. And one of my favorite things about good storytelling is when there's a really cool reveal or a twist. That's also one of the really fun things about Snafus. A lot of Snafus have great reveals and twists. And so I decided to just compile a bunch of my favorites and dish them out to you, à la carte. Like the story of the Azores glider, which I told to Adam Scott, where we learned about Robert Piche and the incredible tactics he used to save an entire plane full of passengers as they ran out of fuel over the Atlantic

• 1:52Speaker 04

  Ocean. It's an insane story. Or maybe the Sophia Bush episode, in which I told her about how Pablo Picasso might have been involved in an art heist of the Mona Lisa. Yeah, that's true. Or when I told John Lovett about the horrific Donner Party, and he gave us some hilarious Survivor-adjacent ruminations. It's a massive episode, filled to the brim with a lot of my favorite Snafu story reveals and twists. So enjoy.

• 2:29Speaker 04

  Well, now, it's still really early in the morning, or late at night, depending on how you're looking at it. So it's very, very dark. Piche and Diéger, they couldn't exactly see their surroundings very much, not to mention the fact that it's basically dark. They have some electric. This is very cool. The, there's another special piece of technology that was a bit of a rock star that night, and that is what's called a ram air turbine, or RAT. So in case of emergency engine out scenarios, and these do happen more often than you think, there is this RAT. It is a small wind turbine that deploys, I think from the bottom of the jet usually, and it's basically a little propeller that is a power

• 3:13Speaker 04

  generator. And so the power of the wind is hitting this little turbine, and it generates some extra hydraulic and electrical power when everything else has failed.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  It gives them just enough power to, to have the minimum hydraulics that they need.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And to power some of the instruments in the cockpit and so forth. So like,

• 3:33Speaker 05

  That's wild.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. And talk about, I mean, you're marveling at the engineering of these things. There's so many things about airplanes that are just mind blowing.

• 3:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  So with help from the RAT,

• 3:44Speaker 05

  Do you, do you also wish, as I do, that it was an actual RAT that deploys in emergencies? He has a little captain's hat on?

• 3:52Speaker 04

  I do wish that.

• 3:52Speaker 05

  And he really knows what he's doing?

• 3:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. And he's, he just has a hamster wheel. And that's what's generating the power.

• 3:59Speaker 05

  That generates all the power. That's right.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  Oh, that would be amazing. I actually wish it was the Heavy Metal Band RAT.

• 4:06Speaker 05

  Oh, God, me too.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  And that they were on the plane, and that they would just rock so hard that there was, right? Remember the hair metal band RAT?

• 4:14Speaker 05

  Talk about generating power, man.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 4:17Speaker 05

  Okay. They just need to play out of the cellar.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  And everyone would be rocking out so much, they wouldn't even realize they're in danger.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  No. No, not at all. The engineering to get the Band RAT into the cargo hold of every airplane flight, that seems like a tricky proposition, but I'm sure we can figure it out.

• 4:33Speaker 05

  It's challenging, but this is America.

• 4:36Speaker 04

  Not insurmountable. Yeah.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  This is America. You're right.

• 4:39Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  With the help of this ram air turbine, the pilots managed to bring a few critical systems back online and fly the plane by hand, but they're still dropping really, really fast with limited control and zero thrust, right?

• 4:52Speaker 05

  Right.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Lages is getting closer and closer, which means there is no time for caution. This is it. They have one shot at this landing. None of this is normal. None of their trajectory and descent rate and all those things, none of it is, is like chill. So air traffic controllers at Lages are actually flickering the runway lights on and off to help them see in the dark, which is insane. The A330 approaches Lages Airport at a very high speed and steep descent angle. Piche actually had to maintain a speed over 140 knots so that the ram air turbine would continue to function. But he couldn't go above 200 knots, or the landing gear might not extend.

• 5:39Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 5:40Speaker 04

  As they get closer, Piche realized he may have been, and this is another little tasty bit of irony, he may have been too good at gliding. Because a normal approach is, you would come into the airport at 3,000 feet from, when you're about 10 miles away from the runway. Piche had kept the plane up so high for so long that they were actually at 13,000 feet.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  Oh, shit.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  And now only eight miles away. So they're too high.

• 6:05Speaker 05

  They're too high.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  The Piche, he's got some serious balls on this guy.

• 6:09Speaker 05

  Dude, he's a badass.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. He decides to pull a 360-degree turn so that he could drop several thousand feet, all while Diéger is putting out the landing gear.

• 6:20Speaker 05

  That is a roll of the dice, because you're dropping the whole time.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  That, with no thrust, you cannot go back up. You've got no room to go back up.

• 6:30Speaker 05

  So if he gets too low, then they're fucked.

• 6:33Speaker 04

  Right. But he makes this basically like a, you know, a circle. And meanwhile, Diéger is dropping the landing gear. Now, this is a wild thing. Usually, it's a hydraulic system that is like fully electronic and everything, and it just drops. But when you have no power, there are actually these, these levers, or sort of like pull latches on the floor of the cockpit, under a panel that you open up, and you pull these latches up, and that's, it's, you manually deploy the landing gear.

• 7:02Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  And it pulls these cables, and it releases the landing gear. The landing gear then falls from the plane from gravity, not from hydraulic pressure. So it's really why, that's why he has to maintain a speed, because if he's going too fast, it will,

• 7:18Speaker 05

  It won't.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. They get the landing gear out by hand, in the, what's called the free-fall method of, of landing gear deployment. And down they're going. 200 knots. The plane makes contact with the runway, and it hits hard.

• 7:35Speaker 05

  I bet.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  In fact, it hits so hard that the plane bounces, and the landing gear and the tires burst from the impact.

• 7:43Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Somehow, Piche brings it back down, and the crew manages to keep the aircraft on the runway and bring it to a stop. And holy shit, we are saved.

• 7:56Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  Are you surprised?

• 7:59Speaker 05

  Piche.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:02Speaker 05

  This guy.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:04Speaker 05

  This guy is a badass.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:07Speaker 05

  That is crazy.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  Some, some questionable choices in the mix of the, the process, but no question, this man has mad skills and a serious, like, pilot's disposition. Here's the casualty list. 16 passengers sustained minor injuries, and most of those were from the evacuation of the plane.

• 8:28Speaker 05

  Sure. Which, that's usually what happens. Yeah.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, right? Which reportedly was completed in approximately 90 seconds. And that's incredible to me, because when I think of, like, people deplaning, it is such a just dumpster fire of elbows and anger and luggage pulling down and whatever. But I would also imagine that being scared of a plane exploding might help you get off a plane quicker. Yeah.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  The second wave of landings was the next day. On Kisca's northern shore, the commandos ran into even more trouble. They'd been promised a flat, pebbly beach. That was the recon. Easy in, easy out. Instead, they ran aground on a steep, jagged mess of volcanic rock and boulders up to 16 feet high. The landing stalled instantly as men scrambled to unload gear and climb over terrain that looked nothing like the brochure.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  So it's safe to say confidence and morale is maybe starting to teeter a little bit.

• 9:27Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Now, there was one upside to the botched landings, which was that no one was shooting at them, which they expected. So the Japanese guns on the island were silent as the commandos struggled ashore soaked and exhausted. But that calm did not last as Frederick's men pushed inland through bogs and rocky ridges. The larger landing ships unloaded wave after wave of infantry behind them. And here's where a series of tragedies starts unfolding. First, that illusion fog. It rolled in and just swallowed everything. Entire units disappeared

• 10:08Speaker 04

  in the gray, radios failed, and no one knew who was where. Then, American and Canadian troops spotted movement in the mist and opened fire convinced they'd found the enemy, but they had not. When the smoke cleared, a dozen soldiers were dead, casualties of a battle fought entirely against themselves. Yes.

• 10:32Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's so demoralizing.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  It's a brutal one. I mean, but if you're in, you put yourself in their shoes, and they're all, they all have the lesson of the Battle of Atu, which was brutal. And the Japanese fighters, of course,

• 10:50Speaker 06

  Out there.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  They had a warfighting ethos called Bushido, which was sort of a descendant of the Samurai discipline, where, where like, they are all in and just, they will not surrender. They will just attack and attack until basically they're

• 11:07Speaker 06

  Can you imagine how deep up these people's bodies are? Talk about the nervous systems. I mean, you just gotta be so jacked up and it's, and all your signals are failing. Like, you can't really see what you're doing. You can't really see where you're put down. You don't really know where anybody is. Like, the adrenaline and the cortisol. I mean, you just, like a crazy physiological state to try to make a decent decision in. And then the hecticness of it and the sort of group think of it. Like, if you shoot, like, if the guy next to me is gonna start shooting, then I'm done. Start shooting and

• 11:41Speaker 04

  You are perfectly capturing the fog of war. That is what the fog of war is. It's like, maybe we sit down and just have a cup of tea.

• 11:52Speaker 06

  I know.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  And just calm our nerve, our nervous systems are overactive.

• 11:58Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  We're not making good decisions.

• 12:00Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 12:01Speaker 04

  Let's just, everyone breathe. Let's be mindful for a second. But then, of course, you instantly panic because you're like, I don't think the Japanese guys are being mindful right now. They're trying to kill us. Well, there was even more danger afoot offshore. The destroyer USS Abner Reed, remember, there's 100 ships

• 12:22Speaker 06

  Right.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  in this thing. This is a massive operation. Isn't that, isn't this kind of like, you're like, what?

• 12:29Speaker 06

  I'd like to see if, I mean, I'm recalling in my mind, like, those old black and white photographs where you can see 100 ships in one eyeful in one frame.

• 12:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 06

  I mean, 100 ships for 10,000 Japanese soldiers. That's like, that's pretty strong showing. Like, we were ready for

• 12:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, they wanted to shut this down. This was like, we have to just close this door. So the destroyer USS Abner Reed struck a Japanese mine that no one knew was there. The Navy knew there were mines, but believed that the nearest mine field was 2,000 yards away from where the ship was. And this blast ripped the stern clean off, hurling dozens of sailors into the freezing water. 87 were killed and 47 were wounded. Many were, were pulled from the frozen water, or freezing water, I should say. And then back on land, things are still just eerie and off, right? They're, they're two days in now, slogging

• 13:27Speaker 04

  through mud and fog, and something's off. And the patrols just keep pushing deeper into Kiska's hills, and there's no gunfire. There's no snipers. There is no resistance at all. And finally, the truth starts to sink in. There are no Japanese soldiers on this island at all.

• 13:48Speaker 06

  No.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  The enemy had vanished weeks earlier, and all they left behind were a few booby traps, some wrecked equipment, and graffiti in their abandoned bunkers mocking FDR and Churchill. 30,000 troops had stormed an empty island.

• 14:08Speaker 06

  Oh, God, Ed. I mean, what are you like, of all the activity in World War II? Top to bottom, from day one till the final surrender. How many, what percentage of it was something like this?

• 14:24Speaker 04

  This one feels colossal. Like, like, I'm sure that this is happening on a smaller scale, like, every day in a war. What is clear is that the fog of war is incredibly real and present all the time, whether or not there's literal fog.

• 14:40Speaker 06

  I don't have a ounce of judgment over this. I'll tell you one thing that's not happening in my body right now is I'm not thinking, God, those idiots. I'm thinking, of course, of course. Like, I would imagine that this is the number one challenge when you're mounting these, a world war in 1942, that all kinds of situations on the ground don't match whatever your signals and indicators are giving you in advance. And all kinds of resources, including human lives, were wasted because it's just too hard to get a handle on exactly what's going on on the ground. So anyway, I'm actually a wealth of knowledge about this stuff, it turns out.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. You're an even better co-pilot for this story than I possibly imagined. You're so well-prepared for this. The art curator of the Louvre said that he had a gut feeling that it was stolen so that thieves would attempt to copy it. But he wasn't, he wasn't gonna let that, or even like, return a copy and hold on to the original. But he would not let that fly because, quote, "I studied the picture for years, mounted and unmounted. I know every minor detail of it, and I would recognize a copy, however perfect, after five minutes' observation."

• 16:07Speaker 06

  Amazing.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  Okay, so that's a quote. So, obviously, quite cocky about his painting analysis skills. But, but it's actually true because he was an expert, as, as the curator of the Louvre, he knew a lot about what's called crack, crackalure, which is the, the tiny little cracks and fissures that form over time in, as an oil painting ages. The Mona Lisa up close is quite cracked, like, it is, it's covered in sort of checking and cracking. And that is, that is, that becomes something of a DNA signature or a fingerprint for a painting, because that's virtually impossible to duplicate.

• 16:46Speaker 06

  Right.

• 16:46Speaker 04

  You can duplicate the cracking, but to match

• 16:49Speaker 06

  Not in all the right places.

• 16:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. It's not gonna, it's just gonna be impossible. So naturally, lots of odd theories and false accusations are flying all around. One claimed that JP Morgan, the American banker, had the picture stolen so that he could keep it in his private collection.

• 17:06Speaker 06

  Shut up.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. A renowned poet by the name of Guillaume Apoignier, Apoignier, became a suspect. He was, forgive my French accent, by the way.

• 17:17Speaker 06

  No, I think it's great.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  Like, I'm kind of cocky about it, but I know it's terrible.

• 17:21Speaker 06

  It's not terrible.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  So Apoignier was one of the rare folks who apparently was not a fan of the painting and, and at one point had joked about burning the Louvre down. But he was like, he was kind of a, a sort of counterculture poet, bohemian, just in the

• 17:39Speaker 06

  Like, almost like a comic?

• 17:41Speaker 04

  Sure. Yeah. And he was well-known. He was something of a celebrity in the, in the, in French, sort of artistic culture at the time. Apoignier's trail led to a shocking second suspect, Pablo Picasso.

• 17:56Speaker 06

  What?

• 17:57Speaker 04

  Yes. Isn't this wild? They thought that Picasso might have stolen the Mona Lisa.

• 18:03Speaker 06

  Shut up.

• 18:04Speaker 07

  For what?

• 18:05Speaker 04

  Well, the link between Apollinier and Picasso was this shady buddy that they had who had, who had stolen Iberian busts for them from the Louvre. Like, they did have stolen property from the Louvre.

• 18:19Speaker 07

  Wait, why, why, why, why? Because they wanted to learn to copy them? Or just because they thought it was like funny and they were a bunch of crazy drunks?

• 18:26Speaker 04

  I don't know the, I don't know the, uh, the, the truth of that answer, but I do know-

• 18:31Speaker 07

  Ed, how could you not know?

• 18:32Speaker 04

  Well, Picasso did also paint one of the busts. So it, it was for artistic reasons presumably, but like also why a stolen thing? Anyway, it's so badass that Picasso had a stolen bust from the Louvre.

• 18:46Speaker 07

  It really is. It makes me like him more.

• 18:48Speaker 04

  Police investigated them, and this is where that guilty, uh, thing gets in because, um, I read a thing about how, uh, that they were questioned and Picasso was so terrified and overwhelmed with fear that, that he was sobbing and, um-

• 19:06Speaker 07

  That would be me. That would be you.

• 19:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and, and acting so guilty that they were just like, uh, you couldn't have done this.

• 19:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, you're not cool enough.

• 19:18Speaker 04

  You're not, you don't have the sort of like fortitude to, to pull something like this off. But it is a wild connection anyway. After considerable questioning, both Apollinier and Pablo Picasso were, uh, were let go. And, uh, and they, they were not, uh, suspects any longer. Another two years goes by, Sophia Bush, they don't, they don't find it.

• 19:39Speaker 07

  Two years?

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Two years, and they're starting to think, oh my God, maybe the Mona Lisa is gone forever, until in December of 1913, a Florentine art and antiquities dealer, Alfredo Jarry- now I do, now my Italian accent is horrific, but I'm just gonna, I'm diving all in. Um, Alfredo Jarry, I also like to do it like this. I put on this voice for Italian-

• 20:05Speaker 07

  A little bit of brand, though.

• 20:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. Um, uh, he received an odd correspondence from a man calling himself, wait for it, Leonard, or Leonardo, perhaps.

• 20:17Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, calling himself Leonardo. This mystery man claimed he had stolen the Mona Lisa and wanted to return it to its birthplace, Italy.

• 20:28Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  So he's now claiming that he stole it for patriotic reasons.

• 20:32Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  Uh, Jarry was suspicious but intrigued. He agreed to meet with, uh, this mysterious Leonard at the Tripoli Italia Hotel in Florence, and brought along with him the Uffizi Gallery Director, Giovanni Pooggi.

• 20:49Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 20:50Speaker 04

  The Uffizi Gallery, obviously being like the Louvre of Italy, and, uh, this guy knows his shit. Let's put it that way.

• 20:59Speaker 07

  Right.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  So the three men, uh, arranged to meet in Leonard's hotel room, where a wooden trunk was waiting. Leonard removed a false bottom from the trunk, and there, wrapped in a red silk cloth, was the Mona Lisa.

• 21:14Speaker 07

  La Giaconda.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  La Giaconda, yes. The Jac, the Jacund one. Pretty dramatic reveal, right? A red silken cloth?

• 21:22Speaker 07

  This is really giving Thomas Crown a fair.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  Yes, right?

• 21:26Speaker 07

  And I like it.

• 21:27Speaker 04

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• 23:41Speaker 04

  Building up in this bridge was all of these twisted train rails and boxcars and barbed wire and entire buildings. And yes, sadly, of course, lots of bodies piling up against it, forming a temporary dam. Now, this dam, uh, which was sort of catching the, the flood, redirected floodwaters upstream of the Stony Creek, which is the other river that, that kind of comes into the town of Johnstown. So now there's, there's, the flood is going upstream Stony Creek. Uh, it reaches a sort of, a point where gravity then overtakes it again and pulls it back,

• 24:20Speaker 04

  unleashing a, unleashing a second wave that floods back into the city from the opposite direction, which is just completely bonkers.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  It's almost overwhelming to even comprehend what is going on. It sounds like, whoa, but to be in it, to be there, it just seems like, well, no one can survive this. This is, this is an insurvivable situation that you have presented.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  It is nuts. Now, it's about to get even more nuts. If you were writing this script, Paul Scheer-

• 24:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  Uh, and you wanted things to get even worse in this moment, what would you do?

• 24:57Speaker 03

  I mean, I want to break another dam. I want to, I don't know, maybe a dual dams or, or, uh, oh, gosh, I mean-

• 25:04Speaker 04

  Come on, think it through.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Fires. We gotta have a fires. We gotta have a fire.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  Right. Okay, here's how things actually spiraled even more. Let's just throw in a completely new kind of natural disaster. The massive pile of flood debris at the Stone Bridge suddenly caught fire. At least 80 people were trapped inside the wreckage and killed just in this inferno. The fire raged for three full days, lighting up the ruins of the city, which is just heartbreaking and incredible.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  Well, I imagine there's also gasoline, there's things that, there's oil in there, there's things that are gonna catch fire.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  All the industrial waste of, of, of a big industrial town like piled up in there.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's gonna, that's gonna keep it going.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  And trees, like, trees, which is just fire fuel. It's just like a big old mass of tons of trees that had been ripped out.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  So we got black smoke, we got waves, we got fires. This is truly a nightmare of, this is-

• 25:57Speaker 04

  It's epic.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, it's epic. This is like going on the ride at Universal Studios where they recreate the earthquake. We're, we're seeing everything.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  I'm gonna say it's a little worse than that.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  I'm gonna say-

• 26:07Speaker 03

  Maybe King Kong?

• 26:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay, okay. All right, yeah. Maybe they threw the King Kong in the bag. Sure enough, October 5th, tempers flared along the Humboldt River when James Reed's oxen got tangled with another wagon. How dare they? Words were exchanged, and then blows. John Snyder, the driver of the Graves family wagon, struck Reed in the head with the butt of his whip. That's pretty badass. Margaret Reed tried to intervene. She caught a blow from the, the butt of that whip. That's when James Reed snapped. He pulled a knife and fatally stabbed Snyder. So after the stabbing, some in the group wanted to hang James Reed. He claimed self-defense. Tensions were high.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  One vocal member, uh, pushed for punishment of some kind. The group compromised. Reed was banished, sent into the wilderness alone with nothing but a horse. So, uh, John, you've been voted off before. That's true. What does it feel like? What do you think's going through James Reed's head? Um, do you think they handed him a menu and let him choose whether he wanted a cheeseburger or a pizza? No. To make you feel better? Probably not. Probably not. Is that what you got on Survivor? Yeah, you walk off. Oh, right. There's a little like booby prize. Yeah. Yeah, well, no, it's more like, like, it's more like, okay, you've been out there, you know, you're kind of like still in shock, and then, they're very sweet because they know you're, you know, you're, you're just sort of stunned by what's happened.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  And then at some point, they hand you a menu and they're like- Hey, you're you're out, but you get to eat whatever you want. So you get to eat like, you know, you can have a burger or steak or a cheese or a pizza or wings or whatever. So that's a that's a nice moment. You get to have that food again. Do you when you're eating that meal of this, just like the most decadent junk food? That's so delicious at that point. Are you just like, I would imagine in your in your mind, you're like, I think I just won. Like all those, they're the suckers. They're still in there. So much. You're still swirling. And also, you're not that hungry because you just haven't eaten for days. So you eat like a little bit of it. And you're you're already kind of starting to build the story of what happened that you're gonna have to tell people. That's what you're kind of working. You're already kind of you're working over. You're working over what happened in your head. Yeah, still fun, though.

• 28:19Speaker 04

  Uh, so Reed had to leave his wife, Margaret, and their kids behind. But his daughter, Virginia, pulled off a stealthy act of love. With help from their Teamster, she snuck out at night and caught up with her dad, smuggling him his rifle, some ammo, and what little food she could she could find. Meanwhile, the Donner Party pushed forward, low on food, high on stress. And by Halloween, they were just 100 miles from their destination, which is pretty, pretty exciting. That's not like, sounds like a lot, but like, like, given how far they'd come, this is like a big deal. They're getting close. And Virginia kept spotting little notes her father left along the trail, as well as these little clusters of feathers from birds he had killed to eat.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  And he would leave these little symbols, kind of signs for his family to let them know he was alive and ahead of them on the trail and doing okay. But then, John, the snow hit, and it hit hard. And we're talking five feet right out of the gate. Those little signs from Reed to his family stopped. The Donner Party ground to a halt themselves. Provisions were dwindling. Morale was basically toast. They were stuck. They're so close. They're so close. So close. And winter had just begun. When is this? What? What? What is the date roughly when this is happening? A little bit after Halloween at this point. Wow. So they also got unlucky. Because, you know, that's early. They started late.

• 29:44Speaker 04

  They started late, but that's a big snow. That's a big snow to come come in November. The stranded families hunkered down around Truckee Lake, building makeshift cabins. That would later become Donner Lake, in in today's for for today's cartographers, building makeshift cabins and praying for a break in the weather. After eight straight days of relentless snow, they started to suspect they might be in over their heads, quite literally, because the snow's getting really deep. You get it? Yeah, because of the height of the snow, they're they're in over their heads physically and metaphorically. The metaphor being being in over your head. That's good. With snow or water. That's good. That's good storytelling right there. Yeah, it's really good. Desperate for help, a group of 10 men and five women strapped together homemade

• 30:29Speaker 04

  snowshoes and set out on foot. The rest of the party gave them a name that sounds kind of like a badass heavy metal band, The Forlorn Hope. So The Forlorn Hope just sets off on their other their homemade snowshoes. And back at camp, things are really falling apart. Adults are getting delirious, kids were starving, and the cold was sinking in deep. One by one, people started to die. Now, there are a lot of myths that swirl around the Donner Party. But desperate times do call for desperate measures. John, real talk, do you think they actually ate each other?

• 31:09Speaker 04

  Um, yes, I do. I do. I mean, I don't. I don't. I mean, I guess it could just be lore. All right. Well, you're right. I don't know. They did. They did do it. They did. Okay. They did. But it's also, it's been sort of like, I think, spun up into, you know, like, was it this violent cataclysm where they attacked each other and ate? Well, according to historian Michael Wallace, they did eat each other. And he even interviewed descendants who confirmed it. But it wasn't quite the, um. Schmorgasbord. Yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't quite the sort of like violent, like attacking each other in order to eat one another. It was more analogous to like the alive story of the the soccer team in the Andes.

• 31:54Speaker 04

  People who died of natural cause, well, you know, of a diet of exposure. Sure. They're they're eating those people. Fair game. Sure. Shall we say? One of my favorite Monty Python sketches of all time is like, these, you it's it's from one of their record, one of one of their audio albums. And it's just, you hear the creaking of a lifeboat in the ocean, and they start debating, uh, who looks more delicious. And it's so perfectly done. He's like, well, I, he looks like he's got a gammy leg. I'd rather have Richard. And they just start debating. I think I think it's a nice thing to do to say, hey, go for it. Just wait till I'm dead.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, don't kill me. Wait till I'm dead. And then I would just say, you know, wings and drumsticks first. Yeah. Sure. I think. That's fair. That's honestly, that's a fair. I would honor that. If you and I were in this situation, and you said that to me, I'd be like, fair, totally fair. As you turn into the Roadrunner and you and you picture me, and you your your lips are watering, and then you look over and I become a turkey, you know, with a head, I'm like, what's Ed? What are you? What are you looking at me weird for? Because you look like a cartoon turkey with the with those little chef hats on your on the bottom of your feet. Exactly, exactly.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  Pumpkin carving sounds fun, until you're elbow deep in pumpkin guts. There's an easier pumpkin tradition. Reese's Pumpkins. No seeds, no giant kitchen knife, no pressure to create a masterpiece that's just gonna shrivel up on the front porch three days later. And if something goes wrong, just eat it. Every mistake is still pretty delicious. So this Halloween, skip the mess of pumpkin carving and stock up on Reese's Pumpkins.

• 33:44Speaker 02

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• 35:12Speaker 02

  Drink responsibly. Be 21.

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• 35:45Speaker 04

  After six days and 30 miles of open ocean, they finally make landfall. Yes, they've been gone now for a year and a half, and they're finally on solid ground. But don't party yet, because I have a little bit of bad news, which is that.

• 36:03Speaker 05

  No.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  Yes. Elephant Island uninhabited, right? So you can't just check into a Hampton Inn and hit the Applebee's for a hot rack of ribs. This is this. This ordeal is far from over. So they're on solid ground, which is which is great. And and it's been a harrowing like, like, they're basically heroes already. But there's so much more ahead. So Shackleton and his crew still need some serious help getting out of there. So after a few days recuperating and gorging on more of that delicious penguin jerky.

• 36:37Speaker 05

  Yummy.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Yummy. Shackleton and four other men once again boarded one of those tiny little lifeboats. And it's just that this is they basically are like sending off just a tiny crew to go get help while the rest wait on Elephant Island. They board a tiny lifeboat named the James Caird and set sail for South Georgia Island. No big deal. It's only 800 miles away.

• 37:08Speaker 05

  My God.

• 37:09Speaker 04

  But alas, after 16 brutal days, again, hot, like incredibly high seas, like, like crazy stormy winds, they make it. They make it to South Georgia.

• 37:25Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 37:27Speaker 04

  But Nick.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  Guess what?

• 37:30Speaker 05

  Oh, and what?

• 37:31Speaker 04

  They're on the wrong side of the island.

• 37:34Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 37:35Speaker 04

  They now.

• 37:36Speaker 05

  What do you mean?

• 37:37Speaker 04

  Well, because I think because the the currents and the wind and the storms were so intense, they couldn't land actually at this little whaling station that they were aiming for. And they actually landed on the exact wrong side of the island. So now they're exhausted, starving, frozen, basically solid, and they have to climb over a mountain to get to this little whaling outpost. And guess what? They did it. They just did it. These guys are unstoppable. This is Ernest Shackleton and a few of his, uh, his top crew. They get all the way over the mountain and they descend into this little, uh, whaling outpost.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  And the, uh, the, the Norwegian, I think he's a Norwegian guy that kind of runs this place. And he's just like, this is impossible. Like, humans can't just show up on South Georgia island with like inexplicably. And he's very.

• 38:35Speaker 05

  You don't know Ernie.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  You don't know.

• 38:37Speaker 05

  You don't, you don't know Ernie.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  Have you met Ernie? Um, obviously the heat, this, this guy is super hospitable, gives them a warm welcome. Um, they're, they, they, they rest up, they recuperate. Uh, but now, of course, they have to go back and rescue everyone on, still on Elephant Island. Uh, and it, but it takes now, it takes a long time to get the resources together to do that. So, uh, it's another 126 days before they finally returned to Elephant Island on August 30th, 1916, and rescued the remainder of the crew and sailed back to civilization.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  They arrived in Chile 638 days after their initial voyage started. And Nick, brace yourself. Every single member of the crew survived.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  That's crazy.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  There were, there was obviously a very tragic loss of, of life with the dogs and Mrs. Chippy. Um, but, uh, but the crew, the human crew all survived.

• 39:47Speaker 05

  Did they eat the dogs?

• 39:49Speaker 04

  I think that some of the dogs were consumed. But at that point, you're like, hey, Billy, if you die, we're eating you. You know?

• 39:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. I don't know. I think if you had to eat a man or a dog first, where would you go?

• 40:05Speaker 04

  Dog? I mean, if you're gonna put me in that, like, Sophie's Choice situation.

• 40:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, me, def, oh yeah, me too. Yeah.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:14Speaker 05

  For sure.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 40:15Speaker 05

  Oh, for sure.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, really, you're, you're thinking real hard about that, but, but we're gonna let it go.

• 40:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 04

  You're, you're a recreational cannibal.

• 40:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm a fine, young cannibal. I'm a fine, middle-aged cannibal.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  Because no one could confirm exactly what happened to Morgan, there were no consequences for his likely murder. The question of whether he was even dead remained technically unanswered. The Masons had stayed quiet, the trail had gone cold, and the court's hands were tied.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  That's an interesting thing of that it's all the powerful people and then he gets arrested and actually brought to trial where it's like the judge is here, then the judge is like, the judge is overseeing the trial. Now the judge is on trial because it's like those are all, that's why that's such a good, uh, system is like all the power, the, the power retains itself. So like.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  You mean good for them?

• 41:13Speaker 03

  Good for the Masons.

• 41:15Speaker 04

  Good for the Masons. It's good for the good old boys.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  Good for the good old boys.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  Like, that's someone on every, you know. Yeah. Yeah, they, they run all of the institutions.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:24Speaker 04

  So like, whether it's the courts, the prisons, the legal system, the, you know, the banks, like, they got, they got all the, all the cheddar. It's all working for them.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  You get all the secrets.

• 41:35Speaker 04

  Maybe they just threw him on a ship, though, to like Europe and he went and started a new life. Yeah.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  Take a vacation.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  Right? Yeah, who knows? It's interesting, the, the level of institutional discipline that was on display here. Like, they never, the Masons were so tight lipped about all of this. And the people who did actually serve time, that was for the kidnapping. It was not for the murder. Um, they couldn't, there was no, no way to verify he was murdered. So, um, all of this, all of this crazy effort on the part of the Freemasons, uh, did not manage to stop the book from being released. Miller, Miller published it anyway in 1827. Yeah.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  Can we get that book? I want that book so bad.

• 42:25Speaker 04

  You can. Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  You can?

• 42:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, illustrations of, of Masonry. I got so excited. You can get that book. I think it's, it's, uh, the contents are fairly lame by 21st century standards, but at the time, it was, this book was extremely scandalous and it was a bestseller, which only fanned the flames of speculation around Morgan's disappearance. So, again, like, we're in way upstate western New York, around the Finger Lakes of New York, which is like ve, like rural today. So, at that time, it's kind of the hinterlands of American settlement and, um, and yet, this, so, so you would think this is like kind of like a local dispute, a local crime. Yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  But it's blowing up, in part because this book really catches fire. And in the months that followed, uh, two competing theories emerged. The first circulated by several Masons was that Morgan had been taken across the border into Canada and paid $500 to disappear permanently and never return to the US. Georgia, you nailed that. The second theory was a lot darker. According to this account, the New York Masons had attempted to hand Morgan off to their Canadian counterparts who refused to get involved and left with no other option. The New York men waited Morgan down with stones and dropped him into the Niagara River. This was not just an idle rumor. Several Masons maintained it was the truth until their dying days, including a man named

• 43:54Speaker 04

  Henry L. Valance, who claimed direct knowledge of Morgan's fate and, uh, and named the Niagara River as his final resting place. Got Hoffa vibes. Yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  It's so extreme, though. It's like, you guys are, you got together because you're bricklayers and plasterers and you can build amazing stuff. Now you're knocking people off to keep your secret handshake a secret. It just is so, it's, they've, they're out over their skis. I'm sorry to be judgmental of the Masons, but I don't like this at all.

• 44:27Speaker 04

  Snafu is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snafu Media, a partnership between Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company. Post-production and creative support from Good Egg Audio. Our executive producers are me, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Glenn Basner, Andy Kim, and Dylan Fagan. This episode was produced by Alyssa Martino and Tori Smith. Our managing producer is Carl Nellis. Our video editor is Jared Smith. Technical direction and engineering from Nick Dooley. Additional story editing from Carl Nellis. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Logo and branding by Matt Gosson and The Collected Works. Legal review from Dan Welsh, Megan Halson, and Caroline Johnson.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  Special thanks to Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, and Nikki Ator. While I have you, don't forget to pick up a copy of my book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screwups. It's available now from any book retailer. Just go to snafu-book.com. Thanks for listening and see you next week.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance. It's running out of Reese's cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes, and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's cups, things can get scary fast. Especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra. Because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's cups doesn't need to be.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Halloween's almost here and I've got plans. My first stop is Total Wine & More for cold beer, ready to drink cocktails, and a bottle of wine to share. And I know I'm getting the lowest prices. Get the fun started at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly, be 21. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.