The Fact of the Matter

Summary

Radiolab – "The Fact of the Matter" (Sept. 24, 2012)

Episode Overview

This episode of Radiolab, hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, explores the nature of truth and fact—how we determine what's real, what evidence should count, and how the facts themselves can become elusive or slippery. Through three distinct but thematically linked stories—a photographic investigation from the Crimean War, the mystery of "Yellow Rain" chemical warfare claims in Southeast Asia, and a deeply personal search for truth in a friendship—the show probes whether facts alone are enough, and what happens when competing narratives and emotional realities clash.

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1. Chasing Truth: The Crimean War Photograph

(Begins ~[01:10])

Key Points

• Errol Morris, acclaimed documentary filmmaker, recounts his obsession with solving a photographic mystery: Did 19th-century photographer Roger Fenton stage the famous "Valley of the Shadow of Death" war photo?
• Two nearly identical photographs exist: one with cannonballs littering the road, one without.
• Historians and essays (notably Susan Sontag) have long debated which was first and whether the dramatic version was staged.
• Morris investigates by traveling to Crimea, scrutinizing shadows, and eventually enlists optical engineer Dennis Purcell to do a forensic comparison.

Notable Quotes & Moments

• "Nothing's so obvious that it's obvious." – Errol Morris on Sontag's claim ([05:11])
• "The pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity." – Errol Morris ([09:28])
• The breakthrough: Purcell notices rocks that have shifted between photos, proving which came first. The empty road preceded the one with cannonballs; Fenton staged the dramatic photo.
  • "Rocks don't fall uphill, they only fall downhill. It's gravity." – Errol Morris ([12:47])

Reflection:

• Ultimately, the successful detective work shows the photo was staged for dramatic effect, raising questions about authenticity, intention, and the nature of photographic "truth."
• Morris ponders the emotional significance—facts vs. feelings:
  • "To make it look the way it felt." – Dennis Purcell ([13:36])
  • "Do I really care whether he put the cannonballs on the road or not?...I do and I don't." – Errol Morris ([14:13])

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2. The Mystery of Yellow Rain

(Begins ~[21:46])

Key Points

• Story unfolds via CIA veteran Merle Pribineau, survivor Eng Yang (with niece Kalia), Harvard chemist Matt Meselson, and others.
• After the Vietnam War, the Hmong people in Laos are attacked; reports emerge of yellow drops ("Yellow Rain") falling from aircraft, leaving people ill or dead.
• Early testing of yellow samples (on leaves, etc.) shows high toxin (T2, a mycotoxin) content, leading U.S. officials to accuse the Soviet Union of chemical warfare.
  • "There is conclusive evidence that the Soviet government has provided toxins for use in Laos." – President Reagan ([29:39])
• The story becomes global political ammunition, eventually prompting American chemical weapons production ([29:25]).

Complications & Counter-Theories

• Some scientists note a high pollen content in the yellow samples—leading Matt Meselson to doubt the "chemical weapon" explanation.
• Breakthrough: Tom Seeley (Cornell biologist) suggests the yellow rain is actually honeybee feces, which often falls en masse as "cleansing flights."
  • "The State Department explanation is not parsimonious...this yellow stuff is not a chemical weapon...it's bee fecal spots." – Tom Seeley ([32:06]–[32:24])
• Meselson and Seeley go to Thailand, observe bee cleansing flights, and confirm the phenomenon.
• Retesting of samples finds no toxin; likely lab contamination contributed to initial 'toxin findings.'
• Despite scientific evidence, Yellow Rain remains listed as a potential chemical weapon in U.S. Army manuals and persists as a powerful narrative for the Hmong.

Emotional & Ethical Tensions

• Eng Yang refuses to accept the scientific explanation; to him, the attacks and deaths were very real, tied to direct experience.
  • "I speak to what I've seen and there is no inkling in my mind that those deaths were not caused by starvation, dysentery—it was chemicals that were killing my people." – Eng Yang ([37:13])
• The interview with Eng grows tense as the hosts try to separate scientific 'fact' from lived experience.
  • "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, but I'm not interested...I think the interview is..." – Kalia Yang ([40:18]–[41:15])

Reflection and Reassessment

• The Radiolab team wrestles with whether factual accuracy can overshadow or minimize human suffering.
  • "What do you do when three truths are right at the same time?" – Errol Morris ([44:46])
• Pat Walters issues an apology for lacking sensitivity during the interview, recognizing the weight of trauma and the limits of journalistic objectivity. ([45:00])

---

3. Can You Truly Know Someone? (The Tim Kreider Story)

(Begins ~[48:34])

Key Points

• Writer Tim Kreider shares the story of his friendship with "Skelly," a man whose life was full of contradictions, fabrications, and secrets.
• Skelly tells stories—a published novel that never appeared, a daughter in France, mysterious absences—that his friends quietly choose to ignore or not confront.
  • "He just seemed like a really good guy who happened to lie more than most." – Tim Kreider ([53:51])
• After Skelly’s death, Kreider and friends discover the extent of his isolation, mental distress, and the hidden reality he kept from everyone.

Notable Quotes & Moments

• "He had so clearly determined not to let people into that chamber of his life." – Tim Kreider ([62:35])
• "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." – Tim Kreider ([66:03])

Reflection:

• The segment raises the issue of what counts as truly "knowing" a person—are the facts of their life enough? Or is shared experience and empathy a deeper form of understanding?
• Kreider finds that, despite not knowing many facts, the emotional reality of friendship remains authentic.

---

Episode Takeaways

• Facts are slippery: The nature of truth is often more complex than a collection of verifiable facts. Context, perspective, and emotional reality shape how facts are interpreted and what they mean to us individually and collectively.
• Objectivity vs. Empathy: Seeking objective truth is vital (whether in photojournalism, forensic science, or reporting), but this pursuit can sometimes conflict with the emotional truths of people’s lived experiences.
• Multiple truths can coexist: As Errol Morris notes, several interpretations might all be "right" depending on the standpoint—historian, scientist, survivor, or friend.

---

Notable Quotes

• "Nothing's so obvious that it's obvious." – Errol Morris ([05:11])
• "The pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity." – Errol Morris ([09:28])
• "The State Department explanation is not parsimonious...this yellow stuff is not a chemical weapon...it's bee fecal spots." – Tom Seeley ([32:06]–[32:24])
• "What do you do when three truths are right at the same time?" – Errol Morris ([44:49])
• "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." – Tim Kreider ([66:03])

---

Important Timestamps

• Crimean War Photograph Mystery & Investigation – [01:10]–[16:34]
• The "Yellow Rain" Controversy: Science, Testimony, and Politics – [21:46]–[47:52]
• Can You Know Someone? (Tim Kreider & Skelly) – [48:34]–[66:21]

---

Radiolab: "The Fact of the Matter" is a meditation on the limits and powers of facts—challenging listeners to consider what it really means to seek and know the truth.

Transcript

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[Errol Morris]

Wait, you're listening.

[Eng Yang]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right.

[Errol Morris]

Okay. All right.

[Jad Abumrad]

You're listening to Radiolab Radio Lab from WNYC.

[Errol Morris]

And npr. Okay, let's see. Hello? Hello, Hi, is this Errol Morris?

I think it's me.

Hello, this is Jad from Radiolab.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hi.

[Errol Morris]

Thank you for your very, very nice but somewhat disturbing email.

What disturbed you in the email?

The term truth fascist.

[Pat Walters]

You called Errol Morris a truth fascist. What were you thinking?

[Errol Morris]

I was trying to. I wrote him an email to try and get him to come talk to us. I don't know why he's used.

That is a truth fascist.

That was meant lovingly, I should say. Wasn't exactly the right choice of words. Fundamentalist.

Oh, I like it.

But really what I meant is this is a guy who's always trying to get to the bottom of things. He's made all these documentaries. Thin Blue Line, got a guy off Death Row, actually, in A Thin Blue Line. He made the Fog of War.

[Pat Walters]

Vernon, Florida.

[Errol Morris]

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, the thing that drives him, the thing that's in all of his films, this desire, relentless desire to figure things out, to get to truth. And it all starts with a photograph.

One of the very, very first photographs of war, 1855.

Which war?

This is the Crimean War that involved Great Britain, France, Russia, the Ottoman Empire. And believe it or not, Sardinia.

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

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.

Just one dirt road between two hills.

There's nobody in the photograph.

No birds, no trees, no people.

There's really nothing living in the photograph.

Not even grass.

Nothing.

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

Cannonballs everywhere.

As soon as you notice them, the photograph springs to life.

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 because you're holding this piece of film that was literally ripped.

[Dennis Purcell]

Right out of that world.

[Errol Morris]

But the context is gone.

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

[Jad Abumrad]

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, exact same camera position, but in this other photograph, the cannonballs that were on the road are gone.

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

Yes.

He thought, that's weird. Let me look into that.

And there was a passage in.

And he ends up reading this essay by Susan Sontag where she talks about.

These photographs as though it's just obvious what was going on.

He was like, ugh, that word.

Well, I don't like the word obvious.

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. Yes, it's obvious.

But that word, nothing's so obvious that it's obvious. And so I started investigating.

And so began a ludicrous, obsessive, dogged, but kind of sublime pro of this slippery little fact that actually inspired this whole hour.

[Pat Walters]

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

[Errol Morris]

Like, what is truth? Is it just a pile of facts?

[Pat Walters]

And how much does the fact of the matter matter?

[Errol Morris]

I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Pat Walters]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Errol Morris]

Back to Errol Morris.

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

Didn't find much.

I interviewed five historians who ordered the photograph in one way, saying, yes, it's.

Obvious, he posed the pictures.

2.

This was a bit of a surprise.

Ordered the photographs in the opposite way, really.

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.

Exactly.

Was that kind of recycling common practice?

Yes, indeed. It was, actually.

So you had a tie, Two historians saying he faked it, two saying he.

Didn'T, and the fifth tiebreaker jump back and forth.

[Pat Walters]

I like that. You tried to call him the tiebreaker and he didn't break the tie.

[Errol Morris]

Well, of course, none of these things is subject to vote. Truth isn't something that you vote on at this point.

He says he was feeling a very familiar irritation. He thought, you know what? Forget historical interpretations.

What if I could, from the photograph itself, the very photograph itself, determine which photograph came first from just the photo? So I started abing the photographs, just.

Sort of superimposing them on each other and flipping back and forth A, B.

B, A, A, B, B, A, et cetera, et cetera.

Nothing.

And then he thinks, I know what I can do. I can start studying the shadows. Which meant, yeah, let's go to the Crimea.

Are you serious?

[Pat Walters]

Yeah.

[Errol Morris]

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.

And I had terrible trouble finding this place.

Is it marked?

[Pat Walters]

No.

[Errol Morris]

All of the guides kept taking me to the Charge of the Light Brigade. That site where Tennyson wrote about the Valley of Death.

[Jad Abumrad]

No, no, no, no, no.

[Errol Morris]

Not the Valley of Death. The Valley of the Shadow of Death.

But finally, a guide named Olga, she was fabulous, helps him locate the spot.

It's completely desolate, undeveloped.

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, could.

I borrow some cannonballs?

[Pat Walters]

Oh, man.

[Errol Morris]

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

But nothing.

[Pat Walters]

Nothing.

[Errol Morris]

There was endless questions about cloud cover, whether you could even Measure the shadows on these photographs.

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

Artifacts of how the prints were made and on and on.

So was the trip useful at all?

Not so much. Oh, man.

[Pat Walters]

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.

And then he went home with no answer to his question. Only that continuing irritation. But he was like, no, no, not done yet.

Look, when you investigate anything, I don't care what it is, whether it's a Fenton photograph or Abu Ghraib or the Muravadalis 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. So, yes, the Fenn photographs worried me that I might not be able to resolve it to my satisfaction.

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

Purcell, who, who is very, very good with Photoshop.

We called him up.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello. Turns out, well, I'm an optical engineer.

[Errol Morris]

So he's not just good at Photoshop, he actually builds high tech cameras. In any case, they were talking at.

[Jad Abumrad]

This party and the Fenton picture came up.

[Errol Morris]

Ariel told him he had this problem.

[Jad Abumrad]

Of wondering which came first and said, could you take a look at these?

[Errol Morris]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Then I immediately started to compare them.

[Errol Morris]

Right away he starts noticing differences between the two.

[Jad Abumrad]

The light changed, the weather was different, shadows.

[Errol Morris]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Photos, flipping the back and forth, back.

[Errol Morris]

And forth between the two photographs.

On the road, flip. Off the road, flip. On the road, flip. Off the road, flip. It's doing this for hours. Off the road, flip. On the road. And then he sees it.

[Jad Abumrad]

The rocks on the left hand side.

[Errol Morris]

This little group of pebbles up on the left bank. Every time he flipped back and forth, flip, flip, those little rocks popped out. They moved just a little bit. And when he zoomed in, he could see that there were five of them.

[Jad Abumrad]

Fred, George, Oswald, Lionel and Marmaduke, we named them.

[Errol Morris]

Yes.

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Down maybe 8 inches or 9 inches.

[Errol Morris]

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

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

The one with the cannonballs on the road was the second picture.

[Errol Morris]

Imagine the scene.

Fenton comes upon an empty road, but he sees cannonballs on the hill.

So he and whoever was helping him would have walked along the sides of the road and lifted up cannonballs, move them onto the road. In that process, they would have invariably knocked into rocks.

[Jad Abumrad]

And rocks don't fall uphill, they only fall downhill.

[Errol Morris]

It's gravity.

So case closed. This has been resolved.

Yeah, I think it has.

So Susan Sontag was right for the wrong reasons. But she was right. Fenton staged a photograph. So in addition to being one of the first photographs of war, this is one of the first photographic lies.

[Pat Walters]

I guess he just figured it was a better photo.

[Errol Morris]

Yeah.

Or you could say Fenton was a coward.

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

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

Or maybe he was after some kind of emotional truth. That's what Dennis Purcell thinks.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's obvious why he did it.

[Errol Morris]

Here's that word again.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Errol Morris]

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

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

Was, but isn't that kind of the question, at the end of the day.

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

Well, I still hope so. I hope you do.

[Pat Walters]

I hope you do.

[Errol Morris]

Don't you?

I do and I don't.

[Pat Walters]

Really.

[Errol Morris]

Why would you go through all this, then?

I guess this is what I take from it, in flipping back and forth between those two photographs.

Flip, he says. You see the rocks move. Flip. And when you see the rocks move, flip, flop. You imagine feet kicking those rocks. And when you imagine feet kicking those rocks, 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.

[Pat Walters]

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

[Errol Morris]

Yes, my father died when I was 2 years old. And perhaps the deepest, one of the deepest mysteries of my life. Who was he? Here are 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.

Errol Morris's 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello, this is Dennis Purcell. Hi. This is Errol Morrison. He is about to read the credits for you.

[Robert Krulwich]

Here you go.

[Jad Abumrad]

Here we go.

[Robert Krulwich]

Radiolab is supported in part by the.

[Jad Abumrad]

National Science foundation and and the Alfred.

[Robert Krulwich]

P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of.

[Jad Abumrad]

Science and technology in the modern world. More information about sloan@w www.floan.org Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. That finishes the credits by end of message. Radiolab is supported by Bilt. Nobody wants to pay rent. But if you have to, Bilt works.

[Errol Morris]

To make it more worthwhile.

[Jad Abumrad]

By paying rent through Bilt, you can.

[Eng Yang]

Earn flexible points that can be redeemed.

[Jad Abumrad]

Toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and more. But it doesn't stop there. You can dine out at your favorite local restaurants and earn additional points, get.

[Robert Krulwich]

VIP treatment, certain fitness studios, and enjoy.

[Jad Abumrad]

Exclusive experiences just for built members. Every month, earn points on rent and around your neighborhood, wherever you call home, by going to joinbilt.com Radiolab that's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com Radiolab.

[Eng Yang]

Hey, I'm Molly Webster, and this is an ad by BetterHelp. So it happens every year. The seasons are changing, the days are getting shorter, and basically, once it becomes dark outside of my window, I feel like the rest of the world disappears and I'm just alone and there's nothing left to do. Watch television. This November, Better Help is asking everyone to reach out to our people. That could be your family, your friends, your neighbors, and to resist this call of the cocoon and yeah, reaching out can take some courage. I've got text messages from January I haven't responded to and you know what? I'm gonna write them back right now. Hi, sorry I've been missing. How are you? Why don't we all do this sooner? Therapy is the same way. BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. You just fill out a short questionnaire and they find a licensed therapist who they think you'll like. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com Radiolab that's betterhelp.com Radiolab.

[Dennis Purcell]

Radiolab is supported by Rippling Finance. Teams often spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets and fixing errors across disconnected spend tools. This can be frustrating. And that's not software as a service. That's sad software as a disservice. If you've been thinking about replacing stitched together tech stacks with one platform for all departments, Rippling can help. Rippling is a unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance, helping people replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system designed to help give leaders clarity, speed and control. By uniting employees, teams and departments in one system, Rippling works to remove the bottlenecks, busy work and silos in business software. With Rippling you can choose to run hr, IT and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps. Right now you can get 6 months free when you go to rippling.com Radiolab learn more at r I p p l-I n g.com Radiolab terms and conditions apply. Radiolab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. The show is hosted by Alex Honnold, who you may recognize from Free Solo, where he climbed El Capitan without ropes. Now he's turning his focus to the biggest challenge of protecting the only planet we've got. Every episode brings you stories that prove climate optimism and isn't naive. It's a strategy. The episodes span the globe, from Arctic scientists and Amazon forest guardians to entrepreneurs reimagining fashion and food systems. You'll hear from explorers, scientists, activists and storytellers who are working to reshape the future in practical, human ways. In one episode, Alex sits down with wildlife photographer Bertie Gregory to discuss how animals can teach humans resiliency, empathy and and hope in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Check out Planet Visionaries Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Errol Morris]

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab.

[Pat Walters]

And today we've been investigating the truth.

[Errol Morris]

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

[Pat Walters]

The story begins with our producer, Pat Walters.

[Errol Morris]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

So maybe take me to what, the summer of 1981. Okay. In the summer of 1981, I was being transferred from one overseas post to another. This is Merle Pribineau, and I'm a retired CIA officer. But in 1981, Merle was still at the CIA, and he was posted out in the sticks out in the boonies somewhere in Southeast Asia. And why were you.

[Pat Walters]

Oh, well, that's.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, 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. Can you say what country you in? I'd rather not. 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 Path at Laos.

[Eng Yang]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

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 a tribe called the Hmong. And Eng says as soon as the Americans left Laos and Vietnamese soldiers showed.

[Eng Yang]

Up in his village, there was a hundred of them.

[Jad Abumrad]

They came in cars, 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.

[Eng Yang]

Of the picture, that's when the killing started.

[Jad Abumrad]

Eng says it began with Isolated attacks.

[Eng Yang]

Villagers started getting killed in random fields.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Eng Yang]

Before long, it was a village. And I know the name of the village. I know the name of the village.

[Jad Abumrad]

Village chief, the Papat 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.

[Eng Yang]

Until one day, the Pathet Lao went over and slaughtered the whole village. That's when we knew that the laws of humanity had been terminated.

[Jad Abumrad]

And not long after that, Eng and his family, along with thousands of other Hmong, fled. Their villages, went into hiding in the jungle. This is where things stood. When Merle got his assignment and before he left D.C. and flew over to Asia, I stopped in our headquarters, and while I was there, I was briefed by our desk officer, who told him about what was happening. The Communist raids, the Hmong fleeing. But then the desk officer said something kind of odd. There had been these reports from refugees, refugees like Eng, about this yellow. These yellow droplets falling from the air. PBS went out to the camps and interviewed some of the refugees. When the aircraft flew over our area, they said this yellow stuff that was falling out of the sky was coming from planes. We only saw the powder spray from it. Some of the refugees talked about powder. Some talked about liquid, a yellow mist sometimes. 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, when the powder reached the ground, it stuck on everything, left behind these yellow.

[Eng Yang]

Spots, yellow drops everywhere, all over the landscape.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Eng Yang]

I saw a dead cow and two dead pigs and several dead chickens. And all the people who'd been exposed, they were all having stomach trouble.

[Jad Abumrad]

Eng says people were doubled over, covering.

[Eng Yang]

Their stomach, writhing in pain, throwing up.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Eng Yang]

There was a person, and I have the photo right here in my keeping. Her Kaupa Mahu had been exposed and her eyes were destroyed entirely.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Eng Yang]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Merle says the thought in the CIA was that this might be some kind of chemical weapon. Right. Did it have a name at that point? Yellow Rain. Yellow Rain. By the time Merle got to Southeast Asia, hundreds of these reports had come in. Hundreds and several thousand people had been reported killed by this stuff. 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. And you have to rely on evidence, which they just didn't have. No. Until all of a sudden, they did. It was just a few months after Merle got there and they started getting these reports that refugees had collected samples off of leaves. Some refugees had shown up covered in these yellow spots. Here, here's a close up. This is Matt Messelson. 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. Here are some on leaves brought back. These are all dried out now. The leaves are small, black, brittle, which only makes the spots stand out even more because they're this incredible bright yellow. They're tiny. They're 2 or 3 millimeters across. And Matt says when scientists put these leaves under a microscope and look, they saw that the spots had a very high content of toxin called T2, which is a poison. And while T2 does grow in nature, the concentrations that they found in these spots was way too high to have occurred naturally, which demonstrated that this was, in fact, a new type of chemical weapon. We now have physical evidence. This is Secretary of State Alexander Haig in the fall of 1981, which has been analyzed and found to contain abnormally high levels of potent mycotoxins. Good evening. Poisonous substance.

[Robert Krulwich]

The United States said today it has.

[Jad Abumrad]

Evidence that chemical warfare has been waged in parts of Southeast Asia. The U.S. obtained a test sample of twigs and leaves. Chemical analysis found high levels of three toxic chemicals. The news of this poisonous yellow rain became an instant political crisis. Refugees in camps along the Thai border have been telling for years of a yellow rain.

[Errol Morris]

A rain that was followed in minutes.

[Jad Abumrad]

By vomiting, bleeding and death. Because everybody knew the Lao and Vietnamese armies were not capable of making this stuff.

[Robert Krulwich]

No.

[Jad Abumrad]

Vietnam could not even make their own rifles. They were pretty backward in that sense, which really left only one likely suspect. Circumstantial evidence points to the Russian.

[Errol Morris]

The Soviet Union may be engaging in biological warfare.

[Jad Abumrad]

The Soviets, of course, denied they were Involved. The Soviets said it was a slanderous accusation, but the US Government did not believe them. The Soviet Union and their allies are.

[Errol Morris]

Violating the Geneva Protocol of 1925.

[Jad Abumrad]

And in the summer of 1982, in a speech to the UN, President Reagan officially accused the Soviet Union of supplying and using chemical weapons in Southeast Asia. There is conclusive evidence that the Soviet government has provided toxins for use in Laos. In Campuchea, three years later, Congress passed legislation authorizing the production of a chemical bomb called the Big eye. It's a 500 pound bomb and it's meant to be carried on high performance aircraft. And within two years, a factory in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, began churning out thousands of bombs designed to carry sarin gas. 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, In November of 1982, there were two days of press briefings by the State Department. 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'd found something else. All the samples had a very high content of pollen 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, this was a very, very clever communist mixture. Somehow the Russians had found a way to use pollen as a vector to transmit this toxin. 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 of just the right diameter to penetrate to the depths of the lungs, thereby making it a more deadly weapon. Matt remembers hearing that and thinking, that just seemed completely bonkers to me. I knew a lot about chemical weapons. He'd never heard of anything like that before. No. 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

I remember the phone call.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is the guy who called Tom Seeley.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm a professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University.

[Jad Abumrad]

Matt picked up the phone. Tom said to him, hey, I analyzed the samples you sent me.

[Robert Krulwich]

And then he said, the State Department.

[Jad Abumrad]

Explanation is not parsimonious.

[Errol Morris]

Meaning?

[Jad Abumrad]

Meaning this yellow stuff is not a chemical weapon. Then he paused and he said, it's bee.

[Robert Krulwich]

And then he used a four letter Word.

[Jad Abumrad]

I think we can use that word. Is that all right? Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

He said it was beep.

[Errol Morris]

Bee what? Beep.

[Robert Krulwich]

What we call fecal spots of honeybees.

[Errol Morris]

That was their idea.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. They were like, look, here's the thing. Every winter, bees kind of hibernate 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. So they stay inside, confined to their hives all winter, feeding their babies, fattening up the new worker bees for the next season. And since they're very fastidious, they do not defecate in their nests.

[Errol Morris]

They don't poop all winter.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right. So they become immensely constipated.

[Robert Krulwich]

And then on the first warm days.

[Jad Abumrad]

They all fly out en masse to, like, 100ft off the ground and defecate all at the same time. And it's called a cleansing flight. And anybody who cultures bees knows this. And if you get caught beneath this situation, Tom says it feels like light.

[Robert Krulwich]

Raindrops hitting your arms, hitting your forehead.

[Jad Abumrad]

So this was their theory, that the yellow rain was not a chemical weapon. It was just bee droppings. They published this, and the government was like, seriously? Even a bunch of prestigious scientists came forward and said it was an absurd explanation, kind of crazy and embarrassing. A, let's not forget that this rain was toxic, and B, honeybees in Southeast Asia don't even hibernate. There is no winter in Southeast Asia. It's the tropics. So Southeast Asian bees never get constipated and they never do the big poop.

[Errol Morris]

Those aren't good objections.

[Jad Abumrad]

No. Matt and Tom counter by going to Thailand. Tom and I flew out there. They go into the jungle, they find some beehives, and one day they're staring up at a hive, and in a flash, they see it happen. The bees shoot up into the sky.

[Robert Krulwich]

And within a minute or two after that, we started to get rained upon.

[Errol Morris]

By the bee feces.

[Jad Abumrad]

So they tell the government, sorry, we think it happens here, too.

[Errol Morris]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

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. The British never found a trace The Swedes never found a trace. The way Matt sees it, the analyses were wrong. He thinks that lab, the lab in Minnesota that had been doing this work, inadvertently contaminated the pollen. Because this lab did lots of other work with mycotoxins, large quantities of these toxins. 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

And my friend, it's a good friend.

[Jad Abumrad]

Pongthep, who was part of that team.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Which hasn't ever happened. In fact, Yellow Rain is still. That's Merle again in the U.S. army Chemical Corps Manual is, you know, one of the possible weapons that might be used. Oh really? Yeah, it's still there. It's still there.

[Eng Yang]

I have a clarifying question before I interpret that. So they found toxins initially and then when they looked again at those samples, the toxins were no longer there.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's right.

[Eng Yang]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Eng Yang]

Seems I interpret that for my uncle.

[Jad Abumrad]

A little shaky. Eng's response was if this was just.

[Eng Yang]

Bee feces, 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

We asked Kalia to tell Eng what the scientists had told us. That the Hmong were definitely dying. The Hmong were under real attack. They were being fired at from airplanes and by soldiers. 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.

[Eng Yang]

I speak to what I've seen and there is no inkling in my mind that those deaths were not caused by starvation, dysentery, it was chemicals that were killing my people.

[Jad Abumrad]

So we wanted to know, and this was an honest question, did he see something that would contradict the scientist's story.

[Pat Walters]

Did the source of the rain. Was there always a plain and then rain, a plan, or did sometimes the rain happened without a plane?

[Eng Yang]

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

[Pat Walters]

We don't know whether there was a plane causing it. It was just. You just see the dust.

[Eng Yang]

You have to understand that the planes are shooting bullets and bombs every day, all the time. And 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. 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 with my own eyes. I saw pollen that could kill grass, could kill leaves, could kill trees.

[Pat Walters]

But he himself is 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.

[Eng Yang]

You know, that there were chemicals that being used against the Hmong in the mountains of Laos, Whether this is the chemicals from the bombs or yellow rain chemicals were being used. It feels to him like this is a semantic debate. And it feels 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.

[Pat Walters]

As far as I can tell, your uncle didn't see the bee pollen fall, your uncle didn't see a plane. All of this is hearsay.

[Eng Yang]

My uncle says for the last 20 years, he didn't know that anybody was interested in the deaths of the Hmong people. He agreed to do this interview because you were interested. You know what happened to the Meng 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 has been questioned again and again is not a surprise to him or to me. I agreed to the interview for the same reason that Radiolab was interested in the Hmong story, that they were interested in documenting the dust 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. 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.

[Errol Morris]

Now that. That wasn't the end of the interview. They. They kept on talking. Robert and Bat 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 Yangs 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 going to 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

That somehow that moment was when the whole story changed for me.

[Errol Morris]

How exactly?

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Errol Morris]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Errol Morris]

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 Krulwich]

Right.

[Pat Walters]

So you are exactly what she's saying.

[Errol Morris]

So you're.

[Pat Walters]

And that is wrong. That is absolutely, to my mind, that is not fair to us.

[Errol Morris]

How is it not fair?

[Pat Walters]

It's not fair to ask us to not consider the other stories and the other frames of this 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?

[Jad Abumrad]

But, yeah, I mean, I do think that. I don't know. I think that until she. 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.

[Errol Morris]

Yeah. Yes.

[Pat Walters]

I thought. I thought her reaction was very balancing, but her desire was not for balance. Her desire was to monopolize the story. And that we can't.

[Errol Morris]

I'm not sure we can say that.

[Pat Walters]

Though, if you listen to the words. That's what she said.

[Errol Morris]

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 it's like. And 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?

[Pat Walters]

This is where we stop. So that was our original conversation. 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. I had no idea what the Yangs were going to say. And when they got angry, I was embarrassed. And when I got angry in my conversation with Jed 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 truth. But in this case, given how much Mr. Yang had already suffered, I should have done it with more respect and more gently.

[Eng Yang]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

More information about [e-mail].

[Dennis Purcell]

Radiolab is supported by rippling. Finance teams often spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling spreadsheets and fixing errors across disconnected spend tools this can be frustrating. And that's not software as a service. That's sad software as a disservice. If you've been thinking about replacing stitched together tech stacks with one platform for all departments, Rippling can help. Rippling is a unified platform for global hr, payroll, IT and finance, helping people replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system. Designed to help give leaders clarity, speed and control. By uniting employees, teams and departments in one system, Rippling works to remove the bottlenecks, busy work and silos in business software. With Rippling, you can choose to run hr, IT and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill the gaps. Right now you can get 6 months free when you go to rippling.com Radiolab learn more at r I p p l-I n g.com Radiolab terms and conditions apply. Radiolab is supported by Planet Visionaries, the podcast created in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Stay tuned for a trailer and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honl Foundation. I wanted to let you know about a brand new season of the Planet Visionaries podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This is the podcast exploring bold ideas and big solutions from the people leading the way in conservation. Join me in conversation with the likes of climate champion Mark Ruffalo, biologist and photographer Christina Mittermeier, and one of the most successful conservations of our time, Chris Tompkins. Join us on Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts. I don't really know where Tim is, so we're just going to try.

[Errol Morris]

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Pat Walters]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Errol Morris]

This is Radiolab and today we're talking about truth and facts. Yep, facts of the matter.

[Pat Walters]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello Tim. Nope, not there. I think if we just shout very.

[Pat Walters]

Loudly out the window. We wanted to talk to Tim because Tim is not only is he a.

[Errol Morris]

Wonderful writer and before that a cartoonist.

[Pat Walters]

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.

[Errol Morris]

Knew turns out to be wrong?

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello Tim.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, there you are. You sound great too.

[Errol Morris]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

His identity, right so 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 on the other corner.

[Robert Krulwich]

If I had a beer in this tiny room, that would be easier.

[Jad Abumrad]

Tell us how you met this guy.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Pat Walters]

It was like vacuum salesman, knock knock kind of thing.

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Pat Walters]

Because the knocking on the door stuff was just really, you know, a few hours a day.

[Robert Krulwich]

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

[Pat Walters]

And one of those nights out drinking with friends, he got to talking with Skelly. What did he look like, by the way?

[Robert Krulwich]

You know, 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.

[Pat Walters]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

No, he's about to.

[Pat Walters]

Oh, he's about to.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, I'm sorry. He had this great mop of curly hair, glasses that were literally held together by duct tape. The overall effect was warmth and intelligence.

[Pat Walters]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

It wasn't really clear at first whether he belonged to our camp, the hippieish 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, but Tim says at.

[Pat Walters]

The time he liked the guy. Yeah, for one thing, women seemed to like him.

[Robert Krulwich]

They were charmed by him right away. All my girlfriends always liked him. And beyond that, you know, he and I were two of the readers in the group. We each always had a book with.

[Pat Walters]

Us, so they began to swap books. And as they got to be good friends, Skelly even showed him his writing.

[Robert Krulwich]

I still have it somewhere in longhand, even beautiful longhand. He was clearly A sort of kindred spirit.

[Pat Walters]

But then some questions popped up. One day, Skelly told Tim that he.

[Robert Krulwich]

Had written a novel and that it had been accepted for publication.

[Pat Walters]

Tim was like, wow.

[Robert Krulwich]

I was excited for him.

[Jad Abumrad]

You probably thought you got published. That's amazing. I wanted to do that.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah. So, you know, I kept bugging him about, well, when's your book coming out?

[Pat Walters]

Scully would say, well, you know, in a few months. And then the few months would pass, and Scully would say, well, they just pushed it back. It's coming.

[Robert Krulwich]

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 it may be that 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.

[Pat Walters]

Initially, Tim thought, well, there's probably some.

[Robert Krulwich]

Truth to it, you know, even if the truth was only the kind of truth that's contained in dreams.

[Pat Walters]

But then there were other stories.

[Robert Krulwich]

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 canvas, and he supposedly was going to 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.

[Errol Morris]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

No, we didn't say that. And, you know, 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, 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.

[Pat Walters]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

We frequently ended up crashing on the same floors together, closed down the bars together.

[Pat Walters]

Every night they take road trips together blasting classic rock.

[Robert Krulwich]

We loved Led Zeppelin.

[Pat Walters]

And after a while, those stories, like.

[Robert Krulwich]

I've published a novel or I have a daughter in France. We didn't hear that stuff anymore. 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.

[Pat Walters]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

You just never knew. 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.

[Pat Walters]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

Bay, 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 going to take the train up there and join us. And so we break away from our pleasant setup 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 cell phone 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 Mount Royal Tavern.

[Pat Walters]

How did you know it was the Mount Royal? How did you know that?

[Robert Krulwich]

We just knew. 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 tried to catch it, but I was like three minutes too late. But I checked and there's another train at 7:20. It gets in 7:45. I'll definitely be on that one. So hopefully y' all get this message and be there to meet me. 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 cell phone, 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.

[Pat Walters]

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?

[Robert Krulwich]

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, 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 sometime, he 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 going to 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, you know, marginal or pathetic or loserish. 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.

[Pat Walters]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

I still saw him pretty often. He'd take the train up and we'd get some beers and some chicken wings. And one day I got a phone call from a friend of mine, and he sounded very badly shaken.

[Pat Walters]

Tim's friend said that he'd been worried.

[Robert Krulwich]

About Skelly 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 lying on the floor. Dad. 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.

[Pat Walters]

Just before they arrived, it occurred to Tim, well, maybe we should go through.

[Robert Krulwich]

His house, 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'd first found him and he said, yeah, well, here's the thing.

[Pat Walters]

He told him, you guys, you can go back into that house, but I'm. I'm not going back in there.

[Robert Krulwich]

He had warned us, but as soon as we stepped in, it was still shocking and terrible.

[Jad Abumrad]

What did you see when you walked in?

[Robert Krulwich]

Um, there are aspects about that that I will never tell you or anyone else, but suffice it 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. And he'd stopped throwing things out. There wasn't electricity, there wasn't working plumbing.

[Pat Walters]

Really? No plumbing at all?

[Robert Krulwich]

No, no, I don't think so. And words are going to fail me here. I mean, the, the simplest way to say it would be to say it was clearly a place where an insane person had lived, where 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.

[Pat Walters]

Happened.

[Robert Krulwich]

But on some level he had, he'd understood that. I mean, it was a secret that he was keeping and he kept it locked inside that house. And I, 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. How utterly alone he must have felt himself to be.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

No, I don't think there is anything that anyone could have done for him. I mean, he had so clearly determined not to let people into that chamber of his life, 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. He was his best and most decent and sanest self when he was in our company.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, well, you know, the only people I knew of who ever got mad at him for telling what they would have called 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

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 is 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 50ft 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. 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.

[Pat Walters]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

Hi there. This is Tim Kreider. I've been asked to call and leave.

[Robert Krulwich]

A voicemail recording your credits. Here they are. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.

[Jad Abumrad]

Our staff. Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Kim Howard, Brenna Farrell, Melissa o', Donnell, Dylan Keefe, Andy Mills, Lynn.

[Robert Krulwich]

Levy and Sean Cole, with help from Matt Kilty, Daisy Rosario and Nadja Wilson.

[Jad Abumrad]

Special thanks to Rebecca Katz, Jean Guilleman.

[Robert Krulwich]

Or possibly Jean Guillemon and Paul Hillmer.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hope that works.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, for you guys.

[Robert Krulwich]

Bye.

[Jad Abumrad]

Bye.