Look Out Below

I know you from somewhere? For nineteen year old Bobby Schaffron, it seemed everyone at Sullivan County Community College had that same feeling. It was moving day in nineteen eighty and a dozen people had welcomed him back to school, which was very nice, but a little odd because Bobby was a brand new student. And another thing. Some people were greeting Bobby and they kept calling him by the wrong name, Eddie. Finally, one of the other students asked him a strange question,

was he adopted? When Bobby replied yes, the student grew excited. Bobby. He said, I think that you might have a twin. It turned out that Bobby Schaffering looked exactly like Eddie Galland, another student who attended the college the year before. When Bobby met Eddie face to face, the similarities were unmistakable. They had both been born on July twelfth of nineteen sixty one, They were both adopted through the Louise Wise

adoption agency, and they looked exactly alike. Now, long lost twins finding each other is already an amazing story right. In fact, it got Bobby and Eddie on the front page of several New York newspapers. But the truly miraculous twist happened several days later when the boys got a call from a guy named David Killman. Bobby and Eddie looked exactly like him. They weren't long lost twins, they were triplets, and these three men were carbon copies of

each other. They all had the same curly hair and big smiles. They were all adopted by Jewish families in New York, and each had an adopted sister who was two years older. But the similarities didn't stop there. They had big, gregarious personalities. They all liked Chinese food, smoked Marlboroughs and wrestled in school. They had never met before, but they felt like the oldest of friends. In the years after Bobby, Eddie and David found each other, they

became minor celebrities. They headlined every major talk show and were fixtures on the club circuit. They opened a restaurant called of Course, Triplets. They even landed a cameo in a Madonna movie. But still, the trio had some burning questions. For instance, why did they have to find each other in the first place. It wasn't common for adoption agencies to split up siblings, let alone keep their existence a

secret from each other. Why had the Louise Wise agency lied to the three boys and their families at the same time? And the Triplets were asking these questions, so was a journalist, Lawrence Wright. He'd been working on a story about twins separated at birth, and in his research he found references to an obscure study. A psychologist, doctor

Peter Neubauer, was studying the effects of nature versus nurture. Basically, Neubauer wanted to know what had a bigger effect on someone's life, their genetics or the environment that they grew up in. To find out doctor Neubauer purposely separated sets of twins and had them adopted by different families and the adoption agency that he used for his experiment the Louise Wise Agency where Bobby, Eddie and David had been

adopted from. So when Lawrence Wright reached out to the triplets with this revelation, at first they couldn't believe it, and then they started comparing notes. All three remembered strangers coming to their houses throughout their childhoods. These people would film the boys and ask them questions. They'd tested their coordination, their cognitive development, even their IQ and their parents had been told that it was just part of a study

on how adopted children adjusted to their new homes. But each boy never knew that he had two identical brothers just a few miles away. Bobby, Eddie, and David were devastated by this revelation. It felt like every aspect of their lives had been tightly controlled for some experiment. Even their families were carefully selected. David was purposely placed into a working class family, Bobby's parents were middle class, and

Eddie grew up upper class. The pressure of fame coupled with the discovery was a lot for the brothers to bear. For Eddie, it appeared to be too much. He took his own life in nineteen ninety five at the age of thirty three. The two remaining brothers, Bobby and David, are still looking for answers, namely why this unethical study was carried out in the first place and what the

results were. Unfortunately, answers have not been forthcoming. Doctor Peter Nubauer, who ran the study, died in two thousand and eight. He donated all of his materials to Yale University on under one condition that all of his notes would be sealed until twenty sixty six. Perhaps one of the saddest parts of the whole tale is that there are some Neubauer study subjects who have never been found, People who have lived their whole lives without knowing about their twins,

just like Bobby, Eddie and David. Who knows if there are other yous wandering around out there. It's enough to make you do a double or even a triple take. There have been a lot of crazes over the years. The nineteen sixties saw Beatlemania. The nineties had kids collecting little cardboard discs called pugs, and the nineteen seventies had the pet rock. But before mop tops and slammers and caged minerals, there were balloons. Not the kind that can lift a house in a Disney movie. I'm talking about

the big one, hot air balloons. It all started in seventeen eighty three. That year, the Montgofier brothers launched their two man hot air balloon over Paris. It flew five and a half miles in just under half an hour, with a rooster, a sheep and a duck in tow, and when it landed the world was changed. Ballooning took off in Europe like nothing else before. No pun intended the idea of floating in a giant gas field sphere

was too powerful to ignore. Lots of people with grand ideas about air travel flocked to cities like London and Paris to show off their creations. This led to the formation of flying circuses that would draw large crowds to watch them from the ground. Strangely enough, this was not where Monty Python got their name. That's a curiosity for another day. But not everyone was enthralled. Some believe this new age of aviation would be the downfall of society.

In a letter to a contemporary of his, art historian Horace Walpole wrote, I hope these new mechanic meteors will prove on any playthings for the learned and the idol. He believed that they were nothing more than a fad, and that the obsession with hovering above the clouds would eventually pass, but the ballooning community showed no signs of slowing down. In fact, things escalated quickly. Some balloonists, like Vincenzo Lunardi, had to push the envelope by flying higher

and farther. He was known as the Daredevil aeronaut. On September fifteenth of seventeen eighty four, he launched a balloon from Finsbury, England, with over two hundred thousand spectators watching, including the Prince of Wales. Along for the ride were a cat, a dog, and a pigeon. Unfortunately, the cat suffered under the intense cold at such a high altitude. Lunardi touched down and released it before ascending once again. He then landed one last time in a clearing about

twenty four miles away. He planned another launch in seventeen eighty five over the city of Chester, but he was incapacitated due to a severe injury. Instead, he allowed a local enthusiast named Thomas Baldwin to rent his balloon and carry out his own flight. Baldwin had been obsessed with ballooning. He didn't see this flight as just a demonstration of engineering prowess. He had a scientific mind and planned a series of experiments to conduct while thousands of feet in

the air. For one, he brought a bunch of different foods on board to see if they tasted different at higher altitudes. He also packed drafting tools like pencils and paper, along with a map. Oh, and one last thing another pigeon. Pigeons must have been a popular ballooning experiment back then. Once he reached the proper altitude, Baldwin did his taste tests and also experimented with the air pressure. He spent

about two hours up there admiring the views below. There were the roads that snaked through town and the lush trees dotting the landscape. And when he finally planted his two feet back on the ground, he had a new goal in mind to show the rest of the world what he had seen. He sketched the winding roads and opened clearings as they had appeared from the air. He even included the clouds below him, which obscured part of

his ground view. We might laugh about it today, but this was the next best thing to a photograph, which wasn't available at his time, and these were the first aerial maps that were created as a result of hot air ballooning. Some are colored in while others were left black and white, but all of them were as detailed as possible. Baldwin even included directions on how to look at them. He instructed viewers to roll up the map into a tube shape and peer through the center to

get the full effect. Thanks to his desire to convey the Earth from the heavens, people were able to get a bird's eye view of the planet in a way

that no one had ever seen before. Military strategists could now plan their attacks by seeing the terrain that lay miles ahead of them, Titans of industry could plot the optimal areas in which to build their factories, and even the average citizen was able to look at an aerial map and see just how big the world really was, and probably find the straightest route to the market, as straight, of course, as the pigeon flies. I hope you've enjoyed

today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.