Outfoxed

to the city's heart. A young woman had been murdered, and the details were straight out of an Edgar Allen Poe's story. The victim was a twenty year old named Teresa Hollander, and she had been killed while crossing the cemetery of Saint Nicholas Church. The murder weapon a gravesteak. According to newspaper reports, the small metal plaque had been pulled from the earth and used to bludgeon Teresa to death.

When her father found her frozen body the next morning, her eyes were wide open, staring up in a final expression of horror. It was this fact, oddly enough, that gave investigators hope. Recent scientific discoveries suggested that the human eye was capable of recording images, much like a camera. Since Teresa's eyes were open in the moment of death, it stood to reason that the last thing she ever

saw was likely the face of her attacker. If the image could be replicated, investigators would have the killer dead to rights. Now, most people hearing this story today would be quick to write this off as foolishness. An eye is not a camera, they would reason, and they don't record images. But that's not entirely true. Eyes and photography have a lot more in common than you might think. Both have a mechanism for controlling how much light is let in, a lens to focus that light, and a

sensor to capture images. In a traditional camera, the sensor is celluloid film coded in an emulsion of light sensitive silver halite crystals. Briefly exposing the emulsion to light results in a latent image, which is treated with chemicals to create a photograph. Now, for our eyes, the sensor is the retina, a structure made up of tiny rods and cones.

Hitting the retina with light produces electrical impulses that travel through the optic nerve to our brain, and as you might guess, we don't have any way of hacking our brains to pull those images out, especially after death. But here's where things get interesting. In eighteen seventy six, a German physiologist discovered that the rods in our retinas contain a purplish red pigment. It's called rhodapsin, and it turns white when it's exposed to light, and then it darkens

again soon after the light is removed. It's not too different from the way the images are recorded on traditional film stock, although it does fade fairly quickly, but that's not all. Shortly after rhodapson was discovered, another researcher named Wilhelm Kuhn conducted a series of experiments using the eyes of frogs and rabbits. He successfully managed to freeze the rhodapsin at the moment of death, effectively recording the last

thing the animals saw before it died. His most famous experiment, although also most gruesome, involved an now by no rabbit. After spending several minutes in total darkness, it was made to stare out a barred window and then promptly decapitated. The rabbit's eyes were immediately removed and dissected, and the retina was washed with a chemical solution and photographed. The resulting image, which Kuhn called an optogram, is blurry but readable.

It's a clear white space at the center that looks very much like the barred window the rabbit saw in its final moments. Naturally, Kuhn's next task was to replicate the experiment with humans, but this was easier said than done. In eighteen eighty, he dissected the eye of a convicted murderer moments after he was beheaded by a guillotine. Even then, the best he was able to produce was a bunch

of squiggly lines. Some people thought that it looks like a guillotine blade or the steps of an execution platform, but I think those are a stretch at best. So here's the rub. Rhodapsin can hypothetically be used to capture some aspects of the last images that we see before we die, but the images are far too blurry and

simplistic to be used for forensic purposes. Even if you were to somehow remove and process the eyes moments after death, you still couldn't capture something as detailed as a human face. That didn't stop detectives from using optograms in murder investigations, like the case of Teresa Hollander, the girl murdered in the Aurora Graveyard. During the autopsy, her eyeballs were removed and photographed. The resulting optogram was used as evidence in

the trial of her former boyfriend, Anthony Petris. The optogram itself from that trial has been lost, but it must not have been all that convincing, because Anthony was found not guilty. Nevertheless, the practice captured the imagination of the public, and many people came to believe that optograms were a genuinely effective tool for catching criminals. They appear as plot devices in the works of several nineteenth century authors, including

Rudyard Kipling and Jules Vern. Meanwhile, real life criminals started blindfolding their victims or removing their eyes after death to avoid getting caught, and in at least one case, an optogram was successfully used to bring a killer to justice, not because science worked, but because the culprit assumed it did.

When detectives told the murderer that his face had been recorded by the victim's eyes, he confessed on the spot, so you might say that truth is in the eyes of the beholder, and while science is generally our best tool for catching criminals, sometimes it takes a bit of fiction to get the job done. When it comes to strange ways of undermining foreign regimes, nobody beats the CIA.

In the nineteen sixties they tried to get Cubans to believe that Fidel Castro was the Antichrist, and in two thousand and five they created an Osama bin laden action figure with paint that chipped away to reveal the devil's face underneath. The plan, as I understand it, was to give them to Afghan children to turn them against him, but the CIA never went through with it. But World War II saw the CIA at its most creative or

maybe unhinged, depending on how you look at it. It was called Operation Fantasia, a whimsical name for an otherwise hair brain scheme. It came to fruition in nineteen forty five after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. But the goal of this mission wasn't to take out the enemy directly. Rather, the idea was to shatter their morale, using their own

beliefs against them. And it was all thanks to a businessman named Ed Salinger had operated an import export business in Tokyo and therefore was familiar with certain intricacies of Japanese culture. Oh and he also happened to be a master of psychological warfare working for the OSS in America. He knew that the Japanese people were superstitious and would react strongly to seeing an evil spirit in real life. According to Salinger, the Japanese were deeply afraid of kitsune

or fox spirits. But how is he supposed to create such an entity. One plan involves spraying a fox like musk and amplifying artificial animal cries where Japanese could hear them, But that plan was quickly dismissed in favor of an even stranger one, a plan that involved actual live foxes. Salinger decided the best course of action was to release a bunch of foxes into the woods to frighten the Japanese.

In his outline for the operation, he wrote, the foundation for the proposal rests upon the fact that the modern Japanese is subject to superstitions, beliefs in evil spirits, and unnatural manifestations which can be provoked and stimulated. He tested his theory by gathering thirty foxes and letting them loose in a public park. But he didn't just release them haphazardly.

He wanted to make sure that they could be seen even in the dark, so he grabbed his brush and a can of paint and gave the red and white vulpines a coat of green to make them pop. This paint had a unique quality a glowed in the dark thanks to a little ingredient called radium. This was the same kind of paint that had mutilated and killed the Radium Girls in nineteen twenty eight. They would lick the brushes to a fine point and then apply the luminescent

coating to clockhands and dials. Salinger, though, gave the foxes an unhealthy glow before unleashing them into Washington d C's Rock Creek Park, only a few miles from the White House. This was a popular spot for hikers and birdwatchers, so it was almost guaranteed that a few unsuspecting individuals would witness the glowing fox's firsthand, and they did. The National Park Police started getting reports of leaping, ghost like animals

that were terrifying locals. It looked like Salinger's plan was going to be a success. But how was the US supposed to get the foxes all the way to Japan. One idea was to drop them off the coast and let them swim to shore. The oss, however, was skeptical, so Salinger conducted another test. He and a few colleagues loaded a few foxes onto a boat and navigated to the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, but the animals in place, The scientists tossed them overboard and watched, and sure enough,

the foxes found their way back to dry land. The tests proved that Salinger was right. All that was left was to actually carry out the plan. Oh but wait, there's more. Based on the memos and notes published at the time, Operation Fantasia was about to get even weirder. You see, Salinger had apparently wanted to exploit another fox related superstition by gluing a skull to the head of a stuffed fox. He wanted to symbolize the death's head on it's crown. It was, in a sense, weaponized folklore.

The body of the animal would have been covered in black cloth and adorned with glow in the dark paint that looked like exposed bones, and the skull would have been rigged with the way to move the jaw up and down to strike even more fear into the hearts of the Japanese. And that's where everything stopped. The head of the OSS branch, in charge of Operation Fantasia, looked at Salinger's concept and thought that it was entirely too dumb to put into action. He shut it down and

put everyone to work on more feasible projects. Looking back, I think it's clear that Ed Salinger just wasn't the sly fox that he thought he was. 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 a war winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at Theworldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.