Futility Closet

On Feb. 9, 1855, the residents of Devon in southern England awoke to find a bewildering set of footprints in the newfallen snow. "These are to be found in fields, gardens, roads, house-tops, & other likely and unlikely places, deeply embedded in snow," ran one contemporary account. "The shape was a hoof." In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll examine the surviving descriptions of the odd marks and consider the various explanations that have been offered. We'll also revisit the compassionate Nazi fighter pilot Franz Stigler and puzzle over how to sneak into Switzerland across a guarded footbridge. Our segment on the "devil's hoofmarks" is drawn from Mike Dash's excellent article "The Devil's Hoofmarks: Source Material on the Great Devon Mystery of 1855," which appeared in Fortean Studies 1:1 in 1994. The full text (2MB PDF) is here. The Restricted Data Blog's post on John W. Campbell and his 1941 article “Is Death Dust America’s Secret Weapon?” appeared on March 7, 2014. The comments includ