289: Go Ask Your Father
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This message comes from Capital One. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank for details. Capital One N.A., member FDIC. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Hi, Dad. How are you doing? I'm doing fine. When Eric was a kid, his dad would leave for six months at a time. He was in the Merchant Marines. He'd be in Guam or Scotland or God knows where.

And Eric would record these cassettes and send them off to him. Um, in the desert, did the Easter Bunny send you an Easter basket? If he did, you better make sure there's no lizards in it. Dad, um, when are you going to be coming back up to stay? I'm anxious to see you or else at least hear your voice. Yeah, send me a tape, Dad.

This request, that his father record a tape for him, is repeated over and over again on these tapes. Here's Eric probably four years later on another tape in seventh grade. His hope that his dad would respond was so great that every cassette that he sent, he would only record on one side. The other side was blank for his dad to fill in and send back. Never did, though. You can use this tape to send me... I want a tape back, bubba. And, um...

I really hope you can't get your hands on a tape recorder. Well, I guess you did, or else you wouldn't be listening to it right now. But I just got my hair cut yesterday. I don't know if you'd like it or not. These recordings are filled with so much yearning that even when Eric tells his dad about his haircut, you can hear it. Eric reads his dad a poem he's written about the environment. He talks about the weather, two feet of snow. He plays his clarinet. Even this gets a nervous preamble.

I don't know. I'll play my piece for you that I'm going to play tomorrow. But my reed is a new reed and it's not fully soaked yet. So they'll be squeaking. It'll be okay tomorrow because it's soaking right now. So I'll be squeaking. Okay, I'm going to play it now. I know this is the saddest tape in the world that we're starting the show with this week. And I'm just doing it so I can talk about this choice. As adults, we have this funny choice.

Are we going to sit down with our parents and talk about the stuff that hurt us and didn't make sense to us when we were kids? And it's hard to know if it's worth it sometimes. If it's just going to make your parents feel bad. And what are they going to say anyway? But Eric's never understood why his father, in all those years, never sent him a tape back. Not once. So, not long ago, he got together with his father. Those tapes ripped the guts right out of me. They're...

from the era of my life that was so sad. This is Eric's dad. Back when those tapes were sent, during the months when he wasn't away at sea, he was often just living out of his car, scraping by. He and Eric's mom split up pretty early. And I gotta say, this little encounter did not start so well. Eric played his father a bit of the old tape, and his dad cried and said it was killing him. It was just too sad, too hard to listen to, knowing all the ways he'd let Eric down back then. And then, finally...

Eric asked him the question that he brought him there to ask him, why he never sent a tape back. And his dad was as honest as he could be. I don't know. I can't answer that. It was a failure, total failure in that. I guess I figured I'd get home and talk to you. I should have had the strength to do it. I didn't have the strength to do it. That's my only answer. I didn't have the strength to do that. And why didn't you? I don't know. I believe you. That's my only answer. Sorry. You know that? You know how sorry I am about that? Yeah.

That ain't worth much, I guess, but it's all I can do. Was that satisfying? No. No, I don't know. No, it wasn't satisfying, but yes, I think I did believe him. I talked to Eric about all this on the phone. I have two completely different understandings of my dad in my head. One is that dad I knew and missed and was really mad at as a kid. And one is that dad I know now.

And I don't know, I feel like maybe asking him those questions, I wanted to conjure up that younger version and see what a total jerk he was so that I could really be mad at him. It didn't happen. And I just, I saw the dad that I've known for the past few years and I'm not really mad at him.

Right. You're still mad at that young dad. But he's gone. And there's this sweet, kind of sad, loving older guy there now.

Well, how unsatisfying for you and for everyone who wants to confront their parents, given the fact that the people who they're mad at are sort of gone and have been replaced by these kinder, gentler, more sensitive people. Totally unsatisfying. I think probably then confronting your parents never works. Confronting your parents never works because by the time you get around to doing it, your parents are totally different people. Yeah. They're gone. And there are these different beings sitting in front of you when you confront them.

The problem, of course, is that we still have our questions about the past. Whether or not those people we've got beef with are still around to answer the questions. Today on our radio show, for Father's Day, we have stories of two people who head off bravely for answers, despite these odds. In fact, one is about a man who's handed a mystery that he could really use his father's help in unraveling, but unfortunately, his father is dead.

In Act Two, we have a son, a father, and questions so unusual that their answers may require an army of Russian lumberjacks, a giant circular trench in the Sahara Desert, and possibly, yes possibly, a website. Stay with us. ♪

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This message comes from Schwab. Everyone has moments when they could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. This is American Life. Today's show is a rerun. Act 1. Make them say uncle. This is the story of a family, and every family has a black sheep. In Lenny's family growing up, it was Uncle Aby.

Uncle A.B. was the person in my family that I was always told, don't be like A.B., don't be like A.B., you know. You know, there was a kind of like, he was like a model of what not to be. My father would always say to me, don't read in bed at night. Uncle A.B. reads in bed. And like, what was bad about that was that you, you know, you need a book to, as a crutch, you know, to go to sleep at night. Or Uncle A.B. read on the toilet. Now, don't read on the toilet. That's bad. It's not clean. ♪

Uncle Aby was always an hour late for everything. Uncle Aby went out with a string of women when he was single, in a way that seemed unsavory to Lenny's parents. Uncle Aby couldn't be trusted. There were all kinds of things about Uncle Aby to avoid. So Uncle Aby didn't come around much, even though he lived right in the neighborhood. This was in the Bronx in the 1950s. Lenny's dad operated a sewing machine at a factory in the Garment District. His mom did alterations in an apartment store. There wasn't much money. Lenny and his older brother and his parents lived in a one-bedroom apartment.

So fast forward several decades, and he grows up, moves out. And by the time he's 31, his mom had passed away. His father was in the hospital with cancer. And then he's visiting his dad there. And A.B. comes in and he pulls me aside and he says, I have a secret to tell you, but I can't tell you until your father dies. So I just was like, okay, leave me alone, you know. And I just didn't. I said, fine, you know. So then my father did die.

And it was about a week after my father died, just a little bit after the funeral. And A.B. called up, and we were talking about sort of some pieces of furniture that he actually had gone to my father's apartment and taken furniture without asking us. And we're talking about the furniture. And then I said to him, so what's the secret? And this is a long pause. And then he says, no, no, forget it. No, never mind.

And I go, "Come on, you said there was a secret. I mean, you said this. What is it?" He said, "I really don't want to talk about it." I kind of nudged him and finally he said, "Okay, I'll tell you the secret." And I said, "What is it?" And he said, "I'm your father." And there was just this, you know, this was just completely out of the blue. There was no clues in my upbringing. There was nothing. And my father had just died and I'm in the process of mourning him and, you know,

thinking about my connection to him. So I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "Well," he said, "you know, your parents tried to have you for a long time, and there's 10 years between me and my brother. Then your father came to me at my workshop, and he had a jar, and he came over and gave it to me, explained that he needed some semen. So he said he went in the bathroom, and he produced the semen.

And came back, and then he said, nine months later, you were born. Again, it just seemed like completely preposterous. I mean, the whole idea. Then A.B., kind of sensing that I was probably fairly freaked out, said, well, don't worry, though, he said, because your father told me that they mixed the sperm together.

It makes the two brothers, his sperm and your dad's sperm. Right. And so there's a chance, there's some statistical chance, I guess. And the other thing that he said on the phone was he said, you know, you're a smart fella and I've watched you at school and all of your accomplishments and I've always thought it's because of me.

And is that like the most horrible thing you can imagine when he says that? Is that very much like a Darth Vader? Absolutely. I was in a complete, total state of shock. And I just thought like, wow, whose movie am I in? You know, it was just the whole thing was completely bizarre.

Did it seem believable to you at all? You know, it seemed... I mean, it felt like someone had spun me around like a hundred times, and I was just trying to put the... You know, standing there reeling and trying to put the details together. And it seemed kind of crazy, and especially the details. Like, you know, when he told me it was about artificial insemination, I thought, that's got to be, like, really early for artificial insemination. So I went up to the medical library at Columbia, and I just started looking up. And sure enough, I found these documents that...

That said, actually, I probably would be one of the early artificial insemination babies in the United States. But in the early days, they asked for a family member, which, of course, they never do now. And they also did mix the sperm. I mean, I found that detail. And that was the detail that seemed to me the craziest. The mixing the sperm. Yeah. And they don't do it anymore because, obviously...

it doesn't do anything other than make the person who wants to be, who's been trying to be the father feel better. It's such a beautiful idea, though. It's like a firing squad, but in reverse. That is absolutely true. Like in a firing squad, each person would choose to believe they weren't the one who hit the prisoner, and everybody would choose to believe they were the one. Right.

So I did that research, and then the other thing that was interesting was that my father was this amazing cheapskate, and he never had a checkbook because he just didn't want to, he wanted to deal straight in cash. So he had kept these, like, you know, meticulous notebooks of everything he spent, and particularly medical things. And I found this notebook with all of his expenses going back to the year I was born.

Going back to the year you were born, but not before. Not before, yeah. Oh, so was it helpful? Well, yeah, because it listed the name of the gynecologist. So I figured, okay, I'm going to track him down. So I called up. He was dead. But his wife answered the phone, and she said that his records all went to some other guy. So I tried to find that guy. I called him for two weeks, I remember, and his line was constantly busy.

And then when I reached him, it turned out he had just died, like that week. Part of that time when I was wondering about was I went back and thought, like, is there any clues? If this was true, why were there no clues? And the only clue I could come up with, or the only clues I could come up with, was this idea that I just never felt part of that family.

Though everybody has that feeling at one point or another when they're a kid. Right, absolutely. Only everybody doesn't have the opportunity to find out that the feeling is true. You know, my brother, by his own admission, I mean, he said, you're not, you know, we never felt like you were one of us. You're really different from us, is the way you put it. And what were the differences? Um...

My father and my brother very much are very controlled people. Everything had to be in its place. Everything was orderly. And I was like this little spark. You know, I was going around trying to have a good time. I was very, the way they described me as a kid is overly sensitive. And you mean like overly sensitive, like literally you were just an emotional kid, like a normal emotional kid. Yeah. Like I cried a lot. And I, you know, I mean, I now after having children realized I wasn't particularly oversensitive. I was just normal.

I was like, I lived in a kind of imaginative fantasy world that to them, I seemed like I was, you know, different. Because he seemed different, Lenny got a lot of, not punishments exactly. It was more like a steady stream of never-ending reminders to simmer down, settle down, be a nice boy, be more like them. And of course, in there somewhere, don't be like Uncle A.B.,

Any burst of enthusiasm, any odd thoughts expressed out loud, any impulsive deed or comment could be cut short by his parents, sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently. So 1985, my Uncle A.B. died. It was four years after my dad died. And I went to the funeral with my wife, and nobody was there. And my Uncle A.B. was the kind of guy that, I don't know, everyone hated him. He was obnoxious. There was literally no one there. I've never been to a funeral with nobody there.

It was somewhere way out in Long Island. It was me and my wife, his son, and his family, and one neighbor from the old neighborhood in the Bronx. And after the funeral was over, I go and talk to Les, who is, you know, A.B.'s son. And I said, look, I don't know if you ever heard the story. And I told him the story about this. About the jar and the whole thing. About the jar and the whole thing. And Les says, he goes...

I'm sure that's not true. And I said, really, really, why? He said, well, you know, he said, I got to tell you, you know, around that time, my father was delusional. In fact, we had to lock him up. We had to put him away in an institution because he was hearing voices. So he said, like, I don't think that anything he said would have been, you know, too accurate. So he was like, nah, nah, you know, it's probably not true. So that really, that was the thing that, like, completely put the whole thing to rest in my mind for a long time.

I just, at that point, my wife said, look, you know, what difference does it make? I mean, you know, you grew up with your father. You thought he was your father. You know, that's really the thing that's important. So, so you'll never know. And just leave it at that. It seemed like, yeah, that's true. You know, and, you know, just get on with your life. And then he does get on with his life. For 15 years, he pretty much let the question rest right there. Can I ask you a couple of like really basic questions before we go on to what happens next? Sure, absolutely. Who do you look like?

Hmm. I don't, I look like my mother. Okay. Yeah. But I feel, I've always felt that I have my father's body type. He was stringy, you know, his stringy muscles. I mean, I look like I'm a runner. And Uncle Aby, what did Uncle Aby's body look like? He was kind of square or solid, chunkier. And the other detail that Aby, which wasn't a genetic thing, was that he had this huge cleft in his skull.

from some childhood accident. I always felt like he got hit in the head with an axe or something. He had this dent in his skull. The whole thing about Aby was kind of like a repulsion toward him. As years pass, for Lenny, this question about his father and Uncle Aby is like a cut that never quite heals right. It's a hard question to have sitting in the back of your mind. What if your parents were lying to you your entire childhood about something so basic?

And finally, a couple years ago, the miracle that is American science conspired with the miracle that is online shopping to make DNA tests ubiquitous enough and cheap enough for anybody. And Lenny decided to see if it would be possible to settle the question of who his father was once and for all with a DNA test. So he looked for envelopes that his dad might have licked to get a remnant of DNA. And he found some. Excited by this, he moved to the next step. You know, so I called my cousin, Leslie, and said,

I said to him, look, I'm thinking about trying to do this in a more serious way. How do you feel about it? He was okay about it. At the end of the conversation, which I basically called to ask him if he could find some letters for me, there's a pause on the phone. And then he says, by the way, he says, I got to tell you, he said, you remember the last time you asked me about, did I know about this? And I said, I didn't know. He said, I lied to you. I said, what? He said, I lied to you. He said, well, when I was 12 years old, ABC,

took me aside and told me that same story he told you way before, you know, my father died. And he said, don't ever tell Lenny. That's what A.B. said to him. A.B. said to him, don't tell Lenny. Swear you'll never tell him. So, wow, when he said that, then I thought, this has got to be true, right? Because here's A.B. telling Leslie when, you know,

like 30, 40 years before my father died, that this story happened, that this thing happened.

So that was really like a turning point. Yeah, suddenly it seems like it's probably true. Exactly. Then I tilt over to thinking like, wow, then it must be true. But I don't know. There's just, I don't know, there's something fishy about the story. There's something that I don't quite believe or I just find it hard to believe that there isn't, that I could have grown up and nobody would, you know how like in a movie someone would take you aside and whisper to you, hey, you know, there's something you don't know about yourself.

There was just nothing of that, you know? But somebody did do that. They did it in 1981 when your dad died. That's true. That's true. But there's something about A.B. I guess I still feel there's something unreliable about him. You know, there's something, I don't know, self-interested. You know, in a funny kind of way, for the story to work, for it to point to A.B., it all depends on whether you trust A.B. or not. Do I trust A.B.?

Because if I trust A.B., then what he told me and what he told his son is true. But if I don't trust A.B., if I doubt A.B., then the story's not true. So it goes back to that whole, it takes me back to that whole conflict with me and A.B. as a child. A.B.'s not trustworthy. Don't believe him. And the circumstantial evidence that might make you feel, yeah, the story points that way, isn't enough for me. But I don't know, you know, there's like a joke. I gotta tell you this joke.

So there's this guy, and he thinks his wife is cheating on him. So he hires a detective, and he says to the detective, you know, I got to tell you that I think my wife is cheating on me, but I just have this element of doubt, and I want to clear it up. So the detective says, okay, I'll follow her. I'll give you a report. So he comes back like two weeks later, and he's got all these photographs. And he says, well, here, you see there's a photograph of you're leaving home, and there's a photograph of this man ringing the doorbell. Then your wife and he go out.

And then they go to this hotel, and I was able to photograph them, see them embracing in front of the hotel. And then they go in the hotel, and I telephoto lens up to the room. They go in the room, they take off all their clothes, and then they close the shades. And the guy goes, see, that's what I mean, that element of doubt. And I sort of feel like that in this story. Like, you know, every time I come to a place, I have this element of doubt. And then it seems to clear up, and it seems not to. And so, I mean, I do, I am like the guy in the joke.

I want to have it more certain. You know, you don't get a choice. I mean, the thing people always say is, well, you don't get a choice about your parents. And in a weird way, I have a choice, you know? There's parts of me that wants my father to win, and there's parts of me that wants Aby to win, you know? Oh, really? Yeah. Which part wants your dad to win, and which part wants Aby to win? Like, what's the advantage of each?

I guess the part that wants my father to win is the part that just wants to have that kind of consoling structure of you know your past. If you looked at home movies and you re-ran them and you saw...

and your parents, and you said, oh, look, there's me and there are my parents, and here is my father doing this or my mother doing that, as opposed to if you reran them and you saw a person who wasn't your father, who knew on some level that he wasn't your father, trying to be your father. It just, like, complicates the whole issue, you know? Yeah. There's something about the continuity and the way you've thought of yourself your whole life that you want to keep going.

The other side of that is, like, I didn't particularly like my father. He was a difficult man. He had an explosive temper. He was, you know, like if I cried, my father would laugh at me and make fun of me for crying. He could be very intolerant. He would ridicule me and shame me. And that's a part, you know, that I wouldn't mind saying goodbye to or distancing myself from.

Not that AB was, like, better. But it would allow me to detach myself from something that's sort of complicated and painful. Of course, at Lenny's age, what does detaching himself mean? He's already detached himself. When he moved out at age 16, he detached himself when he went to college, when he made his own friends, when he found a wife, when he turned himself into an adult who's very different from either his dad or his uncle.

If you're 55, and you're fully formed, and your parents are long dead, and your own kids are actually completely grown, how much hold do your parents really have on you at that point? How much more independence from them can you possibly need? Yet somehow, even at that age, Lenny says it's still possible to daydream about the parents who you'd rather have had. So if you got to choose, like if you got to imagine your dad going around and collecting other samples besides from your Uncle A.B., like who would you want to choose? Oh, hmm.

He can roam all of New York City in the year 1948. Who do you want him to stop by? That's a good question. You know, two people are coming to mind. One was this guy who lived across the hall who was a podiatrist, and his name was Nathan Zuckerman.

And he had an office like a couple blocks away from where we lived. And in the office was like the one room that was like the podiatrist room. And then there was the waiting room. And then there was like what felt like a hundred rooms back behind there with all kinds of electronic equipment. He was just an electronics hobbyist, like an old radio hobbyist. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But I would just turn everything on and, you know, turn knobs and hear kinds of sounds, you know.

And I used to go there every day after school and just go in there and there would be all these old ladies waiting for their bunions to be removed. Then I'd just go in the back and work on my science projects. He would come back and he'd help me. It was a really nice relationship. And so if he were the guy, that would be good? If he were the guy, yeah. Like the whole thing actually gives you solace in a way that it doesn't with Uncle A.B.? Yeah, exactly. I mean, if we only got to pick our parents. ♪

Do you feel bad at all for thinking that it's possible that your dad isn't your dad? Yeah, I really do. I mean, it definitely, in a weird way, it feels like I'm doing the act of disparenting my father. All right, I'll show you. I'm no longer going to be your son. Right, right. I mean, that feels definitely bad. That feels kind of mean. Back in 2005, when we first broadcast today's show, Wendy met a guy named Wayne Grody.

who was the doctor who ran the Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory, the DNA lab, at UCLA. Grody told him that for paternity tests, you want more DNA than is usually found in an envelope or a stamp. Boyne also told him that there's often a really reliable source of DNA from people who have already died, and that's that in most hospitals,

When they take a biopsy or a tissue sample of any kind, they'll preserve a scrap of it in paraffin wax, just in case it'll be handy someday in reconfirming a diagnosis or in an epidemiological study or as part of a legal case. Wayne told Lenny to check with all the hospitals that his dad was ever in. So Lenny did. And he found a fragment of his dad's tissue from the 1970s at the Columbia Medical Center in New York. And then, before he knew it, Lenny was standing in Wayne Grody's DNA lab in California, talking to a lab technician named J.J.,

Your DNA actually is here. Can I have a look? Actually, it's supposed to be very clear. It's just a tiny little bit. It looks like maybe if I were crying, it would be about five tears. A technician named Dawn shows him another sample, which she insists is less like tears and more like a floating piece of lint. Then he's shown a little slice of wax the size of a fingernail with a little black line embedded in it.

Behind his tissue. Let's see, that's the paraffin block? They cut it in slices, and this is like one slice. So that's one slice. So that little piece of paraffin that you have there is where my father resides. So Don just kind of put that back in a little drawer under a desk, and that's where my dad is now, in the drawer. I mean, he's in the drawer.

Dr. Grote warns Lenny that it could take weeks to get accurate results. And there's no guarantee with tissue so old they'll be able to salvage enough DNA to make a real determination if his dad is Uncle A.B. or if his dad is Morris, the man he thought was his dad. Lenny goes home to wait. We give him a tape recorder to have on hand in case he gets any news. A month passes. Then a letter arrives. Okay, just let's put this in context here. The envelope arrived today sitting right over here.

And I'm looking at it, and I know that inside this envelope is the answer. I'm going to find out who my father is, or if my father is my father. The answer is sitting right there in the envelope. And I am really nervous right now. I'm kind of excited about it. I'm kind of dreading it. Okay. Let's see.

Wow, this is scary. It says, I'm writing to tell you, it's from Wayne. He says, I'm writing to tell you that we have now concluded. Oh, I almost can't read this. This is really weird. I'm getting very scared about this. We've now concluded paternity testing. The results indicate that Mr. Morris is excluded as a possible father of yours. There's all the rest. I'm not going to even read that. So my father is not my father.

Morris is not my father. Makes me feel really sad. My father's not my father. It's a part of me that's going like, I knew it, see, but there it is. It's just in definitive print. Results indicate that Mr. Morris, it says, is excluded as a possible father of yours by mismatches we have observed. And it says that we find a DNA pattern in the child which is not present in that of the alleged father, meaning that it must have been contributed by another man.

I guess I feel abandoned. I know that doesn't make any sense, but I feel like I was abandoned by my father. Then there's this next wave of feeling that's coming up, and it's like, aha, see? That was right. I was right. That the feelings I had of not being part of my family, of being the one who was...

just, you know, bad for being who I, being the other, is like true. That really is true. That was going through their heads. And my father had this really tough road to hoe. And I'm sort of feeling sorry for him, really, and knowing what he went through, you know, how difficult that was, and all the pretense, and the trying to rise above it and be noble. I mean, I feel like he...

He did a great job on that. I mean, he really did. In the sense that he never let me know. He just kept it a secret. Both of them, they went to their graves without even letting me know. And they must have thought there's no way he's ever going to know. And now I know, now at 55 years old, I know that Morris is not my father. You know, in a weird way, I almost feel better about him for that. A week after he opened the letter, Lenny came back into the studio.

And he told me that the DNA test showed something else that was completely unexpected. There are six genetic markers that would have indicated paternity. Lenny's dad only had a match on one of those. If he were Lenny's uncle, you'd expect he'd have three matches, since brothers share half their DNA. And this raises a whole new question.

I had been operating on the assumption that if my father wasn't my father, then my uncle was my father. And that if my uncle was my father, my father was my uncle, which of course sounds like some kind of camp song. But it's still statistically possible that my uncle could be my father. But in fact, it's probably more likely that there was another donor.

And who might that have been? Just somebody who worked at the hospital? You know, it could have been anybody. I mean, if this was done in a hospital, it probably wasn't. It was probably done in a doctor's office. And, you know, one of the standard things that happened back in 1949, 48, was that the doctor himself sometimes was the donor, or sometimes it could have been a medical student. Lenny, both your parents have been dead for decades, but if what you're saying is right...

You might have a living parent, like, in New York right now. Yeah. Like, knowing that he could be out there and alive, your actual dad, doesn't that make you want to find him? No, you know, in a way, I'd just like him to kind of wander along in his life and let me wander along in mine. I think I've had enough parents. I think I know enough now. I don't think I need to know more.

which is to say, in the end, it doesn't matter as much to Lenny who his father is as who his father isn't. From the day that Lenny's uncle A.B. first told him on the phone about his father to the day that Lenny got the letter where the other shoe dropped, it was 24 years. And in the recording that he made that day, Lenny talked about how one of the strangest things about the whole experience was that now he couldn't go and talk to the people who he most needs to talk to about the whole thing. This is even made so much stranger by the fact that

mother and father are dead. And I should be able to go over and see them and say, so, you know, what was this all about? I would say, it's okay. I think I'd actually end up comforting them in a weird way. You know, you did all right. You did what you had to do. You did what the doctors told you to do. You thought that keeping the secret forever, that it would be devastating for me to find out. But I would say like, you know, I'm not devastated. I still love you. I love you very much.

And I guess if I were really being honest, then I would say, you know, but you didn't have to. You could have let me just grow up the way I would have. You didn't have to try to shape me and change me so I wouldn't be like A.B. And you didn't have to fear the difference that you would see in me. And then I think I would just say thank you. Thank you for doing the impossible and for having me.

And then probably we'd just get into a fight with each other or something or just go have some really bad food that my mother made. Lenny Davis is a distinguished professor emeritus of English at the University of Illinois in Chicago. In the years since we first broadcast this story, he's had additional genetic testing that shows that indeed Uncle A.B. is most likely his dad. He wrote a book about his experience. It's called Go Ask Your Father.

Coming up, a dad in one of the most misunderstood, maligned professions in the world. And no, I'm not talking about insurance salesman, car salesman, lawyer, telephone solicitor, or a member of the United States Congress. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

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This is American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, which we first broadcast years ago, back in 2005, Go Ask Your Father, stories in which grown people seek answers from their own parents. And there definitely are certain answers that they would prefer to hear, and only sometimes do they get them. We're bringing this show back this weekend because of Father's Day. We have arrived at Act 2 of our program, Act 2, My Favorite Martian. Paul Tuff tells the story.

This is a story about fathers and sons, and it is a story about communication with alien beings. It begins in the 1820s, in Germany, where an astronomer and mathematician named Carl Frederick Gauss was working as the director of the observatory in the town of Göttingen. After the death of first one wife and then a second, he began to spend every evening at the observatory, staring up through his telescope at the moon and the stars. Could it be, he wondered on those lonely nights, that he was going to be able to see the stars?

that far away in those distant specks of light, there was life. That people just like him were staring back through their own telescopes. Since the first moment that humans began dreaming of communicating with beings from other worlds, there have been two schools of thought on how best to go about it. One strategy is simply to observe, to look through telescopes, to listen to radio waves beaming down at us from space. The second is the active approach, to try to make contact ourselves.

Gauss was the first person to suggest this latter approach, to say that it was we who should make contact with them. But how? This question is hard enough to answer today when we've got rocket ships and lasers and transistor radios. Gauss lived in an era of sextants and quill pens and leeches, none of which were very useful when it came to sending messages into space. So remember those limitations when I describe Gauss's two proposals, which might sound a little crude. Idea 1.

Deploy an army of Russian lumberjacks to clear-cut thousands of square miles of Siberian forest in the precise shape of a right triangle, with huge markings along each side demonstrating the Pythagorean theorem. Idea two. Dig a giant circular trench in the Sahara Desert, hundreds of miles in diameter. A perfect circle. Fill the trench with millions of gallons of kerosene, wait until nightfall, and then set it on fire.

But no one would spring for the kerosene, and so Gauss turned his attention back to non-Euclidean geometry. And for 150 years, no one had a single good idea. Then rocketry was invented, and Alan Shepard played golf on the moon. And all of a sudden, the stars seemed closer than ever. Over at NASA, somebody had a brainstorm. Let's send the aliens a plaque. So in April 1973, Pioneer 11 was launched into space. And bolted onto it was a gold plaque.

Maybe you've seen it. It's got a diagram of the solar system, some mathematical notations, and a drawing of a naked Caucasian woman and man, the man with his right hand raised at a 90-degree angle. 32 years later, this calling card is more than 4 billion miles from Earth, at the outer regions of our solar system. At some point, maybe tomorrow, maybe in 100 million years, someone will find Pioneer 11, or so the theory goes. And when they see the plaque, they will get the message. Greetings from planet Earth.

This is what we look like. We are waving hello to you, and we are nude. In 1974, a year after the launch of Pioneer 11, an American astronomer named Frank Drake took the next step and sent a radio message into space, beamed from a giant radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and aimed at a star cluster 21,000 light-years away. The message was a series of ones and zeros that could be rearranged to form a diagram that showed a stick figure of a human.

innocuous enough, it would seem. And yet, Drake's message drove the astronomy establishment completely crazy. International rules were drawn up, and since that day, no official radio message has ever been sent into space. But that doesn't mean that freelancers have quit trying to make contact on their own. They have not. And I can tell you this because one of them is my father. In the mid-1970s, my father, a mild-mannered university professor, concluded that there had to be more to life than commuting to work every day in his red Toyota Corolla,

and coming home every night to the quiet house on the sleepy street where his family was waiting for him. When he was about the age I am today, he started looking for something new, experimenting with LSD and open marriage and extrasensory perception, and listening over and over to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Until finally, at about the time that Frank Drake was beaming his lonely message out into space, my father left his family behind and set off onto uncharted waters.

From this description, my father might sound like a real Peter Fonda type, but in fact, he is anything but. He is a lover of office products, a man who thinks there is no decision, no matter how intimate and emotional, but cannot be made more effectively by drawing up a few lists and charts. At one point, a couple of years into his relationship with the woman he lived with after moving out of our house, he explained to me that he had come up with a system to eliminate the arguments that had begun to crop up between the two of them.

If they had a disagreement, let's say about what they wanted to eat for dinner, they would each simply assign a number out of 10 to how strongly they felt about their preference. So their conversations included sentences like, I'm a 7 on chicken. If his number was higher than hers, they'd have chicken. It might seem a little strange that a man who often has trouble making contact with the human beings around him has focused his energies on attempts to make contact with extraterrestrials. Strange, and at the same time entirely fitting.

Over the last few years, my father has been building his own giant flaming moat of kerosene. It is a page on the World Wide Web, and it is titled "An Invitation to ETI," which stands for "Extraterrestrial Intelligence." This is how the page reads: "Hello, ETI. We assume you are a highly advanced form of alien intelligence that originally came to Earth from some other place in the universe. We welcome you here. With respect and a spirit of friendship, we invite you to make contact.

Feel free to use whatever form of communication you prefer: email, fax, telephone, or a face-to-face conversation. It's easy to make fun of my father's project, but there is a logic to it, as unlikely as it sounds, a series of premises, each of which, taken alone, makes a certain sense. My father is right that there probably is life somewhere else in the universe. If other civilizations have developed, they probably are a lot more advanced than we are.

He has a point when he says that there's no particular reason to assume that extraterrestrials would choose to communicate via radio signals. He can even be convincing when he says that these alien civilizations might instead have sent probes to our planet to monitor us and our communication media, including the internet. It's only when you put it all together, when you're actually sitting there staring at the fax machine waiting for the alien message to arrive, that the project suddenly seems a little dubious.

In five years, my father has received about 60 messages through his website, and they were all pranks. Emails from smart alecks who thought it might be a good chuckle to impersonate an alien for a while. My father wrote back to all 60 of them, asking them for proof that they were really aliens. A couple of them kept the charade going for a few rounds, but eventually they all gave up and admitted they were only human. And then, late last year, a breakthrough.

In November, my father received an email from a man named Harold, who seemed different than the jokers he usually heard from. Harold didn't claim to be an extraterrestrial. Instead, he said, he had obtained physical evidence of alien life, and he was offering to submit it to rigorous scientific testing. This evidence, he explained, was an alien probe, an energy field embedded in his body. He said that it emitted radio waves that could be detected by conventional instruments. My father was skeptical, but intrigued.

He talked it over by email with the board of advisors he had assembled when he set up his website, and they decided that for the first time in the history of this project, they should put an alien claim to the test. Which is how I wound up driving out to a warehouse in New Jersey one winter morning to meet my father, who had flown down from Toronto for the day. I went because I wanted to see my father at work, because I thought it might give me a chance to connect to a part of his life that meant a lot to him, even if I didn't really understand just why.

It also crossed my mind that if evidence of alien life was going to be found in suburban New Jersey, it wouldn't hurt to be the one guy there with the tape recorder. Hey, Matt. Hi. How's it going? Good. When I first spotted my father, he looked a little weak and off balance. A couple of years ago, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. And although it hasn't incapacitated him yet, he gets tired easily these days. It affects the way he talks, too. Sometimes he has to start a word three times before he finishes it once.

But he seemed glad to be there, catching up with two members of his advisory board who were also there for the test. One, named Paul, was an aerospace engineer, a bearded, energetic man who laughed a lot. The other, Richard, was tall and laconic, with long gray hair. He owned his own electronics firm, and it was his warehouse where we were going to run the test. It was nice to watch these guys interact with my dad. They looked up to him in a way. There was no sign of Harold, and for a while we thought maybe he wouldn't show up.

But then he walked in and launched right into what sounded like a prepared speech. Harold was wearing baggy khaki pants and a white Oxford shirt that looked like it had been packed inside a duffel bag for a few days and then unfolded that morning. He had a kind of a 40s hat on. Not a fedora, but a round hat, more casual, almost a fishing hat. He was clean-shaven and olive-skinned and animated.

We all followed him into the library for his presentation. And I'm going to do a demonstration with an RF detector to show that I am emitting radio frequencies. And exactly how, why, and where they're going, we will determine in the lab. What he was saying, that he himself was emitting radio signals that were being monitored by an alien spaceship, didn't make a whole lot of sense. But there was something about the way he was talking. He acted just like a scientist. Whatever.

He had the lingo down, saying things like gigahertz and RF instead of radio frequency. And when he drew diagrams on the whiteboard, they looked convincing, full of vectors and arrows and numbers. Then he started unpacking his equipment. At this point, I'll demonstrate the radio frequency. He removed a Tupperware container from his knapsack and revealed a little device that looked like a computer circuit board, about two inches long. Then he put it into his mouth. It started to make noise. What you have just seen...

is the activation of an RF detector by transmission from an electric field anomaly placed next to my vocal cords that it transmits back to the extraterrestrials. I looked over at my father to try to figure out what he made of all this, but it was hard to tell just what he was thinking. And then it was time for the test. We all went downstairs to the lab, which was equipped with a huge radio wave detector.

The idea was that it would measure the waves coming out of Harold's head. Richard talked him through it. I guess the next step is for you to go in the room. Would you carry me to move your hat first, please? Oh, sure. You can't hear it on the tape, but this was a really awkward moment. When Harold took off his hat, we could see that he had lined the inside with tinfoil. A tinfoil hat. It's like a cliché, right? A shorthand term for crazy people who believe in aliens.

I'd seen tinfoil hats in movies, but I didn't know they existed in real life. I use that because sometimes the radio signal is really effective. I can imagine. Do you have anything with you, any devices, anything made of metal? Yes, I have some foil on my chest. Okay. Just plain aluminum foil? Yes. Is that all right to bring in there? If that's all it is, then, yeah. You don't have any artifacts? No.

After the tinfoil thing, it wasn't such a big surprise when the lab's equipment failed to detect any radio waves being emitted from the probe in Harold's head. Harold was clearly upset that the experiment hadn't worked, and he made excuses and explained how maybe we needed more sensitive equipment. Paul and Richard, the scientists, seemed a bit ticked off by the whole experience. But my dad wasn't worked up at all. He thanked Harold, shook his hand, and gave him some money for his bus trip home. I wasn't quite sure what to feel. I was a little disappointed despite myself.

I did feel like I'd shared some history with my father, even if it wasn't the Pulitzer Prize-winning kind. But I still didn't really understand just what it was that had brought us here. So after Harold left, I sat down with my father on an office couch just off the library, and I finally got a chance to ask him about some things I'd never really understood about his quest, including what seemed like an unavoidable question for anyone in the field of SETI, which is what insiders call the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Do you think people think of SETI as a joke sometimes?

Yeah, we call it the giggle factor in SETI. Sure. And why do you think that is? I haven't figured it out. I figured it myself, you know. I can't always keep a straight face and tell people what I do. Really? Sure. Well, how come? It's funny to be trying to make contact with another culture that we don't even know whether it exists or not. Is there any other scientific field that is like that? I can't think of one where the field hasn't even proved that its central phenomenon exists yet.

It's true when you look at it that way. It's the thing I sometimes forget about my dad. He doesn't have a lot of illusions about how likely it is that aliens will get in touch anytime soon. I think it's the reason why he didn't seem all that disappointed when Harold struck out in the lab. He's prepared to keep waiting. But I can't help feeling that there is something a little sad about any search for extraterrestrial intelligence, whether it's Carl Frederick Gauss's or my father's. It seems like a quest born out of a great loneliness, out of the feeling that the life we see around us is not enough.

It is a feeling, a longing really, not that different than the way a frustrated husband and father might feel coming back to the same predictable home night after night. It is the feeling that there must be more than this. I thought that this was all that was on Earth, it's all that there is in the universe. I would feel that the universe was diminished somehow. I sometimes get accused of expecting a savior, and I don't think I'm doing that, but...

It certainly comes close to religious belief because you're dealing with something that's just so big, so overarching, so transcendent that it's pretty close to what a lot of people call God. For me, the difference is that the E.T. could exist. I don't see how God could exist. It just sounds too fantastic. Do you think this project is the most meaningful thing you've ever done?

Yes, I think it is. In fact, my shorthand nickname for it is "The Ultimate Project" because it's probably my ultimate project. I've called it that from the start. If I'm going to be honest with you, I should probably say that that's not the answer I wanted him to give. I wanted him to say, "Sure, maybe it's the most meaningful thing I've done professionally, but it doesn't compare to raising my family, to being a father." I think any child of an eccentric father feels two opposing things simultaneously.

Mostly, you want him to stop embarrassing you. When he sends you an email, you want the subject header to be something normal like Thanksgiving plans. You don't want subject headers like the one I received from my father the other day. What if our galaxy is populated by super smart machines? But at the same time, the thought of my dad dismantling his website and giving up his dream feels like a terrible loss. Even if my father's project doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Even if it sometimes feels more like prayer than like science.

I want him to keep looking. It makes him seem a little less alien, oddly enough, and a little more human. Paul Tuff is one of the original contributing editors to This American Life. Since the story first aired in 2005, his father found out that he suffered from multiple system atrophy, not Parkinson's disease. In 2012, he died from complications related to that disorder. Before he died, he asked that Paul and Paul's sister keep his website going. And they planned to do that indefinitely, even though neither of them are as hopeful about it as Paul's dad was.

As of today, they have yet to receive any messages from extraterrestrials. But, you know, if you're hearing my voice right now and you come from another planet or you know somebody who does, you can make contact at www.ieti.org. Paul's latest book is The Inequality Machine, How College Divides Us.

He first read a version of today's story at the Little Grey Books lecture series in New York City. Today's program was originally produced by Diane Cook and myself, with Alex Bloomberg, Wendy Dorr, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollack. Our senior producer for this show is Julie Snyder. Production help from Todd Bachman, Maura Bellows, Kevin Clark, Sativa January, Andy Dixon, Alvin Melleth, and Matt Tierney. Help on today's rerun from Stone Nelson and Angela Javasi. Special thanks today to Elspeth Carruthers, Cliff Dirksen, Gerald Davis, Lane Schmidt, Jonathan Goldstein, and Julianne Hill.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Troy Malatia, who explains his theory on how to run a radio station this way. But I would just turn everything on and, you know, turn knobs and hear kinds of woo-woo-woo sounds, you know. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Next week on the podcast of This American Life, we visit a hospital in Africa, complete with beautiful operating rooms and flying drones that carry snakebite antivenom. They treated a big chunk of its country's people for absolutely free. In February, their funding was shut down when the Trump administration closed USAID. And now the people running this hospital are pondering what was good and what was bad about what they built here. That's next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station.

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