289: Go Ask Your Father

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life.

Ira Glass

When Aric 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 Aric would record these cassettes and send them off to him.

Ira Glass

His request that his father record a tape for him is repeated over and over again on these tapes. Here's Aric, 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.

Ira Glass

These recordings are filled with so much yearning that, even when Aric tells his dad about his haircut, you can hear it. Aric reads his dad a poem he's written about the environment. He talks about the weather, two feet of snow. He plays his clarinet, though even this gets a nervous preamble.

Ira Glass

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 Aric'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.

Ira Glass

This is Aric'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 Aric's mom split up pretty early. And I've got to say, this little encounter did not start so well. Aric played his father a bit at 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 Aric down back then.

And then, finally, Aric 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.

Ira Glass

I talked to Aric about all this on the phone.

Ira Glass

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, we have stories of two people who head off bravely for answers, despite these odds. Act 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-- just possibly-- a website. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Make Him 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 Abie.

Ira Glass

Uncle Abie was always an hour late for everything. Uncle Abie went out with a string of women when he was single, in a way that seemed unsavory to Lenny's parents. Uncle Abie couldn't be trusted. There are all kinds of things about Uncle Abie to avoid. So Uncle Abie 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 a department 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. Lenny 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 Lenny's visiting his dad there.

Ira Glass

And 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 Abie. 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.

Ira Glass

And Lenny does get on with his life. For over 15 years, he pretty much let the question rest right there.

Ira Glass

As years passed, for Lenny, this question about his father and Uncle Abie 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 of 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.

Ira Glass

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? And yet somehow, even at that age, Lenny says it's still possible to daydream about the parents who you'd rather have had.

Ira Glass

Back in 2005, when we first broadcast today's show, Lenny 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 on an envelope or a stamp. But Wayne 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 JJ.

Ira Glass

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. The line is tissue.

Ira Glass

Dr. Grody 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 Abie 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.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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 Abie 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.

Ira Glass

Lenny Davis is a distinguished professor 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 Abie 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 member of the United States Congress. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This 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 have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, My Favorite Martian. Paul Tough tells the story.

Paul Tough

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 Friedrich Gauss was working as the director of the observatory in the town of Gottingen. 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, 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' two proposals, which might sound a little crude.

Idea one, 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, that 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 seven 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 a tape recorder.

[CAR DOOR CLOSING]

Paul Tough

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.

Paul Tough

Harold is 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 '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.

Paul Tough

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. 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.

Paul Tough

He removed a Tupperware container from his knapsack and revealed a little device that looked like a computer circuit board, about 2 inches long. Then he put it into his mouth.

[RAPID BEEPING]

It started to make noise.

Paul Tough

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.

Paul Tough

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 cliche, 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.

Paul Tough

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 had 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 had 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.

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 Friedrich Gauss' 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.

Paul Tough

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.

Ira Glass

Paul Tough is one of the original contributing editors to This American Life. Since this 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 plan 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-- that's invitation to extraterrestrial intelligence-- ieti.org.

Paul's latest book is Helping Children Succeed, What Works and Why. He first read a version of today's story at the Little Gray Books lecture series in New York City.

Ira Glass

Well, today's program was originally produced by Diane Cook and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, Jane Marie, Sarah Koenig, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer for this show was Julie Snyder. Production help from Todd Bachmann, Laura Bellows, Kevin Clark, Sativa January, Andy Dixon, and Alvin Melathe. Our technical director is Matt Tierney.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

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. Torey Malatia, who explains his theory on how to run a radio station this way.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.