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@ -11489,21 +11591,18 @@
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@ -11545,18 +11644,10 @@
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“Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. That’s the one thing we know for sure in this world,” Calvin says to Hobbes in the first panel of a two-panel strip that ran in more than two thousand newspapers on Monday, July 17, 1995. The two friends are in a wagon, plummeting perilously forward into the unseen—a common pastime for them. Outside the world of the cartoon, it’s less than half a year before Bill Watterson, thirty-seven at the time, will retire from producing his wildly beloved work. “Calvin and Hobbes,” which débuted in 1985, centered on six-year-old Calvin and his best friend, Hobbes, a tiger who to everyone other than Calvin appears to be a stuffed animal. Six days a week, the strip appeared in short form, in black-and-white, and each Sunday it was longer and in color. The second panel of the July 17th strip is wide, with detailed trees in the foreground, the wagon airborne, and Calvin concluding his thought: “But I’m still going to gripe about it.”
After retiring, Watterson assiduously avoided becoming a public figure. He turned his attention to painting, music, and family life. He kept the work he made to himself; he gave few, but not zero, interviews. (When asked in an e-mail interview that ran in 2013 in *Mental Floss* why he didn’t share his paintings, he replied, “It’s all catch and release—just tiny fish that aren’t really worth the trouble to clean and cook.”) Still, now and again his handiwork appeared. He wrote twice about CharlesM. Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” whom he never met. For the charity of the cartoonist Richard Thompson, who had been given a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, Watterson illustrated three strips for “Pearls Before Swine,” by Stephan Pastis, and also donated a painting for auction. In other words, he came out for the team.
In 2014, he gave an extensive and chatty interview to Jenny Robb, the curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, on the occasion of his second show there. Robb asked if he was surprised that his strip was still so popular. “It seems the less I have to do with it, the higher the strip’s reputation gets!” he said. In the interview, he comes across as levelheaded, not egotistical, not very pleased with electronic devices, the Internet, the diminished size of cartoons—and also quietly intense, like the dad figure in the strip, who enthusiastically sets out on a bike ride through heavy snow. As a college student at Kenyon, Watterson spent much of a school year painting his dorm-room ceiling like that of the Sistine Chapel, and then, at the end of the year, painted it back dorm-room drab.
My ten-year-old daughter makes a detailed argument (it involves bicycles, ropes, and scratch marks) that Hobbes is indisputably real; millions of us have the more decisively illusory experience of having grown up with Watterson. But we haven’t! Will we be disturbed if, now that time has passed, he has changed? When word came out that Watterson was releasing a new book this year—“The Mysteries,” a “fable for grown-ups,” written by Watterson and illustrated in collaboration with the renowned caricaturist John Kascht—there was more than passing interest. There were also very few clues about the content, save that there’s a kingdom in trouble, living in fear of mysteries. With a different artist, I might interpret this as an enticement, but it seems more likely that Watterson is merely averse to marketing—he did no publicity for his first “Calvin and Hobbes” collection, and fought for years to prevent Hobbes and Calvin from appearing in snow globes, on pajamas, on chip-bag clips, on trading cards. (“If I’d wanted to sell plush garbage, I’d have gone to work as a carny,” he once said.) Yet Calvin and Hobbes are still everywhere, and forever young. Somewhere on the outskirts of Cleveland, their creator is probably irked that his old characters are pouncing into all these reviews of this other endeavor. As Calvin put it, the universe should have a toll-free hotline for complaints.
“The Mysteries” is clothbound and black, about eight inches square, with gray endpapers. The title font looks medieval; the text font looks contemporary. Words appear on the left page of each spread: one or two sentences in black, surrounded by a field of white. The images appear on the right, taking up most of the page, framed by a thick black line. Some of the illustrations appear to be photographs of small clay sculptures alongside elements composed in graphite and maybe paint—but the materials aren’t specified. Think Chris Van Allsburg’s “Jumanji” gone darker, crossed with Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” The characters, unnamed, are drawn from that strange eternal medieval world of fantasy: knights, wizards, a king; peasants with faces like Leonardo grotesques, wearing kerchiefs or hoods. There are forty-three sentences in total, and one exclamation point. The magic of condensation that is characteristic of cartoons is also here, in a story with a quick, fairy-tale beginning: “Long ago, the forest was dark and deep.”
It all sounds rather sombre, but also it doesn’t take long to read it nine or ten times. (The illustrations, slower to process, do much of the storytelling work.) The story is: Unseen mysteries have kept the populace in a state of fear. In response, a king bids his knights to capture a mystery, so that perhaps its “secrets could be learned” and its “powers could be thwarted.” When mysteries are caught, the public finds them disappointing, ordinary. One illustration is of a vender at a newspaper stand, looking askance. Below him are newspapers with headlines such as “So what?,” “Yawn,” and “Boring.” But modern technologies begin to appear: cars, skyscrapers, televisions. Mastering the secrets of the mysteries brought about a lot of technological marvels, and made the people less fearful. Or you might say insufficiently fearful: the woods are cut down, the air becomes acrid, and eventually the land looks prehistoric, desiccated, hostile to life. In one read, “The Mysteries” is a nephew of Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax.”
It’s also kin to the ancient story of Prometheus, a myth we now associate with technological advancements. Prometheus took pity on the struggling humans, and stole fire from the gods to share it with them. And how has that magnificently useful fire gone for the humans? Pretty well by some measures, pretty catastrophically by others. If only humans heeded the warnings within mysteries as well as they followed the blueprints for making Teflon pans and missiles. I don’t think I’ll spoil the plot of “The Mysteries” if I say that the story finds a distinctive and unsettling path to its final three words, which are “happily ever after.”
“It’s a funny world, Hobbes,” Calvin says, plummeting again down a hill in a wagon with his friend. “But it’s not a hilarious world,” he says, as they fall out of their wagon. “Unless you like sick humor,” Hobbes says after he and Calvin have both crashed to the ground.
Watterson has said, of the illustrations in “Calvin and Hobbes,” “One of the jokes I really like is that the fantasies are drawn more realistically than reality, since that says a lot about what’s going on in Calvin’s head.” Only one reality in “Calvin and Hobbes” is drawn with a level of detail comparable to the scenes of Calvin’s imagination: the natural world. The woods, the streams, the snowy hills the friends career off—the natural world is a space as enchanted and real as Hobbes himself.
Enchantment! If disenchantment is the loss of myth and illusion in our lives, then what is the chant that calls those essentials back? An ongoing enchantment is at the heart of “Calvin and Hobbes.” It’s at the heart of “Don Quixote” and “Peter Pan,” too. These are stories about difficult and not infrequently destructive characters who are lost in their own worlds. At the same time, these characters embody most of what is good: the gifts of play, of the inner life, of imagining something other than what is there. If “The Mysteries” is a fable, then its moral might be that, when we believe we’ve understood the mysteries, we are misunderstanding; when we think we’ve solved them and have moved on, that error can be our dissolution.
Calvin offers the means of enchantment for seeing reality properly. This is well illustrated in the June 3, 1995, daily. (The brief black-and-white weekday strips of “Calvin and Hobbes” often feel as whole as the epic Sunday ones.) Calvin is digging a deep hole and Hobbes asks why. Calvin answers that he’s looking for buried treasure. Has he found any? Calvin replies, “A few dirty rocks, a weird root, and some disgusting grubs.” In the final panel, Hobbes: “On your first try??” Calvin: “There’s treasure everywhere!”
While rereading “Calvin and Hobbes” comics for this piece, I was surprised that almost all of them were not entirely forgotten. If I saw them on a crowded subway platform, I would recognize them, even after years of separation. Some of the silliest and most untethered of the strips have stayed with me the most: one in which Hobbes repeats the word “smock” again and again, just happy to say it; another in which Calvin writes down, “How many boards would the Mongol hoard, if the Mongol hordes got bored?”—then crumples up the paper.
Watterson has written, “Whenever the strip got ponderous, I put Calvin and Hobbes in their wagon and send them over a cliff. It had a nice way of undercutting the serious subjects.” “The Mysteries” doesn’t entirely lack that lightness—the contrast of modern and medieval in the illustrations is often funny—but humor is not its main tool. Reading “The Mysteries” after rereading “Calvin and Hobbes” reminded me of the Brothers Grimm story “The Goblins.” Goblins steal a mother’s child and replace it with a ravenous changeling. When the woman asks a neighbor for advice on how to get her child back, she is told to make the changeling laugh, because “when a changeling laughs, that’s the end of him.” She makes him laugh (by boiling water in eggshells? A trick perhaps lost across the centuries), and the goblins take the changeling away and return her child. She counters tragedy with a deliberate silliness—and it succeeds, even as the dark persists. In that sense, the old strip and the new fable work best, maybe, together. I’m also reminded of the strip in which Hobbes says, “I suppose if we couldn’t laugh at things that don’t make sense, we couldn’t react to a lot of life.”
One of the cozy pleasures of “Calvin and Hobbes” is the prominence of the seasons. This was felt even more acutely when the comics appeared daily in the paper, as they did throughout my childhood, when my brother used to call the Sunday comics insert “the intellectual pages.” (Now we both read the nearly comic-free online news instead of the material papers, into which, Watterson has said, “little jokes” were placed as a respite from “atrocities described in the rest of the newspaper.”) In the fall, a leaf pile transforms into a Calvin-eating monster; in winter, Calvin sculpts a snowman swimming away from snow-shark fins; spring is rainy, and in summer the days are just packed. Time hurries along through the year, but the years never pass—a great comfort. In “The Mysteries,” time’s arrow can’t be missed for a moment. Though the story starts in the misty forever-medieval, it quickly javelins forward. By its close, aeons have passed, and the perspective is no longer even earthbound. The book reads like someone saying goodbye. The outcome feels inevitable.
Calvin isn’t the only comic-strip character who doesn’t age. The characters in “Peanuts” never grow up, either. Schulz drew the strip for fifty years, and the final strip was published the day after he died. George Herriman drew “Krazy Kat” for more than thirty years, through to the year of his death, 1944. The characters in “Krazy Kat” also didn’t age or really change much: Krazy Kat is a black cat forever in love with Ignatz, a white mouse who serially hits Krazy with bricks, an action that Krazy misinterprets as a sign of love. Watterson has expressed admiration for both Schulz and Herriman. Yet Watterson, after ten years, moved on to other interests.
“Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography,” by David Michaelis, makes vivid that no amount of success ever separated Schulz from his sense of himself, carried over from childhood, as a lonely and overlooked “nothing.” In 2007, Watterson reviewed the biography for the *Wall Street Journal*, and reminded readers that “Peanuts” had as much darkness—fear, sadness, bullying—as it had charm. “Schulz illustrates the conflict in his life, not in a self-justifying or vengeful manner but with a larger human understanding that implicates himself in the sad comedy,” Watterson wrote. “I think that’s a wonderfully sane way to process a hurtful world.” Herriman, born in the nineteenth century in New Orleans to a mixed-race family, often presented himself, in his adult life, as Greek. It would be oversimplifying to say that Herriman’s background fuelled “Krazy Kat,” just as it would be oversimplifying to say that Schulz was forever a Charlie Brown—but it would be delusional to think that the persistent situations and sentiments of those comics weren’t inflected by their makers’ lives. As Krazy Kat put it, in that magic mixed-up Kat language, “An’ who but me can moddil for me, but I!”
Watterson must have been working out something in his strip, too. By his own account, he had a pretty nice childhood, with supportive parents and a house that bordered a mysterious wood. It’s possible that Watterson quit because he tired of the demanding work, or because he’d said all he had to say, or because he was worn out by the legal battles over his characters. But maybe he just changed. Growing up is always a loss—a loss of an enchanted way of seeing, at the very least—and for some people growing up is more of a loss than for others. Perhaps part of what drove Watterson, “Ahab-like” by his own telling, back to the drawing board with his boy and his tiger day after day was a subconscious commitment to staying a child. Maybe he chose to stop publishing because, in some way, for whatever reasons, he became O.K. with growing up.
In a Sunday strip on April 22, 1990, Calvin’s dad tells Calvin and Hobbes a bedtime story, by request, that is about Calvin and Hobbes. All he does, pretty much, is describe, to his rapt audience, the first part of their actual day. Calvin complains that his dad ends the story too early, that he hasn’t even gotten to lunchtime. His dad says the story has no end, because Calvin and Hobbes will go on writing it “tomorrow and every day after.” The friends are pleased to learn they’re in a story that doesn’t end.
Here’s another story, kindred to “The Mysteries,” about a knight who journeys into a dark and unknown wood. The first scene of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which is thought to have been written in the late fourteenth century, takes place in Camelot during New Year’s festivities. A good time, with feasting and friends, is interrupted by the arrival of a stranger: a massive knight, whose skin and hair are all green, who is dressed all in green, who is riding an all-green horse. The knight carries a huge axe and makes a strange proposal, in such a way that the honor of the whole court feels at stake. He invites someone to swing at his neck with his axe; in return, he will have a chance, a year and a day later, to swing the same axe at the neck of the volunteer, who ends up being Sir Gawain. The resonance of the story with facing the perils of a dark and unknown wood, of nature itself, is pretty clear.
Gawain chops off the head of the Green Knight, who then picks up his head; says, See you in a year; and rides away. Pretty quickly, the feasting and the merry mood return. How, I remember thinking the first time I read the tale, could this possibly end? It’s not satisfying if the Green Knight is killed, or if Gawain is. Maybe both of them die, I supposed.
But no. Gawain keeps his word, despite the perilous terms. En route to his meeting with the Green Knight, in the Green Chapel, he tries to behave well with the seductive wife of the lord who graciously hosts him. Then he bravely bares his neck for the terrifying Green Knight—but he learns it was an enchantment! To me, the ending follows from both good behavior and enchantment—good behavior being something Calvin despises, and enchantment being the realm in which he is king. ♦
# How workers remove toxic debris and ash after Hawaii wildfires
The teams of workers wrapped in white plastic suits stand out against a charred landscape as they pick through the toxic ash and debris that remain after Hawaii’s worst wildfire ripped through the historic town of Lahaina. When it was over, more than 1,700 buildings had been ruined – walls collapsed, pipes twisted, insulation materials broken and scattered across the breezy coastline in northwest Maui – creating a toxic mess that will haunt the Pacific island for months to come.
As Hawaii mourns the 99 people killed in the Aug. 8 fire, and with 6 people still missing, it also must go through the painstaking process of clearing away Lahaina’s now-toxic remnants. In the harbor, dozens of sunken vessels appear as dark shadows on the seafloor, resting in sludge from ash and debris.
“It may take up to a year, and cost up to $1 billion,” said Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz (D) during a September 5 briefing on the floor of the Senate.
When heat and fire move through a town, they destroy treated timber, metal pipes and girdings, insulation and other materials – unleashing hazardous elements and chemicals into the air, water and ground. These toxins, if not properly cleared, can pose health threats for years to come.
A map showing the locations of buildings that were destroyed in the fire and the approximate ages of the neighborhoods.
In the case of Lahaina, the age of the building helps cleanup crews determine which ruined plots might be more dangerous than others. Older structures were more likely to have used asbestos, for example - a cancer-causing insulation material now banned in construction. The plantation-era wooden structures from the early to mid 1900s, which fueled the fire’s rapid spread through the town, might have used timber coated in poisonous arsenic to ward away insects and rot.
The everyday objects and materials that populate an average U.S. household generally pose no threat. But when plastic materials, lead pipes, outdated insulation, treated wood or batteries are engulfed by fire, they can change dramatically for the worse.
“It's basically a college chemistry course happening in real time, with chemicals being converted, one to another, with the heat of the flames,” said Gina Solomon, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
Chemicals released immediately in a fire can include chlorine, benzene and cyanide – all extremely toxic to humans. But as they’re released with the smoke from the fire, they also dissipate relatively quickly, limiting longer-term danger.
Dioxins, a group of highly toxic chemicals that persist for a long time in the environment, can form through urban fire combustion, particularly with burning plastics. They are also initially released in the billowing smoke but will stick around, in the ash, soot and soils left behind. When ingested, dioxins accumulate in animal fatty tissues, which can lead to liver damage, reproductive problems, immune system suppression or illnesses like cancer.
## A methodical process
The arduous cleanup, led by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), begins once the canine teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency have conducted their searches for victims and human remains. Before anything is cleared away, the cleanup crews must inspect and catalog the damage.
Moving plot by plot, they map out the area with spray paint to mark dangerous sites. Pink paint is used for suspected asbestos, red marks lithium battery banks, orange shows highly hazardous areas and items, and white means safe or inert objects. Blue flags are used to mark areas or items of cultural sensitivity. Then the careful task of decontamination begins.
To prevent further pollution, the EPA will also remove toxic hazards like propane tanks, oils, paints and pesticides that might still be found under a kitchen sink or in a garage. When firearms are found, they’re handed to the Maui police.
The toxic materials are taken outside of the town to Ukumehame Firing Range, where the EPA has set up a staging area to sort through the mess. The area has been lined with special, liquid-tight material made from layers of woven polypropylene. Straw wattles surround the area to contain anything that might spill. Here, the various hazards are separated from one another, so they can be packaged and shipped to the U.S. mainland for safe disposal.
Local officials are also working alongside both the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers to identify and preserve any culturally important artifacts or locations.
Lahaina has long been a Hawaiian center of indigenous heritage. In 1802, King Kamehameha I made it the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and it remained the seat of power until the 1940s, when King Kamehameha III moved the capital to Honolulu.
“Lahaina holds some of the most historically significant cultural properties and highest-ranking sacred remains of our ancestors,” said Carmen “Hulu” Lindsey in a statement the day after the fire. She is chairwoman of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, an organization that provides resources for Native Hawaiians.
## Hazardous building legacy
The fire and the damage has not been limited to Lahaina. Preliminary testing of ash found at eight burned homes in the neighboring town Kula revealed very high levels of toxins, with 138 times the acceptable level of arsenic, 18 times the acceptable cobalt levels and about 3.5 times normal lead levels. Because the homes in Kula were constructed during the same time period as homes in Lahaina, the Hawaii Department of Health expects both locations to contain similar contaminant levels.
There are no clear records of what materials were used in building Lahaina. But the age of each structure gives surveyors clues, based on which construction materials were available and commonly used during that period. Buildings constructed in the 1940s-1960s were built when most hazardous materials were available for use.
“The major concerns are arsenic for the building materials, and you know there's lead-based paint and lead pipes,” said Cory Koger, a chemist and toxicologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“The arsenic would be from the Canec, and the lead coming from all the various sources of lead, including historic burning of lead-based fuels,” he said, noting that they won’t aim to reduce lead in the environment to zero, but to the pre-fire levels based on recent Maui environmental data.
### The age of Lahaina’s buildings
The chart below shows an approximate timeline of when some hazardous building materials were in use compared to the age of each building in Lahaina.
Two rows of dots representing all residential and commercial buildings in Lahaina, with their position indicating when they were built from 1900 to the present, and shaded brackets above the lines indicating the potential building materials used in those years that can release toxic chemicals when burnt.
## Sunken boats
The cleanup effort is not limited to Lahaina’s land, but extends into the harbor where the remains of sunken boats now clutter the coastline in heaps of twisted metal and warped fiberglass. For this effort, U.S. Navy salvage divers coordinating with the Lahaina Fire Department and the U.S. Coast Guard have already catalogued dozens of submerged vessels, and expect to find more.
Some of these vessels pose swimming or boating hazards. Some could be leeching dangerous materials into the surrounding water. Aerial surveys by the Coast Guard along with an underwater remote vehicle from the Navy are being used to map out hazards on the harbor floor.
One month after the fire, Kelli Lundgren was able to check on her sailboat Lazy Daze moored at the south end of the harbor - and was shocked to find it was one of only 13 still afloat. She calls them “the Lucky 13.”
“We’re still trying to analyze how that firestorm missed these boats,” Lundgren said. “It’s just incredible.”
### Aerial assessment
Composite image made from frames of a drone video provided by the United States Coast Guard.
Images from drone video are stitched together to show an overview of Lahaina harbor, with dozens of sunken boats showing as shadows through the blue water, and a few white vessels floating at the far southern end of the harbor.
There were 99 boats moored in the harbor before the fire. Winds carried the wildfire’s heat and smoke, along with fire embers, out over the water, warping plastic fiberglass hulls and setting wooden docks and boats aflame. Some people jumped into the ocean and were later rescued.
"I was the last one off the dock when the firestorm came through the banyan trees and took everything with it. And I just ran out and helped everyone I could along the way," Dustin Johnson told reporters at Lahaina’s airport just after the fire. He had been working in the harbor for a company offering two-hour charter tours.
A photograph of smoke billowing out into the water in Lahaina, Hawaii, U.S. on August 9, 2023.
“The water quality inside the harbor is horrible,” said aquatic biologist Russell Sparks with Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR). “You can see it from the surface. There’s a constant sheen of diesel and other pollutants.”
Already more than 2,000 gallons of polluting substances and potentially hazardous material have been removed from the harbor floor. The removal of damaged boats and larger debris will come next.
A destroyed boat floats off Lahaina Small Boat Harbor after the wildfires. August 10, 2023. Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources/Handout via REUTERS
But Sparks and the DLNR’s Division of Aquatic Resources are also concerned about the micro-debris - the broken bits of fiberglass that can degrade marine habitat if not removed. Additionally, water quality devices have been placed along the coral reefs that skirt Lahaina’s coast, with scientists studying the results to understand what may be drifting out of the harbor.
The devices, nicknamed “Fatbags”, contain a high-purity fat in which waterborne toxins, floating metals, dioxins, flame retardants and other hazardous chemicals will accumulate over time. “This mimics what a living creature like coral or fish would absorb. When the samples are analyzed, we’ll have a much better idea of what the reefs are being exposed to as a result of this fire,” Sparks said.
Authorities will continue to monitor the air, soil and drinking water supply, as well as tracking contaminants in the ocean, as the cleanup continues.
Water supply testing after the fire revealed that multiple locations contained benzene and other volatile organic compounds as a result of the wildfire, and drinking water in Lahaina was deemed unsafe to drink by the Maui Department of Water Supply. This decree remains largely in place today. Testing as of October 4 shows no benzene, but detectable levels of metals like lead and copper were found.
Water systems may become contaminated if they lose pressure, sucking in smoke, chemicals or hot gases. This is what happened in parts of the Upper Kula and Lahaina system, according to a Maui County press release. Plastic pieces of the water system less than 1.5 feet underground can also cause contamination when exposed to high heat from a wildfire.
As the cleanup goes on, officials have worried about the mass of toxic ash coating the entire area.
Preliminary air sampling conducted in Lahaina and Upcountry Maui suggested the levels of contaminants were not hazardous. But there is worry that high winds could stir things up. Officials have approved the use of a thickening agent, to be sprayed on the ash to keep it in place until it can be cleaned.
The area around Lahaina has also been grappling with a persistent drought, and the dry vegetation likely fueled the speed and severity with which the fire spread. That drought has also helped to keep pollution from water runoff in check. In the two months following the fire, less than a quarter inch of rain has fallen on the area.
But as November heralds the start of a wetter season that tends to peak in January, that relief may be short-lived. Heavy rainfall would raise the threat of toxic ash and soot washing into the sea where coral reefs and other marine life could suffer.
With about 75% of Lahaina destroyed, much will need to be rebuilt. The estimated cost of rebuilding is around $5.5 billion, according to the Pacific Disaster Center. While residents of small sections in the north, east and southern parts of the town have been able to visit their homes to see what remains, the majority of residents are being kept away while the cleanup continues. In a press conference only days after the fire on Aug. 10, Hawaii’s Lieutenant Governor Sylvia Luke saw recovery taking place over the span of not months but years. “It’s not just homes, it’s schools, businesses, there’s infrastructure, broadband needs. It’s going to be significant.”
Notes
The graphic showing a timeline of toxic building materials uses 1980 as an approximate phase-out point for asbestos, following a series of bans in the 1970s. Asbestos regulation in the U.S. has evolved over the years and some regulations have been overturned. Regulations surrounding asbestos may vary depending on specific products and applications.
The chart also visualizes all buildings in Lahaina. Each dot represents a structure in Tax Map Key (TMK) land parcels beginning with 245 and 246, totalling 4,976 buildings.
Sources
Maui County; U.S. Coast Guard District 14; EPA; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources; Pacific Disaster Center (PDC); Office of Planning, State of Hawaii; USGS; Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA); U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission; Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH); Maps4news; HERE; OSM.
# The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn to Horror Movies and Haunted Houses
Chain saws roar, and [spine-chilling screams](https://www.tiktok.com/@only_joya/video/7158124264971832619) echo from behind a dense wall of trees. You know you're at a scary attraction in the woods of Denmark called Dystopia Haunted House, yet everything sounds so real. As you walk into the house, you become disoriented in a dark maze filled with strange objects and broken furniture; when you turn a corner, you're confronted by bizarre scenes with evil clowns and terrifying monsters reaching out for you. Then you hear the chain saw revving up, and a masked man bursts through the wall. You scream and start running.
This might sound like the kind of place nobody would ever want to be in, but every year millions of people pay to visit haunts just like Dystopia. They crowd in during Halloween, to be sure, but show up in every other season, too. This paradox of horror's appeal—that people want to have disturbing and upsetting experiences—has long perplexed scholars. We devour tales of psychopathic killers on true crime podcasts, watch movies about horrible monsters, play games filled with ghosts and zombies, and read books that describe apocalyptic worlds packed with our worst fears.
This paradox is now being resolved by research on the science of scary play and morbid curiosity. Our desire to experience fear, it seems, is [rooted deep in our evolutionary past](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/on-the-nature-of-fear/) and can still benefit us today. Scary play, it turns out, can help us overcome fears and face new challenges—those that surface in our own lives and others that arise in the increasingly disturbing world we all live in.
The phenomenon of scary play surprised Charles Darwin. In [*The Descent of Man,*](https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Descent_of_Man/NaPu24dY4iAC?hl=en&gbpv=0) he wrote that he had heard about captive monkeys that, despite their fear of snakes, kept lifting the lid of a box containing the reptiles to peek inside. Intrigued, Darwin turned the story into an experiment: He put a bag with a snake inside it in a cage full of monkeys at the London Zoological Gardens. A monkey would cautiously walk up to the bag, slowly open it, and peer down inside before shrieking and racing away. After seeing one monkey do this, another monkey would carefully walk over to the bag to take a peek, then scream and run. Then another would do the same thing, then another.
The monkeys were “satiating their horror,” as Darwin put it. Morbid fascination with danger is widespread in the animal kingdom—it's called predator inspection. The inspection occurs when an animal looks at or even approaches a predator rather than simply fleeing. This [behavior occurs across a range of animals](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23735625), from guppies to gazelles.
At first blush, getting close to danger seems like a bad idea. Why would natural selection have instilled in animals a curiosity about the very things they should be avoiding? But there is an evolutionary logic to these actions. Morbid curiosity is a powerful way for animals to gain information about the most dangerous things in their environment. It also gives them an opportunity to practice dealing with scary experiences.
Customers at Dystopia are threatened by ghouls that could break past a thin wire barrier at any moment. Credit: Henriette Klausen
When you consider that many prey animals live close to their predators, the benefits of morbidly curious behavior such as predator inspection become clear. For example, it's not uncommon for a gazelle to cross paths with a cheetah on the savanna. It might seem like a gazelle should always run when it sees a cheetah. Fleeing, however, is physiologically expensive; if a gazelle ran every time it saw a cheetah, it would exhaust precious calories and lose out on opportunities for other activities that are important to its survival and reproduction.
Consider the perspective of the predator, too. It may seem like a cheetah should chase after a gazelle anytime it sees one. But for a cheetah, it's not easy to just grab a bite; hunting is an energetically costly exercise that doesn't always end in success. As long as the cheetah isn't starving, it should chase a prey animal only when the chances of capturing it are reasonably high.
If it's best for gazelles to run only when the cheetah is hunting, then they benefit if they can identify when a cheetah is hungry. And the only way for a gazelle to learn about cheetahs is by closely observing them when it's relatively safe to do so. For example, if the surrounding grass is short and a cheetah is easily visible, a gazelle feels safer and is more likely to linger a while and watch the cheetah, especially if the gazelle is among a larger group. The age of the gazelle matters, too; adolescents and young adults—those fast enough to escape and without much previous exposure to predators—[are the most likely to inspect cheetahs](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/bf00164184). The trade-off makes sense: these gazelles don't know much about dangerous cats yet, so they have a lot to gain from investigating them. Relative safety and inexperience are two of the most powerful moderators of predator inspection in animals—and of morbid curiosity in humans.
Today people inspect predators through stories and movies. Depictions of predators are found in stories passed along through [oral traditions around the world](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michelle-Sugiyama/publication/261705774_Lions_and_Tigers_and_Bears_Predators_as_a_Folklore_Universal/links/004635351513dd4e8a000000/Lions-and-Tigers-and-Bears-Predators-as-a-Folklore-Universal.pdf). Leopards, tigers and wolves are frequent antagonists in regional folklore. We also tell stories and see films about monstrous fictional predators such as ferocious werewolves, mighty dragons, clever vampires and bloodthirsty ogres.
Indulging in stories about threats is a frighteningly effective and valuable strategy. Such tales let us learn about potential predators or menacing situations that other people have encountered without having to face them ourselves. The exaggerated perils of fictional monsters create strong emotional and behavioral responses, familiarizing us with these reactions for when we have to deal with more down-to-earth dangers.
Children are often the intended audience for scary oral stories because these stories can help them learn about risks early in their lives. Think about the key lines of *Little Red Riding Hood:*
“Grandmother, what big eyes you have!”
“All the better to see with, my child.”
“Grandmother, what big teeth you have got!”
“All the better to eat you up with.”
The tale teaches a young audience, in a safe and entertaining way, what wolves look like and what certain parts of a wolf do. The story takes place in the woods, where wolves are typically found. It's scary, but told in a secure space, it delivers a valuable lesson.
A menacing figure looms out of the darkness at Dystopia. Credit:Jacob Papsø
Our fascination with things that can harm or kill us is not limited to predators. We also can be morbidly drawn to tales of large-scale frightening situations such as volcanic eruptions, pandemics, dangerous storms and a large variety of apocalyptic events. This is where the magic of a scary story really shines: it's the only way to learn about and rehearse responses to dangers we have yet to face.
Most people were feeling pretty uncertain about the future in 2020. COVID had thrust the world into a global pandemic. Governments were restricting movement, businesses were closing, and the way of living that many were used to was screeching to a halt.
But some of us had seen something like it before. Less than a decade earlier meningoencephalitic virus 1, or MEV-1, was wreaking havoc. It spread with terrifying speed and without requiring close contact in subways, elevators and outdoor public spaces. Society's response to MEV-1 foreshadowed what would happen in 2020 with COVID: travel stopped, businesses closed, and people started stockpiling supplies. Some of them began touting dubious miracle cures.
If you don't remember the worldwide devastation of MEV-1, you must not have seen the movie *Contagion*, a 2011 thriller starring Matt Damon, Kate Winslet and Laurence Fishburne. Watching it might have benefited you when COVID spread across the planet. In a study that one of us (Scrivner) conducted in the early months of the pandemic, those who had seen at least one pandemic-themed movie [reported feeling much more prepared](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7492010/) for the societal surprises that COVID had in store. The stockpiling of supplies, business closures, travel bans and miracle cures were all things fans of *Contagion* had seen before; they had already played with the idea of a global pandemic before the real thing happened.
Learning to [regain composure and adapt in the face of surprise](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/393866) and uncertainty seems to be a key evolutionary function of play. Engaging in play that simulates threatening situations helps juvenile mammals such as tiger cubs and wolf pups practice quickly regaining stable movement and emotional composure. Humans do this as well. Call to mind a backyard party where young children squeal with fear and delight as they are chased by a fun-loving parent who threatens, with arms outstretched in monster pose, “I'm gonna get you!” It's all just fun and games, but it's also a chance for the kids to try to maintain their motor control under stress so they don't tumble to the ground, making themselves vulnerable to a predator—or a tickle attack from the parent.
Researchers who study human fun and games have argued that [the decline of thrilling, unstructured play](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ985541.pdf) over the past few decades has contributed to a rise in childhood anxiety over that same time period. School and park playgrounds used to be arenas for this kind of play, but an increased emphasis on playground safety has removed opportunities for it. Don't get us wrong: safety is a good thing. Many playgrounds of the past were dangerous, with ladders climbing upward of 20 feet to rusty slides with no rails. But making playgrounds *too* safe and sterile can have unintended consequences, including depriving children of opportunities to learn about themselves and their abilities to manage challenging and scary situations. Kids need to be able to exercise some independence, which often involves a bit of risky play.
Many scientists who study play have proposed that adventurous play can help [build resilience](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10567-020-00338-w) and [reduce fear](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/147470491100900212) in children. In line with this research, organizations such as [LetGrow](https://letgrow.org/about-us/) have created programs for schools and parents to foster independence, curiosity and exploration in children. Their solution is simple: let kids engage in more challenging, unstructured play so they can learn how to handle fear, anxiety and danger without it being too overwhelming.
Even virtual scary experiences provide many of these same benefits. The Games for Emotional and Mental Health Lab created a horror biofeedback game called *MindLight* that has been shown to reduce anxiety in children. The game centers on a child named Arty who finds himself at his grandmother's house. When he goes inside, he sees that it has been enveloped in darkness and taken over by evil, shadowy creatures that can resemble everything from blobs to catlike predators. Arty must save his grandmother from the darkness and bring light back to her house. He has nothing to defend himself with except a light attached to his hat—his “mindlight.” Players controlling Arty must use the mindlight to expose and defeat the creatures.
But there's a catch: as a player becomes more stressed (as measured by an electroencephalogram), their mindlight dims. The player must stay calm in the face of fear by practicing techniques such as replacement of stress-producing thoughts or muscle relaxation, borrowed from cognitive-behavioral therapy. As they regain their composure, their mindlight grows in power, and they are able to defeat the monsters with it. This combination of therapeutic techniques and positive reinforcement (kids defeat the monsters and conquer their fear) makes *MindLight* [a potent antianxiety tool](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563216303296). Randomized clinical trials with children have shown the game to be [as effective at reducing several anxiety symptoms as traditional cognitive-behavioral therapy](https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10826-020-01728-y.pdf), a widely used anxiety treatment.
Scary play can help adults navigate fear and anxiety, too. Scrivner [tested this idea](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-90782-001) with visitors to Dystopia Haunted House. Haunted house goers could take personality surveys before they entered and answer questions about their experience when they exited. After about 45 minutes of being chased by zombies, monsters and a pig-man with a chain saw, the visitors ran out of the haunted house and into some members of the research team, who then asked them how they felt. A huge portion said they had learned something about themselves and believed they had some personal growth during the haunt. In particular, they reported learning the boundaries of what they can handle and how to manage their fear.
Other research from the Recreational Fear Lab in Aarhus, Denmark, has shown that [people actively regulate their fear](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304422X18301517) and arousal levels when engaging in scary play. This means that engaging with a frightening simulation can serve as [practice for controlling arousal](https://psyarxiv.com/7uh6f/) and may be generalizable to other, real-world stressful situations, helping people bolster their overall resilience.
In one study that supports this idea, real soldiers played a modified version of the zombie-apocalypse horror game *Left 4 Dead* that incorporated player arousal levels. In the game, zombies pop out of nowhere, chasing players and clawing them to the ground, generating visceral fear even in experienced video game players. In the study, some players were given visual and auditory signals when their arousal increased: a red texture partially obscured the player's view, and they heard a heartbeat that got louder and faster as their stress increased. Later, during a live simulation of an ambush, soldiers who played the video game and received biofeedback had lower levels of cortisol (a stress biomarker) than those who did not play. Strikingly, these people also [were better at giving first aid to a wounded soldier](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0036169&type=printable) during that simulation.
People who confront monstrous predators in a relatively safe space, such as a haunted house, can learn to manage anxiety felt during distressing real-life situations. Credit: Andrés Rein Baldursson
These rehearsals for stress may be especially effective when people do them in groups. Collectively experiencing a dangerous situation ties people together. There are many anecdotal examples of this in history, from post-9/11 America, to military platoons, to the high levels of cooperation and assistance that often occur in the aftermath of natural disasters. There are also experimental studies showing that danger and fear can be powerful positive social forces. For example, engaging in rituals such as [fire walking can physiologically synchronize people with one another](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1016955108) and [promote](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797612472910) mutually beneficial behavior.
We don't need exposure to real danger to reap these cooperative benefits, however. Collectively simulating upsetting or dangerous situations through scary play could confer similar benefits without the physical risk. In the health-care industry, [simulations are often used to teach medical skills](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33273877/) by creating situations that are intense. [In public health](https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exercises/event-201-pandemic-tabletop-exercise), simulations have been used to teach people ways to cooperate and coordinate in pandemic preparedness and response.
In other species, [learning about risks is often a social endeavor](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347284710554). Stickleback fish investigating predators often do so with others. One stickleback will begin approaching, then wait to see whether another will approach a little closer. Then the first stickleback will go a little further, taking its turn being the one nearest the predator. The results of studies into this behavior even suggest that sticklebacks from regions with higher predation risk are more cooperative than those from places with lower risk.
In humans, morbid curiosity seems to be associated with cooperation and risk management. For example, in many societies people tell stories about dangers in their environments, whether those are natural disasters such as fires, earthquakes and floods or threats of war, theft or exploitation from nearby groups. The Ik people of Uganda, whom one of us (Aktipis) has studied as part of the Human Generosity Project, have a collective and emotionally compelling way of engaging with concerns about raids from other groups. They enact entire plays with music, dancing and drama where they reexperience both the tragedy and the triumph of helping one another during such difficult times. Such stories and dramatic enactments can bring shared attention to these kinds of challenges, and we know that [shared attention is one mechanism that can help people cooperate and solve coordination dilemmas](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-07532-000).
A failure of group imagination, in contrast, can lead to vulnerability. Some researchers have suggested that [zombie-apocalypse fiction can lead to more creative solutions during unexpected and risky events by](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Buchanan-7/publication/340390898_The_Dark_Side_of_Group_Behavior_Zombie_Apocalypse_Lessons/links/5fafb251a6fdcc9ae050e888/The-Dark-Side-of-Group-Behavior-Zombie-Apocalypse-Lessons.pdf) helping people become more imaginative. With [CONPLAN 8888](https://www.stratcom.mil/portals/8/Documents/FOIA/CONPLAN_8888-11.pdf), a fictional training scenario, the U.S. military used a hypothetical zombie apocalypse to make learning about disaster management more fun for officers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did something similar with a comic they produced called [*Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic*](https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/6023). Organizations have recognized that couching fears in imaginative play is productive. Right now our research team is developing a set of scary group games to help people manage shared risks and fears.
What can we learn from the human propensity for scary play? First, don't be afraid to get out there and explore your world, even if it sometimes provokes a little fear. Second, make sure that your morbid curiosity is educating you about risks in a way that is beneficial to you. In other words, don't get stuck doomscrolling upsetting news on the Internet; it's a morbid-curiosity trap that, like candy, keeps you consuming but does nothing to satisfy your need for nourishment.
Instead of doomscrolling, take on one or two topics you want to know more about and do a deeper dive that leaves you feeling satisfied that you've assessed the risk and empowered yourself to do something about it. Be intentional about gathering more information through your own experience or by talking with others who are knowledgeable on the subject.
You can also tell or listen to scary stories with others and use them as a jumping-off point for thinking about real risks we face. Watch a movie about an apocalypse, go to a haunted house, get in costume to go on a “zombie crawl,” or have a fun night at home chatting with your friends about how you'd survive the end of the world. And finally, invite creativity and play into spaces where the gravity of a situation might otherwise be overwhelming. Make up horror stories or dress up as something frightening and have a laugh about how silly it all is. In other words, embrace the Halloween season with abandon—and then bring that same energy to the challenges of the times we're living in now.
This article was originally published with the title "Why We Need Scary Play" in Scientific American: Science News, Expert Analysis, Health Research , , 72-79 ()
**Athena Aktipis** is an associate professor of psychology and a cooperation scientist at Arizona State University. Her forthcoming book is *A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times* (Workman, 2024).Credit: Nick Higgins
**Coltan Scrivner** is a behavioral scientist at the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark and in the psychology department at Arizona State University. His forthcoming book is *Dark Minds, Soft Hearts: The Science Behind Our Fascination with the Dark Side of Life* (Penguin, 2024).
# They Cracked the Code to a Locked USB Drive Worth $235 Million in Bitcoin. Then It Got Weird
At 9:30 am on a Wednesday in late September, a hacker who asked to be called Tom Smith sent me a nonsensical text message: “query voltage recurrence.”
Those three words were proof of a remarkable feat—and potentially an extremely valuable one. A few days earlier, I had randomly generated those terms, set them as the passphrase on a certain model of [encrypted](https://www.wired.com/tag/encryption/) [USB thumb drive](https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-usb-flash-drives/) known as an IronKey S200, and shipped the drive across the country to Smith and his teammates in the Seattle lab of a startup called Unciphered.
Unciphered’s staff in the company’s Seattle lab.
Photograph: Meron Menghistab
Smith had told me that guessing my passphrase might take several days. Guessing it at all, in fact, should have been impossible: IronKeys are designed to permanently erase their contents if someone tries just 10 incorrect password guesses. But Unciphered's hackers had developed a secret IronKey password-cracking technique—one that they've still declined to fully describe to me or anyone else outside their company—that gave them essentially infinite tries. My USB stick had reached Unciphered’s lab on Tuesday, and I was somewhat surprised to see my three-word passphrase texted back to me the very next morning. With the help of a high-performance computer, Smith told me, the process had taken only 200 trillion tries.
Smith’s demonstration was not merely a hacker party trick. He and Unciphered’s team have spent close to eight months developing a capability to crack this specific, decade-old model of IronKey for a very particular reason: They believe that in a vault in a Swiss bank 5,000 miles to the east of their Seattle lab, an IronKey that's just as vulnerable to this cracking technique holds the keys to 7,002 bitcoins, worth close to $235 million at current exchange rates.
For years, Unciphered's hackers and many others in the crypto community have followed the story of a Swiss crypto entrepreneur living in San Francisco named Stefan Thomas, who owns this 2011-era IronKey, and who has lost the password to unlock it and access the nine-figure fortune it contains. Thomas has said in interviews that he's already tried eight incorrect guesses, leaving only two more tries before the IronKey erases the keys stored on it and he loses access to his bitcoins forever.
Screens in Unciphered’s lab show a microscopic image of the layout of the IronKey’s controller chip (left) and a CT scan of the drive.
Photograph: Meron Menghistab
Now, after months of work, Unciphered's hackers believe they can open Thomas' locked treasure chest, and they're ready to use their secret cracking technique to do it. “We were hesitant to reach out to him until we had a full, provable, reliable attack,” says Smith, who asked WIRED not to reveal his real name due to the sensitivities of working with secret hacking techniques and very large sums of cryptocurrency. “Now we’re in that place.”
The only problem: Thomas doesn't seem to want their help.
Earlier this month, not long after performing their USB-decrypting demonstration for me, Unciphered reached out to Thomas through a mutual associate who could vouch for the company’s new IronKey-unlocking abilities and offer assistance. The call didn't even get as far as discussing Unciphered's commission or fee before Thomas politely declined.
Thomas had already made a “handshake deal” with two other cracking teams a year earlier, he explained. In an effort to prevent the two teams from competing, he had offered each a portion of the proceeds if either one could unlock the drive. And he remains committed, even a year later, to giving those teams more time to work on the problem before he brings in anyone else—even though neither of the teams has shown any sign of pulling off the decryption trick that Unciphered has already accomplished.
That has left Unciphered in a strange situation: It holds what is potentially one of the most valuable lockpicking tools in the cryptocurrency world, but with no lock to pick. “We cracked the IronKey,” says Nick Fedoroff, Unciphered's director of operations. “Now we have to crack Stefan. This is turning out to be the hardest part.”
In an email to WIRED, Thomas confirmed that he had turned down Unciphered's offer to unlock his encrypted fortune. “I have already been working with a different set of experts on the recovery so I'm no longer free to negotiate with someone new,” Thomas wrote. “It's possible that the current team could decide to subcontract Unciphered if they feel that's the best option. We'll have to wait and see.” Thomas declined to be interviewed or to comment further.
A Very Valuable, Worthless USB Stick
In past interviews, Thomas has said that his 7,002 bitcoins were left over from a payment he received for making a video titled “What is Bitcoin?” that published on YouTube in early 2011, when a bitcoin was worth less than a dollar. Later that year, he told [WIRED](https://www.wired.com/2011/11/mf-bitcoin/) that he'd inadvertently erased two backup copies of the wallet that held those thousands of coins, and then lost the piece of paper with the password to decrypt the third copy, stored on the IronKey. By then, his lost coins were worth close to $140,000. “I spent a week trying to recover it,” he said at the time. “It was pretty painful.”
In the 12 years since, the value of the inaccessible coins on Thomas' IronKey has at times swelled to be worth nearly half a billion dollars, before settling to its current, still-staggering price. In January 2021, as Bitcoin began to approach its peak exchange rate, Thomas [described to *The New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/technology/bitcoin-passwords-wallets-fortunes.html) the angst that his long-lost hoard had caused him over the years. “I would just lay in bed and think about it,” he said. “Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.”
Around that same time in 2021, a team of cryptographers and white-hat hackers founded Unciphered with the goal of unlocking exactly the sort of vast, frozen funds that many unlucky crypto holders like Thomas have long since given up on. At the time of Unciphered’s official launch, the cryptocurrency tracing firm Chainalysis estimated the total sum of those forgotten wallets across blockchains to be worth $140 billion. Unciphered says it has since successfully helped clients open locked wallets worth “many millions” of dollars—often through [novel cryptographic vulnerabilities or software flaws](https://www.keybleed.com/) it has discovered in cryptocurrency wallets—though nothing close to the size of Thomas' IronKey stash.
A deconstructed IronKey inside of Unciphered’s laser cutting tool.
Photograph: Meron Menghistab
Only around the beginning of 2023 did Unciphered begin to hunt for potential avenues to unlock Thomas' IronKey prize. Smith says that they quickly started to see hints that the IronKey's manufacturer, which was sold to storage hardware firm iMation in 2011, had left them some potential openings. “We were seeing little bits and pieces,” Smith says. “Like, this looks a little sloppy, or this looks not quite like how someone should be doing things.” (Kingston Storage, which now owns IronKey, didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)
Even a decade-old IronKey is a daunting target for hackers. The USB stick, whose development was funded in part by the United States Department of Homeland Security, is FIPS-140-2 Level 3 certified, meaning it's tamper-resistant and its encryption is secure enough for use by military and intelligence agencies for classified information. But emboldened by the few hints of security flaws they'd found—and still with no participation from Thomas—Unciphered's founders decided to take on the project of cracking it. “If there is an Everest to attempt, this is it,” Fedoroff remembers telling the team. The company's founders would eventually pull together a group of around 10 staffers and outside consultants, several of whom had backgrounds at the National Security Agency or other three-letter government agencies. They called it Project Everest.
A $235 Million Treasure Hunt
One of their first moves was to determine the exact model of IronKey that Thomas must have used, based on timing and a process of elimination. Then they bought the entire supply of that decade-plus-old model that they could find available for sale online, eventually amassing hundreds of them in their lab.
To fully reverse engineer the device, Unciphered scanned an IronKey with a CT scanner, then began the elaborate surgery necessary to deconstruct it. Using a precise laser cutting tool, they carved out the Atmel chip that serves as the USB stick's “secure enclave” holding its cryptographic secrets. They bathed that chip in nitric acid to “decap” it, removing the layers of epoxy designed to prevent tampering. They then began to polish down the chip, layer by layer, with an abrasive silica solution and a tiny spinning felt pad, removing a fraction of a micron of material from its surface at a time, taking photos of each layer with either optical microscopes or scanning electron microscopes, and repeating the process until they could build a full 3D model of the processor.
Because the chip's read-only memory, or ROM, is built into the layout of its physical wiring for better efficiency, Unciphered's visual model gave it a head start toward deciphering much of the logic of the IronKey's cryptographic algorithm. But the team went much further, attaching tenth-of-a-millimeter gauge wires to the secure element’s connections to “wiretap” the communications going into and out of it. They even tracked down engineers who had worked on the Atmel chip and another microcontroller in the IronKey that dated back to the 1990s to quiz them for details about the hardware. “It felt very much like a treasure hunt," says Fedoroff. “You’re following a map that’s faded and coffee-stained, and you know there’s a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, but you have no idea where that rainbow’s leading.”
That cracking process culminated in July, when Unciphered's team gathered at an Airbnb in San Francisco. They describe standing around a table covered with millions of dollars’ worth of lab equipment when a member of the team read out the contents of a decrypted IronKey for the first time. “What just happened?” Fedoroff asked the room. “We just summited Everest,” said Unciphered's CEO, Eric Michaud.
Unciphered still won't reveal its full research process, or any details of the technique it ultimately found for cracking the IronKey and defeating its “counter” that limits password guesses. The company argues that the vulnerabilities they discovered are still potentially too dangerous to be made public, given that the model of IronKeys it cracked are too old to be patched with a software update, and some may still store classified information. “If this were to leak somehow, there would be much bigger national security implications than a cryptocurrency wallet,” Fedoroff says.
The team notes that the final method they developed doesn't require any of the invasive or destructive tactics that they used in their initial research. They've now unlocked 2011-era IronKeys—without destroying them—more than a thousand times, they say, and unlocked three IronKeys in demonstrations for WIRED.
Cryptic Contracts
None of that, however, has gotten them any closer to persuading Stefan Thomas to let them crack *his* IronKey. Unciphered’s hackers say they learned from the intermediary who contacted Thomas on their behalf that Thomas has already been in touch with two other potential players in the crypto- and hardware-hacking world to help unlock his USB stick: the cybersecurity forensics and investigations firm Naxo, and the independent security researcher Chris Tarnovsky.
Naxo declined WIRED’s request to comment. But Chris Tarnovsky, a renowned chip reverse engineer, confirmed to WIRED that he had a “meet-and-greet” call with Thomas in May of last year. Tarnovsky says that, in the meeting, Thomas had told him that if he could successfully unlock the IronKey, he would be "generous," but didn't specify a fee or commission. Since then, Tarnovsky says that he has done very little work on the project, and that he has essentially been waiting for Thomas to start paying him on a monthly basis for initial research. "I want Stefan to cough up some money up front," says Tarnovsky. “It's a lot of work, and I need to worry about my mortgage and my bills.”
But Tarnovsky says he hasn't heard from Thomas since that first call. “Nothing came out of it,” he says. “It's weird.”
Unciphered’s director of operations Nick Fedoroff.
Photograph: Meron Menghistab
Unciphered's team remains skeptical about Naxo’s progress and whether it’s any further along than Tarnovsky. There are only a small number of hardware hackers capable of the reverse engineering necessary to crack the IronKey, they argue, and none appear to be working with Naxo. As for Thomas' suggestion that they could subcontract to Naxo or another team working on the project, Unciphered's Fedoroff says he won't rule it out, but argues it doesn't make sense when Unciphered alone can crack the IronKey. “Based on what we know, we don't see any benefit to anyone in going that route,” Fedoroff says.
Thomas, meanwhile, seems to display an unusual lack of urgency in unlocking his $235 million, and has offered only vague hints about why he has yet to reveal any progress toward that goal. “When you're dealing with so much money, everything takes forever,” he told the *Thinking Crypto* podcast in an [interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwN_rsu8xJc) over the summer. “The person you're working with, you need some contract with them, and that contract needs to be rock solid, because if there's some issue with the contract, there's suddenly hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.”
To potentially accelerate that cryptic contract process, Unciphered plans to publish an open letter to Thomas and a video in the coming days designed to persuade—or pressure—Thomas into working with them. But Fedoroff concedes that it's possible Thomas doesn't actually care about the money: In its piece about his locked coins in 2021, *The New York Times* wrote that Thomas already had “more riches than he knows what to do with,” thanks to other crypto ventures.
Fedoroff notes that it's impossible to know for certain what Thomas' IronKey holds. Maybe the keys to the 7,002 bitcoins are held elsewhere, or gone altogether.
He says Unciphered is still hopeful. But the team is also ready to move on if Thomas won't work with them. There are, after all, other locked wallets out there for the company to crack. And the decision of whether and how to unlock this particular USB drive's riches will ultimately fall to its owner alone. “It's incredibly frustrating,” says Fedoroff. “But when you're dealing with people, that's always the most complex part. Code doesn't change unless you tell it to. Circuitry doesn't either. But humans are incredibly unpredictable creatures.”
*Updated 10:55 am ET, October 24, 2023, to correct a misspelling of Nick Fedoroff's surname.*
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