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1945, after 14 years and a total of nine escapes, Charrière was a free man. He settled in Venezuela, got married, had children, opened a restaurant, and wrote his autobiography.
    The East Indian wandering whistling duck whistles rather than quacks.
    THE TRICKY PART
    But was it really his biography? When Charrière’s book was published in 1969, it was an immediate success. People all over the world were fascinated by his tale. But decades later, in 2005, another prisoner from Devil’s Island claimed that he was the real Papillon.
    Charles Brunier was 104 years old and living in a nursing home outside of Paris. He said he’d known Henri Charrière back in the 1930s and 1940s, when they were both imprisoned in French Guiana. Brunier claimed that he told Charrière stories of three of his own escapes, all of which appear in the book. Brunier even had his own butterfly tattoo—on his left arm.
    History seems to back up Brunier’s story. Other prisoners remembered seeing him on Devil’s Island. Some also remembered Charrière. But they said he wasn’t an escape artist and had a reputation as a model prisoner. Others even said Charrière was never at Devil’s Island at all. The prison didn’t keep good records of who came and went, so we’ll probably never know for sure who the real Papillon was. Henri Charrière died in 1973.
    Top-selling gift for Christmas, 1975: Atari’s Pong video game Top-selling gift for Christmas, 2005: Sony’s PlayStation 3.

SPOT OF MYSTERY
    Can there really be a place where the laws of time and gravity don’t apply ?
    S TRANGE HOUSE IN THE WOODS
    In 1890, Gold Hill, Oregon, was a small, sleepy town with little gold left to mine. That year, after a heavy rainstorm, a former gold processing office (basically, a shack on a hill in the forest) slid off of its foundation and came to rest farther down the hillside. People went inside and found a place that didn’t seem to make any sense: rocks rolled uphill, and people were able to stand on the walls.
    In 1930, that shack—now called the Oregon Vortex House of Mystery—opened as a tourist attraction where visitors could see the strangeness for themselves:
    •Brooms stand on end.
    •Children appear taller than adults.
    •And few animals seemed willing to enter the area. But how…and why?
    BRING IN THE SCIENTIST
    John Lister was an engineer from England. He came to the Vortex in 1929 to study all the strange goings-on. He even discussed what he called “abnormalities” in the area’s magnetic field with Albert Einstein.
    Lister seemed to think there was something extraordinary happening, but he never shared his findings with anyone. To this day, no one really knows what he came up with. Legend has it that, before he died in 1959, he burned all his notes, but supposedly, he’d written, “The world isn’t yet ready for what goes on here.”
    SO WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON?
    Over the years, people came up with many different theories:
    1. When the house fell, it moved so fast that it ripped a hole in the earth and created a “gravitational anomaly,” where “high-velocity soft electrons” exit the earth. (Not likely, because there are no such things as “gravitational anomalies” or “high-velocity soft electrons.”)
    2. There’s a giant underground magnet or other device that’s causing the strange activity. (Also unlikely.)
    3. The weirdness could be caused by magnetic rocks in the area. (Possible, but there is no evidence of iron or other magnetic rocks in the ground near Gold Hill.)
    4. High concentrations of volcanic rocks cause the strange events. (Not true—volcanic rocks can’t alter gravity.)
    THE EXPLANATION?
    The debate has raged for years. True believers always point to magnetic abnormalities, or even the supernatural. But most people think the tricks at the Vortex are just optical illusions. The House of Mystery is likely a tilted house at a strange incline on a hill. The floor, walls, and ceiling are built at sloping