Riddles are short, playful puzzles that hide a simple answer behind clever wording. They’re designed to trip up quick assumptions, forcing the brain to slow down and look more carefully at what’s actually being asked.
The best ones don’t rely on obscure facts; they rely on paying attention. That’s why some classic riddles keep circulating for years people enjoy that tiny moment of “ohhh, of course” when the trick finally clicks.
The “plane crash on the border” riddle is one of those: it sounds dramatic and complicated, but the solution turns on a very ordinary detail most readers skim past.
The Riddle
If a plane crashes on the border of the United States and Canada, where do they bury the survivors?
The Answer
The answer is: you don’t bury the survivors.
Answer Explanation
The “border plane crash” riddle works by misdirection. The setup feels like a serious, almost news‑style scenario: a crash, two countries, and the idea of splitting responsibilities. Most people instinctively start weighing options:
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Should the survivors be “buried” in the country where the plane took off?
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In the country where most passengers came from?
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Or in whichever country owns more of the crash site?
The mind races ahead because borders and jurisdiction are genuinely complicated topics in real life. But the riddle never asks anything about laws or ownership, it asks where to bury the survivors. The keyword “survivors” is the clue that this entire line of thinking is off‑track.
In normal language, survivors are living people. Burying them would only make sense if they had not survived, which turns the question itself into a contradiction. Once that’s clear, the answer becomes obvious and a bit funny: there’s no need to argue about which country gets to bury them, because they aren’t being buried at all.
