Missing, Presumed Dead

and apartments are reflections of ourselves. No one wants to live in a place with holes in the roof and dirt everywhere. The people of kit Salt no better than anyone. Kit Salt is a remote town located on the north coast of British Columbia, only a puddle jump away from the shores of Alaska. Uh In nineteen seventy nine, the town was officially established to provide homes for the miners working in the nearby molybdenum mines. The area was no

stranger to the mining business. Since nineteen eighteen, mines opened near kit Salt had produced a variety of metals such as silver, lead, copper and zinc. This new one, though molybdenum was an element used in producing steel alloys to make them harder and more corrosion resistant. It was a lucrative business, so much so that the town attracted twelve hundred residents to live and work there. The town also became a major opportunity for construction companies from all over

North America. They flocked to kit Salt to build everything from single family homes to apartment buildings, even a hospital and a shopping center. Locals lacked for nothing. They had a library, several restaurants, a post office, banks, everything a modern suburban enclave needed to keep its residents happy. Heck, the sewage treatment plant was so advanced. Kit Salt had the cleanest water in the province, and from the street level, it looked like any other suburb, with well manicured lawns,

simple homes, and trees and greenery surrounding the town. This little corner of Canada was a slice of heaven on earth for just two years. Around After eighteen months or so, the molybdenum market collapsed. The mines were forced to close, and the town's folk had no choice but to uproot their lives once again and find steady work elsewhere. The company behind that mine, American Metal Company, evacuated everyone fairly quickly. The people living there took almost all of their belongings,

save for the furniture and large appliances like television sets. Now, when we think of ghost towns, we usually pictured dilapidated homes and buildings covered in graffiti, with caved in roofs, shattered windows, and ruins claimed by the elements. Kits Sold, however, was different. American Metal Company didn't think the malebdenum crash would last forever. It hired a caretaker to watch over

the town until it was able to welcome everyone back. Well, that time never came, and Kits Salt sat vacant for over twenty years. In two thousand five, the town was purchased by an entrepreneur from India named Krishnan Sutan Theoren. He spent seven million dollars to own what has become something of a time capsule of a lost era the

early nineteen eighties. Since he bought it, Krishnan has spent at least twenty five million dollars sprucing up the grounds and maintaining each property he's hired a fleet of cleaners and caretakers to make sure the grass stays mode and the streets stay clean up. Until recently, the public could tour Kit Salt and walk through the buildings. Old TV sets in wooden frames still sit against living room walls. The carpet and furniture are all original, as is the

wallpaper in rooms that still have it. The grocery store shelves are empty, but the registers and the shopping carts are still intact. Books even sit on the library shelves, and the hospital's various medical equipment is right where it was left forty years ago. A gymnasium stands empty, it's hardwood flooring waiting for the scuffs and squeaks of sneakers during a pickup game of basketball, and the red upholstered seats in the abandoned theater patiently wait for viewers who

will never come back. The shopping center boasts would paneling and signs for stores like Sears with painted window designs still intact. And it may not seem like it given how modern it is, but Kit Salt is a historic village. It's a snapshot of a time period many people didn't live through and don't remember. For others, it's an eerie trip down memory lane. Will it's homes and businesses ever be filled with new tenants. No one knows except for the current owner. But I kind of hope it stays

just like it is. We already have ghost towns from the Old West and the Turn of the century. But a ghost town that looks like it was plucked from the pages of a Stephen King novel. That's something you don't see every day. Few television shows hold up as well as the nineteen sixties anthology series The Twilight Zone. It was acclaimed for its brilliant writing, moralistic plot lines,

and mind bending twists. Of its many timeless episodes, One of my favorites tells the story of Flight thirty three, a Boeing seven oh seven aircraft heading from London to New York in nineteen sixty one. After the airplane inexplicably accelerates, it appears over what should be New York City. Instead, the pilots looked down only to see dinosaurs roaming the earth. The plane has traveled back in time, hoping to make

it back to nineteen sixty one. The pilots catched the same jet stream that brought them millions of years into the past and make it back to New York City of nineteen thirty nine. As far as the audience knows, the plane never returns to nineteen sixty one. Its crew and passengers are lost to time. Something similar happened in San Francisco in nineteen forty two, but this aircraft didn't go back in time, at least I don't think so. The Goodyear Company is known for two things, tires and blimps.

Except before they were flying over football stadiums, the blimps, or airships as they were known, made by the Goodyear Aircraft Company, were being used by the United States military. They've been built as commercial vehicles, literally vehicles to be commercials, meant for advertising Goodyear's new range of tires. However, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U. S. Navy commandeered the fleets and designated them under the L class of

military airships. One in particular, the L eight, was instrumental in the Doolittle raid of Tokyo in nineteen forty two. It had delivered modification parts for the B twenty five bomber to the USS Hornet aircraft carrier which was taking the Doolittle Raiders to their destination. That was in April of that year. Four months later, on August sixteen, the L eight airship was ordered to perform a routine patrol

off the coast of San Francisco. It's two man crew, Lieutenant Ernest DeWitt Cody and Ensign Charles Ellis Adams, were tasked with searching for Japanese submarines, which had been taking out Allied ships in the area for some time. The L eight was outfitted with a thirty caliber machine gun, three hundred rounds of ammunition, and a pair of three D and twenty five pound depth charges to handle water bound enemies. Cody was a twenty seven year old senior

aviator and Navy veteran. He didn't just know his way around that aircraft, he also knew how to keep a level head in tough situations. His commanding officer once referred to him as one of the most capable pilots and one of the most able officers that he had ever

worked with. In fact, Lieutenant Cody had been the one flying the L A during the delivery mission to the U. S s. Hornet four months prior ensign Adams was older than Cody by eleven years and had survived the crash of the USS make An airship off the coast of California in nineteen thirty five. He'd just recently been commissioned as an officer and had twenty years of airship experience

under his belt. The German government even decorated him after he helped rescue passengers from the Hindenburg disaster in nineteen thirty seven. On the morning of August sixteenth of nineteen forty two, at six oh three a m. Cody and Adams took off in the l A from Treasure Island in San Francisco. They were to travel to the Farallon Islands, followed by a fly by of the Golden gate Bridge, all in all a round trip within a fifty mile radius.

Conditions were clear that morning for the Blimps one thousand and ninety third trip, with the previous trips all having been completed without incident. Roughly an hour and a half after takeoff, Cody and Adams radioed back to Treasure Island with reports of an oil slick. Not far from the Farallon Islands. The airship dropped down to thirty feet above the slick and circled it for a closer look before

heading back up into the sky. Around eight fifty a m. A nearby Liberty cargo ship and fishing boat watched the L A do its inspection before it disappeared. For hours, no one knew what to make of it. The blimp's crew wasn't responding to calls from Treasure Island, nor could anyone see its bulbous frame hovering above. It had simply vanished.

Navy planes went out looking for it to no avail. Then, at fifteen am, just over two hours after its last sighting, the L eight popped up again off the coast of Ocean Beach. Now it was floating low enough for two local fishermen to grab ahold of its tie lines and pull it down. They managed to hold it long enough to check the control car, and what they found shocked them.

There was no one inside. Cody and Adams, we're gone. Eventually, the fishermen could no longer hold onto the blimp and let it go, at which point it hit a hill and damaged one of its propellers. One of the two depth charges even came loose as well, and wound up on a golf course nearby. Now even lighter, the ship ascended again until an automatic valve started releasing helium from the envelope, that giant bag of air that gives the

blimp it's distinction shape. It drifted over parts of San Francisco for a while until it finally crashed in front of someone's house in the suburbs. Well, crashed isn't exactly the right word. Suffered. A bumpy landing is more like it. It had caused some scraped roofs and downed electrical wires by the time that police arrived on scene, but it was the kind of landing that wouldn't have killed or even seriously injured Cody or Adams had they been inside.

Investigators noted that the control card doors were open, all three parachutes were still on board, as was an emergency life raft. Radios and engines were fully functional, and no one had sent out any distress calls. Whatever had happened to cause the two men to disappear, it had been sudden. The prevailing theory was that one of the men had opened the rear hatch and deployed a smoke marker over the oil slick, but had slipped the other crew member

in an effort to help him back on board. Also must have fallen in the water, making the blimp light enough to rise back up on its own. Other of suggestions have come up over the years as well, that the men had deserted the Navy and defected to Japan, or that they had been captured, but nothing definitive could be proved. The truth was that nobody had any answers. Lieutenant Cody and Ensign Adams were declared legally dead in nineteen,

one year after their disappearance. But who knows. Maybe they took a trip to the Twilight Zone and ended up in an ancient version of San Francisco. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.

I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Oh