Thinking Sideways: Anjikuni Lake

all of the legwork on this thing. They'll also notice if you had listened to what we're calling the last twenty six episodes before and you're re listening now, the music and sound effects are gone. Yes, we've we've gone back to straight audio, So be warned. We sound a little different today than we do in what you're about to listen to. Yeah, bye bye, Thinking Sideways. I don't understand you never know what stories of things. We simply don't know the answer too. Well. Hold there, Welcome to

another episode of Thinking Sideways. We are the podcast that tackles the unsolved mysteries that baffled people through the ages, and we solved them. My name is, my name is Joe, on my left is Steve, and on my right is and so we're gonna delve into another really cool unsolved mystery. This is the Angel Couni Lake mystery. It's a disappearance of an entire tribe of Escobos. And this story has

got everything. It's got mysterious blue blinking lights in the sky, church desecration, Canadian mounted police, grave robbery, and across dressing dog And did I leave anything out? Yeah? Yeah it is, It really is, Okay, So let's get started here. Our story starts in November of nineteen thirty. A fur trapper named Joe Label is in the Northwest Territories of Canada. This is like the area north of Manitoba since been partitioned off, and they've created a new problem. It's called

I forget what it's called. It's like Neiva two or something like that. But they created a new province of province for the Innuit Indians that are in Northwest territories. Yeah. So, Lake on Jokani is located about two miles west of Hudson Bay and well north of Manitobah. So anyway, he was trudging along looking for this village where apparently he was familiar with the inhabitants and he'd been by there

many times. And had friends there, and he was hoping to spend the night there and maybe get a hot meal. He comes to it in the evening apparently, like I don't know what, like early evening too, and it was not quite dark yet, apparently like around twilight. Yeah, maybe twilight,

that's a good word. The village, as the story goes, was huts and some tents, and when he was when he approached it, he noticed that it was unnaturally quiet, and normally you would expect to hear the sounds of people and then the dogs barking in such things, and there were no noises coming from the village, which purpose interest piqued his interest just a little bit. Also, he noted that none of the chimneys had smoke coming out

of them, which is unusual. This is late November and so and this is of course, of court kind of towards the Arctic circles, so it's going to be really really cool out. So he did notice a fire some distance away from the village, and so he walked to the fire and when he got there and the fire was embers, but there was nobody there. So he walked back to the village and he started looking in the huts, and what he found is that they all looked like

people have been living in them recently. They all were stocked with food and had clothing and other possessions laying around. The rifles all the all the villagers rifles were leading in the usual spot against the wall near the doorway, and but there was nobody there. In any of these huts. He found a pot of stew caribou in one, which was moldy, apparently had been sitting there for a while. He found a half and half mended sealskin coat in

another that had still had the needle in it. But there were there was nobody there, and there was no size of violence. Nothing was torn up or anything, but the people were all gone. So his next step was to circle the upside of the village. He was looking for any footprints that would tell him what direction they had gone, and if they had all suddenly made a mass exodus, he was wondering what direction they had gone.

He circled the entire perimeter of the village, found nothing, so at this point he was getting kind of creeped out, so he decided to head off too. Apparently there was a telegraph office about twenty five miles away, So he decided to head to this telegraph office and get a message off to the Mounties and get them in there to investigate this mysterious disappearance. Uh and some telling they arrived there several hours later, and some tellings they arrived

like the next day. All that sounds a little fantastic to me because this place was hundreds of miles away from anywhere and so but eventually, but eventually, the Mounties arrived. So they meet up with Mr. LaBelle, and then they started heading back to Anticony, and on their way they encounter a trapper named armand Laurent and his two sons who lived in a shanty somewhere in the way of obviously, and they asked them if they had seen anything out of the ordinary. They said that they had seen a

gleaming object in the sky a few days before. Laurent said that the object changed its shape and that it was flying in the general direction of Lake Anjocuney. So the Mountains continued to Anjocuny and found it was still empty. They were searching the village and they discovered that the

village burial ground had been plundered. All of the graves have been opened and the bodies have been removed um and other accounts only one grave had been opened with the body removed, and some accounts say the marker stones for the graves were stacked into two neat piles on either sides of the graves. They also discovered some sled dogs about three feet from the village. Some accounts say two to three sled dogs and sub stay seven. But they apparently had starved at death, and in one account

they were they were tied to some scrubby trees. And I don't know how much how much they having away of scrubby trees up there, because again this is kind of like in the Arctic, and it's up of the tree line, so there might not have been a tree around for miles. And lastly, they reported seeing bluish lights

on the horizon in the twilight. There were, and of course obviously these people were used to living in the frozen waste lands of the North, and then you know, they know what the Aurora borealis looks like, So wasn't that Yeah, so it wasn't the Aurora borealis. It was

blue blinking lights which eventually disappeared. They found some berries in a cooking pot, and based on the growing season for these berries, et cetera, in the state of deterioration of the berries, they concluded that the Innuits have been gone for two months or longer. So we've got a completely deserted village. Deserted village. We don't know, we don't know, we don't know what happened to these people. Yeah, but they didn't just show up, you know, twenty miles away

or anything like that. You just disappeared. They just disappeared. This isn't like that the Roanoke Island story right where it's like, oh, all of these people disappeared, but all of a sudden there's blonde haired, blue eyed Indian. How weird like that, We're saying they've just disappeared on They just they apparently just disappeared. Nobody moving forward. This is uh, we've talked about these sorts of things before. This is

a tale that's kind of grown in the telling. Ye. So yeah, it's all it's been around since nineteen thirty when the original story was published. I remember this one has inflated. Oh, it's mass massively inflated. Massively inflated. For example, the part about the Mounties running into that trapper named armand lorent And who purported seeing a Ufo headed towards

Lake Antikuti. Apparently that that that part of the story appeared in three somebody wrote a book called The World's Great Ufo Mysteries, and they just sort of tacked on that part of the story the well, not the blue Lights part, but the part about running into this trapper named armand lorent And and damn him saying that he'd seen a Ufo okay into the trap. No, apparently not

before three. So so yeah, so they so the other things, the other embellishments have been put in, and and just for for the sake of our listeners, I'm going to go back to the original story, but first I want to go through some of the later stories because they're kind of fun. In another version of the story, there were two thousand people in the village who managed that's that's a big village. Yeah, that's a pretty big city. Yeah.

In in this in this retelling, the village had a population of oh this is you got another one had a population of up to It had a Catholic church, a local watering Holy I e. Bar and it had docks with kayaks tied up to them. As in the other versions, most of the has had possessions, including rifles left behind in them. Yeah. The rifles are the interesting part, right because I can kind of explain it away to

go to into theories. Yeah, but you can kind of explain stories like this way, like, oh, they just left, and they all left for like some mysterious reason. But if you're going to wander into the Arctic, you wander with your rifles, right, They're kind of are critters out there. Yeah, so that's yeah, I'm glad to see that at least that persists. Yeah. Yeah. So so there's all these rifles left behind, which is inexplicable they left their kayaks behind.

So uh So, anyway, our our friend the trapper joe Leabelle went to this watering hole. He came to the village it found it mysteriously empty. So he went to the local watering hole, which was on the outskirts of the village. It's kind of a cafe, or it was kind of a cafe bar and it was called the mac Shack. So this is in the over Zealous This is in later retelling of the story. Yeah, so he goes to the mac Shack, which is named for its owner,

fran mackenzie. He found it empty, but mackenzie McKenzie had been had been crippled in while serving in the military, so he used to crutch that He found the place empty, but mc mackenzie's crutch was in pieces on the floor, which he found kind of disconcerting. And then he looks to a window and he notices a bonfire about four yards away, so he heads that way. But when he

gets there, there's no one there. There's a stew apparently of seal, a seal stew, seal meat cooking in a pot, and so a few but a few artifacts and possessions were laying about, but there were no people. Um, he left at that time because he was sloroughly creeped out, and went to it to that I went to that same telegraph office twenty five miles away. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived. Some say the next day, and uh,

some people say longer. I'm guessing longer really in real life, really in real life, but of course this isn't really real life. So people, yeah, yeah, I think the I think the population of the entire province is about today, about fifteen or twenty thousand people and that thirty I'm sure it was a lot less. Yeah, it's a pretty empty place in this fantasy full version. Well, so anyway, the mystery deepens. When they got there, they found Mackenzie's

diary in his bedroom. So in the entry previous to the day that LaBelle arrived, he wrote that strange blue lights had been appearing in the night sky for several days before. So that's true. Then, of course that means he was there just the day before LaBelle arrived in the village. So yeah, a real sudden exodus of these people. Here. Here's a really another really creepy part nearby. Outside, they found Mackenzie's dog, which was a husky, a female husky.

The dog was dead. Somebody addressed the dog in women's clothing, including underwear. Some we're actually taking the trouble to put women's underwear on this dog, draped the dress over it and put lipstick on its lips, pierced it's ears, although they didn't apparently get around to putting ear rings, and and forced a wedding ring onto her left paw. Apparently did some damage to the paw while forcing this wedding ring on you are you are pulling my leg. I

am not pulling a leg. This is actually out there. This is actually no, that's not like the cheap of Cobra. I'm not making this not just just a messenger here, I'm just passing it along. Okay. So, as I said before this, the village had a Catholic church. Um it was trashed and smashed up and had been heavily graffiti. The graffiti referenced Unitarian Universalist church symbols, which I think

is kind of bizarre. We've been grown up in the Unitarian Church, yeah, I tell you, yeah, what y facing other churches is not something that typically happened, especially especially the Unitarians. The Unitarians are all about all about the fact that they don't really believe in anything, and so that's a that's a that's a big centerpiece of the Unitarians believe. They come together in the belief that there

might be something, but there might not. But it's good for adults to come together and talk about how to live a good life even if there is a God, but maybe there isn't. But I do think that's one of the intriguing things about this particular part of the story though, is that, you know, yeah, they don't seem to have very much hate for the Catholic Church. I mean, there are definitely some religions you could be like, Okay, I guess I could see there's like a feud there

or something. Yeah, yeah, I mean but that typically maybe this is maybe this is not made up at all, because typically if he makes up up, it's Satanic symbols, right, yeah, that would be what you would expect. Yeah, I don't know. So, yeah, maybe the person that that actually made this up, and I'm not saying it's made up, of course, but maybe the person who made this up didn't understand what the Unitarian Church is all about, and they thought they were

Satanic or something like that. I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, So at the Catholic church, which of course, as we said, was trashed and covered with the Kramiti, there was also a graveyard. Graves had all been opened and the bodies have been removed except for one. This was the grave of a guy named Punkylos Yeah, yeah, something like that.

He was He was a tribal leader who had founded the village years back, and his grave was undisturbed, but the Mountie's found that the grave was warm to the touch and no snow on it because the stone melted off the grave was warm. The other graves have had trash thrown in them. Okay, So anyway, that that is our telling. Those of the story so far, apparently it's been embellished a little bit over the years. Don't like it. It's so far the accounts sound like they vary a lot.

So the facts are very soft on this at this point. Yeah, you know. In fact, the you know, I don't know if you guys know this, you probably did, But the Royal Canadian menta Police um as you know, has a website and they've actually got a little page devoted just to this little mystery, basically denying that they had no involvement in it. There's no record whatsoever of any Mountie's ever heading out to this place or ever finding any any disappeared eskimos. They say the whole thing is an

urban legend. And they say, by the way that given the topography and the weather of the place, they doubt that Lake Anchocuni could in this area could have sustained a community of even people. So that's what the mantis say yeah, the mountis Yeah, the Mattieves denied it very strongly.

It stinks of a cover up, doesn't it. Well, I was just gonna say, actually that like this, this is just like exactly the kind of story that like, there's no reason for them to deny any kind of involvement, right, I mean, it's not like there's like some renegade submarine like or maybe there is, I don't know. It doesn't

stink of something that you want to cover up. Like a lot of stories we talk about, you can say, Okay, it would make sense that this government is faking knowledge of it, are saying they don't have knowledge of it, because that would be something you'd want to cover up. This doesn't. Yeah, one of the things like like, for example, in this telling of the story where he goes out to the bonfire and there's a stew of seal meat in a pot. Well, I'm sorry, everybody thinks of any

eats is as eating seals all the time. But the fact of the matter is it's only the ones that live by the ocean get to eat the seals. These guys seals are Yeah, the nearest source of seals for these people was two hundred miles away and Hudson Bay, and so it's not too likely they would track two hundred miles to kill a seal and make some some stew up. That's that's that's a long way to go for takeout. Yeah, it really is. So where did this

story originate? I mean, obviously it's been embellished. There are places like the UFO History thing that have talked about it. But so so where did it originated? Well, that's a good question. So the earliest mention of this story was from a reporter named Emmett E. Kelleher. His story was picked up by a newspaper. This is the only this is the only one that we can find. Supposedly, the

story actually circulated all over Canada. In the US, Emmett Callaher worked for a organization called the NIA, which was what stood for the Newspaper Enterprise Association. So the NIA was a news distribution network. It was kind of like the APS today, has strangers all over the place. I've actually done a little research on on Kellagher and I can't I don't know if he actually worked for any actual newspaper, if he was just a stringer for the NA.

So it's it's hard to say. There's very sketchy information on this guy, but we'll talk about him in a little bit. So he published a story soon the na which was picked up by apparently supposedly a lot of newspapers, but the only, the only actual archived version anybody can find, appeared in a Virginia newspaper town of Danville. The paper is called the Danville b and this story was published in November, November seven. That would be a real quick

turn around, Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And if you read the story, I'll get him that in a moment or two. Obviously this happened, not, this incident did not happen in November nineteen thirty. That's you know, there's a little confusion there. That happened long before that months at least. So in this version, which I have a copy of, um, he arrived by kayak over the lake instead of walking as in the other stories. There were no docks to tie up to. He just pulled his kayak up on the beach.

He got there, not in the We're probably about mid day or early afternoon. The village had no huts. It was six tents made of carib hides. And when he walked towards the village. He was calling out to them because he didn't want to arouse suspicion. Nobody replied, but two dogs came out to very almost nearly dead from starvation. Dogs came out of the village, and he noticed there were seven other dogs lying nearby who were start to death.

Um so he went to the village and the village was deserted, and he was at this point a little creeped out, and he wants to look at one of the tents, and he was afraid he might find a corpse in there, but luckily there wasn't one. But he looks in there and he pokes around. He sees possessions in the tent. There's a parking laying on the on the ground, and he picks the tarp up, the park up, and he finds a rifle underneath it, and the rifle

had been rusted from laying there for a while. He went to the other tents, and in another tent he found some fox hides. When he moved those aside, there was another rifle, also rusty, and those were the only two rifles he found. He had. His guest was that there had been more or less twenty five people living there, and he estimated that they had been gone for perhaps as long as twelve months based on the amount of

rifle rifle rust. In this story, he didn't know people of the village, Yeah, exactly, there's no in this account, he had had no relationship with these people. He just was paddled along, saw a village, went up to it and it found it deserted, and found a couple of rusty rifles in there, along with some other odds and ends. So he walked down to the lake and discovered what he believed was an Eskimo grave. The grave was a karen.

You know what a karen is, just like a pile of stones based on Yeah, and so it had been if it had been a grave, and he apparently believed that it was a grave, that it had been exsumed. Somebody pulled the stones and stacked him on the side and on one side, and then the body was gone. So he thought that that was kind of puzzling and inexplicable. Yeah, that's a little weird. And so in his account, he

around for a while. He fished, caught some fish and gave them to the dogs who obviously needed them, and then after that he left because he didn't want to be there after dark, because obviously he was a little creeped out by the whole thing. But he went on his way. He didn't he did not go to a telegraph office. And at this point, let me stay there. There was no telegraph office within miles of this place. I was, I was checking out a map of the area.

And even today, there were no settlements within a hundred two hundred miles of this place. I mean, so there wouldn't have been a yah, it's really remote. So there would not have been a telegraph office within twenty five miles of this place. So he didn't high he didn't high tail it to a telegraph office. He just went

on about his business of being a trapper. According to the news article, during the season, quote unquote, he visited at least a dozen enemy camps, and in those he inquired about the village of the Dams and so I'd like to call it. And he told them the story, and they were all they all claimed to know nothing about it. They assumed that it was Corno Suk. And I'm not pronouncing that correctly, I'm sure, but Durnarsuk is

a is an Eskimo legend. He's an evil sky spirit and he actually is a commander of a legion of evil spirits, and he's they're very terrified of him, and they all wear charms to ward him off, et cetera. And so when stuff like this happens, they just assumed that it was him. So the article. The article refers to an investigation by the Mounties, but it's a little vague, and it says that they're puzzled. Here's what it says. Officers of the Northwest Mounted Police trying to trace the

lost tribe are equally puzzled. They say the tribe may have perished in as a blizard while off on a caribou hunt, although admitting that it is unlikely that all the women and children would have gone along pastile ch occasionally strikes Eskimo camps, but in that case there would have been bodies one and that mentions another another couple

of interesting clues. Tribe Willing, about a hundred and fifty miles to the north of the abandoned camp, has an adopted ten year old Eskimo boy who appears to wandered into the camp a few months ago and does not belong to any of the nearby tribes. So this isn't again the news story by the original accounting the original account in nineteen thirty other boy in the tribe are resisent about things, and nobody has learned anything but from

them so far. And the other the other interesting clue is and this is like a non clue, but it's in the article and asking my names. Uh so mac I think his house pronounced walked into a hospital on the Hudson Bay Railway for treatment for frozen legs. That was thought that he might know something about the situation. So they found an Eskimo who could speak dialect and who began to question him. Salimc refused to talk about it,

and mentioning torn Ark. He does it, he calls the evil spirit, not torna Suk or torn Suk, but torn Ark. And this one acally mentioned torn Ark and refused to answer any questions they got. They got a bottle of whiskey and tried to get him drunk, but he refused it. And that's what the articles for. Yeah, I had I tried to get him drunk and he wouldn't And so that's it. Those are dead ends And obviously both of those.

I mean something some you know, some random innuit shows up and you're thinking, I have been he knows something about them disappeared people. So it's like it's like I don't really know about this. That's about it for that article, again, written by Emity Kelleher, a stringer for the NIA, It appeared in a number of newspapers and it pretty much died out now. Subsequently, other other websites have sided and

I found a few of these. They cited an article in the Toronto Star of all places, which appeared on November twenty three, nineteen thirty. According to this according to this article, the Canadian Mounted Police went out to the lake and came back on the day of the tent and basically said they had no idea what had happened.

So let me quote from it here. The inspector for the Royal Canadian Menta Police returned to day to confirm the disappearance of an escopole village in the Northern Lakes region. So he returned with the team's funding today confirmed the store the village hat was indeed abandoned in the most strange circumstances. And so this appeared prior four days prior to tell of her story UH in the Toronto Star.

So I don't know, my I think somebody could very easily have just written this out and posted on the website, and it's pure bunk. I have no idea. I went out to the Toronto Stars website and they actually have uh an online archive, and I was hoping to be able to get in there and look for this article, but unfortunately requires a subscription, and I checked her expense account. Unfortunately it's not there. As it turns out, there's nothing in there, and I have to keep the pap for myself.

I would like to say that if any of our listeners actually want to pay to go out to their go out to their archive and look for this article, and the day if you want to search on again is November tent I. You know, I'm just guessing that somebody just made this up and posted on their website,

has been copied over the other website since then. It follows the thread of a lot of the quote unquote facts in details of the stories that they just as we said before, tacked on, Oh yeah, definitely, and then they gain momentum and then they're tacked on. I don't know, I like the story from the Danville b I think it's um it makes a lot. I mean, yes, it's a mysterious, but it's believable, right, it's believable that these things happened. He didn't know these people, you know, he

wasn't like wandering around. There were some dead dogs, there were a couple of rifles left, but it wasn't like just everybody had been like teleported or something. The situation, right, which I appreciate. Also, you know, it corresponds pretty well with what the Mountie's have said where they didn't really investigate. Yeah, but but you see the we see a lot of the components or you know, the elements of the grandier, more grandiose retelling to the story. Okay, if not a

couple of rusty rifles and they're okay to pay the foundation. Yeah, yeah, that that. And and then he found his cairn, which he assumed to be a grave and probably was but maybe not, which had been taken apart, and the stones neatly aside, and that crew of course into an entire graveyard being opened up. And so the elements are there as far as the rifles go. I mean, it's it's possible that if he was telling the truth about finding them, they might have been broken rusty rifles that they didn't

bother taking with them when they left. So let's let's okay. So we do have what sounds like a very simplified version of a base story, of the base story of this group of people disappearing. So do we have anything what actually happened to him? Uh? No, But you know, the the anyways were kind of a nomadic people. They would go around like they were into fishing and hunting, and then later on they got a little bit into

world commerce. They started trapping and trading, but they were still nomadic and so they might have just abandoned their camp. Well I know that. Well, let me let me go through some let me go to some of the other ones. Of course, that uh turned our suit the evil spirit some people have said proposed aliens trans dimensional traffic travel. In my opinion, they might have left just because it

was an infestation. Maybe they were taken over by fleas, you know, like the coastal Indians around here used to, and there was a terrible fleet problems that would have got bad enough they would just abandon their villages and move on to somewhere else. They built another village because that's how bad the fleas would get. So there was something that was just some local pest and one possibility.

But but apparently, you know, abandoned any week. Camps are not that unusual way up in the frozen North, you know,

for one reason or another, they just had to move on. Yeah, I guess as far as them being nomadic goes, I mean, they are, but they usually take their stuff with them, Like making a tent out of caribouo hide is not particularly easy task, even if you don't take the polls right, you take the outside of it, and you leave the bare bones of your camp maybe and you know, maybe some cast off like your rusty rifle or you know whatever, but you know, not fox skins, not Parka's not the

out food that you're probably gonna want to eat. Yeah. Yeah, so it's um a little bit of a head scratcher.

But let me stop for a second and talk about the reporter, Emmy emit Eat kelleher As I said, work with the new Newspaper Enterprise Association, and I did a little a little digging, and I found some other stories that have been written by him because thought I was interested in finding out about him, is like, you know, is he an actual legitimate reporter or did he just write crackpot stories and so and the stories that I found, I only found a couple of them, but they were

actually they've been reprinted in various newspapers and they were fairly straight up news stories. One was about there some missing airman they're playing crashed and it was this big search on for them, and so he wrote a story that was picked up by some papers. And another one there was a two hundred mile dog sled race in Manitoba, and that appeared in several papers that I was able to find. And they were straight up news stories, no

no supernatural stuff at all. So, yeah, he lives in Flint Flon, Manitoba, or he lived in Flint Vallon, Manitoba, Manitoba. Let me say, obviously he's probably not alive anymore. Flynn Flon is right on the border with Saskatchewan. It's like five hundred miles south of Andrew Cooney. And apparently this story was picked up the Eskima disapparian. Eskima story was picked up by many, many papers, but only nobody has been able to find any of them except for the

Bill Dan will be in Virginia. But you know, some of the stories were picked up, like the dogsled story that was picked up by the Miami Daily News Record and Hope, Arkansas Star, the Pittsburgh Sentinel letting his stuff. I mean, these guys, this is actually a very successful news distribution organization. So his his stories stories whenever. Yeah, So there was talk about that, the talk about the

investigation by the Canadian menta Police. They did say in nineteen they got an inquiry from the Australian skeptics, who are a bunch of people who look into talk about the paranormal, and the reply from the RCMP historian was that the people working in that area back in those days had since retired, but years before, because his story was circulating around, they had been asked about what happened, and not one of them could recall anything like this

ever happening. There's no record anywhere of any sort of investigation by the Royal Canadian mount of Police. There was never any search expedition and they never went up to Leak Couny to see about the disappearing innuits. According to this is again according to the RCMP My personal theory is this, and you guys can dispute this if you want to. But Kelleher was a stringer, which meant he probably got paid by the story. In other words, you know,

he didn't get paid a set salary. He had If he did get paid a set salary, then he had to produce work. Now, a stringer is basically freelance. Would that be correct in a modern phrase? Yeah? And he was there guy, He was there guy up in the frozen North. So obviously, you know, when something happened like this plane crash, well he got to write some stories about it and make some money. You know, there's dogs led ray, same thing. You know, things are probably up

there kind of uneventful. So there's probably not a lot of not a lot of stories. And my my best guests would be that he talked to some guy. Maybe there was actually a guy named Joe LaBelle that he had a chat with over a beer. And the guy said, yeah, you know, was wandering around and lake on Jakuni and I came upon this abandoned Eskimo village and I want to look at it. It It would just creep me out.

And so he was saying that probably was like the germ of a good idea, because obviously he wants to make some money, so he probably took this story and embellished it just a little bit. So it's not unusual at all to finding at and abandoned any village, but one that's got they left behind their rifles and their in their possessions and their dogs and all that stuff.

I mean, that's a little sex here. And you know, the odds of that story being picked up by more and more papers, which would make him more money, are much higher if there's a sexy, sort of mysterious, supernatural element to the whole thing. So you're telling me we're

just discounting aliens. Yeah, I'm sorry. Here's my my question for you, Joe, is that do we know from any records or have you found anything in the records about any kind of turf worce in the area among the natives, because this this is something that sounds very similar to stories that we've heard, you know, with American Indians, where one tribe would go ahead and walk in and kill the other tribe, take some of the people away, and

just leave the tribe. They didn't burn it like you're seeing all the Old West movies, they just went ahead and took what they wanted, and they left everything behind because they didn't care, because they had enough. So I wonder if this could be a situation where they just came in and grabbed him and took them. You know, I could see that possibility, except this area is so sparsely populated that I can't see a lot of contention for hunting grounds and fishing grounds and stuff like that.

I also like kind of unlikely. I feel like there would be signs of some kind of struggle, would be some kind of fight. Well, if it's let's say it's just six months to a year later for that time to take for a rifle that's sitting in a tent to russ. A lot of those signs are footprints in the dirt and things being knocked over. But as a year's time goes by, they take the bodies and stuff. Is that the deal? I mean, like, if they killed any of the men in the village, what you're saying, no,

I I don't know that they even killed them. I mean there's all kinds of takeovers where not no blood is spilled. I mean I'm thinking of this grave, that this care and that he saw that then seemed like maybe had been desecreated, and that was kind of their their you know, their last act to prove, all right, we we own you now and you're part of us, and you're trying no longer exist because we just destroyed

this this altar, whatever it may be to them. Yeah, I guess I still say, like, yes, they might have a lot, but you can never have too much caribou. You have too many caribou skins, rifles which warmth, well, rifles, Okay, if they're again, we can just I feel like I in my brain like those rifles were just bad rifles. The like in my brain, they probably were busted, best to repair, unless the tents were like in bad shape. All He said that one of them was, according to

the story, one of them was kind of shredded. Yeah. Yeah, and but that's but then again he also estimated again that the camp have been abandoned for at least a year, so you know, when and everything else, whether conditions are harsh up there, it's entirely possible. I you know, I guess my theory is the kind of nomadic situation except for that it's it's inhospitable to anyone. So you know, this tribe of people Ish goes out and it's like, oh, there's no one around here, we're gonna just set up

camp here. And they set up camp and then, you know, because they've had to leave their old camp for whatever reason, they get there and they realize that they're literally dying, so they leave some of their dogs, right, because you don't want to have to feed the dogs all the time. You take some but not all. You leave some stuff because you literally just can't carry it. You know, you can carry what's on your backs or whatever, and you

just walk away from it. But then you would think that, you know, if this guy was traveling around meeting with other Innuit tribes, they would be like, oh yeah, oh yeah, that was us so the other well, and that that makes me wonder, okay, well, why would they get Well, the infestation is one reason. Um, And if they're nomadic, that means they go to different sites during different seasons and times of year to take advantage of what's there.

And I wonder if they either overstayed one time, as in, okay, we should we should be leaving it September and then everybody drugged their feet and suddenly it's late October. We really got to get out of here. The weather is terrible. Or if they got there and there was a sudden change in the weather and winter came super early, and I'm trying to think of things that would force them out of the village in a hurry. If suddenly there's

a blizzard and grab yourself and go. You know, they may have died in route wherever they were going, or

they may have made it and just ignored the story. Well, the fact of the matter is is like if if they were saying no matter, if they abandoned the village, say because I say they had fleas, and then that's that's a good reason to abandon your all your caribou chance because they and so if they had a band in there that and then moved down the road a little ways and build another village, how would anybody know?

It's like, oh, there's another Inuit village and maybe away, and how would anybody Now, I mean, it's like that, this is nineteen thirty. It's like, you know, so it's entirely possible these guys left and just set up shops somewhere else, and for just normal, mundane reasons, this one is scarily simple. Yeah, very simple answers, but none of them seem to match exactly. As in the it's when you get two pieces of jigsaw and they look like

they're going to go and don't. Yeah, I think you know, And that's a great argument for why it's made up. It's just a made up story. Again. Yeah, you have you have a reporter who who maybe had a small incentive to jazz of the story just a little bit, or just make it up entirely. I mean, you know, you could have also made it up entirely if we're gonna go with the he made it up theory, you know. And he's a reporter, so he knows that it has

to sound believable. It can't actually sound like, you know, there's two thousand disappeared out of nowhere. He knows it has to be totally reasonable, and that there can't be so many details that somebody could go up and like look for this place. Right. That's good, that's that's that's

that's a very good point. You pick a spot, You pick a spot that's like five miles away and literally and is five hundred miles away from where this guy lives, right, and then you say, you know, like nobody's going to contact the mounteas and if they do, there's so many, like they're so far dispersed that there's no way. You know, it's ni it's all you can just call over, well you could, but it's Canada, so it's like the nineteen hundreds really, So you know, you call over and you say, oh,

did you guys go up to this place? You're not gonna do that. Nobody cares, you know, maybe that you know, they probably somebody else must have done it. I don't know where we're coming with it. It's just a head scratcher. Well, you know, I you know, I don't think it's even a head scratcher. I think I think I think it was just a somewhat exaggerated story that grew in the telling. So the story actually well let me let me get

into the history of the story too. So it was originally was published in nineteen thirty and then dropped out of existence for decades. And in the nineteen sixties a guy named Frank Edwards. She wrote a book named Stranger than Fiction or Stranger than Science or something like that. I remember reading that book when I was a kid. Actually,

but I don't remember this particular story. So he dredged the story up and put it in his book, one of those unsolved mysteries kind of thing, and then it dropped out of existence again for years, and then in the mid seventies, a magazine called Fate published a story

about it. At that point, that's when things really changed a little bit, because somebody read the article and wrote in a letter about it to the magazine, and this person I can't remember her name, but she claimed to have been a UFO abductee, and so she read the story and the part and she took great, great exception to the story that the Royal Canadian mount of Police had not investigated this or denied investigating it, because she said that on a ferry ride some years before this,

she had met a guy who said he worked for the Canadian Mounties and that he spent nine years tracking this case, and that yeah, yeah, and that was I know,

I don't know, yeah, yeah, I know. And so at that from that point on, of course, now now UFOs attached themselves to the story, and so UFOs are all an integral part of the story now now anytime, but anybody talks about it, it's like, oh what about UFOs and and that's and and again six years after that, I think it was six seven years after that book came out. Actually that actually appended that part about the trapper named armand Laurent and he mentioned seeing a UFO

in the sky. Oh that's yeah, yeah, but the genesis was back from this this person's correspondence with this magazine who claimed to have talked to a mountee who's spent nine years investigating this. But I don't think there's nine years of material, and I don't think so is barely like what thirty minutes worth of material. Yeah, I fully investigated all. Yeah, we've gone through it pretty thoroughly, you know. Yeah, I can't imagine the mount he is getting too excited

about it. Somebody comes and says, oh my god, my god, I ad any week camp and they'd say, yeah, why do we care? And that's I'm sure there wasn't a nine year investigation. Yeah, I'm sure there wasn't any investigation. So anyway, this result it was not a mystery at all. It's a fake y. Yeah, it's just kind of just I don't I don't, I don't I don't follow a fake. I think that there's some like we've talked about, there's some seed of truths in there, but I just don't

know where it is. Steve going in for the underdog thing again. You just keep being the name there. That's crazy Nancy naysayer here. Yeah, well, I'm gonna go with I'm gonna go with my theory, which is just this guy was drinking. This guy was drinking beers in a bar next to this porter and started telling this story about how he came across an abandoned Innywit village. He

was creeped out by it. And then the reported thought, we're gonna I'm gonna drag a story out of this and I'm gonna jazz it up just a little bit so to get picked up by a whole lot more papers and all the more money. Have a new theory. Let's past on that, right. This explorer dude, he's like sitting next to a reporter and the guys like, yeah, I'm a reporter, and he goes, oh you are, I have a story to him. Let's see, Yeah, there I was.

I mean, and surely if he's if he sees inuits and stuff like that, he sees these abandoned places, he knows they exist. You know, it's perfect. It's the perfect mix of the theories. Okay, yeah, I like it. I think that's a good one. Or actually, a third theory is that he wasn't actually a trapper at all. He was a troop of cobra all right. Anyway, So that's it. If you want to check out links to the story, and we'll have plenty of stuff about there for you

to look at. Check out our website Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. And if you would like to send us an email with your own particular theories about the case, send us an email at Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com, and also check us out on iTunes and on Stitcher. I do hope that somebody out there is not as cheap as mean. You pull me up the

cash for the Toronto Stars Archives site. Yeah maybe that too. Uh. And if you're an anyway, and I've mispronounced all the names, so I'm really sorry, feel a free to call us or send us an email and explain how to pronounce that stuff. Anyway. That's it for now, see you next week. I'm Joe, so long, Bye bye bye,