The Anjikuni Lake Incident
1930
Photo credit: Nicolas Perrault II
While seeking somewhere to rest for the night in November 1930, fur trapper Joe Labelle came across an Inuit settlement near Anjikuni Lake in Nunavut, Canada. Although a fire was burning beneath a pot with scorched food inside, there was no trace of the 30-strong community.
Furthermore, each hut still contained each resident’s personal possessions. The community’s food and fish supplies were full and untouched. As unlikely as it was that the entire village had just up and left at a moment’s notice, it was even more unlikely they would do so without taking their clothes, weapons, and community food supply.
Labelle informed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) from the nearest telegraph office. They sent a unit to the isolated settlement. On the way, the Mounties stopped for refreshments at the home of local trapper Armand Laurent. He informed them of a strange gleaming object that had flown over his property several nights earlier. It had headed in the direction of Anjikuni Lake.
Upon arriving at the Inuit village, the RCMP confirmed that it was completely abandoned. In addition, the graves on the edge of the settlement were all broken open and missing their respective bodies. Even more bizarre, the stone markers were neatly placed in two piles on each side of the graves.The case remains unsolved despite two investigations by the Canadian authorities in the early 1930s.
This one certainly has me puzzled. Why would these folks take off without their food supplies and weapons ? What is the deal with the missing burials? Lots and lots of questions, for sure!
Coffee in the kitchen this morning. Raining again.
11 comments:
Once again all I can say is WOW!!!
Since a local trapper saw some bright lights, I'm going with the alien theory. Nothing else can explain this weird happening.
It's the aliens.
Hey Mamahen...
I'm glad you liked it!
Thanks for stopping by this morning!
Hey Linda...
Seems that the lights would be part of the mystery for sure.
Thanks for coming over today!
Hey Momlady...
That sure seems to be the consensus about this event.
Thanks for the visit this morning!
Well it certainly is weird while I don't believe in the alien thing what else could it have been. And yes why the empty graves.
I guess our rain came and went, but it was nice to have it. See you for coffee in the kitchen
Hey Jo...
Like I said, lots of questions.
Thanks, dear, for dropping by today!
I found this pretty interesting but alas, I then found this which seems to answer the questions. Still fun to ponder over coffee though!!!
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4371
The most famous published account of Joe Labelle's mysterious encounter comes from Frank Edwards' 1959 book Stranger than Science, in which Edwards devoted three short pages to the story.
There are a number of things about the Joe Labelle story that raise red flags. For one thing, it happened in November, when average temperatures are 13°C degrees below freezing. Angikuni Lake is a sheet of ice; kayaks pulled up on the beach would not be "battered by wave action". The very presence of kayaks so far inland is suspect, though not impossible. Migratory Inuit would often portage their kayaks to hunt caribou. These eastern Iglulik kayaks were made of sealskin stretched over willow branches. But the small Angikuni Lake is landlocked so far inland on the Barrens that neither willow nor sealskin were available, and this would be by far the farthest inland that the historical use of Iglulik kayaks would have ever been documented. Not impossible, but highly suspect.
Edwards also had Labelle describing a permanent settlement, a "friendly little Eskimo village" of "about thirty inhabitants" that he'd known "for many years". A statement from the Mounted Police says "A village with such a large population would not have existed in such a remote area of the Northwest Territories." They had left sealskin garments behind, in a region where there was caribou hide rather than sealskin; and as a trapper Labelle should have been able to identify it properly. So there was either a series of quite improbable circumstances, or Labelle was wrong, or Edwards was wrong.
It was 1976 when the story really broke. Dwight Whalen wrote a cover story for the November 1976 issue of FATE Magazine called "Vanished Village Revisited". Whalen was the first to note the 1930 and 1931 articles, there does not seem to be any record of any earlier author finding them. Whalen also wrote that when he called the RCMP personally, he was told they had no record of any such event — despite the many details in Sgt. Nelson's report, provided by the RCMP Commissioner himself. Whalen concluded that the whole story was largely invented by Emmet Kelleher, possibly based on a tall tale he heard from Joe Labelle who may, or may not, have stumbled on some actual ruins of a village or camp.
And then things got weird. In the April 1977 edition of FATE, a reader wrote in to dispute Whalen's conclusion. This reader was none other than Betty Hill, at the time the most famous self-described alien abductee in the world, and subject of the 1966 book The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer. Betty claimed that while on a ferry ride with her husband Barney at the Bay of Fundy, they met a Captain Larsen who, as a Mountie, had spent nine years investigating the mystery of the vanishing village at Angikuni Lake. In his opinion, wrote Betty, the villagers had all been abducted by UFOs.
In 1988 John Colombo's book Mysterious Canada repeated all of this, including Blundell and Boar's overblown details and all of Whalen's correspondence with the RCMP. People magazine ran a 1988 article essentially repeating all of this sensationalized new information. The Canadian UFO Report published in 2006 by Rutkowski and Dittman added all the villagers' ancestral graves having been emptied, and a Rense.com article in 2001 increased the village population to 2000 and buried the dog corpses under twelve feet of snow.
I like the alien theory better than the above, Bubba. And who said anything about beaches being battered by wave action?
Still a believer ~
Hey Meritt...
I sure appreciate the link to the info about this topic. I had no idea that it had been researched to this extent.
Thanks for stopping by today, my friend!
Hey Sis...
We are certainly getting a lot of folks voting on the alien theory today, but that's cool.
Thanks, sis, for coming by today!
There's really only one scientifically plausible explanation: They were eaten by Sasquatches. It happens more often than most people realize.
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