The Village that Vanished

A Canadian fur trapper stumbled across an abandoned Inuit village in the winter of 1930.  Though the shelters were still intact and provisions plentiful, there was evidence that suggested the people had left in a hurry and at once.  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigation turned up no clues that could explain the disappearance of the people of Lake Angikuni.  It was as if they had vanished into thin air.

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THE VILLAGE THAT VANISHED

Narrated by Jay Nix

 
On this episode of BTF, we’re going to venture into the Canadian tundra to a remote lake in the Kivalliq Region of Nunavut.  It was there along the shores of Lake Angikuni that an Inuit village was discovered abandoned by a fur trapper in 1930.  The tents, though empty, were still habitable.  Kayaks tied up along the shoreline were battered, hinting that they had been unattended for some time.  There were frozen pots of food dangling over long-dead fires.  Clothing was folded, provisions plentiful and a few rifles – the most prized possession of any native hunter – were stacked neatly along the walls of the enclosures.  And those that ventured to the settlement to investigate discovered even more disturbing evidence that something indeed strange had occurred there.  Yet as for the people of the Angikuni village, there was not a trace.  It appeared as if they had vanished all at once into the dark artic night.

This is yet another tale that I discovered in the classic works of Frank Edwards.  For the paranormal podcaster, Edward’s work is a gold mine of inspiration.  I have a particular affinity for strange disappearances and this story of the “Vanishing Village” sits right in my wheelhouse and is a story ripe for the BTF treatment.  How we do this is we’re going to revisit the tale as it’s often told.  Then we’ll see what about the tale is true and what we discard as myth and legend.  And then we’ll see if we can find out from where the story originated and finally try to tie it all together.  So, let’s get this party started with the tale of the Village that Vanished.

By late November 1930, winter had already descended upon the northern territories of the Canadian wilderness with its annual vengeance.  Gale-force winds, snow drifts higher than a two-story building and temperatures dipping into double digits below zero were the norm. Through this wind and snow, Joe LaBelle drove his dog team hard as he raced south while keeping an eye on the quickly setting sun off his right shoulder.  

A Canadian of French extraction, Joe was an expert trapper and was right at home in the harsh climate of the sub-arctic.  But after weeks trapping in the remote wilderness, it was time to return to civilization.  His trip had been a successful one, with pelts and skins weighing down his sled almost to the breaking point.  His ultimate destination was Churchill, where he would sell his haul, get some well needed rest and reprovision for another foray out into the vast northern wilds.  But Churchill was still over 300 miles to the south and the trip was going to be a difficult one even for someone hardened against harsh winter environment like Joe.  And though adept at living off the land, his food stores were running low, and he had all but run out of coffee.  So rather than making camp for yet another freezing night outside, LaBelle decided to take a slight detour and perhaps enjoy some of the local hospitality.

Nudging the lead dog slightly to the right, Joe urged his team toward the shores of one of the countless lakes that dotted the northern Canadian landscape.  Angikuni is a large glacial lake home to trout, pike and arctic greyling and a popular watering place for the local moose and caribou herds.  It was for these reasons that the local Inuit had made their home on the banks where the Kazan river emptied into the lake.  Joe knew the place and the people well and was a familiar sight in the village.  He was sure he would find a warm welcome, a warmer fire, and hot meal at the small hamlet.  His intention was to rest there for a couple of days, maybe three, before continuing onto Churchill.

The lake was surrounded by low-lying hills and anyone approaching the village would need to descend through a long, gentle cut to get there.  As LaBelle turned onto the slope toward the village, he was struck by how quiet the place seemed.  No smoke curled from the tops of the huts, no one was moving about.  And the Inuit’s dogs, who could smell an interloper from a mile away, would normally burst into a chorus of high-pitched barks to signal anyone approaching the settlement.  But they too were strangely silent.

As he approached the encampment, his curiosity turned to concern.  The entryways of several huts were not securely tied, the caribou-skin doors flapping against the wind.  

LaBelle called out repeatedly as he walked around the camp.  But there was no reply.  He poked his head into one hut and then another looking for any sign of life.  Each time he entered a hut he was greeted by the same quiet scene.  Clothing and blankets were piled in the corners of the tiny abodes.  The fire rings located in the room’s centers had all appeared to have burned out, some with pots of cooked food, now long frozen, still suspended over frost-covered coals.  In one home, a child’s garment in the process of being mended lay on the floor.  A needle crafted of walrus tusk and sinewy thread still protruded from the animal skin coat.

In a few of the huts Joe was baffled to find that the Inuit had left behind their rifles.  This was unheard of, for even a single hunter let alone a party to leave the village and not bring their weapons for protection against bears and wolves seemed unthinkable.

Near the water’s edge Joe found several kayaks tied up and bobbing in the surf.  They appeared to have been there for a good while, battered by the ravages of wind and wave.  

But it was on the outskirts of the camp where Joe made a heartbreaking discovery.  A team of sled dogs lay dead in the new fallen snow.  By the look of things, they had been tied down as was the routine every evening before turning in.  But they had never been untied and, unable to break free, had starved to death where they lay.

Yet perhaps the most disturbing find LaBelle made lay beyond the encampment and away from the water.  Here the trapper found a small cemetery where the villagers buried their dead.  But to Joe’s horror he found that all of the graves, perhaps ten or more, were open and the bodies removed.  The stones that were customarily placed over the graves had been removed and carefully stacked in cairn-like piles near each plot.  Like the villagers themselves, there was no sign of the Inuit dead.

Joe LaBelle spent more than an hour searching the camp for any clue as to what might have happened to the inhabitants, but he found nothing.  He briefly considered staying the night at Lake Angikuni, but the eeriness of the abandoned village unnerved LaBelle and he chose to press on in order to alert the authorities about his discovery, which he did upon reaching the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Station in Churchill less than a week later.  

As soon as they heard LaBelle’s strange tale, the Mounties set out for the village accompanied by another trapper Armand Laurent and his two sons who were familiar with the area and the people who lived there.  The Mounties asked Laurent if he had seen anything out of the ordinary recently in the area of Lake Angikuni.  The woodsman told the police that several days ago he had seen odd lights hovering in the sky.  As we watched, the light began slowing drifting in the direction of Lake Angikuni and disappeared over the horizon.

When the police detachment arrived at the village, they found everything just as Joe LaBelle had stated in his report.  The Mounties and the Laurent boys scoured the area for any clues as to where the Inuit might have gone.  But there were no tracks leading in any direction.  Just the empty huts, the defiled graves and the kayaks bobbing along the lake shore.  It was as if the entire population of the village had vanished all at once into cold the Canadian air.  In the files of the RCMP, the reason behind the disappearance of the Inuit at Lake Angikuni was listed as “unknown”.  And remains so today. 

For anyone with an interest in the paranormal, this story or at least its paradigm will seem very familiar.  It certainly isn’t the only tale of an entire village or even town disappearing en masse, but it is one of the most recent.  And as with such tales comes the requisite host of differing theories attempting to explain the mystery in cogent terms.  But before we expend our energies to that end, i.e., the how and the why, I think we should first determine if that is even necessary.  In order to do that we’ll want to take a closer look at this tale to determine what is mystery, what is myth, and what is just made up.

For our returning listeners you can probably guess on which side of the fence I tend to come down on with regards to mysterious disappearances.  I’m a big believer in Hakams Razor, the dictum that states “With all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the correct one”.  The most egregious explanations I usually dispense with right away.  But in this case, I’m going to make an exception to illustrate how these outlandish theories tend to be either the root or the result of misleading or blatantly false information added to the story in order to embellish it.  We’ve come across this before on BTF, so it should come as no surprise that we will here.

The clues we have as to the story’s authenticity are scarce, and I have a feeling that’s intentional.  The location, the time frame, the people, and the scarcity of written records concerning the missing village all combine to make investigating this mystery a hard row to hoe.  But I’ll give it a shot.  Let’s first take a look at where this tragic event reportedly took place.  Then we’ll look at the players involved, both the Inuit themselves as well as those responsible for the discovery of and investigation into the disappearance.   Then we’ll try and trace the paper trail as it were, the written records that brought this story to the attention of the reading public.  Then lastly of course we’ll attempt to piece this whole puzzle together and see what it actually looks like.  So here we go.  Let’s take a trip to the Great White North.

It is difficult comprehend just how expansive Canada really is with just a cursory glace at a map.  At roughly 3,800,00 square miles, it is the second largest country on the planet in land area (behind Russia) but is only slightly larger than the United States (thanks to Alaska).  But this statistic is super misleading.  While the US is a relatively consistent and unbroken land mass (Hawaii and Alaska being obvious exceptions), much of the northern reaches of Canada are comprised of hundreds of islands, some as large a US states, spread across untold thousands of square miles of the artic archipelago extending to the northern tip of Greenland.  These widely dispersed islands also help Canada claim the top spot when it comes to the world’s longest coastline at a whopping 151,000 miles.  The country’s population dispersion is a study in duality.  A majority of the nations largest cities are located in the southern reached of the provinces that border the United States, mostly along coastal areas or with access to river transport.  After Edmonton, Alberta at 53 degrees north latitude, the only cities north of this line – and I say cities, not towns -- are Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories and Whitehorse in the Yukon, both of which have populations of less than 25,000 each.  Thus, the vast and rugged interior of the northern provinces are almost uninhabited.  In fact, Nunavut – the area that we’ll be focusing on in this episode – has an official population density of near zero.  Over an area of 1.8 million square kilometers, there are only 31,000 people.  That equates to just under 4 people per square kilometer.  This of course is an average, as there are stretches of the interior where there is no human habitation for thousands of square miles.  And at the heart of this vast region at roughly the geographical center of Canada sits Lake Angikuni.

This body of crystal-clear glacial water is home to a number of freshwater game fish and is a frequent watering stop for the wildlife that call the area home.  But it is far removed from any established human settlements or even trading outposts.  To say that Lake Angikuni is in the middle of nowhere is an understatement.  It is 180 miles north of the Manitoban border and 245 miles west of the nearest town of Rankin Inlet on the west coast of Hudson Bay.  The provincial capital of Iqaluit is located on Baffin Island almost 1,000 miles the east as the crow flies.  There is no network of roads in this region.  The only way to get around is by float plane, specially equipped 4-wheel drive vehicles with lots of spare fuel or on foot.  So, those going to Lake Angikuni really have to want to get there.  Nunavut Province in which the lake is located is the newest of the Canadian states, having formerly been a part of the Northwest Territories until being separated and given over to the first nation people for self-governance in 1999.  And though this expansive area is sparsely populated, the province is home to over 30,000 inhabitants, the vast majority of which are native Inuit.  

The Inuit people are descendants of the Siberian migration that brought humans from the Asian continent over the glacial land bridge to Alaska during the last ice age.  Research suggests that the Inuit broke from the Aleut tribes around 4,000 years ago and began migrating across northern Canada.  Their habitat now spans the breadth of the country, reaching all the way to Greenland.  While first nation people of the artic regions have long been referred to as Eskimos, this catch-all is today considered colonially obsolete and racist and has been replaced by the more acceptable term Inuit.  These hearty people adapted well to life in the unforgiving climate of the arctic, crafting clothing out of the hides and skins of seals, bears and caribou.  For most of their history the Inuit were nomadic, relocating their camps depending on the availability of food sources and the seasons (which in Inuit culture can be as many as 16, rather than our standard 4).  This transitory existence of the Inuit continued up until the 1950’s when they began to transition to a more sedentary lifestyle, constructing permanent structures and establishing year-round settlements usually in proximity of coastal trading and transportation routes.  But, at the time of our story in 1930, the Inuit were still a people on the go, rarely staying in any one particular place for very long.  

With an efficiency born of necessity, the Inuit could establish a village-sized encampment within a matter of hours and just as quickly break it down and begin transporting it to a new location.  Thus, it would not have been unprecedented to find the remnants of such camps dotting the wilderness areas of the Canadian arctic.  Wooden hut frames and fire breaks would certainly mark the spots where former camps had been, as well as discarded broken tools, unserviceable sled, and the odd bone pile that the local scavengers had yet to disperse.  But anything of value – sleds, skins, food, utensils, and above all weapons -- the Inuit would of course have taken with them.  

With this in mind, let’s have these last few observations serve as a segue into a closer look into the reported facts surrounding this tale of the vanishing village.

Now we know that the Inuit were at the time of this alleged incident, circa 1930, still a nomadic culture.  In that it was November and therefore already butt-ugly cold in the upper regions of Nunavut, the snow was piling up quickly and the caribou and other game animals upon which the Inuit depended were well into if not at the end point of their annual southerly migration.  So, it should have come as no surprise to any who had previously visited an Inuit camp along the shores of Lake Angikuni to find the settlement abandoned.  The other particulars like the abandoned housing, food, rifles, and defiled graves notwithstanding, this seems to make perfect sense.

Okay, so then we should spend a little time talking about all these strange particulars.  But before we do that, maybe it would be a good idea to talk about the man who discovered the abandoned village and thus started this whole affair, Joe LaBelle.  In the story, LaBelle is described as 40-year veteran trapper that knew the land and the people like the back of his hand.  An expert without reproach is a recurring theme in many such mysteries and is a popular tactic that writers often employ to add to the inexplicability of the story.  The thinking is that if an expert can’t solve this puzzle, what chance do we mere mortals have to do so?  I mean it’s not as if the guy was a greenhorn in his first season as a trapper in the area, right?  Well, in 1931 Sergeant J. Nelson of the RCMP looked into the matter after the story broke and found that our unimpeachable expert Joe LaBelle was a real guy after all.  However, his expertise became immediately impeachable when Nelson found out that LaBelle had applied for his first trapping license in 1930, operated only in north and central Manitoba, and had apparently never been to Lake Angikuni.  Hardly the seasoned professional that the story would have you believe.  Now that we know that LaBelle was unfamiliar with the Inuit in the area, it follows that he would be unfamiliar with their nomadic practices as well.  So, if this novice trapper came upon an abandoned seasonal encampment (be it at Angikuni or elsewhere), he might not have realized the situation’s normality and may have thought the scene was indeed inexplicable.  If LaBelle did indeed stumble upon an Inuit camp in the winter of 1930 (which is by no means a given), of course the inhabitants would have been long gone by then.  They wouldn’t have been stupid enough to remain in the frozen Northwest Territories after the caribou migration.  They certainly had more common sense that Joe LaBelle, as he was apparently still trapping long after the winter had already sent most animals scrambling for warm climes to the south.  

This brings us to a few more red flags that stick out like so many sore thumbs in the story.  Let’s start with the team of dead dogs.  Like I mentioned, the area around Lake Angikuni is beyond remote, with current access only by float plane, specialized amphibious vehicles or on foot.  Foolhardy individuals hoping to reach the area in winter could use dog sleds, but you’d really have to know what you were doing.  In the winter of 1930, there were only two options, on foot and by dog sled.  Whenever the Inuit scouted for a new campsite, moved their settlement, or even went on a day trip to hunt during the winter months, they traveled by dogsled.  So why leave their dogs behind?  That’s like setting out on a road trip and forgetting your car.  Well of course they wouldn’t, but by having the villagers abandon their only two modes of transportation (the other of course being the kayaks) gives the storyteller a convenient immediacy to the departure, i.e., that whatever happened, happened crazy fast.  Likewise, the same argument applies to the kayaks.  Why would the Inuit discard perfectly good kayaks?  There is a two-pronged problem with this little facet of the story.  On the one hand, the story gives the reader the impression that the kayaks were in tip-top shape, they were just bobbing along in the surf after having been hurriedly left behind.  But that’s a big assumption to make.  We’ve seen that the Inuit wouldn’t leave behind those things necessary to their survival.  So if they abandoned the boats it’s because they didn’t need them where they were going or that they were no longer functional.  But even if we assume they were functional and that they were needed, they would not have been rocking gently in waters along the shoreline because there was no shoreline on which to rock.  The average temperature in that location at that time of year was about 15 degrees below zero.  If there were kayaks left in the water at that time, they were seal-skin popsicles and would have been frozen in place until the following summer.  And with every body of water between Hudson Bay and the Pacific frozen solid for the winter, what possible use would the Inuit have for a boat in November anyway?  

The Inuit at that time would have been migrating south along with their primary food source as it made its way towards its winter forest range.  The barren-ground caribou provided the local inhabitants with food and skins for clothing and shelter and were vital to the survival of the people.  So important was the caribou to the Inuit that they based their very existence around the migration patterns of the animal to always keep the herds in close proximity.  Naturally if someone were to come upon an Inuit village in the middle of the frozen tundra in winter, you can rest assured that village would be a ghost town.  Had LaBelle actually found the Inuit still residing at a camp along the shores of a frozen lake in the middle of winter, now that would have been strange.  

Okay, so the Inuit would not have remained at the camp over the winter months.  That much we know.  But why remove the bodies from the graves and leave behind their shelters and weapons.  Simple.  They didn’t.  The cemetery containing a dozen open graves is clearly a fabricated aspect of this tale.  For one thing, the population of the village was estimated at 20 to 25 people.  And in that the camp was a temporary settlement for this small community, the death of between 1/3 and ½ the population would have been a catastrophe on an epic scale and something not likely to have been omitted from the oral history of the Inuit of Nunavut.  But there isn’t any mention of such a mass burial occurring in the decades surrounding the story.  And even if such a deadly event had occurred, the Inuit certainly would not have dug up the bodies and taken them away during their move.  This was by no means an Inuit burial custom.  The Inuit, by that time, had begun to transition away from traditional burial beliefs in favor of newfound Christian practices.  Thus, the dead – be it one or 12 -- would have remained where they were and not lugged about from camp to camp every time the caribou moved on.  Its details like this that can alert the reader that the story is fiction, and the writer is overreaching, to put it mildly.  Everything up until now might on the surface seem somewhat plausible, but this instance of the dead missing from their neatly excavated graves in the now frozen earth was one straw to many on this camel’s back.  

And as for the shelters and weapons?  Same thing.  While the supports for the tents and huts were likely of locally sourced wood and would have been reconstructed from new material whenever the people relocated, they certainly would have retained the animal skins used as the habitat’s coverings and doorways.  Same goes with the rifles.  For the sake of argument, let’s say that something terrible did happened at the village.  At the onset of such an event, don’t you think that the first thing the Inuit would have reached for in order to protect themselves would have been their weapons?  Even if the rifles were left behind after some paranormal exodus, you’d think to see these firearms scattered about the camp with spent cartridge casings littering the ground as they fought against whatever it was that had taken them.  Certainly not propped up against a wall in the huts.  Again, we see this as an obvious red flag signaling that this aspect of the story was undoubtedly manufactured.

Conventional wisdom and common sense no show us that the particulars as stated in this tale are pure bunk, they didn’t happen.  This Joe LaBelle character, while apparently a real person or at least based on one, was not the expert outdoorsman described in the story.  He was a relative novice and newcomer to the area in his first licensed season as a trapper.  So, if he found an abandoned Inuit campsite in the dead of winter as claimed (and I am by no means stipulating this), he was the only person that saw this as out of the ordinary.  Anyone else would have expected the villagers to been long gone by the seasons first snowfall.  And the description of the location as a village is yet another strike against the authenticity of the story in that the Inuit didn’t live in villages, but rather small nomadic camps that would move regularly corresponding to the caribou migration.  The kayaks, if there were any, would not have been bobbing in the surf, they would have been encased in ice and probably no visible under layers of drifting snow over the frozen lake even if they did exist which in all likelihood they did not.  The left behind rifles were a stretch to begin with and something we can wag a finger at.  For the Inuit to leave their rifles behind would be akin to you getting a new job, relocating your family to a new city and leaving your kids behind.  Something that important would be coming with you.  And do we really need to talk about the empty graves at the burial ground?  This little nugget is so obviously fools gold that we can dismiss it as such without further discussion.

But for all the mystery surrounding the tale of the missing Inuit village, the attempts at explaining the disappearance are scant at best.  No seems to have even tried.  Investigation complete, throw hands up in air, case closed.  And it’s not as if theorists were starved for home-grown explanations in the very mythology of the Inuit themselves.  The people of the Canadian arctic boast a wealth of supernatural entities that would have made perfect villains in this story had a writer so chosen.  The nunamiutait were elementals so to speak, earth spirits who shared the land with the Inuit.  These shadow people were invisible to all but the inner eye of a shaman. The Qallupilluit was a scaly mermaid like creature that would snatch children and drag them back into the water; the perfect foil for a mystery occurring near a lake, wouldn’t you think?  The Mahaha was a demon that reportedly tickled its victims to death.  The Ijiraat were shapeshifters that could transform their appearance into that of any arctic animal, but their burning red eyes always gave them away.  And there are others which the Inuit feared and respected, yet none of them has ever been put forward as a possible culprit for the village’s disappearance.  Why?

While it was claimed that the Mounties visited the lake and conducted an on-site investigation, their findings and subsequent theories on the disappearance are suspiciously absent from the record.  But if one takes the time to contact the RCMP and inquire about the mystery, they find out why.  According to records and contemporary statements made at the time of the alleged tale, the RCMP has no idea where any of this nonsense started or who started it.  They did not take a statement from any Joe LaBelle about an abandoned village.  They certainly didn’t make the 330-mile trip overland to investigate the matter as there was no matter to investigate.  Thus officially, and as all evidence suggests, the entire episode never happened.   

Then from where did this story come?  Well, this is actually fairly easy to determine as the tale only went through a couple of incarnations before Frank Edwards got hold of it in 1956.  All indications are that Mr. Edwards found the story in the Virginia newspaper the Danville Bee, under the title “Village of the Dead”.  The title of the piece was a local addition, but the article itself was a reprint of a story that originally appeared in the Manitoba daily La Pas that had been written by an Emmitt Kelleher.  Some accounts list the paper in which the original story appeared as the Halifax Herald, but this edition of the paper containing the story hit newsstands on November 29th, 2 days after the story appeared in the Danville Bee on 27 November 1930.  But regardless of who printed the story first, this would have to be one of the most amazing feats in the history of journalism.   For this story of an alleged disappearance which occurred in an inaccessible region of the Canadian arctic in winter no less to make into a Virginia newspaper virtually overnight is not only dubious but practically impossible.  For this to happen, Emmett Kelleher would have had to have been waiting in the Churchill Mounties station when LaBelle came in and made his report.  And not just the initial report.  He would have had to wait until the RCMP had ventured to the lake, conducted their investigation, and then returned to Churchill before verifying these subsequent particulars which he then included in the story.  But I don’t mean cast Kelleher as a villain in this story, for he certainly was not.  For in his original story as printed in the papers, he describes only a few dead dogs and a single rusty rifle.  Nothing about kayaks, nothing about interrupted sewing or uneaten meals, nothing.  The story was to remain unchanged for almost 25 years.  That is until a writer with a bent for mysteries stumbled upon it in 1956.

For fans of the podcast and of true mysteries, Frank Edwards is the Ernest Hemingway of the genre.  His books “Stanger than Science” and “Strangest of All” are benchmarks on the subject and are must-adds to the library of anyone interested in such things.  Edwards resuscitated the legend by including it in his book Strangest of All under the chapter heading “The Vanishing Village”.  The three dead dogs of Kelleher’s article are now a team of a dozen animals, the rusty rifle is now an arsenal in perfect working order, and there is now food in pots, kayaks in the riding the swells in the lake and perfectly sound huts abandoned for no reason at all.   And while the Edwards’ version does touch on a subsequent investigation by the RCMP, it doesn’t mention anything about a second trapper named Laurent and the strange lights in the sky over the lake.

This aspect of the story, oddly enough, comes from a story in the book World's Greatest UFO Mysteries by Nigel Blundell and Roger Boar.  Now the only way one could justify including this story of a missing Inuit village in a compendium about UFO mysteries is to make sure that a UFO is prominently featured in the narrative.  In this case it is insinuated by the reference to a mysterious light offered up by the equally mysterious Laurent boys.   I’ve come to expect these kinds of red flags in true mysteries when information absent from previous incarnations of a tale suddenly emerges and veers the narrative in an entirely new direction.  In this case I was struck by the passage in the story when the Mounties recruit this new figure, this Armand Laurent, and the first thing they ask him is if he has seen anything strange around the lake.

“Funny you should ask”, he offers up, “because sure as shootin’ me and the boys saw these strange lights in the sky and…”  blah, blah, blah.  The elder trapper went on to describe a large cylindrical object that turned into a bullet and shot off toward Angikuni about the time the Inuit went missing.  Sure, looks like the RCMP found just the right guy to help them with this particular case, doesn’t it?  The Mounties just happened to ask the one person who had seen something strange near the lake if he had seen something strange near the lake and over the sight of a mass disappearance in which UFOs were now the prime suspect in a book about UFO mysteries.  That my friends is quite the coincidence.  It was also the Blundell / Boar narrative that upped the population of the village from 23 to 1,200.

I think we can dispense with the Armand Laurent tangent as a self-serving repackaging of the tale in order to bolster an inane case for mass alien abduction.  

So now almost 90 years after the story first appeared in print, the current incantation barely resembles its inspiration.  Have you ever played the game Grapevine where you have ten people sitting around a table and one person whispers a snippet of a story to his or her neighbor so that no one else can hear?  Then the story is whispered to the next person and the next until it makes its way around the table and back to the person who started the tale.  When the original and ending version of the story are compared, the two are often so distorted and embellished that they don’t resemble each other in the least.  This is a common paradigm of the true mystery genre.  A tale is told with a mysterious bent, often innocuous, and easily explained.  But once another writer and then another takes hold and begins to clip a fact or two and paste a supposition here and there, all of a sudden you have a tale that barely resembles the original. 

In the end, there are two possible solutions to this mystery of the vanishing village.  The first has an independent newspaper writer, Emmitt Kelleher, crossing paths with a local trapper named Joe LaBelle.  LaBelle tells Kelleher a wild tale about his adventures in the arctic, playing to his audience by overstating not only the story itself but his experience and credentials as well.  He’s never even been to Nunavut, but the writer doesn’t need to know that.  The eager newspaperman hungry for a scoop laps up the trappers lies with a spoon.  As would be expected from an independent journalist with purported sensationalistic tendencies, Kelleher molds the LaBelle story into a more captivating tale that is sure to amaze and even terrify potential readers.  The second is basically the same, just take Joe LaBelle out all together and have Kelleher make up the whole thing himself.  Yes, we did determine that LaBelle was a real person, but that does not mean he was the genesis of the tale.  Kelleher could have simply ascribed authorship to the tracker in order lend more weight to the tale.

In either case, the story it turns out is merely a work of fiction.  An innocent tale of an abandoned Inuit camp that grew into paranormal legend.  Had not Blundell and Boar ruined the mystique with their inane UFO nonsense, the story might have avoided closer scrutiny and thus retained some semblance of mystery.  But the truth of the matter is that there is no truth to the story.  That doesn’t mean the story itself isn’t entertaining.  Just that it does not hold up modern investigative techniques.  In the past, many of these so-called true mysteries remained such due to the simple fact disproving them would prove a monumental task.  Now the internet allows us immediate access facts that before only a dedicated researcher might uncover, and only if he or she had the time and inclination to do so.  Also gone are the nomadic ways of the Inuit who like the rest of us have traded in their wandering ways for stability, sustainability, and high-speed internet.  And while the Nunavut Inuit no longer seasonally crisscross the barren interior of the Canadian arctic, the history of this nomadic culture lives on in their songs, their myths, their stories, and in their people.  Only now, the legend of the village that vanished is no longer a part of this history, but a footnote in its mythology.