February 13, 2021 • 37 mins
Between 2007 and 2016, 17 disembodied feet - still wearing shoes - have washed ashore between Washington and British Columbia. What's behind the sudden influx of Vancouver's mystery feet? Find out in this classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ahoy there everybody, it's your old pal Josh. And for
this week's s Y s K Selects, I have chosen
our episode on disembodied feet, Yes, with the great title
why are so many disembodied feet washing ashore in British Columbia?
Were released it back in June of two thousand and sixteen,
and it's a cozy little mystery about feet washing ashore
(00:25):
and we don't know why still to this day. I
hope you enjoy it. It's a really good episode. Welcome
to Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles
(00:47):
Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there, and there six feet
in this studio right now, and all of them are
exactly where they're supposed to be attached to their lowered legs. Yeah,
well the calf, yeah, yep, above the floor facing forward
to you, right. Yeah, that's a big one too, because
(01:08):
if it's facing backwards, you've got problems or you're just
going the wrong way all day long. Maybe. So, um,
do you know where they're not supposed to be Chuck feet? Yes, uh, well,
they're not supposed to be on the armrest of the
seat in front of you on an airplane, yes, or
a movie theater, yes, But I know you're not talking
(01:30):
about common courtesies. That bug me. But I agree with
you wholeheartedly. That is so wrong. And um, I'm meant
to tell you. I'm on, I've come over to your side.
About taking shoes off on the plane. It's okay if
I do it, but um, you mean And I were
flying somewhere and this dude behind us head it's nasty,
(01:52):
stinky feet and he had his shoes off, and like
we're facing forward and we could smell his feet below
our seats behind us, And I kept turning around giving
him the dirtiest looks, and he was like, you had
no idea what I was doing. Did you look at
his feet and then and he still didn't get it.
Did you look at his feet his face and then
clamp your nose? I did that still didn't work. I
(02:14):
threw up a little bit onto him. He just thought
it was there sick. Yeah. Yeah, I know. People disagree
with me. People wrote in We're like, what's it to you?
I thought it was to eat your own to eat
your own chuck? Yeah, you know, yeah, all right, so
I'll tell you a place where feet aren't supposed to be.
They're not supposed to be off on their own on
(02:37):
a beach somewhere, not attached to a body exactly. No,
that's not something that you see every day, No, unless
you're in Vancouver, and then it happens like almost every day.
It seems like not quite, but sure, there's something very
weird going on in Vancouver. You say there's no mystery.
I said, there's still a bit of a mystery to it.
(02:57):
But well, well we'll start at the beginning. Okay, Okay.
August twenty, two thousand seven. It's kind of a cool
and drizzly day at a place called Jedediah Island Provincial
Park up in British Columbia, right near Vancouver, right, lovely,
are sure, of course, that's why you would want to say,
like go park or camp at this park with your family,
(03:20):
which is what a twelve year old girl was doing.
I couldn't find this girl's name. Saved my life, probably
because she's twelve. She wouldn't be good to say it anyway.
She was sure. She was walking along the beach with
her dad, and um, there was a bunch of like flotsam,
you know, that's the term for stuff that washes up
from the sea, that the sea spits up onto the shores.
(03:40):
And um, she saw a shoe and she picked it
up and she untied it and turned it upside down
and out fellaw sock and inside the sock was a
human foot yep, and she was pretty surprised. Size. Yeah,
it was a campus brand shoe, which ended up being
(04:02):
not neither here nor there, but it is manufactured in India,
mostly sold in India. Um, and we'll just park that
right there for now. Yeah. So the families like this
is unusual. Sure, they borrowed a radio from somebody else
and they alerted the authorities, and in very short order,
the mounties showed up, the corner showed up, the coast
(04:23):
guard showed up. I bet the mounties were all over
that foot. Um. So yeah, they said, you know what, well,
we're gonna take that foot is if that's okay, little girl,
And she threw her sobbing tears, said sure, but just
give me a little money, okay. Uh. And they said
we're going to send it off for DNA examination, and um,
(04:43):
that did that return nothing The DNA as far as
I know. Yeah, there was no there's no match. So
that wasn't like a clue the d NA, Yeah no,
but it was the first thing they tried. Sure the DNA.
They also looked at it to see what was going
on with the foot, if if there is any kind
of sign of what the deal was. Yeah, they held
it up to their ear and pretended like it was
a telephone. And one of the other mount he said,
(05:05):
that's not funny. But they're like, oh, it is kind
of funny, and they said sorry, so um, they didn't.
They just kind of filed it away. It actually didn't
make much of a stir outside of the area. It
was worth talking about. It got a little bit of
ink because it was just so weird. But they put
the foot away and at the coroner's office and everybody
(05:27):
went about their lives, right, I would assume so. And
then six days later another foot showed up in the area,
not the same place, but in the same in the
same general area, another right foot, which means it wasn't
for the person's other foot. Now that'd be weird. So
there's two people missing feet. Now, this is a men's
Reebok size eleven I think, and the people who found
(05:48):
it said that when they saw it, they immediately knew
that there was a foot in there because it looked full.
It looks how they is how they put it. Yeah,
and they picked it up and smell of it and
they're like, yeah, it's a foot, that's right. And the
mountains came in again and they got off their horses
and uh. Corporal Gary Cox said, you know, it is
(06:09):
a little weird to find two feet, especially within six
days of one another. Yeah, in the same area it was. Um.
He described it as a million to one odds. I
don't think he did the science on that, but it's
just something you say. But he said, too, is pretty crazy, Yeah,
and I agree with him. Yeah. So the first foot
was in on Jedediah Island. The second ones on Gabriela Island,
(06:30):
which is I couldn't find exactly how far away it
was across the water, but it's it's not that far.
They're close, but they're separated by some water, um, and
they're not all of a sudden there's two feet that
were found within six days. The media starts to catch
drift of this one. Yeah, right, there's feet, uh shoe
de feet washing up on the shores in Vancouver, and
(06:54):
at the time, at that very time, um, Robert Picton
was on trial in Vancouver for um murdering as many
as forty nine women. You've heard to him, right, I think.
So he was a notorious pig farmer who would like
butcher women and feed them to his pigs, and then
butcher's pigs and feed pigs to his guests. Yeah. One
(07:15):
of the only probably Canadian serial killers, right, yeah, yeah,
and one of the worst of all serial killers. He
was a horrible, horrible person because he wasn't crazy, you
know what I mean, He was just a just a
horrible person. Um. And so he's on trial at that time,
got I think twenty five years, which is like the
maximum sentence you can get in Canada, come on Canada,
(07:40):
years for for up to forty nine horrible murders. Um.
So he was on trial. There are also a lot
of like really high profile missing people in the area too,
that it just vanished without a trace in the four
years leading up to that. Yeah. And you point out
because you wrote this idea, but actually I was pointing
(08:01):
out that Christopher Solomon pointed something. Okay, Well, the point is, uh,
and this is a little strange, but maybe not. I
don't know. I was trying to make sense of it.
British Columbia apparently just has a higher than normal rate
of missing persons than other parts of the world, which
is weird. Yeah, but I mean like a lot more, yeah,
(08:21):
more than people over a fifty nine year period. And uh,
Solomon compared that to Kentucky, which is about the same
size and population or same size population, they only had
five and fifteen people missing over that fifty nine years.
That seemed really low to me. Did eight people a
year missing in the whole state like that remained missing? Okay?
(08:45):
Unsolved forever? Yes, because in Kentucky they'll just be like
he was Uncle Billy's right down the road for a week,
right exactly. Okay, So like the the the idea is
that BC has almost five times the number of unsolved
seeing person's cases over this fifty nine period compared to Kentucky,
which has about the same size population. It's a lot more, yeah,
(09:05):
And I mean Solomon might have gone in and selected like, oh,
Kentucky's got the lowest of the same size population, so
that will really point it out. But it does seem
that BC has a large amount of missing persons. Now, uh,
I bet it has something to do with the terrain
and the wildlife, probably the abundance of water. Probably that too.
(09:25):
It's not a good good thing. A lot of heroin, yeah,
you know, sadly, and they probably go missing, you know,
in a drug And in addition to the serial killer theory,
one of them was that these were like people who
would either run a foul of the local organized crime
synd kits or um ran a foul of like a
(09:47):
fellow heroin addict unorganized crime, exactly disorganized Remember that movie?
What movie disorganized crime? Was that? A movie with Who's
the the Dude, the Blonde Dude from l A Law
Corpin Burnson. Yes, it's actually a good movie. Really, I
haven't seen Smart of decades. Hey, Summer School is one
(10:10):
of the all time greats. Man, it sounds like that
kind of movie disorganized crime, Like they're a bunch of
bumbling criminals. Definitely, But I think like or Fred Gwynn
was in it, Herman Munster, one of his last roles.
All right, so you talked about theories. One of the
other theories, remember we mentioned India manufactured that first shoe.
(10:32):
Some people said, you know what this is, sadly just
feet of tsunami survivors from the Indian Ocean disaster December
two thousand four, and they just years later, these like
body parts are watching up on shore, which is sort
of plausible. It is. I mean, two fifty people died
(10:52):
in that tsunami. A lot, if not most of them
were never found. Yeah. Also, we had people point out,
remember when we said that modern disaster flicks are bad,
We had a bunch of people right in say The
Impossible it was a great movie, that's the one about Yeah,
and it was great, it was awesome. But I think
that's different because that was a uh factual Uh, it's
(11:16):
about a factual event. But and I categorize it as
a disaster now. See I don't categorize it as that
because it was a real thing that happened. Like disaster
flicks to me are when you know, when you invent
some crazy disaster. Well okay, well let me ask you this.
If it were totally fictionalized but the exact same movie,
would you then consider it as a disaster flick? Yes? Okay,
(11:36):
so it's like on that scale and everything too. I
had the impression it was much more just like a
human interest. Well it became that. But they showed the
film the Tsunami like it was not amazing, how realistic.
It is very very tough movie, very hard to watch.
Have you seen Twelve Years of Slave yet? I still
(11:57):
cannot bring myself to watch that. That's pretty rough. It's
just staring at me on my DVR every night. I'm
gonna it'll be soon. I'll let you know. Okay, I'll
just come into work crying. Okay, what did I do now? Alright,
So the tsunami disaster, they said, um, might have been
one of the reasons. But um, I think other people said,
(12:19):
you know, maybe that's not the best explanation. Other people said, well,
a lot of people just go missing from other things,
like planes go down in the Salish Sea, which is
the body of water between I think Vancouver Island and
mainland British Columbia, which is where most of these were found.
Is it Salish? I think so. But we'll hear from
Canadians one way or the other. You say Salish, I say, Salish,
(12:41):
who's right? Really? You know? All right, well, let's we're
getting all excited here with these theories. But there were
more feet to come, and we'll get back to those
feet right after this, So chuck. The when those first
(13:11):
two feet were found within six days made the rounds,
people talked about it, and then it's just kind of
drifted out of the news, right like a foot in
the ocean exactly. Um. And then a third foot was found,
and it came roaring back because this is yet another foot,
a totally different one. This is a woman's foot, actually
a new balance size seven I think, and Kirkland Island,
(13:36):
same general area right right, the same forty miles stretch
along that coastal area. And this is within ten months
now five ft four people. Yeah, so um, the other
new balance sneaker was found. That was the fifth foot found.
And then in between the yeah, they matched the foot
to the you know, I don't know if that's good
(13:58):
or bad, but they found the guy's other foot, right
the the woman that was the woman that they they
found her two ft yes, so her feet were number
three and number five to turn up. And in between
an entirely different person's foot turned up, men's like size
eleven Nike I think. So yeah. Within within a ten
month period, there were five feet belonging to four different
(14:20):
people that turned up on this little stretch. That's right,
that's significant. Then there was a six foot the next August.
This was in actually Washington, so I guess it had
its UH papers in order and made its way to
the States. And so, like you said, if you're following
the story at home as it's going on, you're starting
(14:42):
to think, like, if I go to the beach, I'm
going to see a foot today. And a lot of
people did do that. Yeah, a lot of people around
British Columbius started looking for disembodied feet. They were turning
up so frequently. And I misspoke, you were right. So
the seventh foot to turn up was the woman's other foot.
That's hard to keep track, it really is, all these
disembodied So how many feet in total, sir? I think
(15:06):
the last two were found February of this year. Yeah,
and they actually belonged to the same person. But they
were found a week or two or so apart. Yeah,
and I say last, I mean most recent. I'm sure
more feet will come. It seems that way because between
so the first foot was found in August two thousand
and seven. These most recent feet were found in February
two thousand and sixteen. That total seventeen disembodied feet found
(15:31):
within a hundred and fifty miles stretched between Tacoma, Washington
and British Columbia. That's unusual. It seems like it, And
there's a lot of theories, but no one can stay
definitively here's what's going on, right, Uh And I know
we're making a lot of jokes. I realized these feet
belonged to people who are no longer with us. I
(15:52):
just want to throw that out there that we do
a lot of comedy on this show. So we did
a coma episode that had jokes. I mean, come on, okay,
I just want to see aw either. Uh. So from
the beginning, the cops and the Mounties were basically like,
I don't you know, this seems really fishy. Uh, but
it's not. We don't think it's murder. We don't think
(16:13):
there's someone out there killing people and chopping their feet off,
which is what a lot of people thought, but and
notably think, because their feet weren't cut off, and you
can tell right they were. They said that they were
naturally disarticulated, right, that's right. Um, So that first foot
that that girl found on Jedediah Island was identified pretty
quickly because the cops released a picture of the shoe
(16:34):
to the media. And remember it was a Campus brand
which has made in India, sold mostly in India. And
so the guy whose foot it was, his family saw
it on the news and identified him as somebody who
he was a longtime sufferer of depression and he was
in a depressed state when his family last saw him.
(16:54):
So the cops came to the logical conclusion that he
had killed himself. So foot number one has been matched
to a missing person case, right, that's right. Uh. So
then the new balance shoes turned up on separate islands. Uh,
this is the woman and she was identified as a
lady who also was suffering from depression and jumped off
(17:17):
a bridge. I think they knew this for sure. Yes,
that's where the woman was last seen, was jumping off
a bridge. Yeah, this has been four years previous, So
now they're starting to get a pattern here where all right,
there was another man to the one on Valde's Island
feet three and five. Uh, they determined was either suicide
(17:37):
or accident. And then another couple of people who were
accidentally killed. And so they see this pattern. Now, all right,
these are people that just happened to die or died
by their own hand, um near enough to the water
where their feet were there. Yes, I'm just being vague
for now, right, Yeah. But the weird thing is is now,
(17:59):
all of a sudden, in a very short period of time,
relatively short period of time. Um, I mean because one
of these guys whose feet turned up was last seen
after his boat turned over. So in a very short
period of time, all these people who died a very
different periods of time, suddenly their feet were starting to
turn up in this area around the stylish Sailish sea. Yes. Um,
(18:22):
and the cops had a I guess kind of a
pretty good idea from the outset. But to understand what
was going on, or at least what the cops say
was going on, you have to understand what happens to
a a person who dies in the water. You think
that people float, you know, yeah, you kind of think
(18:43):
that because in movies that you know, if you're trying
to get rid of a body in the water, you
always you know, tie submit blocks to a submit shoes,
is the old joke. You know, somebody turned up like
that in New York recently, like with submit shoes. Not
too many movies. But the idea is that you have
to weight the body down. And I suppose if you
were going to get rid of a body that I
(19:03):
would probably do the same thing, just out of you know,
just cover my basis, just to be sure. Well. The
thing is, if you do you cement shoes on a person,
which you should never do that, but if you did, UM,
what you're doing is you're not ensuring that they sink right,
then you're ensuring that they don't come back up, because
that's what happens body that has gone unconscious or has
(19:27):
drowned and died. UM sinks pretty quickly, and it usually
sinks so quick that if you are looking for a
drowning victim, you you should look on the bottom pretty
close to where they were last seen on the surface.
They sink that fast. Man. So a body sinks UM,
and it will sink faster and fresh water than saltwater
(19:48):
because saltwaters makes humans a little more buoyant. UM. I
guess overweight people, people with a lot of fat on
their bodies sink uh more slowly than people who are leaner. UM.
And then depending on the water temperature, as well. Um,
and how deep the water is, they'll sink faster and
(20:09):
faster as they get to the bottom. Yeah. And depending
on what you're wearing, Yeah, like a code or shoes
or something like that that all the way down, or
a backpack, it's it's definitely gonna pull you down. But
the point is once you go under, once you submerge,
and you're dead or you're dying, Um, you're gonna sink
pretty quick. Yeah, there's more pressure to the deeper you
get in the body of water. Uh. You mentioned the
(20:30):
temperature was lower, but there's also more pressure that compresses
the air in your body, and that's gonna make you
less floaty as well. So the thing the cool air
or the cool temperature does down there is it uh
kind of preserves you for a little while, longer than
ordinarily because um, the bacteria that will eventually consume your
(20:52):
body or just gonna be slower you do, so they
just move more slowly. But that bacteria is eventually gonna overcome, um,
the sinking of the body, because your body is an
enclosed system generally roughly, I mean you've got a mouth
and all that, you know. But as they're eating, they're
putting out as a waste product. UM gases like methane
(21:15):
and stuff like that. UM, and your body traps that
stuff and it begins to bloat. And I'm everyone knows
that once you blow, you float. That's right, that's the
forensics bumper sticker. Yeah, eventually you're going to rise to
the top like a dirigible because of those gases that
are trapped in your body, or like like a submarine.
(21:40):
I guess do you mean they keep going into the
air like a blip, You float off and then your
foot will be found on the moon later. Uh, yeah,
you're gonna float. And that's why whenever they people discover
like a dead body in a lake much later, it's
you know, it's not a pretty thing. They're they're bloated
and puffed out and decomposed. It's not pretty. But if
(22:04):
you are UM, if you were trapped, say like in
a vehicle or something like that, and all of this
takes place, UM, eventually, your your body's going to be
prevented from floating away and it will eventually rupture. And
once the rupture happens, all that gas and the um,
the buoyancy that's created by it is all released and
(22:26):
you're staying there. You're staying there. And I read this
article about um. Did you read the article about the
Oklahoma guy? Yeah? It was really weird. It is so
like the guy. There was a guy who was um
whose brother went missing in his Camaro and I think
like nineteen seventy and he um, he just never knew
(22:47):
what happened to him, and he used this boat ramp
on this place called Fosse Lake. And he found out
later when the cops accidentally discovered the car, that his
brother had been submerged in just twelve ft of water
for forty years. All those times he was back in
his boat into False Lake, his brother was right below him. Yeah,
isn't that crazy? And they found him accidentally, and then
(23:08):
they found another car that had gone missing I think
the year before, just a few feet away. And the
moral of the story is that False Lake is really murky.
I mean twelve ft of water, two different cars Camaro, Yeah, Camaro,
and I think like a packer or something like that,
or buick Man. Unbelievable. Uh all right, well let's take
(23:29):
another little break here and we'll talk a little bit
more about what can happen to a body underwater. And uh,
what's the deal with all these feet? All right? Uh,
(23:58):
just this year that was a study. There's some criminologists
at Simon Fraser, you outside of Vancouver, and there's been
a bunch of studies like this over the years where
they we've talked, you know, in our Body Farm episode
where criminologists and forensics experts try to see what happens
to bodies under various conditions, including being sunk underwater. Uh.
(24:20):
So they took a pig carcass in this case not
a human cad ever, and they sunk it kind of
near where uh in the Sailors Sea where these feet
had been appearing. And um, this these pigs carcasses were um,
they were bones in a matter of days. It was
really really fast. Yeah, they were really surprised surprisingly fast
because you know, conventional wisdom is that this took weeks months,
(24:44):
maybe even, and the other studies had shown that, right,
and these things, these pigs were like just bones in
a few days. Um. They think it's possible that the
Sailors Sea is um an anomaly because this was an
almost a thousand feet of water, but it's really highly oxygenated,
so there's a lot of life down there, um, a
(25:04):
lot more things to eat a body exactly, whereas if
you took it to another body of water and a
thousand feet there, there might not be as much oxygen,
so it might take longer. But for the sailors c
it's possible for something to be reduced to bones in
a few days. Yeah, here was my one problem with
the way they did this study. Maybe I overthought it,
but they trapped it under fencing, um, which presumably means
(25:27):
that that was just you know, kind of in one
place the whole time. I would have, like, if you're
going to simulate a human body, I would have uh
maybe shackled a leg and and put a long leader
a hundred so it could move around and see what
a body would do. See the site, because a body
(25:48):
can move on the bottom a little because there's currents,
so you know, there's just you know, minor gripe. But yeah,
have you seen did you see the video of it,
the time elapse video. It's really something. It's gross. Don't
need it. So um. There was another study that I
found that really kind of um ties all this together.
(26:10):
It was from and it was carried out by the
corner of King's County, which is where Seattle is, and
Um he or she I think it was heat Um
looked at bodies that have been pulled from the water,
and he took the amount of time they've been in
the water submerged, and then uh, the amount of body
parts that were left or exactly what body parts are left,
(26:33):
and basically went back and reverse engineered the process by
which a body comes apart when it submerged underwater. That's
valuable information, it really is, you know. And so what
they what they came up with was that the the skin,
the thinnest areas of skin typically cover like joints like
your wrists and ankles, does get eaten away first, which
(26:53):
exposes that soft tissue beneath that holds your hand to
your arm or your foot to your leg, and then
that gets attacked by scavengers and all the other stuff
that's eating it. And so between the things eating that
soft tissue holding the bones together and the wave action
of the currents at the bottom of the body of water,
(27:16):
the hands and then the feet were loose, they disarticulate,
so they naturally will fall off the body as the
body's decomposing submerged underwater and they are among the first
parts to go. That's right. And if you're just a
foot and you're not wearing a shoe, um, then chances
are that foot will get consumed and you will never
(27:37):
see it again. Although one of these feet was a
barefoot correct, which seems to be a little bit of
an outlier, a little bit um. But if you've got
a shoe on that thing that's tied up nice and tight,
and you're disarticulated at the ankle, that foot is still
inside that shoe, gonna make it really hard for a
scavenger to get in there. And it's very possible that
(27:59):
that foot will not decomposed, or at least decomposed very slowly. Right,
And not only that, will it be protected once it disarticulates.
If it's wearing a certain kind of shoe, specifically an
athletic shoe that's made in the last like, uh twenty years,
it's gonna have air injected into the soul. And in
(28:20):
the case of like remember Nike Air max Is, they
had actual air pockets like in the in between the
soul and the bottom of the shoe, and that actually
creates a buoyant effect that will lift a shoe including
one that has a foot still inside to the surface. Yeah.
So they started looking all these cases and they said, well,
(28:40):
almost all of these are athletic shoes, so that makes sense,
and it's gonna bob upside down because of that rubbery soul,
so it's going to be protected even more from birds
and things. So what we have here is a case
of people that just happened to die and their feet
happen to come away from their bodies and be well
protected by these awesome running shoes and eventually made their
(29:05):
ways to shore. Um. But a little bit weird that
they would happen in this area in such a span
of time. I would still say, right, that's a that's
to me the um and and we should say, that's
what you just said. That's the cops position, and it
has been basically since the outset, since the first foot
was found. Basically nothing to see here, and there's not
(29:26):
a lot there too, um to undermine it or attack it. Like.
It's a pretty sound position. But there is still a
mystery to it to me in that why British Columbia
like it. It doesn't make sense, And there's a couple
of explanations. One is that the Sailors Sea is something
like a lagoon to where water flows in from the
(29:47):
Pacific Ocean from the south northward into the Sailors Sea,
and once stuff goes in there, it basically recirculates. It
doesn't come back out very often. Well that when you
see the sign that says sailors see it says feet
flow in, they don't out exactly right. So once you
see that sign, you're like, well, there's the explanation. Um.
The idea is that the Sailor Sea would experience higher
(30:09):
incidents of flots some of all types, including feet, which
is one explanation it could be right, Well, I'm sure
that has something to do with it. Sure. The other
explanation is um, one of my favorite things in the world,
which is a version of uh. Well, there's a couple
of names for it. UM. There was a guy named
(30:30):
arnold's Wicki uh in two thousand six of linguistics professor
at Stanford who coined the term frequency illusion. And that's
one of the cognitive biases. UM. We're basically if you
are looking for something, you're gonna find it. All these
people saw in the news feet washing up on the shore,
So like you said, they all started looking for feet,
(30:51):
and every time a foot was found, it just supported
the idea that, yes, there's something really weird going on here,
which only increased the awareness and the focus on this
means that people started seeing more and more feet, that's right.
So frequency illusions specifically is a mix of selective attention
and confirmation bias. So in this case, selective attention unconsciously
keeping an eye out for that new thing that you
(31:13):
were just told about, which is the feat uh. And
the confirmation bias in this case is the reassurance that
it's just proof, more and more proof of its omnipresence.
More feet. You could see that happening here for sure.
Pretty interesting. It's called the bottom mine Haff phenomenon too. Yeah.
I didn't know where that came from. That was a
(31:33):
dude until I looked it up. It was just a
comment or on a on the Pioneer Press of St.
Paul discussion board, and he had heard about the bottom
mine Haff terrorist group a couple of times and one
day and for the first time, yeah, and just said,
you know, bottom mine Huff phenomenon, and it became a meme.
(31:55):
I thought it was more. I don't I thought it
was cooler than that. I thought there was some cool
explanation that wasn't just some dude online. It definitely sounds
cooler than it is. It sounds way cooler than it is.
But it's a common thing, and people, Uh, you talk
about eleven eleven on the clock is a big one
for a lot of people, say, you know, I see
eleven eleven all the time in the clock. It's because
(32:15):
you're looking for it, sure frequency illusion. It's not actually
happening more than it ever was. You're just paying more
attention to it now. And this is really really unnerving suggestion, man,
because it's it says that feet washing up on the
shore is way more common than and of us realizing
(32:35):
that if you went over and picked up an athletic
shoe on a beach somewhere, there's a good chance that
there's going to be a foot inside. We just aren't
aware of this, as is human beings and outside of Vancouver, right, right,
So that makes Vancouver the capital of the disembodied, the
(32:56):
disembodied feet capital of the world. I don't know that
that necessarily holds up, though, I don't think it's been explained. Yeah,
because I mean I bet. I bet you it's frequency illusion.
I I disagree. I think it's something else. I think
it probably has to do with the hydrology or something
about Vancouver or British Columbia. There's this some database called
(33:16):
name US and it's like a catalog of unidentified remains.
And I did a search for disarticulated foot and out
of like forty thousand unidentified remains in the US were
from Vancouver. The only three were disarticulated feet, and one
was found in the Washington state area, So you could
(33:37):
technically kind of included in that weird Vancouver clump. One
was in Maryland and one was in Dallas. That was it.
So it does really seem like Vancouver has a higher
than usual incidence of disarticulated feat showing up in its area. Wow,
which is weird? Are you in the case? No, I'm
(33:59):
just a fan, Okay, So you got anything else? No?
I just realized that I've been like rotating my feet
around and just feel sort of Uh. If you want
to know more about this, um you can. Actually there
are three really good articles that I read in addition
to some other ones, but three stood out. One was
(34:21):
by Winston Ross of The Daily Beast one was on
Pacific Standard. I didn't see an author, and then Christomers
Christopher Solomon's outside article. Those are all pretty stand out. Uh.
And since I said stand out, it's time for a listener. Now,
I'm gonna call this Internet Roundup. I don't know if
people watch, but we have an Internet show called Internet Roundup.
(34:44):
Several hundred people watch, Yeah, and it's like the silliest
thing we do. We sit down in this studio on
video and we just talked about a couple of things
on the Internet that we think our neat. So that
is a setup. Hey, guys, I was recently on a
Delta flight and they show these on Delta, and this
is not an advert. I was recently on adults flight
from Atlanta at Austin keeping an eye out for your hat, Chuck.
(35:07):
I got very excited when I remembered I could watch
your Internet round Up show on the plane to pass
the time. Because we began our descend in Austin, sudden
thunderstorms developed. It was quite bumpy, to say the least.
If you have never been on a plane that unsuccessfully
tried to land in a thunderstorm, I don't recommend it.
I just had listened to your How to Survive a
(35:27):
Plane Crash episode from two thousand and eight just that
week before, and I remember thinking how grateful I was
that I was in the back of the plane, because
Chuck said I had a better chance of surviving that way. Uh,
it's not much of a chance, but sure. I just
thought you would like to know that despite the horrible
weather going on, I never lost connection with your show. Uh.
Watching Internet round up and able to listen and watch
(35:48):
you guys really helped me keep calm until our pilot
finally gave up trying to land and diverted the plane
to Houston. That's even scarier. You know, I'm not gonna
try anymore. Well, let's just go to Houston close enough. Yeah. Uh.
In the end, everyone made it to Austin safely, though,
So thanks for everything you guys do. And that is
(36:08):
from Lauren Sprouse. Thanks a lot, Lauren. Um, have you
ever watched videos of planes that come in for a
landing but it's too windy so they have to like
immediately take back off. Now that's never happened, like they
touched down and take off. If you watch those waiting
to get onto a plane, it's a really good way
to poke at your brain. Wow. Yeah, no, thank you. Uh.
(36:29):
If you want to get in touch with us, you
can hit us up on Twitter, s y sk podcast.
You can join us on Instagram s y s K
podcast too. You can join us on Facebook, dot com
slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an
email to Stuff podcast at how stuff worst dot com
and has always joined us at our home on the web,
Stuff you Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know
(36:51):
is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Ahoy there everybody, it's your old pal Josh. And for
this week's s Y s K Selects, I have chosen
our episode on disembodied feet, Yes, with the great title
why are so many disembodied feet washing ashore in British Columbia?
Were released it back in June of two thousand and sixteen,
and it's a cozy little mystery about feet washing ashore
(00:25):
and we don't know why still to this day. I
hope you enjoy it. It's a really good episode. Welcome
to Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles
(00:47):
Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there, and there six feet
in this studio right now, and all of them are
exactly where they're supposed to be attached to their lowered legs. Yeah,
well the calf, yeah, yep, above the floor facing forward
to you, right. Yeah, that's a big one too, because
(01:08):
if it's facing backwards, you've got problems or you're just
going the wrong way all day long. Maybe. So, um,
do you know where they're not supposed to be Chuck feet? Yes, uh, well,
they're not supposed to be on the armrest of the
seat in front of you on an airplane, yes, or
a movie theater, yes, But I know you're not talking
(01:30):
about common courtesies. That bug me. But I agree with
you wholeheartedly. That is so wrong. And um, I'm meant
to tell you. I'm on, I've come over to your side.
About taking shoes off on the plane. It's okay if
I do it, but um, you mean And I were
flying somewhere and this dude behind us head it's nasty,
(01:52):
stinky feet and he had his shoes off, and like
we're facing forward and we could smell his feet below
our seats behind us, And I kept turning around giving
him the dirtiest looks, and he was like, you had
no idea what I was doing. Did you look at
his feet and then and he still didn't get it.
Did you look at his feet his face and then
clamp your nose? I did that still didn't work. I
(02:14):
threw up a little bit onto him. He just thought
it was there sick. Yeah. Yeah, I know. People disagree
with me. People wrote in We're like, what's it to you?
I thought it was to eat your own to eat
your own chuck? Yeah, you know, yeah, all right, so
I'll tell you a place where feet aren't supposed to be.
They're not supposed to be off on their own on
(02:37):
a beach somewhere, not attached to a body exactly. No,
that's not something that you see every day, No, unless
you're in Vancouver, and then it happens like almost every day.
It seems like not quite, but sure, there's something very
weird going on in Vancouver. You say there's no mystery.
I said, there's still a bit of a mystery to it.
(02:57):
But well, well we'll start at the beginning. Okay, Okay.
August twenty, two thousand seven. It's kind of a cool
and drizzly day at a place called Jedediah Island Provincial
Park up in British Columbia, right near Vancouver, right, lovely,
are sure, of course, that's why you would want to say,
like go park or camp at this park with your family,
(03:20):
which is what a twelve year old girl was doing.
I couldn't find this girl's name. Saved my life, probably
because she's twelve. She wouldn't be good to say it anyway.
She was sure. She was walking along the beach with
her dad, and um, there was a bunch of like flotsam,
you know, that's the term for stuff that washes up
from the sea, that the sea spits up onto the shores.
(03:40):
And um, she saw a shoe and she picked it
up and she untied it and turned it upside down
and out fellaw sock and inside the sock was a
human foot yep, and she was pretty surprised. Size. Yeah,
it was a campus brand shoe, which ended up being
(04:02):
not neither here nor there, but it is manufactured in India,
mostly sold in India. Um, and we'll just park that
right there for now. Yeah. So the families like this
is unusual. Sure, they borrowed a radio from somebody else
and they alerted the authorities, and in very short order,
the mounties showed up, the corner showed up, the coast
(04:23):
guard showed up. I bet the mounties were all over
that foot. Um. So yeah, they said, you know what, well,
we're gonna take that foot is if that's okay, little girl,
And she threw her sobbing tears, said sure, but just
give me a little money, okay. Uh. And they said
we're going to send it off for DNA examination, and um,
(04:43):
that did that return nothing The DNA as far as
I know. Yeah, there was no there's no match. So
that wasn't like a clue the d NA, Yeah no,
but it was the first thing they tried. Sure the DNA.
They also looked at it to see what was going
on with the foot, if if there is any kind
of sign of what the deal was. Yeah, they held
it up to their ear and pretended like it was
a telephone. And one of the other mount he said,
(05:05):
that's not funny. But they're like, oh, it is kind
of funny, and they said sorry, so um, they didn't.
They just kind of filed it away. It actually didn't
make much of a stir outside of the area. It
was worth talking about. It got a little bit of
ink because it was just so weird. But they put
the foot away and at the coroner's office and everybody
(05:27):
went about their lives, right, I would assume so. And
then six days later another foot showed up in the area,
not the same place, but in the same in the
same general area, another right foot, which means it wasn't
for the person's other foot. Now that'd be weird. So
there's two people missing feet. Now, this is a men's
Reebok size eleven I think, and the people who found
(05:48):
it said that when they saw it, they immediately knew
that there was a foot in there because it looked full.
It looks how they is how they put it. Yeah,
and they picked it up and smell of it and
they're like, yeah, it's a foot, that's right. And the
mountains came in again and they got off their horses
and uh. Corporal Gary Cox said, you know, it is
(06:09):
a little weird to find two feet, especially within six
days of one another. Yeah, in the same area it was. Um.
He described it as a million to one odds. I
don't think he did the science on that, but it's
just something you say. But he said, too, is pretty crazy, Yeah,
and I agree with him. Yeah. So the first foot
was in on Jedediah Island. The second ones on Gabriela Island,
(06:30):
which is I couldn't find exactly how far away it
was across the water, but it's it's not that far.
They're close, but they're separated by some water, um, and
they're not all of a sudden there's two feet that
were found within six days. The media starts to catch
drift of this one. Yeah, right, there's feet, uh shoe
de feet washing up on the shores in Vancouver, and
(06:54):
at the time, at that very time, um, Robert Picton
was on trial in Vancouver for um murdering as many
as forty nine women. You've heard to him, right, I think.
So he was a notorious pig farmer who would like
butcher women and feed them to his pigs, and then
butcher's pigs and feed pigs to his guests. Yeah. One
(07:15):
of the only probably Canadian serial killers, right, yeah, yeah,
and one of the worst of all serial killers. He
was a horrible, horrible person because he wasn't crazy, you
know what I mean, He was just a just a
horrible person. Um. And so he's on trial at that time,
got I think twenty five years, which is like the
maximum sentence you can get in Canada, come on Canada,
(07:40):
years for for up to forty nine horrible murders. Um.
So he was on trial. There are also a lot
of like really high profile missing people in the area too,
that it just vanished without a trace in the four
years leading up to that. Yeah. And you point out
because you wrote this idea, but actually I was pointing
(08:01):
out that Christopher Solomon pointed something. Okay, Well, the point is, uh,
and this is a little strange, but maybe not. I
don't know. I was trying to make sense of it.
British Columbia apparently just has a higher than normal rate
of missing persons than other parts of the world, which
is weird. Yeah, but I mean like a lot more, yeah,
(08:21):
more than people over a fifty nine year period. And uh,
Solomon compared that to Kentucky, which is about the same
size and population or same size population, they only had
five and fifteen people missing over that fifty nine years.
That seemed really low to me. Did eight people a
year missing in the whole state like that remained missing? Okay?
(08:45):
Unsolved forever? Yes, because in Kentucky they'll just be like
he was Uncle Billy's right down the road for a week,
right exactly. Okay, So like the the the idea is
that BC has almost five times the number of unsolved
seeing person's cases over this fifty nine period compared to Kentucky,
which has about the same size population. It's a lot more, yeah,
(09:05):
And I mean Solomon might have gone in and selected like, oh,
Kentucky's got the lowest of the same size population, so
that will really point it out. But it does seem
that BC has a large amount of missing persons. Now, uh,
I bet it has something to do with the terrain
and the wildlife, probably the abundance of water. Probably that too.
(09:25):
It's not a good good thing. A lot of heroin, yeah,
you know, sadly, and they probably go missing, you know,
in a drug And in addition to the serial killer theory,
one of them was that these were like people who
would either run a foul of the local organized crime
synd kits or um ran a foul of like a
(09:47):
fellow heroin addict unorganized crime, exactly disorganized Remember that movie?
What movie disorganized crime? Was that? A movie with Who's
the the Dude, the Blonde Dude from l A Law
Corpin Burnson. Yes, it's actually a good movie. Really, I
haven't seen Smart of decades. Hey, Summer School is one
(10:10):
of the all time greats. Man, it sounds like that
kind of movie disorganized crime, Like they're a bunch of
bumbling criminals. Definitely, But I think like or Fred Gwynn
was in it, Herman Munster, one of his last roles.
All right, so you talked about theories. One of the
other theories, remember we mentioned India manufactured that first shoe.
(10:32):
Some people said, you know what this is, sadly just
feet of tsunami survivors from the Indian Ocean disaster December
two thousand four, and they just years later, these like
body parts are watching up on shore, which is sort
of plausible. It is. I mean, two fifty people died
(10:52):
in that tsunami. A lot, if not most of them
were never found. Yeah. Also, we had people point out,
remember when we said that modern disaster flicks are bad,
We had a bunch of people right in say The
Impossible it was a great movie, that's the one about Yeah,
and it was great, it was awesome. But I think
that's different because that was a uh factual Uh, it's
(11:16):
about a factual event. But and I categorize it as
a disaster now. See I don't categorize it as that
because it was a real thing that happened. Like disaster
flicks to me are when you know, when you invent
some crazy disaster. Well okay, well let me ask you this.
If it were totally fictionalized but the exact same movie,
would you then consider it as a disaster flick? Yes? Okay,
(11:36):
so it's like on that scale and everything too. I
had the impression it was much more just like a
human interest. Well it became that. But they showed the
film the Tsunami like it was not amazing, how realistic.
It is very very tough movie, very hard to watch.
Have you seen Twelve Years of Slave yet? I still
(11:57):
cannot bring myself to watch that. That's pretty rough. It's
just staring at me on my DVR every night. I'm
gonna it'll be soon. I'll let you know. Okay, I'll
just come into work crying. Okay, what did I do now? Alright,
So the tsunami disaster, they said, um, might have been
one of the reasons. But um, I think other people said,
(12:19):
you know, maybe that's not the best explanation. Other people said, well,
a lot of people just go missing from other things,
like planes go down in the Salish Sea, which is
the body of water between I think Vancouver Island and
mainland British Columbia, which is where most of these were found.
Is it Salish? I think so. But we'll hear from
Canadians one way or the other. You say Salish, I say, Salish,
(12:41):
who's right? Really? You know? All right, well, let's we're
getting all excited here with these theories. But there were
more feet to come, and we'll get back to those
feet right after this, So chuck. The when those first
(13:11):
two feet were found within six days made the rounds,
people talked about it, and then it's just kind of
drifted out of the news, right like a foot in
the ocean exactly. Um. And then a third foot was found,
and it came roaring back because this is yet another foot,
a totally different one. This is a woman's foot, actually
a new balance size seven I think, and Kirkland Island,
(13:36):
same general area right right, the same forty miles stretch
along that coastal area. And this is within ten months
now five ft four people. Yeah, so um, the other
new balance sneaker was found. That was the fifth foot found.
And then in between the yeah, they matched the foot
to the you know, I don't know if that's good
(13:58):
or bad, but they found the guy's other foot, right
the the woman that was the woman that they they
found her two ft yes, so her feet were number
three and number five to turn up. And in between
an entirely different person's foot turned up, men's like size
eleven Nike I think. So yeah. Within within a ten
month period, there were five feet belonging to four different
(14:20):
people that turned up on this little stretch. That's right,
that's significant. Then there was a six foot the next August.
This was in actually Washington, so I guess it had
its UH papers in order and made its way to
the States. And so, like you said, if you're following
the story at home as it's going on, you're starting
(14:42):
to think, like, if I go to the beach, I'm
going to see a foot today. And a lot of
people did do that. Yeah, a lot of people around
British Columbius started looking for disembodied feet. They were turning
up so frequently. And I misspoke, you were right. So
the seventh foot to turn up was the woman's other foot.
That's hard to keep track, it really is, all these
disembodied So how many feet in total, sir? I think
(15:06):
the last two were found February of this year. Yeah,
and they actually belonged to the same person. But they
were found a week or two or so apart. Yeah,
and I say last, I mean most recent. I'm sure
more feet will come. It seems that way because between
so the first foot was found in August two thousand
and seven. These most recent feet were found in February
two thousand and sixteen. That total seventeen disembodied feet found
(15:31):
within a hundred and fifty miles stretched between Tacoma, Washington
and British Columbia. That's unusual. It seems like it, And
there's a lot of theories, but no one can stay
definitively here's what's going on, right, Uh And I know
we're making a lot of jokes. I realized these feet
belonged to people who are no longer with us. I
(15:52):
just want to throw that out there that we do
a lot of comedy on this show. So we did
a coma episode that had jokes. I mean, come on, okay,
I just want to see aw either. Uh. So from
the beginning, the cops and the Mounties were basically like,
I don't you know, this seems really fishy. Uh, but
it's not. We don't think it's murder. We don't think
(16:13):
there's someone out there killing people and chopping their feet off,
which is what a lot of people thought, but and
notably think, because their feet weren't cut off, and you
can tell right they were. They said that they were
naturally disarticulated, right, that's right. Um, So that first foot
that that girl found on Jedediah Island was identified pretty
quickly because the cops released a picture of the shoe
(16:34):
to the media. And remember it was a Campus brand
which has made in India, sold mostly in India. And
so the guy whose foot it was, his family saw
it on the news and identified him as somebody who
he was a longtime sufferer of depression and he was
in a depressed state when his family last saw him.
(16:54):
So the cops came to the logical conclusion that he
had killed himself. So foot number one has been matched
to a missing person case, right, that's right. Uh. So
then the new balance shoes turned up on separate islands. Uh,
this is the woman and she was identified as a
lady who also was suffering from depression and jumped off
(17:17):
a bridge. I think they knew this for sure. Yes,
that's where the woman was last seen, was jumping off
a bridge. Yeah, this has been four years previous, So
now they're starting to get a pattern here where all right,
there was another man to the one on Valde's Island
feet three and five. Uh, they determined was either suicide
(17:37):
or accident. And then another couple of people who were
accidentally killed. And so they see this pattern. Now, all right,
these are people that just happened to die or died
by their own hand, um near enough to the water
where their feet were there. Yes, I'm just being vague
for now, right, Yeah. But the weird thing is is now,
(17:59):
all of a sudden, in a very short period of time,
relatively short period of time. Um, I mean because one
of these guys whose feet turned up was last seen
after his boat turned over. So in a very short
period of time, all these people who died a very
different periods of time, suddenly their feet were starting to
turn up in this area around the stylish Sailish sea. Yes. Um,
(18:22):
and the cops had a I guess kind of a
pretty good idea from the outset. But to understand what
was going on, or at least what the cops say
was going on, you have to understand what happens to
a a person who dies in the water. You think
that people float, you know, yeah, you kind of think
(18:43):
that because in movies that you know, if you're trying
to get rid of a body in the water, you
always you know, tie submit blocks to a submit shoes,
is the old joke. You know, somebody turned up like
that in New York recently, like with submit shoes. Not
too many movies. But the idea is that you have
to weight the body down. And I suppose if you
were going to get rid of a body that I
(19:03):
would probably do the same thing, just out of you know,
just cover my basis, just to be sure. Well. The
thing is, if you do you cement shoes on a person,
which you should never do that, but if you did, UM,
what you're doing is you're not ensuring that they sink right,
then you're ensuring that they don't come back up, because
that's what happens body that has gone unconscious or has
(19:27):
drowned and died. UM sinks pretty quickly, and it usually
sinks so quick that if you are looking for a
drowning victim, you you should look on the bottom pretty
close to where they were last seen on the surface.
They sink that fast. Man. So a body sinks UM,
and it will sink faster and fresh water than saltwater
(19:48):
because saltwaters makes humans a little more buoyant. UM. I
guess overweight people, people with a lot of fat on
their bodies sink uh more slowly than people who are leaner. UM.
And then depending on the water temperature, as well. Um,
and how deep the water is, they'll sink faster and
(20:09):
faster as they get to the bottom. Yeah. And depending
on what you're wearing, Yeah, like a code or shoes
or something like that that all the way down, or
a backpack, it's it's definitely gonna pull you down. But
the point is once you go under, once you submerge,
and you're dead or you're dying, Um, you're gonna sink
pretty quick. Yeah, there's more pressure to the deeper you
get in the body of water. Uh. You mentioned the
(20:30):
temperature was lower, but there's also more pressure that compresses
the air in your body, and that's gonna make you
less floaty as well. So the thing the cool air
or the cool temperature does down there is it uh
kind of preserves you for a little while, longer than
ordinarily because um, the bacteria that will eventually consume your
(20:52):
body or just gonna be slower you do, so they
just move more slowly. But that bacteria is eventually gonna overcome, um,
the sinking of the body, because your body is an
enclosed system generally roughly, I mean you've got a mouth
and all that, you know. But as they're eating, they're
putting out as a waste product. UM gases like methane
(21:15):
and stuff like that. UM, and your body traps that
stuff and it begins to bloat. And I'm everyone knows
that once you blow, you float. That's right, that's the
forensics bumper sticker. Yeah, eventually you're going to rise to
the top like a dirigible because of those gases that
are trapped in your body, or like like a submarine.
(21:40):
I guess do you mean they keep going into the
air like a blip, You float off and then your
foot will be found on the moon later. Uh, yeah,
you're gonna float. And that's why whenever they people discover
like a dead body in a lake much later, it's
you know, it's not a pretty thing. They're they're bloated
and puffed out and decomposed. It's not pretty. But if
(22:04):
you are UM, if you were trapped, say like in
a vehicle or something like that, and all of this
takes place, UM, eventually, your your body's going to be
prevented from floating away and it will eventually rupture. And
once the rupture happens, all that gas and the um,
the buoyancy that's created by it is all released and
(22:26):
you're staying there. You're staying there. And I read this
article about um. Did you read the article about the
Oklahoma guy? Yeah? It was really weird. It is so
like the guy. There was a guy who was um
whose brother went missing in his Camaro and I think
like nineteen seventy and he um, he just never knew
(22:47):
what happened to him, and he used this boat ramp
on this place called Fosse Lake. And he found out
later when the cops accidentally discovered the car, that his
brother had been submerged in just twelve ft of water
for forty years. All those times he was back in
his boat into False Lake, his brother was right below him. Yeah,
isn't that crazy? And they found him accidentally, and then
(23:08):
they found another car that had gone missing I think
the year before, just a few feet away. And the
moral of the story is that False Lake is really murky.
I mean twelve ft of water, two different cars Camaro, Yeah, Camaro,
and I think like a packer or something like that,
or buick Man. Unbelievable. Uh all right, well let's take
(23:29):
another little break here and we'll talk a little bit
more about what can happen to a body underwater. And uh,
what's the deal with all these feet? All right? Uh,
(23:58):
just this year that was a study. There's some criminologists
at Simon Fraser, you outside of Vancouver, and there's been
a bunch of studies like this over the years where
they we've talked, you know, in our Body Farm episode
where criminologists and forensics experts try to see what happens
to bodies under various conditions, including being sunk underwater. Uh.
(24:20):
So they took a pig carcass in this case not
a human cad ever, and they sunk it kind of
near where uh in the Sailors Sea where these feet
had been appearing. And um, this these pigs carcasses were um,
they were bones in a matter of days. It was
really really fast. Yeah, they were really surprised surprisingly fast
because you know, conventional wisdom is that this took weeks months,
(24:44):
maybe even, and the other studies had shown that, right,
and these things, these pigs were like just bones in
a few days. Um. They think it's possible that the
Sailors Sea is um an anomaly because this was an
almost a thousand feet of water, but it's really highly oxygenated,
so there's a lot of life down there, um, a
(25:04):
lot more things to eat a body exactly, whereas if
you took it to another body of water and a
thousand feet there, there might not be as much oxygen,
so it might take longer. But for the sailors c
it's possible for something to be reduced to bones in
a few days. Yeah, here was my one problem with
the way they did this study. Maybe I overthought it,
but they trapped it under fencing, um, which presumably means
(25:27):
that that was just you know, kind of in one
place the whole time. I would have, like, if you're
going to simulate a human body, I would have uh
maybe shackled a leg and and put a long leader
a hundred so it could move around and see what
a body would do. See the site, because a body
(25:48):
can move on the bottom a little because there's currents,
so you know, there's just you know, minor gripe. But yeah,
have you seen did you see the video of it,
the time elapse video. It's really something. It's gross. Don't
need it. So um. There was another study that I
found that really kind of um ties all this together.
(26:10):
It was from and it was carried out by the
corner of King's County, which is where Seattle is, and
Um he or she I think it was heat Um
looked at bodies that have been pulled from the water,
and he took the amount of time they've been in
the water submerged, and then uh, the amount of body
parts that were left or exactly what body parts are left,
(26:33):
and basically went back and reverse engineered the process by
which a body comes apart when it submerged underwater. That's
valuable information, it really is, you know. And so what
they what they came up with was that the the skin,
the thinnest areas of skin typically cover like joints like
your wrists and ankles, does get eaten away first, which
(26:53):
exposes that soft tissue beneath that holds your hand to
your arm or your foot to your leg, and then
that gets attacked by scavengers and all the other stuff
that's eating it. And so between the things eating that
soft tissue holding the bones together and the wave action
of the currents at the bottom of the body of water,
(27:16):
the hands and then the feet were loose, they disarticulate,
so they naturally will fall off the body as the
body's decomposing submerged underwater and they are among the first
parts to go. That's right. And if you're just a
foot and you're not wearing a shoe, um, then chances
are that foot will get consumed and you will never
(27:37):
see it again. Although one of these feet was a
barefoot correct, which seems to be a little bit of
an outlier, a little bit um. But if you've got
a shoe on that thing that's tied up nice and tight,
and you're disarticulated at the ankle, that foot is still
inside that shoe, gonna make it really hard for a
scavenger to get in there. And it's very possible that
(27:59):
that foot will not decomposed, or at least decomposed very slowly. Right,
And not only that, will it be protected once it disarticulates.
If it's wearing a certain kind of shoe, specifically an
athletic shoe that's made in the last like, uh twenty years,
it's gonna have air injected into the soul. And in
(28:20):
the case of like remember Nike Air max Is, they
had actual air pockets like in the in between the
soul and the bottom of the shoe, and that actually
creates a buoyant effect that will lift a shoe including
one that has a foot still inside to the surface. Yeah.
So they started looking all these cases and they said, well,
(28:40):
almost all of these are athletic shoes, so that makes sense,
and it's gonna bob upside down because of that rubbery soul,
so it's going to be protected even more from birds
and things. So what we have here is a case
of people that just happened to die and their feet
happen to come away from their bodies and be well
protected by these awesome running shoes and eventually made their
(29:05):
ways to shore. Um. But a little bit weird that
they would happen in this area in such a span
of time. I would still say, right, that's a that's
to me the um and and we should say, that's
what you just said. That's the cops position, and it
has been basically since the outset, since the first foot
was found. Basically nothing to see here, and there's not
(29:26):
a lot there too, um to undermine it or attack it. Like.
It's a pretty sound position. But there is still a
mystery to it to me in that why British Columbia
like it. It doesn't make sense, And there's a couple
of explanations. One is that the Sailors Sea is something
like a lagoon to where water flows in from the
(29:47):
Pacific Ocean from the south northward into the Sailors Sea,
and once stuff goes in there, it basically recirculates. It
doesn't come back out very often. Well that when you
see the sign that says sailors see it says feet
flow in, they don't out exactly right. So once you
see that sign, you're like, well, there's the explanation. Um.
The idea is that the Sailor Sea would experience higher
(30:09):
incidents of flots some of all types, including feet, which
is one explanation it could be right, Well, I'm sure
that has something to do with it. Sure. The other
explanation is um, one of my favorite things in the world,
which is a version of uh. Well, there's a couple
of names for it. UM. There was a guy named
(30:30):
arnold's Wicki uh in two thousand six of linguistics professor
at Stanford who coined the term frequency illusion. And that's
one of the cognitive biases. UM. We're basically if you
are looking for something, you're gonna find it. All these
people saw in the news feet washing up on the shore,
So like you said, they all started looking for feet,
(30:51):
and every time a foot was found, it just supported
the idea that, yes, there's something really weird going on here,
which only increased the awareness and the focus on this
means that people started seeing more and more feet, that's right.
So frequency illusions specifically is a mix of selective attention
and confirmation bias. So in this case, selective attention unconsciously
keeping an eye out for that new thing that you
(31:13):
were just told about, which is the feat uh. And
the confirmation bias in this case is the reassurance that
it's just proof, more and more proof of its omnipresence.
More feet. You could see that happening here for sure.
Pretty interesting. It's called the bottom mine Haff phenomenon too. Yeah.
I didn't know where that came from. That was a
(31:33):
dude until I looked it up. It was just a
comment or on a on the Pioneer Press of St.
Paul discussion board, and he had heard about the bottom
mine Haff terrorist group a couple of times and one
day and for the first time, yeah, and just said,
you know, bottom mine Huff phenomenon, and it became a meme.
(31:55):
I thought it was more. I don't I thought it
was cooler than that. I thought there was some cool
explanation that wasn't just some dude online. It definitely sounds
cooler than it is. It sounds way cooler than it is.
But it's a common thing, and people, Uh, you talk
about eleven eleven on the clock is a big one
for a lot of people, say, you know, I see
eleven eleven all the time in the clock. It's because
(32:15):
you're looking for it, sure frequency illusion. It's not actually
happening more than it ever was. You're just paying more
attention to it now. And this is really really unnerving suggestion, man,
because it's it says that feet washing up on the
shore is way more common than and of us realizing
(32:35):
that if you went over and picked up an athletic
shoe on a beach somewhere, there's a good chance that
there's going to be a foot inside. We just aren't
aware of this, as is human beings and outside of Vancouver, right, right,
So that makes Vancouver the capital of the disembodied, the
(32:56):
disembodied feet capital of the world. I don't know that
that necessarily holds up, though, I don't think it's been explained. Yeah,
because I mean I bet. I bet you it's frequency illusion.
I I disagree. I think it's something else. I think
it probably has to do with the hydrology or something
about Vancouver or British Columbia. There's this some database called
(33:16):
name US and it's like a catalog of unidentified remains.
And I did a search for disarticulated foot and out
of like forty thousand unidentified remains in the US were
from Vancouver. The only three were disarticulated feet, and one
was found in the Washington state area, So you could
(33:37):
technically kind of included in that weird Vancouver clump. One
was in Maryland and one was in Dallas. That was it.
So it does really seem like Vancouver has a higher
than usual incidence of disarticulated feat showing up in its area. Wow,
which is weird? Are you in the case? No, I'm
(33:59):
just a fan, Okay, So you got anything else? No?
I just realized that I've been like rotating my feet
around and just feel sort of Uh. If you want
to know more about this, um you can. Actually there
are three really good articles that I read in addition
to some other ones, but three stood out. One was
(34:21):
by Winston Ross of The Daily Beast one was on
Pacific Standard. I didn't see an author, and then Christomers
Christopher Solomon's outside article. Those are all pretty stand out. Uh.
And since I said stand out, it's time for a listener. Now,
I'm gonna call this Internet Roundup. I don't know if
people watch, but we have an Internet show called Internet Roundup.
(34:44):
Several hundred people watch, Yeah, and it's like the silliest
thing we do. We sit down in this studio on
video and we just talked about a couple of things
on the Internet that we think our neat. So that
is a setup. Hey, guys, I was recently on a
Delta flight and they show these on Delta, and this
is not an advert. I was recently on adults flight
from Atlanta at Austin keeping an eye out for your hat, Chuck.
(35:07):
I got very excited when I remembered I could watch
your Internet round Up show on the plane to pass
the time. Because we began our descend in Austin, sudden
thunderstorms developed. It was quite bumpy, to say the least.
If you have never been on a plane that unsuccessfully
tried to land in a thunderstorm, I don't recommend it.
I just had listened to your How to Survive a
(35:27):
Plane Crash episode from two thousand and eight just that
week before, and I remember thinking how grateful I was
that I was in the back of the plane, because
Chuck said I had a better chance of surviving that way. Uh,
it's not much of a chance, but sure. I just
thought you would like to know that despite the horrible
weather going on, I never lost connection with your show. Uh.
Watching Internet round up and able to listen and watch
(35:48):
you guys really helped me keep calm until our pilot
finally gave up trying to land and diverted the plane
to Houston. That's even scarier. You know, I'm not gonna
try anymore. Well, let's just go to Houston close enough. Yeah. Uh.
In the end, everyone made it to Austin safely, though,
So thanks for everything you guys do. And that is
(36:08):
from Lauren Sprouse. Thanks a lot, Lauren. Um, have you
ever watched videos of planes that come in for a
landing but it's too windy so they have to like
immediately take back off. Now that's never happened, like they
touched down and take off. If you watch those waiting
to get onto a plane, it's a really good way
to poke at your brain. Wow. Yeah, no, thank you. Uh.
(36:29):
If you want to get in touch with us, you
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and has always joined us at our home on the web,
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(36:51):
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