The Angikuni Lake Disappearance Vanishing of an Entire Inuit Village #shorts

If one villager suddenly vanished into thin air, you might consider it to be a bit careless.

But when the entire population of a village disappears overnight without explanation, it begins to sound a bit suspicious.

Yet, legend has it that this is exactly what happened to the Inuit population of the village of Angikuni in Canada in 1930.

It’s a story which has taken some unusual twists and turns over the best part of a century. After the initial 1930 report, the story was largely forgotten for a couple of decades until it resurfaced and gradually evolved into something very different.

Whilst sceptics have largely dismissed the whole thing as an entirely fictional urban myth with zero basis in reality, a fairly recent discovery has shed intriguing new light on the original source.

And it seems that even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have got a little confused over the part they played in the investigation, as they made an embarrassing slip-up when attempting to completely debunk the curious myths swirling around the icy landscape of The Vanishing Village of Angikuni Lake…

The Setting

The lake is located deep in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut – one of the northernmost territories in Canada and one of the most sparsely populated areas on Earth.

The lake is apparently an excellent fishing spot, which might be one of the reasons why an Inuit group is said to have set up a community nearby in a new village which they named after the lake.

The nice thing about this community is that unlike, say, almost every village I’ve ever visited in the UK, these locals were actually quite welcoming to tourists.

Not that you’d get many tourists out there in the middle of bloody nowhere, of course.

But you apparently did get the odd fur trapper wandering through on the hunt for beaver, and the community would be more than happy to accommodate them, offering a slap-up fishy meal and shelter for the night.

Oh, and maybe a good drink, too.

When they weren’t busy fishing and attending to guests, the residents also apparently liked to make their own high-strength wood brew to help keep them warm.

So all in all, the village of Angikuni – which some reports suggest was inhabited by as many as 2,000 people - made quite a handy pit stop for the weary traveller, as they would be given free grub, a bed for the night, and enough wood brew to knock out a horse.

But it appeared that the hotel bar was about to run dry.

The Modern Legend

We’re going to kick off with the more recent version of the story of the vanishing village which is the one most likely to have been told around campfires over the last twenty years – or at least circulated widely around the internet.

It’s worth bearing in mind that there are certainly more than a few cheeky embellishments – or, well, outright lies – in this most-commonly shared version, so we’ll later try to pick through the bones of the story to discover which bits, if any, were true.

And it all begins with one of those fur trappers who was in for a bit of a disappointment on his latest visit to Angikuni.

Joe Labelle’s Discovery

Joe Labelle was a Canadian fur trapper who was more than familiar with the friendly village.

He also knew that it could be a pretty spooky place drenched in legends of wood ghosts and tales of the evil spirit Wendigo and the demon Torngarsuk.

But he wasn’t too bothered about any of that nonsense on the freezing cold night in November 1930 as he approached the village in full expectation of a warm greeting from his Inuit buddies, a nice bit of trout, and a gallon of wood brew. That would be more than enough to perk his spirits for the next leg of his hunt for beaver.

The sense of disappointment that Joe was about to experience was similar in a way to the crushing anguish that you experience after a good night out when all the pubs are closed and you’re looking forward to rounding off the evening with a nice, juicy doner kebab, only to find that the local kebab house has been demolished.

I mean, that wouldn’t have been a major problem in my hometown of Rotherham, as you would only have to stagger sideways for a few yards before you came across another kebab house.

But Joe was unlikely to find an alternative option out there in the remote wilderness after discovering that his original plan for supper had gone pear-shaped.

And his sense of disappointment was destined to be a little more profound.

Joe initially grew concerned as he approached the village and found everything to be eerily quiet. A community of 2,000 people usually makes a bit of noise, not to mention the constant barking of the packs of sleigh dogs.

But today, there was nothing. No laughter, no barking, and not even any smoke rising from the chimneys.

When he finally arrived at the village, he was dismayed to find it completely deserted with no sign of life, either human or huskie.

By the shore of the lake, he found three kayaks which had been abandoned for so long that they had been battered by wave action.

Yet he also came across a fire pit in the middle of the village which was still burning, although the food hanging over it was way past its best.

As Joe explored further and began having a good nosy around the deserted huts, he found evidence that the residents appeared to have left in a hurry.

He found a fish storehouse which was still nicely stocked, and in fact he found plenty of abandoned food and provisions and personal belongings in the huts.

If the locals had suddenly decided to move out, they hadn’t bothered to take anything at all with them.

Joe also found no sign of any footprints or sleigh tracks in the snow which you might expect during a recent mass migration of 2,000 people.

Joe may well have felt chilled to the bone if he wasn’t already chilled to the bone.

Now I know what you’re all thinking… were the sleigh dogs ok?

Sadly, the answer is no.

The RCMP Investigation

After deciding that he couldn’t cope with this mystery on his own, Joe decided to run all the way to the nearest telegraph office where he sent an urgent message to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for assistance in the case of the vanishing village.

When the Mounties turned up, they were to unearth further disturbing discoveries.

Let’s get the dogs out of the way first.

The RCMP discovered that the village’s entire pack of sleigh dogs had been tied to trees and left to starve to death.

A slight variation on this aspect of the tale suggests that all the starved dogs were found buried under 12 feet of snow.

But either way, the vanishing villagers hadn’t taken the dogs with them which indicates that they didn’t travel very far.

Unless of course they were abducted by aliens in which case they may have travelled very far indeed, but without the need for sleigh dogs.

After a little more digging, the Mounties came across evidence of a little more digging.

Hundreds of Inuit ancestral graves had been dug up and all the bodies had been removed. So whoever or whatever had taken the population of the village had also decided to take the long-dead ex-residents along for the ride.

Graverobbing might be considered a bit anti-social at the best of times, but desecrating the final resting place of the dead is downright sacrilegious to the Inuit.

It could have been argued that hungry wild animals were responsible for this, but the ground was frozen solid, and the headstones had been stacked neatly into piles.

If this was the work of hungry wild animals, they were particularly clever hungry wild animals with access to tools. And they liked to tidy up after themselves.

On the hunt for more clues, the Mounties eventually came across another wandering fur trapper by the name of Armand Laurent who was on the hunt for beaver with his two sons.

The Mounties asked Armand if he’d spotted any unusual activity over the last few days, and it turned out that the fur trapper had his own bizarre story to tell.

He and his sons had been minding their own business and killing soft, furry things when they all noticed a huge luminous flying object in the sky.

The Mounties may have initially assumed that Armand and his sons had been knocking back too much wood brew and had in fact just seen a glimpse of The Northern Lights – a fairly common sight in Northern Canada.

But the trapper insisted that this was definitely not Aurora Borealis - it was a cylindrical object which appeared to take the form of a bullet before landing somewhere over the village of Angikuni.

Some versions of the story suggest that the Mounties themselves saw a strange pulsating light in the sky later that night, and they definitely hadn’t been on the wood brew.

So this leaves us with a mystery. An entire population of 2,000 people had seemingly disappeared overnight, but they’d obviously left in a hurry, leaving behind all their belongings and provisions and weapons whilst food was still cooking over a pit.

There were no footprints, no sleigh tracks, and not the slightest sign of violence other than the desecration of ancestral graves.

And of course they couldn’t have got very far without their sleigh dogs which were inconceivably left to starve to death – and yet, it must have taken a while for the dogs to starve but the fire pit was still burning as if it had been abandoned quite recently.

So how did a whole village just vanish into thin air?

Beats me. They were probably all eaten by space wolves or something.

The Story’s Evolution

Maybe we were giving up a bit too early there, but the RCMP didn’t seem to waste too much time on the matter before they conceded defeat, and not many others seemed too bothered about picking up the trail.

It’s claimed that the very first reports of the story popped up in newspapers in late 1930 – most notably in an article written by Emmett E. Kelleher for the Virginia newspaper ‘The Danville Bee’ – and then the vanishing village was completely forgotten until writer Frank Edwards reopened the case for his 1959 book ‘Stranger than Science’.

It was again re-examined in the 1990 book ‘The World’s Greatest UFO Mysteries’ by Nigel Blundell – and you can guess from the title that Nigel came to some pretty outlandish conclusions, as did the later 2006 book ‘The Canadian UFO Report’ by Chris Rutkowski and Geoff Dittman.

It’s the latter version of the story which has become the most widely known, and is the one we have largely stuck to here. But in a curious case of literary Chinese Whispers, each new retelling came with its own additional sub-plots not present in the original reports - a point which we’ll return to in a moment or seven.

But in the meantime, let’s rattle through some of the theories that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police clearly couldn’t be arsed to investigate in much detail.

Theories and Explanations

The obvious answer is alien abduction. The aliens clearly had no interest in dogs which is why they were left to starve, but they couldn’t get enough of humans, even the ones that had been dead for years.

However, let’s park that UFO theory for a while on the grounds that this is ‘Decoding The Unknown’ and the answer is never bloody alien abduction.

On a more mythological note, the vanishing village could have been the work of the Wendigo – a malevolent spirit from folklore who was imagined to stomp around the lakes and forests of Canada.

Often depicted as a giant humanoid with a heart of ice, the Wendigo’s party trick was to possess humans and make them feel so hungry that they would resort to eating their mates.

And apparently you always knew when the Wendigo was lurking nearby because he stank rotten.

Then again, it could have been the work of the sky god Torngarsuk, the unofficial forest monster of Canada. This character is a bit trickier to spot or smell from a distance, as nobody can decide what he looks like. He could be a bear or a one-armed man, but either way, it doesn’t really matter as he’s invisible to everyone except for the angakkuq – the medicine man of Inuit tribes.

This one seems a bit more unlikely as although he’s sometimes depicted as a mischievous demon, the angakkuq view Torngarsuk as a benefactor who helps to cure sickness.

However, I’m going to politely rule both these theories out for the moment, because as far as I’m aware, no missing persons case has ever officially been wrapped up as ‘Probable Abduction by a Demonic Spirit or Mostly Invisible Bear Monster.’

The problem we have now is that most of the more rational theories - which don’t involve UFOs or Sky Gods - can’t fully explain every aspect of the story.

A popular suggestion is that the community just decided to embark upon a mass migration.

But you’d think they’d at least take some of their food and tools and weapons with them, not to mention their sleigh dogs. That would have been more useful than just packing up their dead relatives from the ancestral graveyard, an act which the Inuit people would never have considered anyway.

They could have been murdered by a rival tribe, trampled to death by a herd of angry moose (Mooses? Meece? Check this before sending to Simon, otherwise we might look a bit stupid), or they may have fallen prey to a disease outbreak.

But there was no evidence of violence or indeed a single dead body.

It’s been proposed that the locals could potentially have been the victims of a natural disaster such as a landslide or an avalanche, but that doesn’t really make any sense at all as the deserted village was untouched, so every single member of the community must have travelled a great distance to specifically get hit by an avalanche whilst leaving the food simmering back home with the dogs.

At this point, I’m starting to think that abduction by aliens or by the sky god Torngarsuk are the only plausible theories that tick all the boxes.

The RCMP Denial

Of course, there’s another potential answer:

The whole thing was just complete bollocks from start to finish.

That was the narrative being pushed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police when the story began attracting interest again following publication of that 1959 book ‘Stranger Than Science’.

If you look on the RCMP website today, you’ll see the following official explanation delivered by the Mounties in 2017:

The disappearance in the 1930’s of an Inuit village near Lake Angikuni is not true. An American author by the name of Frank Edwards is purported to have started this story in his book ‘Stranger than Science.’ It has become a popular piece of journalism, repeatedly published and referred to in books and magazines. There is no evidence however to support such a story.

This is backed up by an earlier 1988 explanation from the RCMP historian S.W Horrall who had this to say to the Australian Skeptics confederation:

Many years ago the members of RCMP, then retired, who had served in the area at the time these events were purported to have happened, were asked for their comments on the story. They could not confirm it, recalled nothing like it, and were astounded that such a ridiculous tale could be believed. Our files were carefully searched. No strange craft was ever reported.

No one named Joe Labelle ever came to the RCMP in panic about Lake Angikuni. The RCMP did not send out any search parties. The only records we have on the story are copies of letters to correspondents like yourself informing the writers that the story is entirely fictitious.

That sounds pretty definitive to me. It’s not entirely accurate, but it sounds pretty definitive.

Brian Dunning from The Skeptoid Podcast drew very similar conclusions to the RCMP in 2013.

All credit to Brian, he raises plenty of interesting points which seem to challenge the credibility of the story. He points out that there has never been a shred of evidence that the village of Angikuni ever existed.

Brian also explains that the lake would have been a sheet of ice in late November so those wave-battered kayaks would never have been battered by wave action. The community would have been unlikely to ever make use of kayaks in the first place.

It also seems incredibly unlikely that such a large population would ever have lived in such a remote area anyway.

Brian initially agreed with the RCMP in his belief that the original 1930 newspaper reports never actually existed, and in all likelihood, neither did the fur trapper Joe Labelle or the newspaper writer Emmett E. Kelleher.

The whole thing was just completely made up from scratch by Frank Edwards to help shift more copies of his 1959 book.

However, as Brian himself later conceded, he was very much mistaken on those last few points.

Frank Edwards was certainly guilty of adding new elements to spice up the story for his book, but an original 1930 newspaper report does indeed exist.

It turns out that fur trapper Joe Labelle and writer Emmett E. Kelleher were both very much real people.

And there may well have been a very real public report on the investigation released by the RCMP in early 1931, even though the Mounties still claim today that no such investigation or incident ever took place.

The Original 1930 Report

Emmett E. Kelleher’s report first appeared in other newspapers before a reprint landed in the ‘The Danville Bee’ of Virginia in November 1931.

And it’s this story from ‘The Danville Bee’ which was very recently unearthed from the archives, alongside captions and headlines describing ‘The Vanishing Eskimo Tribe’ – this was 1931, don’t forget – and ‘The Village of the Dead’.

It’s fascinating to see just how much this earliest version of the story differs from the subsequent embellished retellings.

The way that Emmett E. Kelleher reports it after speaking to Joe Labelle first-hand, the experienced fur trapper arrived in the village of Angikuni that day in search of shelter and lashings of wood brew from his acquaintances at the village.

The report indicates that he arrived by canoe – a detail missed out in subsequent versions which all seem to vaguely suggest that he either just wandered by on snowshoes or stepped through an enchanted cupboard or something.

Incidentally, this original report is one of the very few to actually get the name of Angikuni Lake right. Frank Edwards renamed the lake Anjikuni in his 1959 book, and it’s this new misspelling which was more frequently repeated in later versions.

But here’s the first really significant change:

Do you remember when we said that the village boasted a population of around 2,000?

Not so, according to the original newspaper report. Joe Labelle reckoned that the population of his favourite pit stop was in fact just 25.

Frank Edwards later increased this slightly to 30 for his 1959 book, but it was Nigel Blundell who later got a bit carried away when he suddenly raised the population to 1200 for his 1990 book ‘The World’s Greatest UFO Mysteries’.

By the time we get to ‘The Canadian UFO Report’ in 2006, the population had peaked at 2,000.

So, Joe was probably expecting a much quieter reception than we might have been led to believe. Just maybe not as quiet as the one that he got.

After beaching his canoe about a hundred yards away, Joe approached the village shouting out greetings but the only response he got was the doleful whining of a couple of starving husky dogs who limped feebly towards him, close to death.

Joe later came across an additional seven dead dogs just lying in the snow, having clearly died of starvation.

This is a far cry from the entire packs of dogs who had been inexplicably tied to trees or buried under twelve feet of snow, an element which doesn’t make it into the story until the 2006 ‘Canadian UFO Report’.

The 1930 newspaper article goes on to explain that Joe began venturing into the 25 silent tents, fearing the worst. He was half-expecting to come across a collection of corpses, and was even beginning to speculate that the residents may have been murdered, or that the legends of the evil spirit Torngarsuk might have some truth in them after all.

It certainly looked as if no wood brew was going to get served up tonight.

What he actually found was no sign of life or indeed death at all.

He found some personal belongings, clothes, a rifle, and a greasy black iron pot, but no bodies. Joe came to the conclusion that the whole place had probably been deserted for at least twelve months.

You’ll note that there was no suggestion at all of food still cooking over a pit at this point, which makes it sound as if the locals weren’t in quite such a sudden hurry to leave whilst making supper, and clears up the mystery of why a seemingly long-deserted village with starved dogs still had a fire burning. There’s also not a single mention of kayaks, wave-battered or otherwise.

Joe then came across a single open grave, and observed that the cairn appeared to be empty whilst the stones had been stacked neatly on one side.

This is still a deeply puzzling sight for Joe to come across, but again it’s a far cry from the entire desecrated graveyard which first seems to have wormed its way into the story in Nigel Blundell’s 1990 UFO book.

Joe eventually popped back to the lake for a spot of fishing to feed himself and the two near-starved dogs who had been following his every step. He then decided that there was nothing more he could do here, jumped back in his canoe, and continued his long quest for beaver, hoping that he might be able to pick up some more clues as to the fate of the village from other communities he would encounter on his travels.

He didn’t have much luck in that regard. Most of the other villagers he came across just appeared to pin the blame for the vanishing village on Torngarsuk. It’s not clear whether he left plenty of fish for the two dogs or offered them a free ride to the nearest kennels.

It’s worth pointing out that whilst Joe was eventually able to contact the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he certainly didn’t just run all the way to the nearest telegraph office on the same day of his discovery, largely because he was in the middle of nowhere, and the nearest telegraph office is likely to have been thousands of kilometres away.

According to the 1930 article, the Mounties did eventually conduct their own investigation, but drew a complete blank.

They heard tales of a mysterious ten-year-old Inuit boy who had just wandered into a village around 150 miles away from Angikuni and had been adopted by a local tribe, even though nobody had a clue where he came from – it was almost as if he had just dropped out of the sky.

They also came across an Inuit called Saumek who had just been brought to a local hospital for treatment for his frozen legs. The Mounties suspected that Saumek might know a thing or two about the disappearing village, but after getting a translator on the scene, Saumek appeared reticent to answer any questions on the matter, and would only keep mumbling about the evil spirit Torngarsuk.

It’s alleged that the Mounties resorted to trying to get Saumek drunk in the hope that this might make him a bit more chatty, but Saumek point-blank refused to partake in a drink as he didn’t like the taste of whisky.

And that largely seems to conclude the grand investigation by the RCMP into the matter.

If you’re wondering what happened to the mysterious flashing lights supposedly witnessed by fur trapper Armand Laurent and his two sons – and maybe even the Mounties themselves – this appears nowhere in the original newspaper report.

It seems to be an invention first presented in the 1990 book ‘The World’s Greatest UFO Mysteries’ which incidentally has the audacity to present everything presented within its tatty pages as true fact, despite there being no source at all for these luminous flying objects in the sky.

A Diminished Mystery

So we’re now left with a mystery which isn’t quite as mysterious as widely depicted.

Whereas common versions of the story tell of a population of 2,000 people who vanished without trace whilst cooking supper, leaving behind everything after aliens or evil spirits had killed all their dogs and desecrated their graveyard, the original newspaper report instead suggests that 25 residents were no longer at home, after leaving behind a few dogs, a few personal belongings, and a single dug-up grave.

But what was the original conclusion of the RCMP after their exhaustive investigation during which they tried to get a hospital patient drunk before shrugging and giving up?

Well, we can’t be entirely sure about that.

According to a 1988 book entitled ‘John Robert Columbo’s Mysterious Canada’, the author claims to have seen a 1931 RCMP report which was compiled by Sergeant J. Nelson, and released to the public.

As far as I can make out, nobody else has been able to confirm this, but John Robert Columbo does seem to be a much more credible and respected author and researcher than the other lot who were clearly just making up twaddle for UFO books.

If we’re to believe this report exists, Sergeant J. Nelson appears to conclude that the whole thing was a work of fiction cooked up between Joe Labelle and writer Emmett E. Kelleher.

Sergeant Nelson considered the writer to be a sensationalist journalist who was just chasing another dramatic headline to grab attention. He also noted that the writer had used supposedly ‘new’ photographs to accompany his article, but these were actually lifted from the RCMP’s own archive and dated back to 1909.

Meanwhile, although Sergeant Nelson confirmed that fur trapper Joe Labelle’s identity was genuine, he also revealed that Joe was a rookie fur trapper who was new to the area and had only very recently applied for his first trapping licence, so he was unlikely to be familiar with the Northern territories or any supposed welcoming villages dishing out trout sandwiches.

The lack of a licence is not necessarily compelling evidence in itself that Joe was new to fur trapping – he may well have just been new to the concept of legal fur trapping – but Sergeant Nelson claimed that he had spoken to other experienced fur trappers who confirmed that Joe was very much the new kid on the block of ice.

The RCMP report apparently concluded that there was no foundation whatsoever for the hoax news story.

Even if it had existed, Sergeant Nelson speculated that the disappearance of the community was nothing more mysterious than a case of seasonal abandonment common to the nomadic nature of the Inuit. The RCMP considered the case to be closed.

The RCMP’s Embarrassing Error

Whilst we can’t be entirely sure of the authenticity of that report, we do know for certain that the original 1930 newspaper report existed, and this does beg the question why the Royal Canadian Mounted Police still continue to deny that it was ever published whilst insisting that the origins of the fake story lie in Frank Edward’s 1959 book.

That’s simply not true.

It could be the case that the RCMP discovered evidence of alien activity or demonic shenanigans from the evil spirit Torngarsuk, and later tried to cover their tracks and suppress any evidence in fear of whipping up panic.

Or it could be the case that the RCMP archivists and historians were just not very good at their job, and couldn’t locate historical records stretching back any further than about 1983.

It’s possible that the 1931 RCMP report is not genuine, in which case the newspaper report may have simply fabricated the RCMP’s investigation along with the rest of the story.

I’m kind of inclined to believe that writer John Robert Columbo discovered the report though, even if he didn’t appear to share it with anyone.

And I’m also inclined to agree with the findings of the report.

I suppose it’s possible that a small group of Inuit did indeed spend time briefly by Angikuni Lake, and then decided to make a sudden move – possibly motivated by fear of attack from another tribe or space wolves – which prompted them to leave the dogs behind and dig up Grandpa for good luck.

But that doesn’t really make any sense, and no evidence has ever been found that a village ever existed in that area at all.

There’s something else about the original 1931 newspaper report which doesn’t make any sense.

If Joe Labelle encountered two huskies who were starving to death, why exactly were they still so hungry when there were another seven dead dogs nearby?

That’s not how things are going to pan out in that situation.

It seems more likely that Joe would either find nine dead dogs, or two living dogs with big bellies who were licking their lips whilst thinking about fish pudding.

Maybe there was some grain of truth in Joe Labelle’s original story. As a rookie fur trapper, perhaps he was given the wrong information about the nearest hotel bar, and ended up getting a bit confused when he came across a village that had long been deserted, inhabited only by a few stray huskies.

And however small this grain of truth, it was transformed by an over-excited journalist into a sensationalist newspaper report, which then kept expanding in size and preposterousness in subsequent retellings over the decades to follow, until the reworked tale bore almost no relation to what exactly Joe Labelle experienced that day.

Still, if you ever find yourself facing an invisible bear or an invisible one-armed man, it’s probably worth grabbing your pets and your Pot Noodles before you make a dash for it, otherwise you’re just gonna end up confusing future generations for an unfathomably long time.

And always be very careful when taking advice from a Mountie, they clearly don’t know their arse from their elbow.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Angikuni Lake disappearance?

The Angikuni Lake disappearance refers to the alleged vanishing of an entire Inuit village near Angikuni Lake in Canada in 1930. The story involves the sudden disappearance of the village’s inhabitants, leaving behind personal belongings, food, and starving dogs.

Who was Joe Labelle?

Joe Labelle was a Canadian fur trapper who reportedly discovered the deserted village of Angikuni in November 1930. He found the village eerily quiet, with no signs of life and evidence that the residents had left in a hurry.

What did Joe Labelle find in the village?

Joe Labelle found the village completely deserted with no sign of life. He discovered abandoned food, provisions, personal belongings, and a fire pit that was still burning. He also found starving dogs and evidence that the residents had left in a hurry.

What role did the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) play in the investigation?

The RCMP conducted an investigation after Joe Labelle reported the disappearance. They found further disturbing discoveries, such as the desecration of ancestral graves and the starving dogs. However, they later dismissed the story as a fictional urban myth.

What are some of the theories about the disappearance?

Various theories have been proposed, including alien abduction, the work of mythological creatures like the Wendigo or Torngarsuk, mass migration, disease outbreak, natural disasters, and even the possibility that the entire story is a hoax.

What did the RCMP conclude about the disappearance?

The RCMP initially conducted an investigation but later dismissed the story as a fictional urban myth. They stated that there is no evidence to support the story and that it was likely fabricated by writer Frank Edwards for his 1959 book ‘Stranger than Science’.

What was the population of the village according to the original newspaper report?

According to the original 1930 newspaper report, the population of the village was estimated to be around 25, not the 2,000 often cited in later retellings.

What did the RCMP find during their investigation?

The RCMP found evidence of desecrated ancestral graves, starving dogs, and a village that appeared to have been abandoned in a hurry. They also heard tales of a mysterious Inuit boy and an Inuit named Saumek who was reticent to discuss the matter.

What is the significance of the 1931 RCMP report?

The 1931 RCMP report, allegedly compiled by Sergeant J. Nelson, concluded that the story was a hoax fabricated by Joe Labelle and writer Emmett E. Kelleher. The report suggested that the disappearance was likely a case of seasonal abandonment common to the nomadic nature of the Inuit.

What is the current stance of the RCMP on the Angikuni Lake disappearance?

The RCMP continues to deny the authenticity of the story, stating that there is no evidence to support the claim that an Inuit village near Lake Angikuni disappeared in the 1930s. They attribute the origins of the story to Frank Edwards’ 1959 book ‘Stranger than Science’.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Angikuni Lake Disappearance Vanishing of an Entire Inuit Village #shorts
• Hero image source by Brandon Zhang / openverse, cc0.