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This episode is brought to you by IBM from labradoodle to Cronut. The world loves a hybrid and so do businesses. So today they're going hybrid with IBM hybrid cloud approach lets them use Watson II to modernize without rebuilding and bring all their partners and customers together in one place. That's why businesses from retail to banking are going with a smarter hybrid cloud using the tools, platform and expertise of IBM. The world is going hybrid with IBM, go hybrid at IBM, dotcom slash hybrid cloud.

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At what point must we become a monster in order to catch one? From my heart radio comes a mind bending new original sci fi thriller. Tomorrow's monsters, it's a safe application with one very simple benefit you never have to sleep again.

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Starring John Boyega, when he began self experimenting with his own mind apps, it changed him and something else has taken over.

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And Darren Criss, we don't do what we do simply because we love humanity. We did test the weakness in them. Tomorrow's monsters available now on the radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Ahoy there, everybody, it's your old pal Josh, and for this week's Esquire s case Selex, I have chosen our episode on disembodied feet.

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Yes. With the great title, Why are so many disembodied feet washing ashore in British Columbia?

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We released it back in June of 2016. And it's a cozy little mystery about feet washing ashore. And we don't know why. Still to this day, I hope you enjoy it.

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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 would be Chuck Bryant, there's Gerri over there, and they're six feet in this studio right now. And all of them are exactly where they're supposed to be attached to their lower legs below the calf. Yeah. Yep. Above the floor facing forward you, right? Yeah. That's a big one to keep because if it's facing backwards, you got problems or you're just going the wrong way all day long, maybe.

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So you know where they're not supposed to be. Chuck Feet. Yes.

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Well, they're not supposed to be on the armrest of the seat in front of you on an airplane.

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Yes. Or a movie theater. Yes.

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But I know you're not talking about common courtesies that bugs me.

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No, but I agree with you wholeheartedly. That is so wrong. Yeah.

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And I meant to tell you, I'm on I have come over to your side about taking shoes off on the plane. Oh, good. It's OK if I do it, OK. But I mean, we're flying somewhere and this dude behind his head, it's nasty, stinky feet.

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And he had his shoes off and we're facing forward and we could smell his feet below our seats behind us just and I kept on around giving him the dirtiest looks.

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And he was like he had no idea what I was doing.

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Did you look at his feet and then. Yes. And he still didn't get it. Did you look at his feet, his face, and then clamp your nose with your dick?

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That still didn't work. I threw up a little bit on to him. He just thought he was very sick. Yeah, yeah.

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I know people disagree with me. People wrote. And we're like, what to you? I thought it was to eat your own, to eat your own junk. And you know, don't you? Yeah. I mean. Yeah, I mean. All right.

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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 a beach somewhere not attached to a body.

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Exactly. Oh, no. That's not something that you see every day.

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No. Unless you're in Vancouver and then it happens like almost every day it seems like.

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Not quite. But sure. There's something very weird going on in Vancouver. You say there's no mystery. I see there's still a bit of a mystery to it, but.

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Well, let's start at the beginning. OK, OK, August 20th, 2007. It's kind of a cool and drizzly day at a place called Jedidiah Island Provincial Park up in British Columbia, right near Vancouver. Yeah, right.

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Lovely area. Sure. Of course. And that's why you would want to say, like, go park or camp at this park with your family, which is what a 12 year old girl was do. I couldn't find this girl's name. Saved my life, probably because she's twelve. Yeah. She wouldn't be good to say it anyway.

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She was sure she was walking along the beach with her dad and 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 under the shores.

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And she saw a shoe and she picked it up and she untied it and turned it upside down and out, fell a sock. And inside the sock was a human foot.

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Yep, and she was pretty surprised. Size 12, yeah, it was a campus brand shoe which ended up being not neither here nor there, but it is manufactured in India, mostly sold in India. Right. And we'll just park that right there for now. Yeah. So the family's like this is unusual. Sure. They borrowed a radio from somebody else and they alerted the authorities in very short order. The Mounties showed up. The coroner showed up, the Coast Guard showed up.

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I bet the Mounties were all over that foot. Mm hmm. Um, so, yeah, they said, you know what? We're going to take that foot, if that's OK, little girl. And she threw her sobbing tears, said, sure, but just give me a little money, OK?

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And they said, we're going to send it off for DNA examination. And that did that return? Nothing. The DNA, as far as I know, yeah. There was no there's no match.

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So that wasn't like a clue. The DNA. Yeah, no.

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But it was the first thing they tried the DNA. They also looked at it to see what was going on with the foot. If there is any kind of signs of what the deal was.

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Yeah, they held it up to their ear and pretended like it was a telephone. And one of the other Mounties said, that's not funny. But they're like, oh, it is kind of funny.

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And they said, sorry. So they didn't they just kind of filed it away. It actually didn't make much of a stir outside of the area.

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Yeah, it was worth talking about. It got a little bit of ink because it was just so weird. But yeah, they put the foot away and the coroner's office and everybody 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 the person's other foot.

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Now they'd be weird. So there's two people missing feet now. Yes. This is a men's Reebok size 11, I think. And the people who found it said that when they saw it, they immediately knew that there is a foot in there because it looked full.

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It looked funny how that is, how they put it full of foot. Yeah. Yeah. And they they picked it up and smelled it.

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And they're like, yeah, it's a foot. That's right. And the Mounties came in again and they got off their horses. And Corporal Gary Cox said, you know, it is a little weird to find two feet.

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Yeah. Especially within six days of one another. Yeah. In the same area it was, he described it as a million to one odds. I don't think he did the science on it, but it's just something you say. Right.

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But he said two is pretty crazy. Yeah. And I agree with him. Yeah.

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So the first foot was in Jedidiah Island. The second one's on Gabrial Island, which is I couldn't find exactly how far away it was across the water. But it's it's not that far right. They're close, but they're separated by some water and they're now all of a sudden there's two feet that were found within six days.

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The media starts to catch drift of this one.

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Yeah, right. There's feet, shrewd feet washing up on the shores in Vancouver. Right.

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And at the time at the very time, Robert Pickton was on trial in Vancouver for murdering as many as 49 women. So you've heard of him, right? I think so, yeah. He was the notorious pig farmer who would like butcher women and feed them to his pigs and then butchers pigs and feed pigs to his guests.

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Yeah, one of the only probably Canadian serial killers, right? Yeah, yeah.

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And one of the worst of all serial killers.

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He was a horrible, horrible person because he wasn't crazy, you know. I mean, he was just a just a horrible person. Yeah. 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 in Canada.

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What. Come on. Canada. Yeah. 20, 25 years for, for up to 49 horrible murders. Yeah. 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.

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Yeah. And you point out because you wrote this, correct? I did. But actually I was pointing out that Christopher Solomon pointed something out.

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OK, 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.

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Yeah, which is weird. Yeah. But I mean, like a lot more. Yeah.

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More than 2400 people over a 59 year period. And Solomon compared that to Kentucky, which is about the same size and population. Right. Or same size population. They only had 515 people missing over that fifty nine years.

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That seemed really low to me.

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Eight people a year missing and the whole state like that remained missing. OK, unsolved forever. Yes. Because in Kentucky they'll just be like he was Uncle Billy's right down the road for a week.

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Right, exactly.

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OK, so like the idea is that B.S. has almost five times the number of unsolved missing persons cases over this fifty nine period compared to Kentucky, which has about the same size population. It's a lot more. Yeah.

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I mean Solomon might have gone in and selected like oh Kentucky's got the lowest of the same size population, so that'll really point it out. But it does seem that B.C. has a large amount of missing persons. Now, I bet it has something to do with the terrain and the wildlife, probably the abundance of water.

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Probably that, too. It's not a good good thing. A lot of heroin. Yeah. You know, sadly. Yeah. And probably go missing, you know, in drug bender. And in addition to the serial killer theory, one of them was that these were like people who had either run afoul of the local organized crime syndicates.

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Yeah. Or ran afoul of like a fellow heroin addict, an organized crime disorganize. Yeah, I remember that movie. What movie? Disorganized Crime was that a movie with who's the the dude. The blonde dude from L.A. Law. Corbin Bernsen.

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Yes. Wow. It's actually a good movie really.

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I haven't seen Mark Harmon in the decades.

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Hey, Summer School is one of the all time greats. Man, it sounds like that kind of movie. Disorganized crime. Yeah, a bunch of bumbling criminals, definitely. But I think like AG or Fred Gwynne was in it.

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Herman Munster. Oh, yeah. One of his last roles. Wow.

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Uh, all right. So you talked about theories. One of the other theories we remember we mentioned. India manufactured that first shoe. Some people said, you know what, this is sadly just feet of Sudani survivors from the Indian Ocean disaster, December 26, 2004. And they just years later, these like body parts are washing up on shore. Yeah. Which is sort of plausible. It is.

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I mean, two hundred and fifty thousand people died in that tsunami a lot. If not most of them were never found. Yeah.

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Also, we had people point out, remember when we said that modern disaster flicks are bad? Hmm. We had a bunch of people write in and say The Impossible was a great movie.

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That's the one about astronomy. Yeah.

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And it was great. It was awesome. But I think that's different because that was a factual it's about a factual event.

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But and I do 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 or when, you know, when you invent some crazy disaster.

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Well, OK. 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?

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Yes. OK, so it's like on that scale and everything, too.

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I had the impression it was much more just like a human interest. Well, it became that.

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But the film The Tsunami, like it's no, it's not amazing how realistic it is. I will check it. Very, very tough movie.

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OK, very hard to watch. Have you seen 12 Years a Slave yet?

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Still cannot bring myself to watch that. It's pretty rough. It's just staring at me on my DVR every night.

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It'll be soon. I'll let you know. OK, I'll just come in to work crying.

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OK, what did I do now? All right. So the tsunami disaster, they said, might have been one of the reasons. But, um, I think other people said, you know, maybe that's not the best explanation. Right.

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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. Yeah, which is where the hostages were found. Is it Salish? I think so.

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But we'll hear from Canadians one way or the other.

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You say Salish. I say Salish. Who's right? Really, you know. All right.

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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.

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So check that when those first two feet were found within six days, made the rounds, people talked about it and then it just kind of drifted out of the news, right?

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Like a foot in the ocean. 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. Yeah.

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And Kirkland Island, same general area. Right, right, uh, the same 40 mile stretch along that coastal area, and this is within 10 months now, five feet, four people.

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Yeah. So the the other new Balance sneakers was found. That was the fifth foot found. And then in between the.

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Yeah, they matched the foot to the you know, I don't know if that's good or bad, but they found the guy's other foot. Right. The woman that was the woman that they.

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Oh they found her two feet. Yes. OK, so her feet were number three and number five to turn up. And in between an entirely different person's foot turned up means like size 11. Nike, I think. Wow. So yeah, within within a ten month period, there were five feet belonging to four different people that turned up on this little stretch. That's right. That's significant.

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Then there was a six foot. Mm. The next August this was in actually in Washington. So I guess it had its 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 to think like if I go to the beach, I'm going to see a foot today.

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And a lot of people did do that. Yeah. A lot of people around British Columbia 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.

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It really is all these disembody speak. So how many feet in total, sir? I think the last two were found February of this year. Yeah.

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And they actually belong to the same person, but they were found a week or two or so apart. Yeah.

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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 2007. These most recent feet were found in February. Twenty sixteen that total seventeen disembodied feet found within one hundred and fifty mile stretch between Tacoma, Washington and British Columbia. Wow. That's unusual. It seems like it.

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And there's a lot of theories, but no one can say definitively here's what's going on.

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Right. And I know we're making a lot of jokes. I realize these feet belong to people who are no longer with us. Yeah, I just want to throw that out there. Sure. That we do a lot of comedy on the show.

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So we did a coma episode that had jokes. I mean, come on. OK. Just want to see you there.

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So from the beginning, the cops and the Mounties were basically like, I don't you know, this seems really fishy, but it's not we don't think it's murder. Yeah. We don't think there's someone out there killing people and chopping their feet off. Right.

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Which is what a lot of people thought. Yeah, but it's notable, I think, because their feet weren't cut off. And you can tell. Right.

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They were they they said that they were naturally disarticulated, right? That's right. So that first foot that that girl found on Jedidiah Island was identified pretty quickly because the cops released a picture of the shoe to the media. Yeah. And remember, it was a campus brand which is 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 long time sufferer of depression.

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And he was in a depressed state when his family last saw him. So the cops came to the logical conclusion that he had killed himself. Right. So no one has been matched to a missing person. Case closed. That's right.

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Uh, so then the new balance shoes turned up on separate islands. This is the woman. And she was identified as a lady who also was suffering from depression and jumped off a bridge. I think they knew this for sure. Yes.

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That's where the woman was last seen, was jumping off a bridge.

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Yeah. And this had been for years previous. So now they're starting to get a pattern here where. All right. There was another man to the one on Valdese Island, feet three and five they determined was either suicide 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 near enough to the water where their feet were there.

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Yes. I'm just being vague for now. Right. Yeah.

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But the weird thing is, is now all of a sudden in a very short period of time, relatively short period of time, I mean, because one of these guys whose feet turned up was last seen after his boat turned over in 1987. Yeah. So in a very short period of time, all these people who died at very different periods of time, suddenly their feet were starting to turn up in this area around the Salish Salish Sea. Yes.

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Um, 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 person who dies in the water. Yes, you think that people float, you know, yeah, you kind of think that because in movies, you know, if you're trying to get rid of a body in the water, you always, you know, tie cement blocks to a cement shoes.

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The old joke. Yeah.

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You know, somebody turned up like that in New York recently, like with cement shoes. Yeah. Wow. So too many movies. But the idea is that you have to wait the body down. And I suppose if you were going to get rid of a body, I'd probably do the same thing just out of, you know, just cover my bases, just to be sure. Yeah.

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Well, the thing is, if you do use cement shoes on a person. Yeah. You should never do that now. But if you did, what you're doing is you're not insuring that they sink. Right. Then you're insuring that they don't come back up. Yeah. Because that's what happens. That's right. Body that has gone unconscious or has drowned and died sinks pretty quickly. Yeah.

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And it usually sinks so quick that if you are looking for a drowning victim, you you should look on the bottom. Yeah. Pretty close to where they were last seen on the surface.

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Yeah. They think that fast, man. So a body sinks and it'll sink faster and freshwater and saltwater because saltwater is what makes humans a little more buoyant. Yeah. I guess overweight people, people with a lot of fat on their bodies sink more slowly than people who are leaner. Yeah. And then depending on the water temperature as well and how deep the water is, they'll sink faster and faster as they get to the bottom.

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Yeah. And depending on what you're wearing. Yeah. Like a coat or shoes or something like that, that'll all wear you down or a backpack. It's definitely going to pull you down.

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But the point is, once you go under, once you submerge and you're dead or you're dying, you're going to sink pretty quick.

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Yeah, there's more pressure to the deeper you get in a body of water. You mentioned the temperature was lower, but there's also more pressure and that compresses the air in your body. And that's going to make you less floaty as well. Right. So the thing, the cool air or the cool temperature does down there is it kind of preserves you for a little while longer than ordinarily because, um, the bacteria that will eventually consume your body. Right.

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Are just going to be slower.

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You so they just move more slowly. Yeah, but that bacteria is eventually going to overcome the sinking of the body. Yeah. Because your body's an enclosed system generally roughly. I mean you got a mouth and all that, you know. Sure. But as they're eating they're putting out as a waste product gases. Yeah. Like methane and stuff like that. Yeah. And your body traps that stuff and it begins to bloat and everyone knows that once you blow you float.

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That's right. That's the forensics bumper sticker. Yeah.

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Eventually you're going to rise to the top like a dirigible because of those gases that are trapped in your body are like like a submarine.

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I guess OK, I guess, do you mean they keep going into the air like a blimp, you float off and then your foot will be found on the moon later?

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Uh, yeah, you're going to 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 and puffed out and it's decomposed. Yeah. It's not pretty.

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But if you are if you were trapped, say, like in a vehicle or something like that. Right. And all of this takes place, eventually your your body is going to be prevented from floating away and it will eventually rupture. And once the rupture happens, all that gas and the the buoyancy that's created by it is all released. And so you're staying there. You're staying there. Yeah. And I read this article about, um, did you read the article about the Oklahoma guy?

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Yeah, it was really weird. Isn't and sad. It is.

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So like the guy there was a guy who is whose brother went missing in his Camaro and I think like nineteen seventy. Yeah. And he, he just never knew what happened to him. And he used this boat ramp on this place called Foss Lake and he found out later when the cops accidentally discovered the car his brother had been submerged in just 12 feet of water for 40 years. All those times he was back in his boat into Foss Lake. His brother was right below him.

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Yeah, and that crazy. And they found him accidentally. And then they found another car that had gone missing, I think, the year before, just a few feet away.

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And the moral of the story is that Foss Lake is really murky. Wow. I mean, 12 feet of water, two different cars. Camero Yeah. A Camaro. And I think like a pack or something like that. Or a Buick man. Yeah, unbelievable.

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Uh. All right. Well, let's take another little break here and we'll talk a little bit more about what can happen to a body underwater and what's the deal with all these feet.

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Geico motorcycle. Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more. All right, just this year, there was a study that some criminologists at Simon Fraser, you outside of Vancouver, and there have 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 forensic experts try to see what happens to bodies right under various conditions, including being sunk underwater. So they took a pig carcass, in this case, not a human cadaver, and they sunk it kind of near where they say, let's see where these feet had been appearing.

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And this these pigs carcasses where they were bones in a matter of days, it was really, really fast.

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Yeah, they were really surprised surprisingly fast, because, you know, conventional wisdom is that this took weeks, months, maybe even.

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Sure. And other studies have shown that. Right. And these things these pigs were like just bones in a few days. They think it's possible that the Salish Sea is an anomaly because this was almost a thousand feet of water. Yeah, but it's really highly oxygenated. So there's a lot of life down there where a lot more things to eat.

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A body. Exactly. Yeah. 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 Salish Sea, it's possible for something to be reduced to bones in a few days.

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Yeah. Here is my one problem with the way they did this study. Maybe I overthought it, but they trapped it under fencing. Yeah, um, which presumably means that that was just, you know, kind of in one place the whole time. It's true. I would have like if you're going to simulate a human body, I would have maybe shackled a leg. And put along leader, right? So it could move around and see what a body would do.

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See the site.

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Yeah, because a body can't move on the bottom a little because there's currents.

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So, you know, that's just, you know, minor gripe.

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Yeah, but yeah. Have you seen did you see the video of it, the time lapse video. Oh no. It's really something. No, it's gross. Don't need it. So there is another study that I found that really kind of ties all this together. It was from 1992 and it was carried out by the coroner of Kings County, which is where Seattle is. Yes. And he or she I think it was he looked at bodies that had been pulled from the water and he took the amount of time they've been in the water submerged.

[00:30:13]

And then the amount of body parts that were left are exactly what body parts were left, right, and basically went back in reverse, engineered the process by which a body comes apart when it's submerged under water.

[00:30:24]

Yeah, it'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. Yeah. Those get eaten away first, which exposes that soft tissue beneath that. Hold 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.

[00:30:55]

Yeah. And the wave action or the currents at the bottom of the the body of water, the hands and then the feet or glutes. The disarticulated. Yeah. So they naturally will fall off the body as the body's decomposing, submerged under water and they, they are among the first parts to go.

[00:31:13]

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 see it again. Although one of these feet was a barefoot, correct. Yes. Which seems to be a little bit of an outlier. A little bit. But if you've got a shoe on that thing that's tied up nice and tight and your disarticulated at the ankle, that foot is still inside that shoe going to make it really hard for a scavenger to get in there.

[00:31:42]

And it's very possible that that foot will not decompose or at least decompose very slowly. Right.

[00:31:49]

And not only that, will it be protected once a disarticulated if it's wearing a certain kind of shoe, specifically an athletic shoe that's made in the last like 15, 20 years? Yeah, it's going to have air injected into the soul. Yeah.

[00:32:05]

And in the case of like, remember, Nike Air Maxes, they had actual air pockets, like in the in between the soul and the bottom of the shoe. Yeah. And that actually creates a buoyant effect that will lift a shoe, including one that has a foot still inside to the surface.

[00:32:22]

Yeah.

[00:32:23]

So they started looking all these cases and they said, well, almost all of these are athletic shoes. So that makes sense. And it's going to Bob upside down because of that rubber soul. Right. So it's going to be protected even more from birds and things. Right. So what we have here is a case of. People that just happened to die in their feet, happened to come away from their bodies and be well protected by these awesome running shoes.

[00:32:48]

Yes. And eventually made their way to shore. Yeah, but a little bit weird that they would happen in this area in such a span of time, I would still say. Right.

[00:32:59]

That's a that's to me the. And we should say that's what you just said. That's the cop's position. Yeah. And it has been basically since the outset, since the first foot was found, basically nothing to see here.

[00:33:10]

And there's not a lot there to to undermine it. Yeah. Or attack it like it's a pretty sound position. Yeah. But there is still a mystery to it to me in that. Why British Columbia like it doesn't make sense. And there's a couple of explanations.

[00:33:26]

One is that the Salish Sea is something like a lagoon to where water flows in from the Pacific Ocean, from the south northward into the Salish Sea. And once stuff goes in there, basically recirculates, it doesn't come back out very often.

[00:33:41]

Well, when you see the sign that says Salish Sea, it says feet flow in. They don't flow out. Exactly right. So once you see that sign, well, there's the explanation. Yeah. The idea is that the Sailor Sea would experience a higher incidence of flotsam of all types, including feet, which is one explanation.

[00:34:00]

Yeah, it could be right. Well, I'm sure that has something to do with it. Sure.

[00:34:05]

The other explanation is, um, one of my favorite things in the world, which is a version of well, there's a couple of names for it.

[00:34:14]

There was a guy named Arnold Zwicky in 2006, a linguistics professor at Stanford, who coined the term frequency illusion. And that's one of the cognitive biases where basically if you are looking for something, you're going to find it. All these people saw on the news, uh, feet washing up on the shore. So like you said, they all started looking for feet.

[00:34:36]

And every time a foot was found, it just supported the idea that, yes, there's something really weird going on here which only increase the awareness and the focus on this, which means that people started seeing more and more feet.

[00:34:47]

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 were just told about, which is the feet. Mm hmm. And the confirmation bias in this case is the reassurance that it's just proof more and more proof of its omnipresence. More feet.

[00:35:09]

Right. You could see that happening here for sure. Pretty interesting. It's called the bottom of phenomenon, too.

[00:35:16]

Yeah. I didn't know where that came from. There was a dude until I looked it up, uh, 1994. It was just a commentor on a on the Pioneer Press of St. Paul discussion board. And he had heard about the bottom line half terrorist group a couple of times and one day. Right. For the first time. Yeah. And just said, you know, bottom line phenomenon. Right. And it became a meme. Yeah. I thought it was more I thought it was cooler than that.

[00:35:43]

No, I thought there was some cool explanation. No, that wasn't just some dude online.

[00:35:47]

It definitely sounds cooler than it is. It sounds way cooler than it is.

[00:35:51]

But it's a common thing. People, uh, you talk about 11, 11 on the clock is a big one for a lot of people say, you know, I see eleven, eleven all the time on the clock. Right.

[00:36:00]

It's because you're looking for it. Sure. Frequency illusion. Yeah. It's not actually happening more than it ever was. You're just paying more attention to it now.

[00:36:09]

And this is really, really unnerving suggestion because it it says that feet washing up on the shore is way more common than any of us realize. And 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.

[00:36:29]

We just aren't aware of this as as human beings in outside of Vancouver.

[00:36:36]

Right. Right. So that makes Vancouver the capital of the disembody, the disembodied feet capital of the world. I don't know that that necessarily holds up, though.

[00:36:46]

I don't think it's been explained.

[00:36:47]

Yeah, because, I mean, I bet I bet you it's frequency illusion. I disagree.

[00:36:52]

I think it's something else that probably has to do with the hydrology or something about Vancouver or British Columbia. Yeah, there's this database called NamUs and it's like a catalogue of unidentified remains. Yeah. And I did a search for disarticulated foot and out of like 40000 unidentified remains in the US. Thirty thousand were from Vancouver. The only three were disarticulated feet and one was found in the Washington state area. So you could technically kind of included in that weird Vancouver clump.

[00:37:25]

One was in Maryland and one was in Dallas.

[00:37:29]

That was it. Wow.

[00:37:30]

So it does really seem like Vancouver has a higher than usual incidence of disarticulated feet showing up. In its area, WOWI, which is weird, are you on the case? No, I'm just a fan.

[00:37:45]

Okay, so you got anything else?

[00:37:48]

No, I just realized I've been, like, rotating my feet around and I just feel like they're sort of if you want to know more about this, you can actually there are three really good articles that I read in addition to some other ones. But three stood out. One was by Winston Ross of The Daily Beast. One was on Pacific Standard. I didn't see an author. And then Christopher Christopher Solomon's outside article. Those are all pretty standout.

[00:38:18]

And since I said stand out, it's time for a listener mail.

[00:38:23]

I'm going to call this Internet roundup. I don't know if people watch, but we have an Internet show called Internet Roundup. Several hundred people watch. Yeah. And it's like the silliest thing we do. We sit down in the studio on video and we just talk about a couple of things on the Internet that we think are neat. Right. So that is the setup. Hey, guys, I was recently on a Delta flight and they show this on Delta.

[00:38:43]

Yeah.

[00:38:44]

And this is not an ad for government. No, I was recently on a Delta flight from Atlanta to Austin. Keeping an eye out for your hat, Chuck. I got very excited when I remembered I could watch your Internet roundup, uh, show on the plane to pass the time. So we began our descent 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.

[00:39:09]

I just said, listen to your How to Survive a plane crash episode from two thousand eight just that week before. And I remember thinking how grateful I was that I was in the back of the plane checks that had a better chance of surviving that way. It's not much of a chance, but sure.

[00:39:25]

I just thought you would like to know that despite the horrible weather going on, I never lost connection with your show, watching Internet roundup and able to listen and watch. 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. Yeah, I'm not going to try anymore. We'll just go to Houston close enough. Yeah. In the end, everyone made it to Austin safely, though, so thanks for everything you guys do.

[00:39:52]

And that is from Lauren Sprouse. Thanks a lot, Lauren. 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 had they touched down and take off. If you watch those waiting to get on to a plane, it's a really good way to just poke at your brain.

[00:40:12]

Wow. Yeah, no, thank you. If you want to get in touch with us, you can hit us up on Twitter as well as podcast. You can join us on Instagram as well as podcast, too. You can join us on Facebook. Dot com slash love you should shadow. You can send us an email to stuff podcast, the house, the first dot com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuff you should know Dotcom.

[00:40:36]

Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts, my heart radio is the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You can't control what's outside your home, but you can control what comes in because Clorox disinfecting wipes kill ninety nine point nine percent of viruses and bacteria, including covid-19 virus, when used as directed on hard non-porous surfaces. So whether it's from dirty doorknobs, dirty shoes or something else outside germs won't stand the chance when it counts.

[00:41:13]

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