The mystery of the Eskimo village of Angikuni
World history preserves the memory of many cases of the mysterious disappearance of people who to this day have not found their logical conclusion. However, suppose the disappearance of one person or even a small group of people without a trace can somehow be explained due to the circumstances accompanying the incident. How can one explain the sudden disappearance of all the inhabitants of an entire settlement at once, which happened literally overnight?
But such cases have been witnessed repeatedly. One of the most famous and mentioned among them is the incident in the Eskimo village of Angikuni, which occurred 90 years ago in Canada, but has not received any clear explanation from the local authorities or from independent researchers.…
The settlement of Angikuni, which will be discussed, was located directly on the shore of the lake of the same name on the territory of Nanavut — one of the so-called Big Canadian Lakes, which has long been famous for an extraordinary abundance of fish, in particular pike and trout. The nearby forests were literally teeming with fur-bearing animals, and therefore this area, despite its remoteness and impassability, attracted a considerable number of hunters, fishermen, and other miners.
One of those was a certain Joe Labelle— a Canadian hunter who hunted fur near Lake Angikuni. On that day, November 12, 1930, he, as usual, decided to stop by on the way back to the local fishing settlement in order to have a little rest and, if possible, exchange prey with the aborigines.
Bearing in mind that the locals from the Inuit tribe are very friendly and hospitable, Labelle was already looking forward to a hearty dinner and a quiet night in a warm Eskimo dwelling, but what happened next left a deep imprint not only in the hunter’s memory but also in the entire history of observing anomalous phenomena.
On the approach to the settlement, Labelle shouted the usual greeting in the local dialect for this situation, but in response, he did not hear not only a response from the elders or other members of the community but even the usual dog barking…
When he got to the nearest dwelling, he went inside, finding quite an ordinary situation there: the hearth was slowly burning down, a bowl of fish soup was cooling next to it… All things seemed to be in their places, except for one thing: people seemed to have disappeared, and there were no dogs.
Discouraged, Labelle examined one hut after another in this way and found the same picture everywhere, which could only indicate one thing: people suddenly left their homes in a terrible hurry, abandoning all the things they had started and not having time to take even the most necessary things with them. Even more strange was the fact that there were absolutely no footprints on the freshly fallen snow around, as if people together with animals would voluntarily decide to leave here.…
Referring to overwork and sleepless nights spent in the forest, the hunter, however, did not dare to stay in the village, remembering the ancient legends that said that evil spirits live on the lake, which from time to time remind the locals of themselves…
Labelle, not feeling his feet under him, was able to ski a long way to the nearest communications office, from where he telegraphed the incident to the Canadian police.
A few hours later, a detachment of mounted police reached the village of Angikuni. Along the way, they were joined by three more hunters who happened to be near the lake. Admand Laurent and his two sons, having heard from the police about the incident, said that they had witnessed a strange phenomenon the day before.
Two days ago, while parking, they noticed an unprecedented luminous object in the sky, which was slowly moving towards Lake Angikuni. It changed shape, taking the form of a cylinder, then a pointed spindle. The hunters claimed that the glowing object was not like anything they had seen before — it could not be either the Northern lights, a cloud, or any other atmospheric phenomenon characteristic of these places.
The police arrived at the scene and thoroughly examined the village. They found a few more strange and sinister details that escaped the attention of the exhausted and terrified Joe Labelle. The local cemetery on the edge of the settlement was devastated.
All the graves without exception were dug up, and the bodies of the buried disappeared. This could not have been the work of local residents — the Inuit treated their deceased with trepidation, and disturbing the peace of the cemetery was an ancient taboo. But animals could not commit this ruin either — the graves were dug carefully, the burial stones were stacked in even rows.
Another shocking discovery was waiting for the police a hundred meters from the village. They found the corpses of sled dogs under the snow, which, according to preliminary examination, died of starvation. It seemed incredible. After all, the abandoned houses were full of food supplies. And the Eskimos have always considered sled dogs their main wealth, and would rather starve themselves than let them starve to death.
This inexplicable story became the sensation of the year. Newspapers worldwide vied with each other to put forward more and more new versions of what happened. The official version of the Canadian police did not suit anyone. It said that the Inuit tribe, guided by some of their practical or religious ideas, decided to move to another parking lot.
But this did not explain any of the mysteries of the disappearance of people. Why didn’t they take things, weapons, food? Why did they let the dogs die? Why are there no traces left?
No one could offer a rational explanation for this riddle. The most common hypothesis was the opinion about the abduction of Inuit by aliens. No matter how improbable it may sound, but only such a hypothesis made it possible to make ends meet in this complicated story. And only it could link the disappearance of people with the appearance of a strange flying object the day before, which no one had ever seen in this area either before or after the mysterious incident.
