WILLIAM SHATNER: A world-famous aviator disappears
on her flight around the world.
A ghost ship is discovered sailing the open seas
with no sign of its missing crew.
And a legendary expedition whose fate...
is as chilling as the Arctic itself.
The world is a very big place.
It's covered in swaths of seemingly endless wilderness,
vast open oceans
and a multitude of locations where one can go missing.
Even with modern technology and advanced search techniques,
there are countless individuals
whose whereabouts remain a mystery.
Their stories instill both fascination and fear,
leaving us to wonder how someone could get lost
without a trace.
Well, that is what we'll try and find out.
♪ ♪
34-year-old aviator Amelia Earhart takes off
for a daring attempt
to become the first woman to fly solo
over the Atlantic Ocean.
It was a perilous journey
that had already claimed many lives.
Despite the inherent risks,
14 hours and 56 minutes
after embarking on this death-defying feat,
Earhart touches down in a field in Northern Ireland.
And in that moment, a true icon is born.
JOHN NANCE: The transatlantic flight had not become routine.
A lot of people have died trying.
She did a good job of piloting it.
And her navigation was pretty much dead reckoning,
which we used to joke in the Air Force,
you reckon wrong, you're dead. (chuckles)
Amelia Earhart was a deserved superstar.
She had a voracious nature
for wanting to publicize aviation
and how fascinating it was.
And to do so by pushing the limits
and to prove
that there was no reason to say that,
"Oh, because you're a woman, you can't do something."
She was way ahead of her time.
LANCE GEIGER: Amelia Earhart was just a trailblazer
at a time when women didn't fly.
And so when she decided in 1937 that she was gonna
fly around the world,
which was an ambitious thing to do in 1937,
the world watched with bated breath.
This was exciting.
SHATNER: With years of experience under her belt,
Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan,
take off in a twin-engine Lockheed Electra
for their next great adventure:
a 29,000-mile trip around the Earth.
On July 2, a month and 22,000 miles
into their journey, Earhart and Noonan begin
the longest and most dangerous leg of their flight,
to a tiny, mile-long speck of land
in the middle of the Pacific called Howland Island.
As Earhart and Noonan near Howland Island,
they radio a Coast Guard vessel,
the Itasca, that's been positioned near their target.
The Itasca's only objective
is to guide Earhart in to safely.
ANTHONY ROMEO: So as Amelia is approaching Howland Island,
she tries on the radio to reach the Itasca.
She calls and she says,
"We must be on you, but cannot see you
flying at a thousand feet, low on gas."
So they start sending her Morse code signals.
She says,
"I'm hearing your Morse code signals,
but we can't get you on voice, we can't hear your voice."
And then about 30 minutes later, we hear her final message.
She said, "We're on the line,
157 337, flying north and south."
We never hear from her again.
She's been gone 87 years, and we still
don't have a definitive answer
as to, as to what happened to her.
SHATNER: Amelia Earhart's failed flight
around the world could be considered
the most famous disappearance in American history.
And for decades, it's sparked endless speculation
about just what happened to the beloved aviator.
One of the most compelling theories comes
from Ric Gillespie, the founder of
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery,
or TIGHAR.
RICHARD GILLESPIE: At TIGHAR, we've done
35 years of investigation
on people who disappeared in airplanes.
After we started our Historical Investigation Foundation,
one of our members--
we're a membership organization--
called me and said,
"Hey, we got a theory about Amelia Earhart."
These were two guys who were retired aerial navigators
from the military in World War II.
And what they told me is that
if she did what she said she was doing,
she should have made it to another island.
SHATNER: The most valuable clue Earhart gave before she disappeared
was that she was flying on line 157 337,
a northwest to southwest navigational line
that cuts through Howland Island.
To the northwest of Howland
is nothing but thousands of miles of open ocean.
But to the southwest is a tiny,
uninhabited island called Nikumaroro.
GILLESPIE: We think Amelia Earhart landed
and died as a castaway on this island.
On Nikumaroro.
So we did some archeological excavations on the island.
And we have found a campsite there.
We have found things
that speak of an American woman of the 1930s...
GILLESPIE: ...things that Amelia Earhart
would logically have with her.
GILLESPIE: In 2010, at the site, I was doing metal detecting.
And the first thing
I pulled up out of the ground was this loop.
And I knew immediately
that it came from an easy open,
double-bladed, bone-handled jackknife.
There is an inventory of Earhart's airplane
that was taken by the U.S. Army,
and one of the items they inventoried was
a bone-handled, double-bladed jackknife.
We have found a great deal of archeological evidence.
But it's circumstantial.
You can't get around that.
There is no DNA,
it's just been too long.
Believe me, we've tried.
There's more to learn. There's always more to learn.
SHATNER: Did Amelia Earhart die
as a castaway on Nikumaroro Island?
While it's extremely compelling, without actual DNA evidence,
it's far from conclusive.
And there are many experts who believe
another theory entirely:
that Earhart ran out of gas
and crashed near Howland Island.
ROMEO: She was very close to the island.
She tells us she-she's low on gas.
And, uh, everything points to a very
near miss to Howland Island.
She was right there. She was very close.
SHATNER: Tony Romeo is the founder and CEO
of Deep Sea Vision,
an underwater exploration company.
In September 2023, Tony and his team
mounted an expedition to search for Earhart's plane
near Howland Island.
They painstakingly scanned the seafloor
with an autonomous underwater vehicle
equipped with the latest sonar technology.
Incredibly, nearing the end of their expedition,
they capture a curious sonar image
from the bottom of the ocean
less than 100 miles away from Howland Island.
ROMEO: This is an image of...
what we believe to be Amelia Earhart's plane.
And then what you're seeing is a reflection,
the white areas, which is a reflection
of an object on the bottom of the seabed.
What you're seeing fits very close
to the dimensions of Amelia's plane.
Holy smokes, this thing actually exists.
SHATNER: In early 2024,
this remarkable sonar image made
major headlines around the world.
Has Amelia Earhart's plane been found?
It's a tantalizing possibility,
but as of now, Tony's suspicions have yet to be confirmed,
because the object is at the bottom of the ocean--
15,000 feet below.
What we have right now are sonar images.
The next thing we want are color pictures of the aircraft.
Then we move to the next step, which I think would be
engineering a solution to bring it to the surface.
SHATNER: Could 21st-century technology be
the key to finding Earhart's missing aircraft?
For now, this remarkable sonar image provides
new hope that the fate of America's legendary
lady of the sky may finally be revealed.
Even today, Amelia Earhart still has
this hold on the nation's consciousness.
She is still seen as this hero.
The mystery is still important.
We're still wondering what happened
to this one person in 1937.
It is just this mystery
that we can't let go of until it's answered.
SHATNER: Two British Royal Navy ships--
the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror--
departed England under the command
of veteran polar explorer Sir John Franklin.
Their mission was to be the first to find and navigate
the fabled Northwest Passage.
the long-rumored sea route linking Europe and Asia
that would revolutionize trade between the continents.
But this ever-changing maze of ice
was considered virtually impassable.
With enough rations to support the crew for up to three years,
made possible by innovations like canned food,
the historic expedition was
unlike anything ever attempted.
It was a voyage known as the Franklin Expedition.
The Franklin Expedition was the best equipped
polar expedition that had ever been mounted.
You know, the two ships: HMS Erebus, HMS Terror.
Ice-reinforced and all the geographical knowledge
was in their library that they carried aboard ship.
Um, so they, they, they were
as well prepared as possible.
ADRIAN SIMONOVSKI: The Erebus and the Terror
were equipped with the latest technology.
They had heating systems so that you had
ducting to heat different compartments.
There was a steam engine to help
in propulsion when there was no wind.
So a lot of innovation was done
that was leading at the time.
SHATNER: Despite the innovations employed by Franklin and his men,
in just a few years, it became clear to colleagues
and loved ones back in England
that the Erebus and the Terror were in trouble.
Ultimately, they would become
one of the most famous lost expeditions
in human history.
ROGER MARSTERS: By 1847, as people
in Europe hadn't heard from the Franklin Expedition,
it became increasingly evident that something had gone wrong.
The fact that two ships, 129 men,
disappeared with very few traces,
has presented a blank canvas
on which we can project our fears and our concerns.
SHATNER: To this day, no one can say for sure what happened
to the majority of the people on this ill-fated expedition.
But in 1850, a fleet of search ships
were shocked to discover
the first grim clues.
A small cemetery
with three gravestones
on Beechey Island.
GEIGER: There had been three members
of the Franklin Exhibition who died
very early on in the expedition.
And they were buried on Beechey Island,
the first winter site for the expedition.
It's like a polar desert.
And when they realized
that the Franklin Expedition were lost,
the question was:
okay, what happened to them?
It became truly a global effort
to kind of answer some of these
enduring questions about the expedition.
SHATNER: Dozens of exhaustive searches
continued in this frozen wasteland.
It appears the expedition turned south
after burying three men on Beechey Island.
In 1859, a sled team searching near King William Island...
...discovered an abandoned lifeboat
containing two human skeletons.
Remains of a third sailor were also found,
preserved in the ice.
But the most valuable clue was a hand-written note
discovered nearby at a location ironically named
Victory Point.
MARSTERS: The Victory Point Note was found
near King William Island.
And it gave two status updates
on the expedition.
One in the spring of 1847,
which stated that all was well.
And another from the spring of 1848,
which indicated that John Franklin
had died in the previous year.
And that two dozen members of the expedition
had similarly died of malnutrition,
scurvy, tuberculosis.
And the remaining members of the expedition
would be heading out overland in an attempt at,
uh, self-rescue on the Canadian mainland.
SHATNER: This single letter,
written over 170 years ago,
offers the only known record
of the expedition's last-ditch effort at survival
after being stuck in the ice
for over two years.
And then, the true story of the Franklin Expedition
becomes largely unknown.
Only around 30 of the 129 men have been found.
And the question remains: what happened to the rest of them?
Well, intriguing clues would come
from the oral history of the local Inuit people,
the only known inhabitants of the Canadian Arctic.
The white men that the Inuit described interacting with
inspired true terror in these local inhabitants.
In fact, they believed they were no longer men
but monsters.
LANCE: In 1854, a man named John Ray,
who was a Hudson Bay employee and a trapper,
he had gone searching for evidence
of the Franklin Expedition.
And he had talked to some local Inuits.
And they had an oral tradition
that they had encountered what they called snow zombies.
The Inuit tried to give them food.
They seemed to be unable to even accept help.
They were blue-skinned, they were talking irrationally.
They don't look like a person, they don't act like a person.
They found them in camps where the men were just
on the ground starving.
And they were eating the corpses.
They were engaging in cannibalism.
SHATNER: Did the men of the Franklin Expedition become
real-life zombies, as the Inuit stories suggest?
Or were they driven to madness
from starvation and disease in this deadly environment?
Well, some believe the real answer
came over a century later in the 1980s,
from a team of field researchers
led by anthropologist Owen Beattie.
A colleague of mine, Owen Beattie, who's a professor
of anthropology at the University of Alberta,
led several expeditions to collect human remains
related to the Franklin Exhibition.
The idea was to go and exhume those graves
on Beechey Island to see if there was preserved tissue.
What was discovered was that the three sailors
were incredibly well preserved in the permafrost.
And so autopsies were conducted,
and the tissue showed that there was extremely high levels
of lead found in the remains that were collected.
One of the most common explanations for what might have
happened to the Franklin Expedition was lead poisoning.
And the reason was because of this new technology of canning,
because while the cans were tin, they were sealed with lead.
And so the assumption was that maybe because lead
had leached into the food, it would make you more
vulnerable to things like pneumonia.
And it also could have mental effects, especially paranoia.
And that might explain some of the very strange things
that seemed to happen with the Franklin Expedition.
That they weren't even behaving like men anymore.
SHATNER: Nearly 170 years after the Franklin Expedition
left the safety of England,
two major discoveries would reveal the ships' fate.
In 2014 and 2016,
both the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror
were found on the Arctic Ocean floor,
renewing hope that the fate of the lost Franklin men
might be revealed.
Unfortunately, researchers have found nothing on board
that explains what actually happened.
So the question is,
what became of nearly 100 men
that remain lost and unaccounted for?
LANCE: We found the two ships, and yet
the vast majority of the remains
have never been discovered.
And what's really missing are the logbooks
that might really explain what's going on.
There might be something that tells us the whole story.
We just haven't found it yet.
And that gives us a reason to keep searching.
Whether the lost crew of the Franklin Expedition
were driven mad from starvation,
illness,
or even something supernatural,
the answer remains a mystery.
And such is the case of the strange disappearance
of one of the most famous people
of the 20th century.
Just how did an American musical icon
simply vanish...
never to be seen again?
A small, single-engine plane departs
from Twinwood Farm Airbase en route to Paris.
As it takes off across the English Channel,
the plane disappears
into the dense winter fog.
And is never seen again.
On board this lost flight
is the most famous musical icon of the day,
legendary big band leader
Glenn Miller.
It was said that in 1940, two out of every three
records in a jukebox was a Glenn Miller record.
From the end of October of 1941
until the end of April in 1942,
every single number one record
on the Billboard Top Ten was Miller.
The number one in his all-time greatest hit
was "Chattanooga Choo Choo,"
which actually was the first gold record
ever awarded to an artist.
Glenn Miller was the original
big-time superstar.
SHATNER: Like many of his fellow artists,
in 1942, Miller gave up his lucrative music career
to enlist in the U.S. Army.
For nearly two years, Major Glenn Miller
lead the Miller's Army Air Force Band,
giving more than 350 performances.
It would be an upcoming holiday event
that would change Miller's life forever.
The Miller Army Air Force Orchestra was going to have
a huge performance on Christmas of 1944 in Paris
for all of these soldiers who had been fighting
since D-Day in June.
And Glenn Miller was in the United Kingdom,
but he was anxious to get to Paris to set this up.
So he found out that an officer in the Eighth Air Force,
name of Norman Bassell,
was going to be flying to Paris.
And Miller managed to wrangle an invite to fly
in a very small plane called a Norseman.
One slight problem.
Miller doesn't inform his chain of command of his intentions.
Miller and Bassel get on the plane,
and at 1:55 p.m., that airplane takes off from Twinwood.
No one ever saw it again.
SHATNER: Glenn Miller's plane has never been found.
Even surveys of the English Channel
have not found a single trace.
This clear lack of evidence has fueled sensational theories
to explain the icon's mysterious disappearance.
And one of the most intriguing of all the claims
is that perhaps his plane didn't go down at all.
LANCE: One of the more fanciful theories
was that Glenn Miller was actually a spy,
that he was engaged in espionage.
So the theory is that Miller landed in Paris secretly,
and that they smuggled him into Germany
to negotiate with high-level German generals
about assassinating Hitler to put an end to the war.
And that, at some point, he was betrayed
and that he was killed by the Germans on this secret mission.
And it wouldn't be unbelievable that if it went south
that they would lie about that
and say that his plane went down.
SHATNER: Was Glenn Miller
really an international superstar turned spy?
While it's an intriguing idea, there's no hard evidence
to prove Miller actually was conducting espionage.
But there is some evidence that suggests
there may have been a cover-up surrounding his death.
A cover-up meant to hide a terrible mistake
made by his own allies.
The most popular explanation
for what happened to Glenn Miller
was that he was shot down,
knocked down by friendly fire.
The story goes that, in trying to get to Paris,
flying over the Channel,
Miller's airplane strayed
into a bomb dispersal area.
At that time, if bombers got to their target
and couldn't see the target well enough
to drop their bombs, they would jettison the bombs
over the Channel in approved dispersal areas.
In the 1980s, a British veteran,
who'd been a navigator on a Lancaster bomber that day,
reported that we had hit Glenn Miller with friendly fire
from a bomb jettison from a Lancaster.
As it turned out, with a modicum of investigation,
you will find that there was an RAF bomb jettison that day.
SHATNER: Was the plane carrying Glenn Miller accidentally bombed
by his own allies?
It's certainly possible.
However, there are others who believe
that the circumstances of Miller's disappearance
was triggered by a very different kind of accident:
mechanical failure.
SPRAGG: The carburetor heater in Miller's plane
had been recalled by the Army Air Forces
six months earlier.
So at 1500 feet, if the carburetor heater fails,
then the engine stops,
the nose goes down immediately.
And hitting the English Channel,
it's like hitting a brick wall.
(water splashes)
It disintegrates, and no one survives.
SHATNER: Despite circumstantial evidence
to support the notion of mechanical failure,
answers are far from definitive.
To this day, the plane remains lost,
along with the truth
of what really happened to Glenn Miller.
SPRAGG: I think when a celebrity and famous person vanishes,
we have the ultimate mystery, don't we?
What happened to Glenn Miller?
Where is the debris of the airplane?
It's always open to speculation,
but most importantly in the minds of all of us,
because he captured our imagination,
he remains in our imagination.
Did fame play a role in Glenn Miller's disappearance,
or was it simply a plane malfunction
that caused the band leader to be lost?
Questions also remain about another mysterious case
involving ten people who vanished
and were the possible victims of a deadly curse.
SHATNER: An American brigantine ship known as the Mary Celeste
sets sail from this bustling port
transporting goods to Genoa, Italy.
On board is American Captain Benjamin S. Briggs,
his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia
and an crew of seven sailors
from the U.S., Denmark, and Germany.
But on December 4, 1872,
just under a month after these ten people
set sail on the Mary Celeste,
the vessel is discovered aimless and adrift
in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
On December 4th, David Reed Morehouse,
captain of the Dei Gratia, a Canadian cargo ship,
spies this ship in the distance
about halfway between the Azores and Portugal,
400 miles from each.
It's bucking, doesn't look right.
And so they sail over, and they find the Mary Celeste.
They go aboard
and everything's kind of creepy.
The ship's wheel is spinning uncontrollably,
so he doesn't understand what's going on.
The Mary Celeste was sailing without its crew.
SHATNER: According to the crew of the Dei Gratia,
finding this abandoned vessel
along a major trade route defied explanation.
The Mary Celeste had become
a ghost ship.
A ghost ship was a mariner's term for any ship
found sailing without its crew.
In the 19th century, dozens of ships were found
sailing without their crews every year.
But usually there was a very plausible
and obvious reason for that.
And it's possible
they could've been swept overboard in a storm.
They could have abandoned ship
because they thought it was sinking.
Those are usually things that you can tell.
The difference was,
nothing seemed to fit the Mary Celeste story.
The Mary Celeste is just the quintessential story
of people being lost,
of vanishing without a trace.
It was the strangest thing.
Everything on this ship was intact, including the cargo.
And that's when you have to ask, what happened?
If there was everything stolen, you'd say,
well, pirates, pirates must have done this.
If there was mutiny, there'd be blood,
and the mutineers would've taken the ship.
There's no bodies.
Why would ten people abandon
a perfectly good seaworthy ship?
People wanted to know what happened,
what could've happened?
HICKS: This was a story that went viral,
and every week there was a story
and newspaper reporters found something.
And one week, it's insurance fraud.
This week, it's murder.
Next week, it's mutiny.
And it just gave this story a life of its own.
MARSTERS: Some people have put forward the theory a giant squid
somehow dragged them into the watery depths as well.
There have also been explanations
based on psychic phenomena,
in ways analogous to the Bermuda Triangle.
There have also been people who have attributed
the abandonment of the Mary Celeste
to alien abduction,
but there is no way
of conclusively demonstrating any one theory.
SHATNER: This famous maritime disappearance
has puzzled researchers for over 150 years.
In addition to the passengers, the only thing that appeared
to be missing from the Mary Celeste
was a single lifeboat.
Even Captain Briggs' logbook provides no clues
as to what may have happened.
But some believe that the answer may be found
in a letter written by the captain's wife, Sarah,
two days before the Mary Celeste departed New York Harbor.
Sarah wrote a letter to her mother-in-law,
who was watching their son.
And she had mentioned that the ship is making
all kinds of popping and hissing sounds.
Now, that would be the alcohol down below deck.
They had left with 1,701 barrels of alcohol in their cargo.
It made her nervous.
HICKS: The U.S. routinely sold solvents and fuel
and that kind of alcohol.
If you had 450 gallons of methanol or formaldehyde
that had been bottled up inside a ship's hold for three weeks,
the effects could be serious for the crew.
Nausea, dizziness.
It could even cause hallucinations.
This is serious physiological effects
from exposure to these kind of fumes.
And I think that's what's at the at the heart of what happened.
SHATNER: Could hallucinations explain
why the crew abandoned ship
without any supplies to survive the open ocean?
While it's possible, others believe
the ship itself was cursed.
The Mary Celeste had long been associated
with curious superstition,
ever since it was built in Nova Scotia in 1861.
Back then, the ship went by a different name, the Amazon.
The Amazon had more than its share of misfortune.
We do know that the first captain of the ship
died within a day of setting foot on board her.
Someone had renamed it Mary Celeste,
which is a no-no for ships.
It was maritime folklore that renaming a ship
would anger Poseidon or King Neptune.
And if he had to relearn the name,
the punishment for that was shipwreck or death.
Whether you want to believe that that is supernatural,
paranormal, bad luck, or what,
people died around it, cargo went bad,
nobody ever made money with it.
It was just a horrible, bad luck ship.
Could the crew of the Mary Celeste
have succumbed to the power of a deadly curse
or even the ravages of a giant squid?
Hmm...
It all sounds otherworldly.
Just like the case of a lost airplane pilot
whose last words sounded eerily like a close encounter
with an unidentified flying object.
SHATNER: Since the 1800s,
this 190 mile-wide stretch of water
separating Australia and Tasmania
has earned a reputation where ships,
and even planes, mysteriously go missing.
It's sometimes called the Bass Strait Triangle.
But something truly baffling happens
over this notorious stretch of water
when 20 year-old pilot Frederick Valentich
flies the Strait in a Cessna 182L
and encounters something in the sky.
So, the 20th of October, 1978, Frederick Valentich drives
right across Melbourne to Moorrabbin Airport for a flight.
Which, presumably, he's doing to get his hours up, because
he's a pilot who wants to become
a commercial airline pilot.
And he heads southwest out of Melbourne
and along the coast towards Cape Otway.
His flight plan has him flying from Moorabbin Airport
down to Cape Otway at the lighthouse,
which pilots like to use for navigation,
and then turning to the southeast towards King Island.
RUTKOWSKI: When he was flying towards King Island,
he had some very strange transmissions
and-and radio calls to the tower back in Melbourne.
He asked the Melbourne tower
if there were any aircraft in his vicinity,
because he had said there was another object
about 1,000 feet higher than him...
...and it had very bright lights,
and there shouldn't have been anything there.
SHATNER: What strange craft did Frederick Valentich
see flying over Australia's Bass Strait?
The only clues available today is the transcript
of a six-minute transmission between Valentich
and air traffic controller Steve Roby
from Melbourne Flight Service.
SIMPSON: Fred says, "This is Delta Sierra Juliet.
Is there any known traffic below 5,000?"
And then Steve Roby says, "No known traffic."
And Frederick replies, "Seems to be a large aircraft below.
"It seems to me that he's playing some sort of game.
"He's flying over me two to three times at a time
at speeds I cannot identify."
So then, Steve Roby replies,
"Can you describe the aircraft?"
And Frederick says, "It's got a green light
"and sort of metallic-like.
It's all shiny on the outside."
SHATNER: What was the strange, metallic object
Frederick Valentich reported in real time?
We may never know for sure
because, tragically, this 20-year-old pilot
has never been seen or heard from again.
He says, "That strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again.
It is hovering, and it's not an aircraft."
Within about 15 or 20 minutes of the loss of radio contact...
...a search and rescue, uh, operation was begun,
and that lasted for a number of weeks.
But no wreckage was ever recovered.
Frederick Valentich has been missing now
for 46 years, and yet, we are still talking about him.
SHATNER: An official investigation presumed the event
to be some kind of accident.
But many, including Valentich's own father,
offer another explanation:
UFO abduction.
SIMPSON: His father, he was looking for answers
but nobody knows what actually happened.
He came up with this theory that they might be these people
from another world that captured Fred.
The foundation of that story was what Fred actually said.
He had to believe what his son said.
This unidentified object was flying around him,
and now he's disappeared.
A lot of aircraft have disappeared all over the place,
but very few of them report seeing a UFO
and then disappear.
But that's the case here.
RUTKOWSKI: The Valentich incident really has all these elements
of the entire UFO abduction milieu
and makes us really wonder what was going on in the sky.
Aircraft don't just disappear.
People just don't disappear.
We are used to stories
that have nice beginnings and nice endings.
We know the beginnings, but the endings sometimes elude us.
SHATNER: Located in the heart of this frigid Canadian territory
is a remote lake 197 square miles in size.
It's a place that, according to legend,
was once home to the lost village of Lake Angikuni.
Lake Angikuni is incredibly isolated from civilization.
It's incredibly dangerous.
It's minus-50 degrees Fahrenheit during the day sometimes.
You can absolutely believe that anyone living on the tundra,
that something could happen to them
and you wouldn't know what happened.
SHATNER: According to legends, the small Inuit village
of Lake Angikuni was well-known to fur trappers
who passed through on occasion during hunting expeditions.
In 1930, one of these trappers, Joe Labelle,
reportedly arrived at the village
and made a disturbing discovery.
LANCE: Joe Labelle, he goes and looks, and there's nobody there.
The village is completely abandoned.
The way he describes it is it looks as if they just went out,
expecting to come back, and never did.
RUTKOWSKI: There was food that had been apparently taken
and prepared, but never eaten.
He said that he encountered seven sled dogs.
Five of them had already died of malnutrition.
Two were just barely hanging on.
The villagers wouldn't have left the sled dogs behind
because they were their lifeline to the outside world.
So why did these people disappear?
SHATNER: It is said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
conducted an investigation of the site,
but the villagers were never found.
And this was not the only report made to police
of unusual occurrences at Lake Angikuni.
About the same time that Joe Labelle had found
the abandoned village, there was a story circulating
that another trapper, named Arnold Laronde,
and his sons had seen a very strange object in the sky.
It was described as a bullet-shaped metallic object
moving through the heavens,
and they had no explanation for what they had seen.
This has been suggested by some to be a UFO connection
to the vanishing village.
SHATNER: Although we may never know for certain what happened
to the village of Lake Angikuni,
it remains one of the many lost stories
that continue to fuel our collective curiosity and fear.
STOKES: Every so often something happens
that reminds us that the world is a big place
and that we can be swallowed up into it without a trace.
And I think we're very much haunted by the thought
that people can simply vanish without trace,
and that we may never know where they've gone.
LANCE: We have these mysteries.
They're more than 100 years old, some of them,
and they still captivate our minds.
And the interesting part is
the evidence might still be there.
Maybe we will find Glenn Miller's Norseman.
Maybe we will find Amelia Earhart's Electra.
Who knows what's still out there to find that might solve
some of the great mysteries that still captivate the public?
Learning that someone has suddenly disappeared
from the face of Earth, and that there's very little hope
of them ever being rescued, well, it's...
...it's very unsettling, isn't it?
And when we hear stories that involve
the likes of Amelia Earhart and Glenn Miller,
you have to wonder, is it possible that
any one of us could get lost and never be found?
Well, let's hope not.
But in any case, we can safely consider that
just what caused these infamous vanishings
lies in a chain of events that, for now,
remains unexplained.
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