Stuff You Should Know - Why Are So Many Disembodied Feet Washing Ashore In British Columbia?

Episode Date: June 14, 2016

Between 2007 and 2016, 17 disembodied feet - still wearing shoes - have washed ashore between Washington and British Columbia. What's behind the sudden influx of Vancouver's mystery feet? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Levy, Chuck Bryant.

There's Jerry 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 lowered legs. Yeah. Below the calf. Yeah. Yep.

Above the floor. Facing forward. See, you're right. Yeah, that's a big one too. Okay. Because if it's facing backwards, you got problems. No, or you're just going the wrong way all day long. Maybe so.

Do you know where they're not supposed to be, Chuck? Feet? Yes. Well, they're not supposed to be on the armrest of the seat in front of you on an airplane. Yes. Or a movie theater. Yes.

But I know you're not talking about common courtesies that bug me. No, but I agree with you wholeheartedly. That is so wrong. Yeah. And I meant to tell you, I've come over to your side about taking shoes off on the plane. Oh, good.

It's okay if I do it. Okay. But you and me and I were flying somewhere, and this dude behind us had nasty stinky feet, and he had his shoes off, and we were facing forward, and we could smell his feet below our seats behind us. And I kept turning around, giving him the dirtiest looks, and he was like, he had no idea what I was doing.

Did you look at his feet and then at his face? Yes, and he still didn't get it. Did you look at his feet, his face, and then clap your nose with your fingers? I did that. Still didn't work. I threw up a little bit onto him. He just thought I was a little sick, yeah.

Yeah. I know people disagree with me. People wrote in, we're like, what's it to you? I thought it was to eat your own, to eat your own, Chuck. Yeah. And you know, it's fine. Don't yuck my yum. Yeah.

I'm a yum yucker. All right, so I'll tell you a place where feet aren't supposed to be. They're not supposed to be off on their own, on a beach somewhere. Not attached to a body. Exactly. No, that's not something that you see every day.

No, unless you're in Vancouver, and then it happens almost every day, it seems like. Not quite, but sure. There's something very weird going on in Vancouver. You say there's no mystery. I think there's still a bit of a mystery to it, but we'll start at the beginning, okay? Okay.

August 20th, 2007. It's kind of a cool and drizzly day at a place called Jedediah Island Provincial Park, up in British Columbia, right near Vancouver. Yeah. Right? Lovely area. Sure.

Of course. Beautiful. I want to say go camp at this park with your family, which is what a 12-year-old girl was doing. I couldn't find this girl's name to save my life, probably because she's 12. Yeah, it wouldn't be good to say it anyway. She was sure.

She was walking along the beach with her dad, and there was a bunch of flotsam, that's the term for stuff that washes up from the sea, that the sea spits up onto the shores, 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.

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, and in very short order, the Mounties showed up, the Coroners showed up, the Coast Guards showed up. I bet the Mounties were all over that foot.

So yeah, they said, you know what, we're gonna take that foot, if that's okay, little girl. And she, through her sobbing tears, said, sure. But just give me a little money, okay? And they said, we're gonna send it off for DNA examination, and did that return nothing? The DNA? As far as I know, yeah, there was no match.

So that wasn't like a clue? The DNA? Yeah. No, but it was the first thing they tried. Sure. The DNA, they also looked at it to see what was going on with the foot, if there was any kind of signs of what the deal was.

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

It was worth talking about. It got a little bit of ink, because it was just so weird, but they put the foot away at 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 general area. Another right foot. Which means it wasn't from the person's other foot. No, that'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 was a foot in there, because it looked full. It looks footy. How they, is how they put it. Full of foot? Yeah. Yeah.

And they picked it up and smelled it, 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. 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 that. I don't. But it's just something you say. Right. But he said two is pretty crazy. Yeah.

And I agree with him. Yeah. So the first foot was in Jedediah Island. The second one's on Gabriola Island, which is, I couldn't find exactly how far away it was across the water, but it's not that far. Right. 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. The media starts to catch drift of this one. Yeah. Right? There's feet, shoe to feet washing up on the shores in Vancouver. Right.

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

and feed pigs to his guests. Yeah, one of the only probably Canadian serial killers, right? Yeah. And one of the worst of all serial killers. He's a horrible, horrible person, because he wasn't crazy. You know what I mean? He was just a horrible person.

Yeah. And so he's on trial at that time, got, I think, 25 years, which is the maximum sentence you can get in Canada. What? Come on, Canada. Yeah. 25 years, for up to 49 horrible murders.

Yeah. So he was on trial. There were also a lot of really high-profile missing people in the area, too, that had just vanished without a trace in the four years leading up to that. Yeah, and you point out, because you wrote this, correct? I did, but actually, I was pointing out that Christopher Solomon pointed something out.

OK, well, the point is, 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. Yeah, which is weird. Yeah.

But I mean, like, a lot more. Yeah, more than 2,400 people over a 59-year period. And Solomon compared that to Kentucky, which is about the same size and population, or same size population. They only had 515 people missing over that 59 years. That seemed really low to me. Eight people a year missing in the whole state?

Like, that remained missing. OK, unsolved forever. Yes. Oh, because in Kentucky, they'll just be like, he was at Uncle Billy's down the road for a week. Right, exactly. So the idea is that BC has almost five times the number of missing persons cases

over this 59 period compared to Kentucky, which has about the same size population. That's a lot more. Yeah, 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 BC 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. Probably that too. It's not a good thing. It's not good at water. A lot of heroin.

Yeah. You know, sadly. Yeah, and they'll probably go missing on a drug bender. In addition to the serial killer theory, one of them was that these were people who had either run afoul of the local organized crime syndicates or ran afoul of a fellow heroin addict. Unorganized crime.

Exactly, disorganized. Yeah. Remember that movie? What movie? Disorganized crime. Was that a movie? With who's the blonde dude from L.A. Law? Corbyn Burnson?

Yes. Wow. It's actually a good movie. Really? I haven't seen it in a couple of decades. Hey, summer school is one of the all-time greats, man. It sounds like that kind of movie. Disorganized crime, like a bunch of bumbling criminals.

Definitely. But I think like Fred Gwynn was in it, Herman Munster. Oh, yeah. One of his last roles. Wow. All right, so you talked about theories. One of the other theories. Remember, we mentioned India manufactured that first shoe.

Some people said, you know what? This is sadly just feet of tsunami survivors from the Indian Ocean disaster December 26, 2004. And just years later, these body parts are washing up on shore, which is sort of plausible. It is. I mean, 250,000 people died in that tsunami, a lot, if not most of them were never found.

Yeah, also, we had people point out, remember when we said that modern disaster flicks are bad? We had a bunch of people right in, say, The Impossible, was a great movie about the tsunami. Yeah, and it was great. It was awesome, but I think that's different because that was a factual event. But did you categorize it as a disaster flick?

No, see, I don't categorize it as that because it was a real thing that happened. Like disaster flicks to me are when you invent some crazy disaster. 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? Yes.

OK, so it's like on that scale and everything, too. I had the impression it was much more just like a human interest. Well, it became that, but they showed film, the tsunami. Like it's not amazing how realistic it is. I will check it out then. Very, very tough movie. OK.

Very hard to watch. Have you seen 12 Years a Slave yet? Still cannot bring myself to watch that. It's pretty rough. It's just staring at me on my DVR every night. It'll be soon. I'll let you know. OK.

I'll just come into work crying. OK, what did I do now? All right, so the tsunami disaster, they said might have been one of the reasons. But I think other people said, you know, maybe that's not the best explanation. Right. Other people said, well, a lot of people

just go missing from other things like planes go down in the Salish Sea, which is the body of water between, I think, Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia, which is where most of these were found. Is it Salish? I think so. But we'll hear from Canadians one way or the other. You say Salish, I say Salish.

Who's right, really, you know? All right, well, 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. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point. But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart

radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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? Like a foot in the ocean. Exactly. And then a third foot was found, and it came roaring back, because this was yet another foot.

A totally different one. This is a woman's foot, actually. A new balance, size seven, I think. Yeah. Kirkland Island, same general area, right? The same 40-mile stretch along that coastal area. And this is within 10 months now, five feet, four people. Yeah, so the other new balance sneaker was found.

That was the fifth foot found. And then in between the- Yeah, they matched the foot to the, you know, I don't know if that's good or bad, but they found the guy's other foot. Right, the woman, that was the woman that they first- Oh, they found her two feet? Yes.

OK. So her feet were number three and number five to turn up. Gotcha. And then in between, an entirely different person's foot turned up. Men's like size 11 Nike, I think. So yeah, within a 10-month period, there were five feet belonging to four different people

that turned up on this little stretch. That's right. That's significant. Then there was a six foot. The next August, this was in actually Washington. So I guess it had its 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. 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. It really is. With all these disembodied feet. So how many feet in total, sir? I think the last two were found February of this year. Yeah, and they actually belonged to the same person, but they were found a week or two or so apart.

Yeah. And I say last. I mean, most recent. I'm sure more feet will come. It seems that way because between, so the first foot was found in August, 2007. These most recent feet were found in February, 2016. That total 17 disembodied feet found

within 150 mile stretch between Tacoma, Washington, and British Columbia. Wow. That's unusual. It seems like it. And there's a lot of theories, but no one can say definitively, here's what's going on. 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. Just want to throw that out there. Sure. But we do a lot of comedy on this show. We did a coma episode that had jokes. I mean, come on.

OK, good. Just want to see a way there. 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. Which is what a lot of people thought. Yeah, but notably because their feet weren't cut off, and you can tell. Right. They said that they were naturally disarticulated. 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. 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 longtime sufferer of depression.

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 foot number one has been matched to a missing person, case closed, right? That's right. 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, that's where the woman was last seen was jumping off a bridge. Yeah, and this had been four years previous. So now they're starting to get a pattern here where, all right,

there was another man, too, the one on Valdez Island, feet three and five. They determined it was either suicide or accident. And then another couple of people who were accidentally killed. And so they see this pattern now of, 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. Yes. I'm just being vague for now. Right. Yeah. But the weird thing is, is now all of a sudden, in a very short period of time, relatively short period of time, because one of these guys whose feet turned up

was last seen after his boat turned over in 1987. 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 Sea. Yes. And the cops had, 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, that if you're trying to get rid of a body in the water, you always tie cement blocks to a cement shoes.

It's the old joke. You know, somebody turned up like that in New York recently. Like with cement shoes? Yeah. Wow. So much like too many movies. But the idea is that you have to weight the body down. And I suppose if you were going to get rid of a body,

I'd probably do the same thing just out of, you know, discover my basis. Just to be sure, right? Yeah. Well, the thing is, if you do use cement shoes on a person, you should never do that. No. But if you did, what you're doing

is you're not ensuring that they sink right then. You're ensuring 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.

And it usually sinks so quick that if you are looking for a drowning victim, you should look on the bottom pretty close to where they were last seen on the surface. Yeah. They sink that fast. Man. So a body sinks.

And it'll sink faster in fresh water than saltwater because saltwater 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. Yeah. And depending on what you're wearing. Yeah, like a coat or shoes or something like that. That'll all weigh you down. Or a backpack. It's definitely going to pull you down. But the point is once you go under,

once you submerge in your dead or you're dying, you're going to sink pretty quick. Yeah. There's more pressure to the deeper you get into body water. You mentioned the temperature was lower, but there's also more pressure. That compresses the air in your body, and that's going to make you less floaty as well.

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 the bacteria that will eventually consume your body are just going to be slower to do so. They just move more slowly. But that bacteria is eventually going to overcome the sinking of the body

because your body's an enclosed system generally, roughly. I mean, you've got a mouth and all that. Sure. But as they're eating, they're putting out as a waste product gases, like methane and stuff like that. And your body traps that stuff, and it begins to bloat. And everyone knows that once you bloat, you float. That's right.

That's the forensics bumper sticker. Yeah. Eventually, you're going to rise at the top, like a dirigible, because of those gases that are trapped in your body. Or like a submarine? I guess. OK.

I guess. Do you mean they keep going into the air? Right. Like a blip? You float off, and then your foot will be found on the moon later. Yeah, you're going to float. And that's why whenever people discover

like a dead body in a lake much later, it's not a pretty thing. They're bloated and puffed out and decomposed. It's not pretty. But if you are trapped, say like in a vehicle or something like that, and all of this takes place, eventually your body is going to be prevented from floating away. Sure.

And it will eventually rupture. And once the rupture happens, all that gas and 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, did you read the article? About the Oklahoma guy?

Yeah, it was really weird, coincidence, and sad. It is. So like the guy, there was a guy whose brother went missing in his Camaro in, I think, like 1970. And 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 that 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. Yeah, isn't 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. And the moral of the story is that Foss Lake is really murky.

Wow. I mean, 12 feet of water, two different cars. A Camaro, yeah. A Camaro, and I think like a Packer or something like that, or Buick. Man, yeah. Unbelievable. 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? On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, just this year, there was a study. There's some criminologists at Simon Frazier U outside of Vancouver. And there have been a bunch of studies

like this over the years, where we've talked in our body farm episode, where criminologists and forensics experts try to see what happens to bodies under various conditions, including being sunk under water. So they took a pig carcass in this case, not a human kid ever. And they sunk it kind of near where, in the Salish Sea,

where these feet had been appearing. And these pigs carcasses were, they were bones in a matter of days. It was really, really fast. Yeah, they were really surprised. Surprisingly fast. Because conventional wisdom is that this took weeks, months, maybe even.

Sure, and other studies have shown that. Right, and these things, these pigs were just bones in a few days. They think it's possible that the Salish Sea is an anomaly, because this was in almost 1,000 feet of water. But it's really highly oxygenated. So there's a lot of life down there. There's a lot more things to eat a body.

Exactly. Whereas if you took it to another body of water in 1,000 feet, 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. Yeah, here was my one problem with the way they did this study.

Maybe I overthought it. But they trapped it under fencing, which presumably means that it was just kind of in one place the whole time. That's true. I would have like, if you're going to simulate a human body, I would have maybe shackled a leg and put a long leader, 100, so it could move around

and see what a body would do. See the sights. Yeah, because a body can move on the bottom a little, because there's currents under there. You know? So that's just minor gripe. Yeah. But yeah, did you see the video of it, the time elapsed video?

Oh, no. It's really something. No. It's gross. Don't need it. So there was 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'd been in the water, submerged, and then the amount of body parts that were left, or exactly what body parts were left. Right.

And basically, he went back and reverse engineered the process by which a body comes apart when it's submerged underwater. Yeah. That's valuable information. It really is, you know? And so what they came up with was that the skin, the thinnest areas of skin typically cover joints,

like your wrists and ankles. Yeah. Those get eaten away first, which exposes that soft tissue beneath that holds your hand to your arm or your foot to your leg, and then that gets attacked by scavengers and all the other stuff that's eating it. And so between the things eating that soft tissue,

holding the bone together, and the wave action of the currents at the bottom of the body of water, the hands and then the feet work loosely, disarticulate. So they naturally will fall off the body as the body's decomposing, submerged underwater, and they are among the first parts to go. That's right. And if you're just a foot and you're not wearing a shoe,

then chances are that foot will get consumed, and you will never see it again. Although one of these feet was a bare foot, 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 you're

disarticulated at the ankle, that foot is still inside that shoe. Going to make it really hard for a scavenger to get in there. And it's very possible that that foot will not decompose or at least decompose very slowly. Right. And not only that, will it be protected. Once it disarticulates, if it's wearing a certain kind of shoe,

specifically an athletic shoe that's made in the last, like, 15, 20 years, it's going to have air injected into the sole. And in the case of, like, remember Nike Air Maxes, they had actual air pockets in between the sole and the bottom of the shoe. And that actually creates a buoyant effect that will lift a shoe, including one that

has a foot still inside, to the surface. Yeah. So they started looking at 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 rubbery sole. So it's going to be protected even more from birds and things. So what we have here is a case of people

that just happened to die and their feet happened to come away from their bodies and be well-protected by these awesome running shoes. Yes. And eventually made their ways 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?

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. And there's not a lot there to undermine it 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. 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, it basically recirculates. It doesn't come back out very often. Well, that 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, you're like, well, there's the explanation. The idea is that the Salish Sea would experience

a higher incidence of flotsam of all types, including feet. Which is one explanation. Yeah. It could be right. Well, I'm sure that has something to do with it. Sure. The other explanation is one of my favorite things in the world, which is a version of,

well, there's a couple of names for it. 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're looking for something, you're going to find it. All these people saw in the news feet washing up

on the shore. So like you said, they all started looking for feet. And every time a foot was found, it just supported the idea that, yes, there's something really weird going on here, which only increased the awareness and the focus on this, which means that people started seeing more and more feet. That's right.

So frequency illusion 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. And the confirmation bias in this case is the reassurance that it's just proof, more and more proof of its omnipresence, more feet.

Right. You could see that happening here, for sure. Pretty interesting. It's called the Bader-Meinhof phenomenon, too. Yeah, I didn't know where that came from. That was a dude until I looked it up. 1994, it was just a commenter on the pioneer press of St. Paul Discussion Board.

And he had heard about the Bader-Meinhof terrorist group a couple of times in one day. Right, for the first time. Yeah, and just said, you know, Bader-Meinhof phenomenon. Right. And it became a meme. Yeah. I thought it was more, I don't know,

I thought it was cooler than that. No. I thought there was some cool explanation that wasn't just some dude online. It definitely sounds cooler than it is. It sounds way cooler than it is. But it's a common thing. People, you talk about 11-11 on the clock

is a big one for a lot of people. Say, you know, I see 11-11 all the time in the clock. Right. 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. And this is a really, really unnerving suggestion. Because 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. We just aren't aware of this as human beings.

And outside of Vancouver. Right. So that makes Vancouver the capital of the disembodied feet capital of the world. I don't know that that necessarily holds up, though. I don't think it's been explained. Yeah, because I mean, I bet you it's frequency illusion. I disagree.

I think it's something else. It probably has to do with the hydrology or something about Vancouver or British Columbia. There's this database called Namus. And it's like a catalog of unidentified remains. And I did a search for disarticulated foot. And out of like 40,000 unidentified remains in the US. 30,000 were from Vancouver?

Only three were disarticulated feet. And one was found in the Washington state area. So you could technically kind of include it in that weird Vancouver clump. One was in Maryland and one was in Dallas. That was it. So it does really seem like Vancouver has a higher than usual incidence

of disarticulated feet showing up in its area. Wowie. Which is weird. Are you on the case? No. I'm just a fan. Oh, OK. So you got anything else?

No. I just realized, though, I've been like rotating my feet around and just feeling weird. Like you're sitting there? 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 Solomon's outside article. Those were all pretty standout. And since I said standout, it's time for Listener Mail. 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 these on Delta. Yeah. And this is not an ad for Delta. 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 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.

I just had listened to your How to Survive a Plane Crash episode from 2008. Just that week before, and I remember thinking how grateful I was that I was in the back of the plane because Chuck said I had a better chance of surviving that way. It's not much of a chance, but sure. I just thought you would like to know that despite the horrible weather going on, I never lost connection with your show.

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. Even scarier, you know? Yeah. I'm not going to try anymore. Well, let's go to Houston close enough. Yeah.

In the end, everyone made it to Austin safely, though. So thanks for everything you guys do. 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 immediately take back off? No, that's never happened.

Like they touch down and take off? If you watch those waiting to get onto a plane, it's a really good way to just poke at your brain. Wow. Yeah. No, thank you. If you want to get in touch with us, you can hit us up on Twitter at SYSK Podcast.

You can join us on Instagram at SYSK Podcast, too. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.