This Day in History: A report was published on this day in 1930 of a missing Inuit village in what is now Nunavut, Canada. "Lake Anjikuni is the locale for the disappearance of an entire village. It all happened in November 1930, when a trapper named Joe Labelle was looking for shelter for the night. Labelle was familiar with the Inuit village, whose population ranges from 30-2000, depending on who you believe. He made his way there and found quite an eerie scene—the villagers were nowhere to be found. Everything else, including food and rifles, had been left behind." Source
He found unfinished shirts that still had needles in them and food hanging over fire pits and therefore concluded that the villagers had left suddenly. Even more disturbing, he found seven sled dogs dead from starvation and a grave that had been dug up. Labelle knew that an animal could not have been responsible because the stones circling the grave were undisturbed. He reported this to the North-West Mounted Police, who conducted a search for the missing people; no one was ever found.
Such is the story as it appears in Frank Edwards's 1959 book Stranger than Science; other versions appear in Whitley Strieber's science fiction novel Majestic and Dean Koontz's horror novel Phantoms. The World's Greatest UFO Mysteries (presented as fact) has an even more detailed version, as do other websites and books, adding other standard details such as mysterious lights in the sky, empty graveyards, and over a thousand people missing. A reprint of the story is found in the November 27, 1930 Danville Bee, written by journalist Emmett E. Kelleher. That article states that Joe Labelle found an empty Eskimo camp with 6 tents and that 25 men, women and children had vanished.
While there are some who have "debunked" this story, the original published article does indeed exist.
