# data[].attributes.body
Overview
Depicted below is a picture of the Strait of Georgia -- a theory that claims the feet floated from this strait and washed up on the coast of BC. In the Article referenced above , Susan Allen speaks about the theory of the Strait of Georgia and its relation to the severed feet. She talks about how the feet most definitely came from the Strait and not from an outside source.

Analysis
I think appeal to authority actually may apply here. Susan Allen is a well known professor and may people will take her word because of her expertise and knowledge. Another red flag is again, confusion of correlation with causation. Just because they theorize that the feet came from the Strait doesn't mean all the feet did, some may have been pushed via current into the strait and no one could know. The Strait didn't cause the washed up feet, there is no correlation between the two items.

Again, this theory is unexplained. No one knows if the severed feet were just floating around in the Strait of Georgia and no one truly knows if that's where all the feet came from. This will still go unexplained for quite some time.

# data[].attributes.body
Overview
The image below depicts the 2011 tsunami that rocked Japan and caused a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Reactor.

Analysis
I believe that the confusion of correlation with causation red flag applies to this image. Many people theorize that the feet may have washed up on the shore as a result of the aforementioned tsunami. However, feet have been washing up on shore for far longer than the tsunami theory supports - the disaster occurred in 2012, but feet were first discovered in 2007. While this event did take many lives and did result in many bodies being sucked into the Pacific Ocean, it cannot account for the feet that were found in the four year period prior. The tsunami theory may explain feet found after 2011, but simply cannot stand as a logical explanation for those found before. There is no evidence linking the tsunami to the severed feet.

Unexplained, as often mentioned, applies to this theory. We do not know for certain if the tsunami can be blamed for the shoes washing up after 2011, and we really do not have any reasonable way of determining if this theory is accurate.

# data[].attributes.body
Overview
The image below depicts some of the first shoes discovered between 2007-2012 that washed ashore along the stretch of beach with the severed feet.

Analysis
A reason for belief that can be associated with this image is patternicity. Early on in the investigation, it was noticed that the severed feet that would wash ashore were exclusively the right foot and were primarily men's right feet. This lead police to believe that their could in fact be a connection to this pattern, such as a serial killer; however, it was later disproven when a severed left foot that was female washed ashore. Although there was in fact no connection between the feet, the police created a connection between them by observing and discovering a pattern between the feet, i.e. the fact that they were all right feet and men's feet.

# data[].attributes.body
Overview
The video below details several of the theories applicable to the BC Feet mystery, and appears to discuss them in a fairly non-biased way.

Analysis
Because of the objectivity of this video, I believe that the only applicable analytical options are the reasons for belief. For example, I believe that unexplained applies to this video, as none of these theories have been proved. There is no hard evidence that supports either way that any of these theories are true. Additionally, I think agenticity can be applied to this video, because we as people want to be able to assign blame to something, whether it be supernatural or nefarious in nature, and I think that the theories in this video and the range of how different they are certainly display this kind of agenticity. Every theory in this case wants to assign blame to something different, regardless of evidence.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Since August 20, 2007, several detached human feet have been discovered on the coasts of the Salish Sea in British Columbia (Canada) and Washington (United States). The feet belonged to five men, one woman, and three other people of unknown sex, the two left feet having been matched with two of the right feet.

# data[].attributes.body
Overview
This video appears to have made things more clear about the severed foot Theory. Because it dives deeper into explaining how the feet can be separated from the body and what investigators really believe the reason is for all these feet being washed up on shore.

Analysis
When watching this video i knew i started to believe that maybe there was more of a scientific explanation as to why the feet kept falling off the bodies. which for myself Proof by Verbosity applies in this case because i feel like once the gentleman in the video began to explain that the feet and the hands are the first thing to go on a body that begins to decompose in the water. In my eyes it became clear that in fact that is what was happening to these bodies. That in this video there seemed to be more proof that it was not a mass serial killer and that it was just bodies connected to suicides or accidents in the water.

I feel like perception and observation really apply here because it really depends on the views of the person who are watching this video. I believe that not everyone's views will be the same after watching this but it will get you thinking on what the truth can be and that what i believe is fascinating about mysterious like this because it really comes down to what on are willing to believe is true or not.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Shoes with severed feet - Canada's spine-chilling phenomena

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A severed foot inside a shoe was found on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, making a total of at least 16 such grisly discoveries along the Pacific Northwest shoreline since 2007. RT's Alex Michailovich joins from Toronto to tell us what authorities have to say about the odd occurrence.

# data[].attributes.body
Overview
This video comes from an individual who hosts a Mysteries and Oddities podcast on YouTube. In this video, he begins by explaining what exactly the BC foot beach is, and how long the discovery of severed feet has been occurring for. He describes various theories surrounding the appearance of the feet, ranging from mafia killings to victims of the 2004 tsunami disaster in India, or the simple explanation that this entire phenomenon could just be coincidental.

Analysis
A pseudoscience red flag that you can relate to this post would be confusion of correlation with causation. The fact that so many feet have washed ashore on this particular beach may lead some individuals to believe that this beach may in fact be cursed. Although the two variables, the feet and the beach, correlate by chance, they are in fact unrelated to one another at all. It just so happens that feet have been washing ashore on this particular beach, most likely due to the specific current that runs along this stretch of beach down through to the United States.
A reason for belief that you can relate to this post would be the unexplained. The individual in the podcast theorizes many different scenarios as to why the severed feet have occurred at this particular beach, but the fact that remains true is that no one knows for certain why this phenomenon is occurring. The tsunami theory has been disproven and there has never been a reason for the police to suggest that foul play has been involved, i.e. the mafia or a serial killer. I believe that we will never know for certain what is causing severed feet to wash ashore on this particular beach, and it will be a phenomenon that will remain unexplained.
Limitations and flaws that occur within this video include the fact that the individual hosting the podcast does not have any credentials that would support the information that he is putting forth. The individual seems deeply invested in this phenomenon, and the pseudoscience red flag confirmation bias can be applied to him, as his research may have been geared toward his own personal belief of the phenomenon and the answers he had hoped to receive during his research. As well, the individual would often refer to other sources he had read regarding a particular fact or theory but would not provide the source of the information or the name of the article he had read. Thus proving not to be very reliable with his information.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mysteries and Oddities:  Severed Foot Beach

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Uploaded by williamdefalco on 2016-10-01.

# data[].attributes.body
Overview
This article discusses the applicable conspiracy theories that have been proposed by individuals with knowledge of this mystery. The range is quite large.

Analysis
Frankly, I believe that appeal to authority is evident in this example. The article speaks to several individuals who, while may not be known by name in their level of celebrity, have titles that imply that they have the authority to speak of such things and that they are believable. For example, a lawyer is spoken to regarding a theory of a serial killer, and a scientist is spoken to regarding the theory of the Strait of Georgia. The titles of these individuals encourage belief, because they appear to have authority in their respective fields.

Additionally, I believe that proof by verbosity could be tangentially related to this article. When speaking with the criminal lawyer, the reader is bombarded by several questions that he has, making it appear that he is trying to overwhelm the individual with the amount of 'evidence' that he has of a serial killer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There is no shortage of speculation on why the remains of human feet are washing up on British Columbia's shores, with theories ranging from a serial killer to a morgue worker with a morbid sense of humour.

Susan Allen, a UBC professor of Earth Sciences, studies tides and currents in the Strait of Georgia and believes all the feet that are washing up came from the Strait.

"If these shoes are floating, and the surface currents tend to exit, not enter the Strait of Georgia, (it's) unlikely these shoes come from outside, almost most definitely from inside the Strait of Georgia system," she said.

In one of researcher Gail Anderson's experiments in the ocean off Victoria, B.C., a pig carcass is dragged about by crab activity, allowing her to discover clues about how bodies decompose in water.

Anderson, of the Simon Fraser University Centre for Forensic Research, said that it is difficult for police to study what happens to bodies in water.

She believes the shoes are linked to one or two events.

"Even with seismic activity, there are all sorts of things happening on our sea floor, something has released this, and of course now everyone's looking," she told CTV British Columbia.

Criminal lawyer and crime author Michael Slade discussed his views on a Vancouver radio station, speculating a serial killer could be at work. In one of his books, a serial killer puts body parts along the shores of the province to taunt police.

He said that there are several questions he has:

Why are only feet being found?

Why are they all clad in runners?

Why are they being found in the same area?

Why have none been found in the U.S.?

"We also have to consider that this could be a serial killer," he said. "Somebody who right now is underneath the radar. That has to be on the table."

More than 20 happy and healthy young men have gone missing in B.C. in the past several years but Slade admits that there is no evidence that their lives came to a violent end.

But he adds, "If those men are all athletically healthy, well you've got a tie-in to running shoes right there."

Police have said that they don't suspect foul play, but Slade believes authorities have been slow to make the connection in other high profile cases like that of Robert Pickton.

A plane crashed in that area carrying five people in 2005, but so far DNA has not matched any of the feet to the victims.

Callers to the radio show on which Slade was a guest proposed theories from a morgue worker playing tricks to tsunami victims.

Richard Thomson, a physical oceanographer with the federal Institute of Ocean Sciences on Vancouver Island told The Globe and Mail it "could be a rather sick hoax by someone with access to cadavers and running shoes."

But he says there are other explanations, and he thinks flotation and currents are the key to explaining it.

So far most feet have been found north of the mouth of the Fraser River:

A right foot in a size 12 Adidas running shoe was found on Jedediah Island

A right foot in a size 12 Reebok, was found on Gabriola Island

A right foot in a size 10 1/2 running shoe, was found on Valdes Island

A right foot in a sneaker was found on Westham Island

A left foot in a shoe was found on Kirkland Island

Thomson said possible sources include the Fraser, the Squamish river, the Gulf and San Juan Islands, Burrard Inlet, and sites in northern Washington State including Birch Bay and Boundary Bay.
With a report from CTV British Columbia's St. John Alexander and Carrie Stefanson

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Theories abound in B.C. severed feet mystery

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There is no shortage of speculation on why the remains of human feet are washing up on British Columbia's shores, with theories ranging from a serial killer to a morgue worker with a morbid sense of humour.

# data[].attributes.body
Overview
This article explains UBC professor Susan Allen's interpretation of the severed food mystery and its relation to the Strait of Georgia. This article explains the theory of a serial killer who may be connected to the 20 disappearances of young men.

Analysis
Confusion of correlation with causation is a good red flag to associate with the missing feet. Due to the fact 14 feet washed up on the beach does not mean there is any correlation to the 20 missing young men from BC. Also, a women's foot also appeared, quashing the theory of the 20 missing men were somehow murdered. Perhaps proof of verbosity may also apply to this mystery. There is a huge quantity of missing feet that some how lead to an "unknown" serial killer -- no one is looking for a different theory, everyone is convinced that the missing feet is in direct correlation with the missing young men.

I believe unexplained applies to this article as well. No one really knows or understands why the feet washed up in BC or why they are severed. No one has connected the feet to any murders or disappearances yet -- there is not yet enough evidence to see where the severed feet have come from.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When you're dealing with a tale of intrigue and suspicion in which nothing wants to be what it seems, the best place to start is at the beginning, before everything about the Mystery of the Feet got complicated. Before the dogged reporter and her theory of the Smiley Face Killers. Before the funeral feast of the submerged pig and the ravenous lobsters. And way before my afternoon with a knife-wielding man named Mountain Mike. Before all this, there is only the bucolic image of a little girl on a beach, looking for shells.

On August 20, 2007

On May 22, 2008

On Feb. 2, 2008

On June 18, 2008

On Nov. 10, 2008

It's August 20, 2007. The girl and her family are on a sailing trip in British Columbia. They toss anchor at uninhabited Jedediah Island, 50 miles northwest of Vancouver. It's high summer, but the day is moody with drizzle, the cedars dark and foreboding above the pretty curl of cove.

The girl finds four sneakers on the sand. She lines them up, chooses one. It's a Campus-brand shoe, a righty, white with blue mesh, size 12. She unties the laces, tugging at a sandy sock within.

And, right then, out plops the Start of Everything. Because inside the sock is a human foot. Over the next 15 months, six more feet, also clad in socks and sneakers, will wash ashore at six different places on the puzzle of islands in the Georgia Strait, between Vancouver and Vancouver Island, and in the nearby Fraser River delta.

At first the feet are all men's feet, all right feet. Then a woman's foot appears. Then a left foot. Four of the feet match: one pair of women's feet, one pair of men's. That's seven feet, bow-tied in seaweed, that were once attached to a total of five bodies bodies that don't turn up.

The media arrive by helicopter and boat and do what the media do best: go apeshit. Reporters deliver fevered sound bites and write punny headlines (" Investigators Seek Leg-Up in Mystery Feet Case"), and for a few news cycles in early 2008, the whole world widens its eyes and scratches its head. Even the United News of Bangladesh clucks at the odd and tragic goings-on up there in British Columbia.

In Vancouver, at the HQ of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the authorities know little and say less, and they do it in that grumpy, pinch-lipped way that makes people wonder what they aren't being told. In November 2008, Corporal Annie Linteau, a Mountie spokeswoman, tells me over the phone that they aren't even close to coming up with an explanation. But that, she says, is mainly because there's no reason to think anything fishy is going on.

Seriously? Yes, Linteau says, pointing out that there were no saw marks on the bones, no evidence of foul play. Without that, what do seven feet amount to, really, other than ghoulish serendipity?

By the time I head out from New York for a personal look-see, in early 2009, detectives haven't solved the mystery, but they haven't given up. The Major Crimes Unit is trying to put names to the feet by tracking down DNA from relatives of 57 high-probability men on B.C.'s missing-persons rolls. (At press time, only one foot, the first, had been identified: It belonged to a missing man whom the authorities won't name, in deference to his family.) But even this gumshoe work might not crack the case. As Corporal Linteau tells me when we meet in person inside a windowless briefing room, where she flips through pictures of empty shoes set against rulers, like grim flash cards the search is limited to people known to be unaccounted for.

And so, as I head for the water-licked fringes of Greater Vancouver, the mystery is still as open-ended as a drinking straw.

No Reception

One foot on a beach might've only made a splash in the local Alberni Valley Times. But six days after the first foot was found, on a Sunday afternoon in late August 2007, Vancouver couple George Baugh and his wife, Michèle Géris, went hiking on Gabriola Island, about 40 miles south of Jedediah Island and across the Georgia Strait from Vancouver.

"We were on a trail that obviously hadn't been used for a while ferns were all grown up over it," George is telling me. It's February, and we're sitting inside a café in downtown Vancouver. He says he and Michèle were walking single file, Michèle in the lead, when suddenly she stopped and said, "Look, there's a foot."

This is why I especially wanted to talk to George and Michèle. It's not just that they found a foot (though that helps); it's that, in all the newspaper accounts, the couple seemed so sensible. And that's what a story about severed feet cries out for, isn't it? Grounding? Credibility?

George is a slim, 52-year-old wine importer whose entire presence whispers Canadian civility. He's wearing a forest-green turtleneck and a tight, gray-flecked Caesar haircut. When Michèle came across the shoe, a Reebok runner sitting a couple of yards off the trail at the base of a madrona tree, they both kept walking at first. It was just a sneaker in the woods, after all; maybe it had been carried up from the beach by a dog. But then they went back, because something bothered them about that shoe. It looked so...full.

George poked it with Michèle's hiking stick. He saw "something white, not dried out at all, sort of greasy-looking" nesting inside a fringe of frayed white sock. He called 911: no reception. Michèle suggested that they knock on the doors of homes near the path homes that just happened to be sitting on an isolated country lane called Stalker Road.

George: "I said, 'No, we're not going to knock at any houses. These guys could be involved.'"

Now, here in the café, he's talking, with characteristic thoughtfulness, about how humans crave patterns. It's how we make sense of things, he says. That day on Gabriola, as they sat waiting for the Mounties to arrive, he pulled a newspaper out of a rural mailbox. "Then we read about the Jedediah foot, which was the first one," he says. "I thought, I think we've found the other foot! We've solved the mystery."

But the mystery was just getting started. In February 2008, workers clearing brush on Valdes Island, just south of Gabriola, found Foot Number Three. It was another righty! Another runner! Another size 12! (Well, actually, size 11. But...close enough!)

And this well, this was when things sorta went nuts.

Northwest Noir

Oddity breeds speculation. Deny the people a quick answer to strange doings and they'll gladly make up a story to fill in the gaps.
They're victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami. They're part of the rising body count in VanCity's mushrooming war of gangbangers.
Somewhere in there was the mouse peep of another story, perhaps a truer story that these were just distraught people who took a long walk off a short pier, or the unfound victims of some half-forgotten plane crash. Conspiracy abhors a vacuum.

And, of course, there was always that other possibility.

A couple of years ago, a sociologist named James DeFronzo ran the numbers. The northwestern United States, he found, has more serial killers per capita than anywhere else in the nation.

Argue the reason, but this land of Most Livable Cities Portland! Seattle! breeds killers the way Texas sires halfbacks. The Want-Ad Killer. The Box Car Killer. Ted Bundy. The Green River Killer, who likely murdered more than 48 women around Seattle in the eighties and nineties before getting nabbed in 2001. Long before that, in the 1910s, there was Dr. Linda Hazzard, in Olalla, Washington, whose cure for patients consisted of frequent enemas and a few teaspoons of asparagus broth a day. She killed at least 40 people at her "sanitarium," Wilderness Heights. The locals called it Starvation Heights.

Like the apple maggot and American Idol, some unfortunate things don't stop at the border. Perhaps you've heard of Robert Pickton, B.C.'s shame? For several years, starting in the nineties, he brought prostitutes from Vancouver's heroin-plagued Downtown East side to his pig farm outside the city. There, he threw wild parties at his Piggy Palace Good Times Society and killed perhaps 49 women, grinding some of them up to feed the pigs and serving pork chops to visitors. Before Pickton, there was the "Boozing Barber," Gilbert Paul Jordan, who killed at least seven Vancouver prostitutes. Farther north, between Prince Rupert and Prince George, as many as 19 women are missing along the so-called Highway of Tears.

There's a reason The X-Files was filmed in Vancouver and not Phoenix. Call it Northwest noir. It has its own hallmarks: winter's sooty, daylong dusk; the look of neon bleeding into the gutters; the way people sometimes head into the mountains and simply disappear. For all its deep-green beauty, the Northwest has more than enough mist and mystery to give a body chicken-skin.

So, for people up here, when three feet appeared, it wasn't much of a leap to imagine the worst. The Reebok Ripper? Sure, why not? After all, as the poet said, we have been acquainted with the night.

Savage Road, No Exit

The feet kept coming in 2008. After Foot Three was found in February, Four, a woman's New Balance, washed up in May, just south of Vancouver on Kirkland Island, in the Fraser River delta. In June, Five came ashore downstream, on the rural farming enclave of Westham Island, at the dock of married fishermen Mike and Sharon Bennett. Was the tide sweeping the feet upriver from the same spot? I wondered. What could savvy watermen like the Bennetts tell me?

Driving out to Westham Island in midwinter makes you think of that Annie Dillard line about the Northwest: "It was not quite raining, but everything was wet." Moss on roofs. Ducks floating in drowned berry fields. All this can put you in a dark and darty-eyed state of mind if you're on an errand to talk about severed feet. It doesn't help that the sign guiding me to the water's edge reads SAVAGE ROAD (NO EXIT).

When I first called Mike, he'd said, "It's sure been an odd one around here, because I know two of the other people who found feet. Now that's weird, eh?" Yes, I agreed, that was weird. Obviously, we had a shared sensibility; he told me to drop on by when I got to town.

Now Mike is walking into his kitchen from outside, where he's been readying the family herring boat for the season. He's a strong-looking guy, buzz-cut. Out of the gate, he'd like to share some thoughts about the Mounties' working theory that all these feet are a coincidence, just so much cosmic buckshot. "They're trying to make it look like a freak random thing," he says. "But that's just complete bullshit."

So what's his take? "I would say they all came from up the river," he says. "In fact, I'm sure of it. We found ours during the freshet time of year." The freshet, he explains, is when the spring snowmelt down the Fraser is so big that nothing gets upriver by wind or tide.

"This is one of the great rivers of the world," Mike continues, proud to live on its banks. After coursing nearly 900 miles through the Rockies and the Cariboos and the Coast Range, B.C.'s longest river ends here in a spraddle of channels and rich black mud, but not before it drains a Utah-size piece of provincial real estate. O Fraser, Drainpipe of the Canadian West! That foot could've come from anywhere! (Except downstream, is Mike's point.)

Mike and Sharon's foot showed up on June 16, 2008. "It was in the morning," he recalls, "coffee time." On a gorgeous late-spring day, they took their joe and headed out to see a friend whose boat was tied up at the end of their dock. As they walked out, they saw a runner floating sole side up. "There's a sneaker for you," Sharon joked. "That's not good," Mike replied, sounding serious. "It's a low floater."

This one was inside a Nike, size 11, the first lefty. Eventually police would match it up with Foot Three.

Long after it was bagged and tagged, the foot kept bothering Mike and Sharon. "The sock was in perfect shape," Mike says. "And...ah!" he adds, as if he nearly forgot, "the shoe had what appeared to be a bloodstain on the tongue."

Wait a bloodstain? The police never mentioned a bloodstain. Mike gives me this look, like, Now you know.

Everybody I talk to has a pet solution to the feet mystery, but Mike offers one I haven't heard yet: the Container Theory. "My thought was, if somebody killed a bunch of guys and put their bodies in a container, and after a couple of years the container popped open, the shoes would be the only thing that came up."

He adds, "It could be a car gone over a bank, when I said 'a container.'"

"So it's not necessarily nefarious?"

"But remember the blood on the tongue," he says, chiding me.

Bloody footwear, "containers" stuffed with bodies my head is spinning. Sharon agrees to walk me down to where they found the foot. By the water, a skiff dangles from a winch. A gull cries overhead. Sharon stands on the dock and jabs a cigarette at the green, glassy water. Back at the house, she told me that finding the foot had left her with an ugly feeling. "I cried a little bit," she said. "And after I lifted the foot, I couldn't wash my hand enough."

Now, standing here, I feel foolish and selfish. What did I expect to gain by making her walk down to the dock? Behind us, the late-afternoon sky is exploding, pink cotton-candy clouds edged with gold adrift on the mirrored water. It's ridiculously peaceful.

Sharon says, "We had a friend who drowned a few years ago, on the Fraser. And that was the first thing we thought of when we found it. That it was him."

And suddenly I understand: Crying is an entirely appropriate reaction to finding a foot floating outside your peaceful island home.

When Twenty Two Vanished

The Big Picture. That's what this tale lacks. Context. Perspective. A frame, to show how the puzzle pieces fit together. But the police won't or can't say much about it. Who else knows the shape of things?

Sandra Thomas.

Nobody writes as often or as well about missing British Columbians as Sandra, a pleasant bulldog of a reporter for the twice-a-week, 140,000-circulation Vancouver Courier. Sandra is 50, a heavy-breasted woman with a recent islands tan and red nails as perfect as Chiclets. When I drop by her house, she admits that, for a while, she didn't think much about the feet. She remembers the day she started to care, though. "It was after Bryan Braumberger went missing. It will be two years this June."

On the evening of June 1, 2007, Braumberger, a 17-year-old from the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby, left a friend's house. His car was found not far from his home the next day, unlocked, lights on. "He just vanished," says Sandra.

A few months later, around the time the first foot turned up, a young guy named John Kahler disappeared. Then Derek Kelly. Then Kellen McElwee. "It was after Kellen went missing in March that I really started to think," Sandra says. Her research led to a shocking discovery: Not just a few but dozens of men had gone missing in southwestern B.C. in the previous four years. Even if you took away the ones who had any reason at all to disappear the tweakers, the drug mules, the psychically ravaged you still had, Sandra wrote, "22 healthy, apparently happy men from southwestern B.C. who have simply vanished."

No way, you're thinking. This is Vancouver. Olympic City! And you'd be right, up to a point. From some angles, the place really is Emerald City, with its green-glass high-rises ringed by mountains that wear a geisha face of fresh powder, the air smelling of all good things earth and mountains and salt water. But shift your gaze a little, or pick up a newspaper, and your perspective changes. You read about seven young people shot in the past six days. You see the shuffling knots of junkies and whores at Hastings and Main. You find out that young men are vanishing like cigarette smoke. Even paradise has its underbelly.

And it's not just Vancouver. All of B.C. has a missing-persons problem. Since 1950, more than one in five people who've gone missing in Canada have disappeared here, even though the province is home to just 13 percent of the population. That adds up to more than 2,400 people gone as of August 2009. By rough comparison, Kentucky, with the same population, is looking for 515.

For decades, you could rightly blame it on B.C.'s role as North America's breakwater. Charlie was last seen hauling in his nets? OK, sad, but at least we know how he died. Yet today hardly anybody disappears by falling off his Chris-Craft. Other things are making them go away and in much greater numbers during this decade than ever before. Nobody knows why.

Back at Sandra's dining-room table, I'm feeling dizzy. Again. Every puzzle piece I pick up fractures into smaller pieces. Through the sliding glass door, I can see her backyard, and above that the sky, which is white, or maybe smudged with the first bits of a front a sky waiting for color.

"But where do the feet fit in, Sandra?" I ask.

She smooths the newspaper stories on the table and says that, once she began writing about the missing men, "I start wondering if there's a connection between the three of them the feet, the missing men, and the Smiley Face Killers."

According to two former NYPD detectives, Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte, there's a loose-knit gang of murderers at work across North America. They've killed 35 or more healthy, college-age men over the past decade or so, and they've gotten away with it by making the deaths look like drowning accidents. Graffiti'd smiley faces have been found at the alleged crime scenes.

Or so the detectives claim. Most law-enforcement officials aren't convinced. There's simply not much evidence that these deaths are attributable to anything but the sad confluence of young men, booze, and deep water. Still, Duarte and Gannon have hawked their theory on outlets from the Today show to CNN, and Sandra has pondered in the Courier whether the Smiley Face Killers have anything to do with the feet or with Vancouver's missing men. So far, the feet don't match any of the absent locals, and the Mounties are dismissive. But Sandra's point is, Who knows?

She raps a nail on the table. "The day after my first story came out," she says, "a foot was found near the Massey Tunnel. And again on June 16, after I was on the radio discussing the missing men, another foot washed up."

Wait, is she saying there was a message from the killer?

"I'm sure it's coincidental," she says. "But, still, it's creepy."

Footloose Beach

Many statistical problems have one piece of data that doesn't seem to fit. For B.C. police, it was a black Everest hiking shoe that washed up almost exactly one year after the first foot appeared. The trouble with Foot Six? It was found on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, a good 100 miles southwest of Vancouver, on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Could it be related? Was a copycat at work?

On the scene that foggy afternoon was Detective Sergeant Lyman Moores, of the Clallam County sheriff's office, who just now is steering his black Ford Excursion toward the beach where the foot was discovered. If there's a dress code somewhere for middle-aged detectives, Moores got the memo. He has the bald crown, the mustache, the thick-soled black loafers. A Styrofoam cup of bad filling-station coffee balances on a knee of his prune-colored wash-and-wear pants. With his non-steering hand, he gestures his way through an overview of what he and his detectives have learned about that shoe.

Only 252 size 11's of that model were made, Moores says. "They were all sold in Canada."

A-ha! So the foot came from Canada! I mean, it had to. Right?

Well, maybe. But it could have been bought there and worn down here. Moores knows he needs more evidence before reaching any conclusion.

He pulls over at the rusting gate of an old seaside camp, the Silver King Resort, and we follow the seashore smell of clams to a small bay lined with skipping stones. By the steps to the water, some wit has written FOOTLOOSE BEACH on a piece of driftwood. Not 50 yards away, Moores points out where he found the foot. He toes a thick mulch of tide wrack with a black loafer.

"The wind'll often come from the north, and this is what happens," he says. "The day we found the shoe, the wind had been blowing real hard from the north. There's no doubt in my mind that what's out in the strait is gonna wash up here." So, given this, he says, maybe the foot did come from up in Canada.

That all makes sense, but I ask Moores a slightly broader question: What the hell is going on?

He answers with a detective's caution. "My mind's wide-open that it could be a combination of things," he says. "Did a plane crash that we don't know about? Was this something related to a sports team? Because they were all wearing athletic shoes..."

A cop doesn't become a detective without being good at what he does, which means being suspicious. "I can't help thinking, being a cop, that someone's trying to dispose of bodies," he says. "I remember a few years ago, there was a mortician down south who was burying them in his backyard." And what about that other guy, who was supposed to be burying people's cremated ashes at sea but instead stacked them in a storage locker?

Yeah, what about those guys? Surely they could have imitators?

"It's just too much of a coincidence," Moores says, squinting out toward the strait, where Canada lurks in the mist.

The Knife-Wielding Stranger

Water is the common denominator to this mystery. Water embraces these islands. It carried the feet to shore. I've got to get closer to the water to get closer to the answer. But how?

Then Mountain Mike calls back. Mountain Mike, who found Foot Four and who's called Mountain Mike, he says, "because I can survive just about anywhere." Which includes, apparently, an island in the Fraser River, alone, with only his dog, Sophie, for company.

The town of Ladner is a sloughy place south of Vancouver where farmland, sea, and suburb meet and where Mountain Mike comes in sometimes for a beer. "Ask him how many knives he's carrying!" the boys at Speed's Pub said when I went there looking for him. (One guessed five.) Now, as Mountain Mike motors toward me up the dead harbor, I can hear their laughter again, and I think, Uh-oh. Because now that I see Mountain Mike, he sure looks like he might be the One, with his crazy Taliban beard crawling up his face to meet his low-tugged camo hat, and his feral caterpillar eyebrows wrestling atop his nose.

A ginger dog bounds off the skiff to sniff my boots. "She's the one that found the foot," Mountain Mike says. Not much of a retriever, he says. Won't touch dead things. She's left-handed, he adds. A real rat killer.

This seems like a lot of information. And very little. So I just nod and climb aboard.

As we head out of the slough, I take stock: I'm deepening my knowledge of missing and possibly murdered and dismembered citizens by heading out alone with a disheveled, knife-wielding stranger who looks and smells like a Sergio Leone villain.

But it's too late to turn back, so I decide to enjoy the morning sun, which is making the waters as bright as hammered sheeting, empty and beautiful. I comment on the river's beauty. Mountain Mike corrects me. There's crap all over the place, he says, pointing out a log off the port bow. Run into one of those babies at full speed and you can forget about it. Mike's 57, a lifelong fisherman, and he's helped fish out his share of watermen's bodies over the years.

We cross Ladner Reach, tie up at Kirkland Island, and hop onto an ATV. Mountain Mike is the caretaker of four islands clumped in the Fraser's south arm, a private bird-hunting preserve. While he drives, he talks about fishing, about birds, about trees. He pretty much talks the whole time.

The ATV rounds the northeastern tip of the island; the main channel of the Fraser, which bounds Kirkland Island's north side, swings into view. It's a good half-mile from our shore to the river's far shore: home to the city of Richmond. "They found the other foot right across the way there," he says, pointing at a distant riprapped shore. Foot Seven, he means the last one found, and the one that matched Mountain Mike's Foot Four. It was picked up last November by a local politician's wife.

At a break in the trees, I stare hard at the Fraser's wind-scuffed water. Mountain Mike is right. It looks peaceful, but it's not, at all. The water is full of flotsam a deadhead nodding in a wave, a branch reaching up. Maybe the clue I'm supposed to absorb is that the bodies didn't necessarily come down the Fraser. They could've come from the Fraser.

I'm still a bit jumpy when we stop at a beach strewn with logs and matted canary grass. Here, Mountain Mike says, is where he stepped right on top of a woman's New Balance while out on one of his regular island walks. Sophie just kept staring at it, then back at him, then back at the shoe. "After the third time," he says, "I knew this was something out of the ordinary."

A coyote was following them that day, picking up the rats Sophie killed. I can't leave it here, Mountain Mike thought. He found a five-gallon bucket. Then he carried the foot all the way back across the island and rowed to town. For two hours, it was just the three of them: Mountain Mike, Sophie, and the foot.

After that, he says, Sophie changed for a long time. Wouldn't let people get near her. "She was really subdued. I don't know how they know." I look at Sophie, worrying a stick on the beach. She seems better.

The foot rattled Mountain Mike, too, more than he thought it would. "It took me from May till September to come walk on these beaches," he says. He's sitting on a driftwood log facing me now, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. "I mean, you've found it, but you can't put the rest of it together. It's like when you get a craving for a chocolate bar, and you're in the middle of nowhere, and you don't have one, and there's like...a hole."

I look at the man across from me. I don't see a knife-wielding loner anymore but one of the most thoughtful people I've met in a long time. I think that Mountain Mike is a good symbol for this entire Mystery of the Feet. He seems to be one thing in the imagination, but in reality he's something else entirely. And nothing to be frightened of.

What the Pig Knows

Why does a loose foot, or seven, skeez us out so badly? Why can't we shrug it off, let it sink back down and disappear, accepting the question mark?

Sinking is on my mind as I head up to see Gail Anderson. Gail is a renowned forensic entomologist who told me that, lately, her research has involved sinking dead pigs to the seafloor and watching what eats them.

This I really want to see.

Inside her office at Simon Fraser University, where she works in the School of Criminology, she presses some buttons on her computer and, through the magic of technology, we're 300 feet below the waters of Vancouver Island's Saanich Inlet. I watch as spot prawns mince across a pig carcass on delicate spot-prawn stilt legs. A squat lobster tears roughly at a jowl. I daydream about how delicious free-range, pork-fed lobster must taste. Anderson interrupts to say that, in three weeks, crabs and shrimp can reduce a 50-pound pig to a skeleton.

These experiments are showing Anderson what can happen to a body that, say, a bad guy sinks to the seafloor. But they're also a lesson in what nature can do on its own. And this is the point she wants to make when I ask about the feet: Nature can do weird-seeming stuff.

"Often, when we've found a body in the water, it looks like the guy has been through a terrible fight," she says. "His knuckles can be all ripped up. His face can be ripped off. Your first thought is, My God, this guy's been through a helluva beating." But that appearance can be caused by waves cheese-gratering the body against the bottom, she says.

(Barrett Forster/Getty)

Fair enough, you say. But if there's an answer for everything, why were the finds always feet? Well, our hands and feet are like kites, attached only by a few tendons. Underwater, they flap around and come off pretty easily when body tissues break down. Hands would dissolve and be eaten. Rubber-soled shoes would be natural flotation devices, and they would float sole up, protecting what's inside from gulls.

So why haven't we seen so much of this before? Well, in times past, leather and canvas shoes would disintegrate. Now the shoes survive.

Yeah, but this is seven freakin' feet. That doesn't sound a little odd to you?

Anderson shrugs as if to say, No, maybe it's not so odd after all. "I've spoken to a colleague in New Zealand who said, 'Oh, we get 15 feet in runners every year.'"

"How many times have you seen a shoe along a beach?" she asks. "How many times have you seen shoes hanging on telephone wires? Did anyone ever look in those?"

Closure Or Something Like It

I think I understand what Anderson is telling me: We are blind. We stumble through our world every day, unseeing, uncurious. Maybe we're just trying to keep it together and get the kids to soccer practice. We don't have time to look inside shoes on the beach. Then something happens. We look. And suddenly we see feet everywhere. And so we keep yearning to connect the dots. Even when we know that sometimes a foot is just a foot.

During one of my last afternoons in B.C., I meander in my rental car back to Westham Island. I turn onto a one-lane road that runs atop a dike over the Fraser, and I peer down, fascinated by the flotsam.

Ahead, an empty, wrecked shack slumps into the river. Time has flaked its fake red-brick siding. Driftwood shoals against its walls. And everywhere in the drain-clog-hair-mess of the scene there are reminders of a big river's appetite for junk: Quaker State bottles. A cooler. A crushed Bud can. A frayed bight of rope, coiled in the cattails like a serpent.

Then look! Right in the shack's window! A shoe! A boot! OK, actually sort of a low-cut boot thingy! Black, rubber. Sitting up on the shack's glassless wooden windowsill! My heart pole-vaults into my throat. I want to show somebody, but no one is around on this winter-bleak island. Somewhere, a dog barks. A boat's motor purls in the glassy channel.

It's definitely a man's boot. About a size 11, it looks like from here. And now I can see that the shack really isn't empty. Past the boot, where the underfed afternoon light hits the inside wall, something has been spray-painted that from up here looks an awful lot like is it? could it be? a smiley face.

My scalp crinkles electrically. My eardrums are pounding like a timpani. Then I'm heading down the embankment, laughing and terrified, to where the boot waits for me in the window as peacefully as a still-life in its weathered frame.

Correspondent Steven Rinella (@stevenrinella) is the author of American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon (Spiegel & Grau), and author Christopher Solomon's (@chrisasolomon) work has appreared in The Best American Travel Writing series.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At first the feet are all men's feet, all right feet. Then a woman's foot appears. Then a left foot. Four of the feet match: one pair of women's feet, one pair of men's. That's seven feet, bow-tied in seaweed, that were once attached to a total of five bodies bodies that don't turn up.

# data[].attributes.body
Overview
This article explains several ideas investigators have as to why 14 feet, most still in there shoes, continue to wash up on the beaches of West Coast British Columbia.

Analysis
Based on this article I feel that the theory of unexplained is a good example of reason for belief. Because throughout this article it is clear that there are many different ideas people have to try and explain why these feet keep washing up on the beach. Some people suggest that there could be a potential serial killer or it could be from suicides or boating accidents. It appears to be something in which people are unsure about the true facts so they begin to make up there own. For example, someone in the article had suggested that maybe "Little Aliens" had come and dropped the feet on the beach.

Which leaves me to believe that the red flag of Red Herring applies here because of all the different ideas that have been brought forward when it comes to trying to solve the case as to why this is happening. And based off of the article it is clear to me that investigators are still far from discovering the truth behind why this is happening.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Investigators have been trying to work out why so many feet have washed up on the west coast of British Colombia in Canada over the past nine years.

The grisly remains began surfacing in the region, apparently without explanation, in 2007.

The last two feet, belonging to the same person, were found this month on Botanical Beach, near Port Renfrew, Vancouver Island, earlier this month.

Officials have so far identified ten of the 14 feet as coming from seven individuals, but the dead person whose feet washed up this month remains unidentified.

This means there are between three and five still unidentified dead people who parts have washed up.

Most have been feet still in trainers, from a man's foot in a Reebok shoe on Gabriola Island to a black Adidas trainer on the shore of Campbell River.

The case appears even more grisly than that of the mythical Manchester Pusher - a so far legendary serial killer some believe is behind a huge number of bodies being pulled from canals in Manchester.

There have been more than 80 people found dead in the northern waterways over the last decade, but police insist they are mainly accidents or suicide with no serial killer at large.

Following the latest grisly finds on Botanical Beach, BC Coroners Service has also moved to allay fears of anything sinister such as a serial killer, Satanists or even aliens.

Coroner Barb McLintock said it was not thought, as many member of the public fear, to be as a result of "strange serial killers."

She also quashed a less common myth that "funny little aliens" were depositing body parts.

She said: "Some people do think that. Sad but true.

"A lot of this is simply the quelling of the public imagination.

"No, this is unfortunate and they're all very sad cases."

Experts say none of the cases involve foul play and were either suicide or accidents.

Ms McLintock added: "We pretty well think we know what happened in every case."

She said the latest feet had the same owner, an as yet unidentified male, whose shoes were New Balance size 12 blue and black trainers.

The owner is thought to have died between March 2013, when the shoe first went on sale in north America, and December 2015.

The coroner said the feet come off naturally during decomposition, and are returning to shore because of the modern type of trainers, with lighter foam and air pockets, which were worn.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fears of coastal serial killer after 14 dismembered human feet wash up on beach

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Investigators have been trying to work out why so many feet have washed up on the west coast of British Colombia in Canada over the past nine years. The grisly remains began surfacing in the region, apparently without explanation, in 2007.

# data[].attributes.body
made by Katelyn Amos, Jami Molloy, Gregory Chalmers, and Taylor Handley