Put on your wetsuits, it’s time to plunge into the arctic water and see what this iceberg looks like below the surface.

Babushka Lady

The Assassination of JFK is probably the most heavily-scrutinized single moment of the 20th century. Occurring at a time just as relatively high-quality cameras and video recording devices were becoming accessible to the average person, there’s a wealth of media directly documenting the shooting itself, and every piece of said media has been examined down to the last frame and pixel, either by legit historians or by conspiracy theorists looking for evidence of their theories. It goes without saying then that the discovery of new, unknown JFK assassination coverage would be a big deal. Enter the Babushka Lady.

This is the nickname given to a woman wearing a “babushka-style” head scarf, spotted by eyewitnesses and recorded in multiple photos in the crowd watching JFK’s motorcade passing. She’s noticeable for a number of reasons: no one knows who she was, she was photographed apparently standing calmly in the immediate aftermath of the first shot even as everyone around her dropped to the ground, and most importantly, according to witnesses she was holding a camera. If true, this means that there was–and potentially still could be–unseen photos or even video evidence of the assassination out there somewhere.

Naturally, conspiracy theorists are quite keen on the Babushka Lady for more feverish reasons. To be honest, I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the clearest photo of her is quite eerie, what with the lady smiling directly into the camera as JFK passes by, unknowingly moments away from death. Other than that, there really isn’t any reason to connect her to a hypothetical conspiracy, nor can I come up with any plausible role she would have played in one. This seems like another instance of the Umbrella Man, where conspiracy theorists latch onto some incidental background detail and weave it into their narrative.

Speaking of which…

Badge Man

This is actually from the next level down, but I’m going to cover it here anyway since it’s on the same topic as the last entry.

Remember those conspiracy theorists I mentioned, poring over photos of Dealey Plaza looking for juicy clues? Well, one of them thinks they found something in a photo taken by a witness at the scene. Depending on who you ask, the photo in question either depicts the second shooter standing on the infamous grassy knoll at the very moment he fired his weapon…or it’s just some shadows and a lot of pareidolia.

In my opinion, this isn’t even a mystery–there is obviously nothing there unless you’ve been primed to see it, and even then it takes a lot of imagination. The original photo was blurry to begin with and had degraded by the time the “badge man” was first spotted, and the supposed figure is only really visible at all if you zoom in so far that the miniscule area in question dissolves into a mass of amorphous blobs. The only thing that makes it even slightly compelling is this speculative colorized version, but that’s based entirely on the assumption that there is actually a human depicted in the photo and not just some leaves.

Large Antarctic Sea Mammal

It me, I’m the large antarctic sea mammal

No seriously though, this is a large rotund boi supposedly spotted in the waters off Antarctica by a Japanese research ship in the 50s. Apparently at least one of the witnesses likened it to Godzilla in appearance, although the drawing on the cryptid wiki page makes it look more like some sort of whale.

As for my proposed explanation, I think it was probably some sort of whale.

It’s interesting to note how different cultures have their own unique cryptids, even in an area like Antarctica that no one is native to and where people from all over the world regularly cross paths. If you assume that the creatures spotted don’t actually exist–which I generally do–then you’re left with the assumption that people bring their unique cultural perspectives with them when they travel and that this can prime different groups of visitors to conjure up different cryptids. See for example the European explorers in Africa who interpreted descriptions of folkloric or mythological entities as being dinosaurs–the fact that those explorers started penetrating into the continent’s interior pretty soon after the period where dinosaur bones were first being interpreted for what they actually were probably played a role there: if you had dinos on the brain, the idea that some of them might have survived in the dense sub-Saharan jungles would have seemed pretty plausible, especially if you then encounter people talking about a giant semi-aquatic reptile living in the area.

Oh, and speaking of Japanese cryptids from cold climates…

Ningen

This is one of my favourite cryptid stories of all time, mostly because the Wikipedia article depicts them as weird little guys with hilariously buff legs. Behold:

The Ningen are also fun because they started life on 2Chan in 2002, an environment and timeframe that gave birth to a lot of cool urban legends and internet horror stories. The origin of the idea is an almost-certainly fake tale about a whaling ship spotting something odd in the frigid northern seas, and once the idea was in people’s heads various blurry photos of icebergs, eels and whales have been interpreted (perhaps not always seriously) as sightings of the Ningen.

Mount Asahidake SOS incident

This is a fun one from Japan.

Well, not “fun” exactly, because it involves someone dying. But it’s interesting. You know what I mean.

In the summer of 1989, rescue crews were out in helicopters searching for two hikers who had gone missing in the vicinity of Mount Asahi, in a national park in northern Japan. The pilots spotted a large “SOS” sign made from cut-down trees and naturally directed ground searchers to the area. Shortly afterwards, the two hikers were found alive and well. At a nearby hospital, the hikers were commended on their good sense in building the large SOS sign and thereby assisting in their own rescue…at which point the hikers became very confused, because they hadn’t made any SOS sign. Someone else had, and that person was still missing.

Another search of the area revealed skeletonized remains and a lot of personal effects, but while this did allow for the identification of the missing person–Kenji Iwamura–it also raised a whole lot more questions.

To start with, Iwamura had apparently been suffering from a broken leg at the time of his death, which caused some to question whether he would have been capable of constructing the SOS sign, as it had been made of cut birch trees that would have been very heavy. In addition, no tool like an axe that could have been used to cut the trees down was found with the rest of his belongings, nor was he known to have been carrying such an implement on his hike. So if Iwamaura didn’t construct the sign, does that mean that someone else did? The idea that another person may have been involved in the disappearance was given a boost by the fact that the bones were initially identified as belonging to a woman, but a later re-examination reversed this assessment and thus the missing axe and the question of whether Kenji Iawamura could have built the sign unaided are currently unsolvable mysteries.

Among Iwamaura’s possessions was a cassette tape of anime theme songs (Macross and Magical Princess Minky Momo, in case you’re curious). Also on the tape was an eerie recording of a man shouting for help, possibly made by Iwamura so he could play it on repeat without straining his voice. In the message, Iwamura mentions “the place where I first met the helicopter”, which adds yet another strange wrinkle to the case, as no one knows what helicopter he’s referring to.

Oh, and just to add another fuck-you layer to the whole thing, when Iwamura’s parents listened to the recoding, they weren’t sure if the voice was actually his.

The only thing about the case not in question is how Kenji Iwammura got himself into this predicament: the route up the mountain was marked by a “safe rock” guiding hikers on the correct path, but there was another, very similar-looking rock nearby that was notorious for leading people astray. Descending the mountain in the wrong direction and coming to a steep drop, Iwamura was then prevented from turning back by a thick growth of bamboo that was easy to pass through going down, but made it virtually impossible to go back up. In fact, a few days after the discovery of the SOS sign, a news crew reporting on the incident got into the exact same situation while visiting the site and had to be rescued, and the tape recording mentions the bamboo, so none of this is really in question.

So then, what do we think happened here, overall?

Well, when it comes to cases like this I’m always very wary of statements asserting that a missing person couldn’t have done X or Y thing that the evidence suggests they did. You see this a lot from David Paulides types, who’ll claim that a missing or deceased person couldn’t possibly have gotten to the place where their remains were found, it’s impossible that they could have travelled that far while too injured/tired/young, and thus whatever mysterious bullshit Paulides and his fans think is happening in National Parks, but refuse to explain clearly, must have taken place.

God, I need to do a Missing 411 post some day and get it out of my system.

Anyway, sorry, my point is that we can’t actually state for certain that Kenji Iwamura didn’t construct the SOS sign. We don’t even know if the broken bones really were inflicted before he died; his skeleton was already fragmented when found, and it showed signs of having been chewed on by animals, so it’s possible that the broken bones were post-mortem. If Iwamura wasn’t injured before he died, then a lot of the mystery goes out of this case.

Now, the real Sherlock Holmes wannabes reading this will have spotted a huge hole in my skeptical explanation, which is the missing axe. And I have to admit, that is one aspect of the case that has me stumped (no pun intended). We can speculate that it could have been carried off by an animal or washed away by rain, especially if he actually used something smaller and more portable like a large knife, but that doesn’t answer the question of why Iwamura would have had such a tool with him in the first place. He obviously wasn’t going into the woods planning on cutting down trees, wasn’t known to own anything capable of doing so, and apparently the laws in Japan around carrying bladed implements are quite strict so it seems unlikely that he’d have been carrying one in secret just for the hell of it. Since real life isn’t Minecraft and people can’t just punch trees apart with their bare hands, we have a seemingly-intractable problem here: if Kenji Iwamura cut down those trees, how did he do it?

The only possible solution I can come up with is that he made the sign, but he didn’t cut the trees down–because they had either already been cut down by someone else in the past and left there, or they fell naturally and he just had to pick them up. I did note that the Wikipedia article on the case describes the sign as having been made of fallen birch trees, not chopped or cut birch trees, but the sources for that paragraph are all in Japanese so I can’t check what wording they use. There are very few photos of the sign on the internet, and the ones we do have available are blurry and were taken from a distance, so unfortunately we can’t really determine anything by examining them.

As for Iwamura’s parents stating that they weren’t sure the voice on the recording was their son’s, I’m inclined to discount that out of hand. They were listening to the voice of a person under extreme duress, possibly suffering from thirst, recorded on 1980s audio equipment and in a situation where they had a very pressing motivation to not believe that the voice was Kenji’s. They might also have been primed to not believe that he made the recording based on the questions surrounding the sex of the skeleton and other factors which initially seemed to indicate the presence of another person at the site.