The Phantom SOS

Back when I was a soldier, I was stationed at a sprawling military base adjacent to an enormous wildlife refuge. There was a massive lake that sort of bisected this extensive landmass. A big gravel beach on that lake was used to host a wide variety of social events. One of those events was a country music concert sponsored by a beer company.

Young soldiers are reliably stupid. They are typically physically strong and immensely capable. However, their brains have not matured sufficiently to grant them sound judgment. That’s the perfect milieu to produce the kind of guys who charge up bullet-swept hills because some scary bald-headed person screamed at them to do so.

You think I’m kidding. There is a reason every military post in America is surrounded by used car lots and strip clubs. Young soldiers not infrequently do lyrically dumb things. In this case, a group of buddies had the bright idea to swim across this enormous lake so as to attend the music concert without having to pay the cover charge.

Big, muscular guys are strong but dense. They don’t make great swimmers unless this skill is actively cultivated. Midway across the lake, one of those young men began to flounder. His buddies made haste for the other side and alerted the authorities. Rescuers subsequently pulled a body out of the lake. When these distraught young studs were called upon to establish the identity of the corpse, they said it wasn’t actually their friend.

The initial drowned guy turned up later. The dead man they serendipitously discovered had apparently been attempting the same stupid thing and tragically succumbed earlier in the day without anyone’s being the wiser. Weird, right?

Strange Stuff

Back in 1989, in Daisetsuzan National Park in Japan, a pair of climbers failed to check in at their appointed time. Hokkaido police dispatched a helicopter and discovered a big SOS sign formed from fallen trees. This massive thing was comprised of nineteen heavy birch trunks, each around five meters long. This sign had taken some serious effort to make.

A couple of clicks north of the sign, rescuers spotted the two stranded climbers and retrieved them without difficulty. Upon their return, the cops congratulated them for their ingenuity in constructing the signal. These two guys claimed no knowledge of any sign. This prompted the police to return to the area and search yet further.

A Most Unfortunate Dude

They soon located some skeletal human remains. Several of the bones appeared to have been broken prior to death. There was also evidence of animal predation.

Nearby, they discovered a hole just large enough to fit a typical person. Within, they found a tape recorder, two cameras, a notebook, several cassette tapes, a tripod, a backpack, a few amulets, a pair of basketball shoes, and a human skull. One of the tapes contained theme music from a Japanese anime TV show called “Magical Princess Minky Momo.” The tape case has been improvised out of some sort of cardboard packaging associated with the “Magical Princess Minky Momo” television program. ID found among the stuff identified the corpse as having belonged to a 25-year-old male office worker named Kenji Iwamura. Iwamura had disappeared some five years before.

It Gets Weirder

That’s strange, but easy peasy, right? This poor guy obviously got lost, built the SOS sign, expired, and was later fortuitously discovered during the search for another couple of hapless dudes. That’s all fine, except that the bones apparently belonged to a woman.

When the cops played the cassette tapes, they discovered two minutes and seventeen seconds of a voice shouting. Here is a transcript:

“SOS! Help me! I can’t move on the cliff! SOS; help me! The place is where I first met the helicopter! The sasa is deep, and I can’t get up! Lift me up from here!”

Nobody had any idea what any of that meant. Kenji Iwamura’s parents also listened to the tape and attested that the voice was not that of their son.

This SOS sign was no mean engineering feat. There were no cutting tools to be found, and these tree trunks were all around sixteen feet long. A detailed review of previous aerial photographs used to produce topographical maps showed that the sign had indeed been in place for years. It was simply that no one had noticed it. 41 years later, Iwamura is still listed as missing and presumed dead.

Ruminations

I’m no forensic pathologist, but the most likely explanation to me is that the mortal remains discovered near the sign were indeed those of Kenji Iwamura. Perhaps the autopsy misidentified the gender, and the distraught parents failed to recognize the voice of their son, given his exceptional state of extremis. Regardless, it’s all still pretty darn weird.

So, the next time you strike out alone in the wilderness, you might want to pack a little well-reasoned survival gear instead of a tape recording of the theme music from the “Magical Princess Minky Momo” television program. I rather suspect Kenji Iwamura, or whoever that actually was, would have done better with some fire-making materials and a decent blade. Consider that a cheap lesson to us all.

Get MORE GunCrank Diaries every week!