In overwhelmingly creepy news, Japan has apparently been dealing with unidentifiable wooden boats carrying decomposing bodies, that autopsies could neither determine identity nor cause of death, drifting near their coasts for years.
Officials say that dozens of these phantom boats drift towards their northwestern shores every year. They’ve found (read that again: found) 34 haunting water coffins just this year. But that’s only half of the 65 found last year and 80 more from the year before.
Japanese authorities are operating under the logic that these boats must be fishing vessels from Korean Peninsula that strayed too far from the Korean coast and either ran out of fuel or suffered a catastrophic engine failure that forced them to be at the mercy of the currents. Or, perhaps, desperate North Korean defectors just as unfortunate.
But is it as simple as either of these explanations?
Maybe… Maybe not.