The tape recording they found will give you CHILLS

today's story has a big twist at the end that has fascinated the internet for decades but before we get into today's story if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format and you come to the right place because that's all we do and we upload two or three times every week so if that's of interest to you please invite the like button over to your house for a pizza party but then only serve them fermented herring but then only serve them fermented herring also please subscribe to our channel and turn

on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads alright let's get into today's story [Music] japan is comprised of four major islands the northernmost island is called hokkaido and on hokkaido there is this beautiful national park called daisetsuzan that is nicknamed the playground of the gods because the park is basically all these huge mountains that stretch up into the clouds the tallest mountain inside of this park is mount assa hidake which reaches an elevation over 7 500 feet and it is a very popular hiking destination the trail that brings you to the

summit of mount asahidake is considered relatively straightforward it's pretty much just a straight line but there is one very tricky spot on the way up as you get closer and closer to the summit the trees begin to disappear and you're left with this kind of open landscape where the trail becomes fairly ambiguous it's hard to know where you're going and so hikers are instructed to look for a landmark which is this big square boulder that's known as safe rock and once you get to safe rock apparently the rest of the trail is easy to identify

and follow all the way up to the summit there's a catch though in the same area as safe rock is another large square boulder that looks exactly like safe rock and this imposter is called false safe rock if a hiker confuses false safe rock for the real thing and then attempts to take the path leading away from the imposter they will be led down a path that many people have gotten lost on at first it will feel like you are making progress towards the summit of the mountain but eventually the trail begins to gradually go

downhill now you would think that would be a fairly obvious red flag if the trail is going down and you're trying to go up to the summit that probably something's gone wrong here you've taken a wrong turn but put yourself in the mind of someone who's made this mistake in their mind they reached the landmark of safe rock although it was the imposter false safe rock and so they think they're on the right path and if this is their first time being on this mountain which a lot of people it is they'd probably convince themselves

that they've gone the right way and just keep on going and so if you just keep on going and you don't recognize this mistake about a mile away from false safe rock you enter into this valley that's completely overgrown with thick bamboo it's very swampy and there's lots of very steep cliff drop-offs and once you go inside of this area you can't see anything because the bamboo is so tall and so thick and so it's very easy to get turned around and it's pretty easy to accidentally walk off of a cliff and so over the

years hikers who have accidentally taken the trail leading away from false safe rock have gotten lost in this treacherous area and not all of them have come back in july of 1989 two men from tokyo were hiking up the trail towards the summit of mount assadake when they reached what they believed was safe rock however it was not it was false safe rock and so when they followed the trail leading away from false safe rock it was not long before they were lost in that valley overgrown with bamboo that night when these two men did

not come home their friends and family called the police and a search was launched for them over the first couple of days there was no luck they could not find these two guys they had no idea where they had gone they looked all over the swampy area thinking that's where they might be but they couldn't find them but then on july 24th a helicopter was flying over the mountain over an area that had not really been thoroughly searched it was just to the east of that valley with all the bamboo where they expected them to

be and this helicopter pilot as he went around the corner he got a view down to the midsection of the mountain and he saw this big wide open clearing and right in the middle of this clearing are three huge letters they are spelled using birch logs and the three letters are sos sos is an international code used to signal extreme distress people who go missing or who get stranded somewhere they will try to spell the three letters sos as big as they possibly can and then they will camp out near their signal in hopes that

someone will see it and then come and rescue them this helicopter pilot that seen this distress signal immediately flew over the letters expecting to look down and see the two missing hikers from tokyo but when he was hovering over the sos and he's looking down there was no one there despite the fact that this was a wide open area they are not in the bamboo valley anymore but either way he signaled to the rest of the search party that he had found their sos signal and before long more helicopters and search teams were brought over

to that area and then several hours later a search team that was on the ground who was walking about two miles north of this sos signal saw these two very haggard looking guys come out of the bamboo brush and they come walking up towards them and it turns out it was the missing men from tokyo they were very ragged they were dehydrated famished and they were kind of on the brink of death but they were alive and they were extremely happy to have been found and so a helicopter was brought in the two men were

flown out to the nearest hospital and then after receiving medical care it was determined they would both make full recoveries excited by this news the pilot and some of the other rescuers went to the men's hospital room to pay them a visit and over the course of their conversation the pilot brings up to the two men that they were really smart to build that sos signal that in fact had they not built the sos it's unlikely anyone would have found them and as soon as the two men heard this they kind of reacted to it

they looked at each other then they looked at the pilot and they said what sls signal we didn't make an sos signal after asking the men several questions to make sure they really didn't make this signal the pilot and the rest of the searchers said you know we have to go back to the mountain we have to go back to the sos signal because somebody else has made it and they need our help and so early the next morning these searchers went back out to the mountain back to the sos signal to scour the area

all over again and shortly after they began the search one of the searchers found this deep hole underneath the roots of the tree and in this hole was a backpack and in this backpack amongst other things was a driver's license and an audio recorder the license belonged to a 25 year old japanese man named kenji iwamora who five years earlier had been staying at a lodge near the mountain and one day he had left and on his way out he had told the owner of this lodge that he was going for a hike to the

summit of mount asadake a couple of days later when kenji was supposed to check out of the lodge he didn't and so the owner went to his room he knocked but there was no answer and so the owner used his master key he opened the door and when he looked inside there was no kenji but all of his belongings were still there and so the owner thought that was odd because the last time he saw him he was going out for this hike and so he put two and two together and thought you know what

i think this guy's in trouble so he called the police and reported him missing a search is launched for kenji but kenji was never found and so there was always this mystery about what happened to him fast forward back to 1989 and these searchers are looking at this backpack they just looked at this license and then one of the searchers reaches in and pulls out the audio recorder and hits the play button what they heard was very disturbing it was the sound of a young man presumably who's very distressed who is calling out for help

and it's believed this young man is kenji in japanese he very slowly and deliberately says i'm stuck on a cliff i can't move sos please help me i'm at the spot where i first saw the helicopter but the bamboo is too thick i can't move please lift me up out of here sos here is a clip of the actual recording at this point it seemed fairly obvious to police that based on the proximity of the backpack to the sos letters and the fact that the recording which was in the backpack had kenji literally saying sos

he says this on the recording that kenji must have been the one who built this sos sign he must have built it back in 1984 when he got lost and so now that the police believed they had solved the mystery of who built the sos sign they now needed to figure out where this person went where was kenji and so over the next several hours searchers continued to look around the immediate area of where this backpack was found and soon they would discover something that according to police solved this five-year-old mystery they figured out what

happened to kenji now there is no official police narrative at least not online that explains step by step what happened to kenji so what i'm about to share with you is what i was able to deduce from all of the official reporting that i could find online in 1984 kenji left his lodge and headed for the summit of mount asahidake and on the way up he most likely mistook the false safe rock for the safe rock and just like the two men from tokyo would do five years later kenji went down the wrong path and

got lost in that valley covered in bamboo at some point kenji stopped trying to find his way back to the trail and instead tried to just go down the mountain any way he could and so as he's making his way through this very thick vegetation and this bamboo he eventually gets to a point where he lowers himself down over this ledge and he lands on this cliff and as soon as he lands he looks over the edge and he realizes he can't go any farther it's too steep it's too dangerous but when he turns around

to try to climb back up it's also too steep so he was trapped on this ledge and so there on this cliff ledge he sits and waits hoping that someone has reported him missing and they will come and find him before he dies and at some point as he's sitting there waiting a helicopter flies overhead and kenji most likely was elated he probably believed they saw him and he thought he was going to get rescued but the helicopter would eventually just fly away giving no indication of whether they had actually seen kenji and so for

what must have been at least a couple of days kenji sat on this ledge expecting this helicopter to come back but over time he gradually came to the conclusion that that helicopter had probably not seen him and they were not coming back there was no rescue party inbound for him and so it was around that time as he's having this horrible realization that he pulls out that audio recorder and he records that very eerie and distressing message where he's calling out for help and saying that he's stuck on the sledge and then after he was

done at some point kenji came to the conclusion that his best chance at survival was not waiting for some helicopter to potentially come back because at this point that seemed really unlikely instead his best chance and perhaps only chance was to try to climb down this cliff right in front of him that he had already determined was way too dangerous and so kenji lowered himself and began climbing down this cliff and miraculously he got all the way to the bottom where the ground leveled off without serious injury and so from that point he just kept

on walking down the mountain trudging through all this bamboo until he actually leaves the bamboo and enters this huge clearing on the side of the mountain where basically it's devoid of any vegetation besides some birch trees off in the distance and it was in this clearing that kenji would construct that sos signal believing that was his ticket out of there but unfortunately it was not five years later after searchers had just located kenji's backpack underneath the roots of that tree they would go on to make that huge discovery that solved the five-year mystery and that

discovery was a partial human skeleton laying nearby and eventually that skeleton would be determined to be kenji's and at this point the police said they were not suspecting foul play in kenji's death however they did not release his exact cause of death it's unclear if they just could not determine it or if they didn't want to release it publicly but either way we don't know what it is and then after that the police just closed the case and said okay we're done but to the people who had been closely following this story because this was

a big deal at the time in 1989 they thought the police were kind of missing something there was this obvious huge discrepancy that they all figured the police were going to address at some point and now it seemed like they weren't and a lot of people felt like this is not a discrepancy you can just sweep under the rug this is a really big deal and that discrepancy was how could kenji have made that sos signal as a reminder the three letters sos that was found in that clearing they were made with 19 birch tree

logs each letter was 16 feet tall and 10 feet wide and each log each birch tree log that made these letters up they were all about the same length and appeared to have been expertly cut indicating they had been chopped with an axe or some other cutting tool and where this sos was actually located in that clearing it was several hundred feet away from the other birch trees so on top of the enormous effort that would go into cutting down 19 trees with an axe and i can assure you that cutting down a tree with

an axe or a hatchet is way harder than you think it is kenji would have also had to expend a lot of additional energy just dragging the felled logs over to the area where he actually built the signal basically this was a gargantuan task that even for someone who was fit and healthy and strong in the best of conditions they would still struggle with this and so the idea that kenji after being missing in the wild for several days he's probably dehydrated he's famished he's tired he's sore he's scared he's in the worst possible shape

you can be in the idea that he pulled this off is kind of unbelievable and in fact the person who did kenji's autopsy would say that kenji was not physically capable of putting together that sos signal he was just too weak and there's another complication to factor in there was no axe or any other cutting tool found anywhere near the sos signal near the skeleton near the backpack nowhere there was no cutting tool so either kenji did have an axe and somehow mustered the superhuman strength necessary to chop down 19 trees and then he built

this sos signal in which case why didn't the authorities find the axe or kenji did not have an axe in which case why were there 19 perfectly cut birch logs just laying around in an area that virtually no one went intentionally when the police just would not answer these simple questions about the acts people began coming up with their own theories as to what happened the most prominent theory was that kenji was not actually alone this would explain how he went about building that sos signal he had help and it would also explain why kenji's

family when they heard that audio recording for the first time they said that doesn't sound like our son and so according to this additional person theory that recording wasn't of kenji it was of this other person this additional person people who subscribe to this theory also point out that originally the skeleton was not classified as belonging to kenji it was classified as belonging to some unknown female with type o blood the media and the public went crazy at this revelation and very quickly the police were being hit with lots of questions about this development which

they had no idea what to say about it and so they looked kind of bad in the media they didn't have very many answers they didn't have any leads the pressure was building and then all of the sudden the police say oh we looked at the bones again and it turns out they were not type o blood female they were actually type a blood male which conveniently is the same sex and blood type as kenji some say this was a pure fabrication by police to very conveniently tie up all the loose ends of a case

they were doing a very bad job solving that in reality those were not kenji's bones kenji's still somewhere out there we haven't found him yet and those bones belong to some unknown female with type o blood and she was the additional person but the reality is even if this additional person theory is plausible it's highly unlikely it will ever be looked at seriously by authorities because at this point the case is considered closed so as of now the only thing we can all say with certainty is that an sos sign on the side of this

mountain saved the lives of two men from tokyo in 1989 but exactly who the sign builder or builders were and then what happened to them still remains a mystery for many people so that's gonna do it guys if you found the secret in today's episode let us know in the comment section what it is and where you found it so give us the time stamp and if you're the first to do that we'll pin you at the top of the comment section if you got something out of today's episode and you haven't done this already

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