A Nine-Day Fog Records Box, Misfiled for 23 Years, Surfaces During the Lineage 64 Records Review
The Third Appraisal Center said on the 19th that a box misfiled under the wrong classification number for 23 years turned up during the previously reported building-wide records review prompted by the Lineage 64 leak. Its contents were a bundle of measurement record sheets removed by a TDA observation team during the 2003 Bay Ninefold Fog lockdown, along with one damaged piece of small equipment — not personal belongings of the 12 missing, so the previously reported fact that only two pairs of shoes were ever recovered stands unchanged. But the records gap itself has raised a fresh question of its own.
As previously reported on the 18th, the Third Appraisal Center is cross-checking entry logs against shelf inventories across the entire storage building, following the Lineage 64 drift-object leak. On the 19th, a staff member working on that review found a box near an old shelf number marking a 2003 classification, bearing a different label from the one that should have been there. Part of the label's number showed a handwritten correction, and the box appeared to have sat for years at a location other than the one the corrected number pointed to.
According to the center, the box contained a bundle of roughly 40 measurement record sheets that a TDA observation team had carried back from the field during the nine-day lockdown of the 2003 Bay Ninefold Fog, along with one piece of small measurement equipment with a damaged casing. As previously reported, the only belongings ever recovered from the event were two pairs of shoes left at the quayside, and the box found today does not contradict that fact — it is not the personal property of any of the 12 missing, but classified as part of the observation equipment's own records. "We've confirmed it isn't anyone's personal belongings," the center said. "What we can't say yet is why this one box sat on the wrong shelf for 23 years."
Kaname Tsuyuki, chair of the Preliminary Survey Association, told this paper, "The storage building's shelving has been rearranged more than once over these 23 years. A simple mix-up is entirely plausible. Still, the timing of finding this right after the Lineage 64 matter makes it hard not to go looking for meaning in it." The center, while saying "there is nothing at this point to suggest deliberate concealment," said it would confirm the circumstances alongside its Lineage 64 investigation.
The Nine-Day Fog family association was also informed. Kazuko Sakota, 70, previously reported, whose husband has been missing for 23 years, told this paper quietly, "We've always asked them to come report to the same place, whether they find something or not. This is the same. One more box just means one more thing we won't know until it's opened."
According to the center, the record sheets found hold hand-recorded time-averaged readings from the era's equipment, and as previously reported, the technology of 2003 could not read second-scale fluctuations. The TDA said, "It will still take time to confirm what the observation team was even trying to record back then," and said the matter would be handled separately from the previously reported magnetic-tape re-analysis, whose interim report isn't due until next summer. The procedural mystery of where the box's misclassification occurred remains, for now, as unresolved as the cause of the Fog itself.
Regarding the damaged piece of equipment found in the box, the center said, "We don't know when the casing damage occurred. We'll have it appraised to determine whether it happened in an accident during the lockdown or through ordinary deterioration in storage." Records from the Bay Ninefold Fog show that observation equipment at the time was exposed to heavy sea wind and humidity, which the center said could offer a clue to how similar equipment was handled back then.
Karin Kokonoe, 52, the independent researcher previously reported as centering her next book on the Bay Ninefold Fog, told this paper in response to the discovery, "The mere fact that unsorted records remained on the observation side is, in itself, encouraging for those of us gathering testimony. I'd like to check again, across the 61 interviews so far, whether anyone mentioned other records from that same period." As previously reported, Kokonoe's research proceeds independently of the TDA's investigation.
