A great story involving Google, a conoeist missing for five years and a “Moving to Panama” website.
So what’s the story?
A man disappeared in 2002 while canoeing in the North Sea. His body was never found, and the eventual coroner’s report declared an open verdict on his death, allowing his “wife” to collect on the life insurance. She moves to Panama, and he turns up at a police station in Britain, claiming to have no memory of the past five years. An unnamed woman thought all this sounded very fishy, did a Google search, and came across this photo on the site http://www.movetopanama.com (see left). Now, if you do a search for “john anne panama” on Google images, the thumbnail comes up, but the site itself no longer has the picture. Very interesting! My guess is that they have taken it down so Move to Panama can sell it to all the media agencies out there that are keen to get their hands on it. It would also be interesting to see what sort of traffic spike the site is getting with all the publicity.
It’s ironic that with all the Internet-based efforts to locate Steve Fossett and his plane in the Nevada desert, it took only a day for one anonymous British Internet surfer to find a man who had been missing presumed dead for five years. I tried searching for “steve and Panama” in Google, but had no luck …
