Rafts with skeletons wash up on Micronesia atoll!!

A bamboo raft which was washed up on an island in the Federated States of Micronesia between September and November 2001 in the undated police handout. The Federated States of Micronesia has asked U.S. authorities to help solve the puzzle of mysterious bamboo rafts that have washed up on its atolls with sun-bleached skeletons aboard. REUTERS


Rafts carry mystery skeletons onto atolls

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Mysterious bamboo rafts carrying sun-bleached skeletons have washed up on the shores of Pacific atolls, prompting the Federated States of Micronesia to ask the United States for help finding out where they came from.

Five skeletons, including one of a child, have been found on the 13 giant rafts that first began to appear last September, Pius Chotailug, police chief of the Pacific nation, said on Monday.

"Where they came from we don't know," Chotailug said from Pohnpei, the largest of the Federation's 607 islands which lie between Papua New Guinea and Guam and spreads out over 2,500 km (1,550 miles) of the Western Central Pacific.

"We have an archaeologist...who helped with the investigation of the bones and found they've been dead for up to one month or two months."

Chotailug told Reuters an identity card was found in a wallet on one of the rafts.

It belonged to an Indonesian man from Bitung in Sulawesi, 1,700 km (1,050 miles) to the southwest, where Muslims and Christians have been fighting for three years, raising the possibility the rafters were refugees from a conflict.

But the Federated States of Micronesia does not have any forensics specialists to establish some facts in the case, and has asked the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to help. So far, the FBI has not replied.

"They've been pretty busy, we know," Chotailug said.

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freaky!