A few weeks ago, British teenager Jay Slater went missing in the Costa del Sol region of Spain, spurring international interest in the case and a deluge of speculation and conspiracy theories about the mysterious disappearance. But how much of a mystery is it really?
Here are the facts that are publicly known:
On the morning of June 17, 2024, Slater attended the NRG Music Festival on the island of Tenerife, Spain. After the show, he missed his bus, so he went to the mountain village of Masca with two men he met at the festival. In the morning, Slater set out to walk the 10 miles back to his accommodations. He called his sister 50 minutes after leaving and said he was "in the middle of nowhere," his phone batteries were almost dead, and he had no water. That was the last time anyone heard from him. After a widespread manhunt, authorities called off the search on June 30, but are continuing to investigate the case.
When is a disappearance a mystery?
I love a mystery, and there's an appealing "anything could have happened" aspect to disappearances like Slater's. The unknown gets people's gears spinning—maybe he was kidnapped? Maybe the two men Slater met that night aren't innocent witnesses? Maybe it was part of some greater, sinister conspiracy? Maybe aliens got him?
People filling in the blanks of an unknown situation is to be expected, but all available evidence points to a tragic but mundane explanation: Slater got lost in the wilderness, died, and his body hasn't been found. The mountainous region he was walking is dotted with cliffs, sharp rocks, rivers, and waterfalls. He was unfamiliar with the terrain. He was near the ocean—there are countless ways to die that don't require aliens. The Spanish authorities seem to agree; they're not treating the disappearance like a crime any longer.
Mysterious disappearance culture
But maybe the authorities are in on it—is the kind of thing people say within the thriving online infrastructure dedicated to unsolved disappearances. One of the most visible and silly expressions of it is Missing 411, a book that illustrates how far people will go to reject logical explanations. Missing 411 proposes that there's something mysterious and/or nefarious about "clusters" of people who go missing in and around US national parks and are never found. Because "a lot of people travel to national parks where they get lost and die, and we don't find their bodies because nature is big." isn't an adequate enough explanation.
If you ignore the most likely cause of disappearances, you can come up with all sorts of theories, and man, people have some theories. Some examples from the Slater case: this video with 3 million views that confidently states "People don't just disappear" (sometimes, they do, as we can see here), this video, with 8.3 million views, that offers random shapes in Google street view as evidence that is was all a set-up and he wasn't actually there at all, or this video (6.7 million views) that proclaims Jay Slater has already been found.
What's the harm in playing detective?
The overwhelming majority of amateur sleuths out there aren't doing any harm. They're fighting the drudgery of their lives through mental side-trips into the darkness—everyone likes true crime, right? But there is a subset of cranks who get involved, who screw up legitimate police investigations, or even worse, target families with missing children for their own ends.
In the Slater case (and in other high-profile cases), these people tend to fall into two camps: presumably well-meaning folks who are seeking out the family because they really believe that their crackpot theory will result in Slater returning home safely, and bottom-feeders who are trying to profit off the situation by trying to make themselves a part of the story or through actual crimes.
Members of the (charitably speaking) well-meaning contingent have publicly suggested Slater ran afoul of Moroccan drug gangs, that it's all a scam to raise social media money, that the mafia was involved, and a thousand other unlikely scenarios.
According to Slater's mother, Debbie Duncan, the online conspiracy theorists are making the investigation harder. "They have actually said that there’s too much noise, that’s affecting it,” she told The Guardian.
Slater's employer is imploring people to stop messing around, too. "These people are trying to ruin people's lives and businesses (while) sat behind a screen looking for attention," a post on the company's Facebook page reads. "Everyone may have their own theories and feelings but to publicly post them knowing you are going to hurt people is just cruel."
A lone-wolf mountain climber enters the chat
Shut-ins offering opinions, dime-store psychics, and fake ransom demands from ghouls are depressing, but totally expected in these situations. But there are also people like Paul Arnott. The British climber and TikTok content creator traveled to Spain to aid in the search immediately after Slater went missing. He then quit the official manhunt, publicly calling it a PR stunt. Now he's doing his own investigation on his TikTok channel that's being watched by millions. Maybe he's a well-meaning guy trying to help. Maybe he's trying to raise his personal profile through his association with the case. Maybe it's somewhere in the middle. Right now, the coin is in the air, so there is still the possibility (a very small one, if you ask me) that something other than "got lost and died" happened to Jay Slater. But if this guy, or any other "internet investigator" cracks the case, I'll literally eat my hat.