What we’re into: Auto/Biography
Published 3:00 am Tuesday, May 24, 2022
- Auto/Biography
In 2013, police testing sonar equipment in Foss Lake, Oklahoma, found two cars at the bottom of the lake, each with the remains of three people inside.
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The trio in one car, a 1952 Chevrolet sedan, had disappeared from the area in 1969.
The other, a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro, went missing near the lake in 1970.
Medical examiners confirmed the identities of the six people, all of whom who lived in that part of western Oklahoma.
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What happened?
The theories, as theories tend to be, are numerous.
Not so for definitive answers.
The mystery of the cars in Foss Lake, and the six people who died, is the subject of an episode of “Auto/Biography,” a documentary series that started in 2019 and is produced by Motor Trend magazine. Episodes, which are 44 minutes long, stream on Amazon Prime and Discovery+.
I generally avoid reading autobiographies. Even the more compelling examples of the genre suffer, it seems to me, from the inevitable taint of narcissism.
But “Auto/Biography” is merely a play on words. The series, created by Tim Donahue and Michael May, focuses on mysteries and other interesting stories in which vehicles play a prominent role.
My family came across the series and a newer offshoot — “Auto/Biography: Cold Cases” — recently, and we’ve made it a habit to try to watch one episode most evenings.
Topics range widely. We came across the series by way of “Cold Cases,” which includes an episode about the Yuba County Five, a group of five young men who inexplicably diverted from their intended driving route near Chico, California, in February 1978 and ended up driving into the snowy Sierras. The bodies of four of the men were found a few months later. The fifth man has not been seen since.
(“Cold Cases” also adds two other hosts besides May and Donahue.)
You can learn more about the series at https://watch.motortrend.com/tv-shows/autobiography.
— Jayson Jacoby, editor, Baker City Herald