[AnAmericanMother]

Occam's Razor, my friends, Occam's Razor.

There is a simple explanation for this.

1. The Puget Sound area is the end of the line for a current train out of the Pacific. All kinds of junk washes up there.

2. The synthetic material of athletic shoes is impervious to salt water and wave action, as well as sea scavengers. It also is buoyant.

The feet belong to unfortunate crewmen who have washed overboard from vessels in the Pacific freight lanes. Sharks and crabs devoured the rest of the bodies but could not reach the feet. Once the bones become disjointed by scavengers and/or wave action, the shoes float in the current and wash up in the Puget Sound area (along with containers, scrap lumber, derelict boats and every other kind of debris).

[arthurus]

So why the timeline here? 2011 to present? Nikes didn’t exist on sailors feet pre 2011? What does Mr. Ockham say about it?

[Kipp]

...The feet belong to unfortunate crewmen who have washed overboard from vessels in the Pacific freight lanes....

That's a logical explanation - and I agree the most likely - but I wonder why the feet washing up only occurred starting in 2007. There were athletic shoes long before that. Maybe a change in currents?

[Hatteras]

The majority of shoes found were running shoes (not what deckhands or crewmen on freight or container ships tend to wear) and a number of them had DNA links to previously missing people.

[Boogieman]

“The feet belong to unfortunate crewmen who have washed overboard from vessels in the Pacific freight lanes.”

Sounds plausible but it doesn’t actually add up. You see, they have managed to identify a good number of the owners of said feet, and they were all locals from around the sound, not seamen on oceangoing vessels. I believe many were joggers who disappeared, if I remember correctly.

Kind of makes sense, since they are finding feet in athletic shoes, which are more associated with joggers than crewmen on boats.