🚨 “THE MISSING HOUR: New Report Raises Fresh Questions About Nolan Wells’ Final Timeline”

The United Cinjun Navy has [music] just released its full investigative report on the Nolan Wells case.

And this is raising new questions about what really happened on [music] Horn Island, revealing what investigators maybe still can’t verify.

We’re going to break down the [music] biggest findings for you right now.

>> A missing hour.

That’s what investigators still can’t account for.

Not a theory, not a rumor, a documented gap in the timeline of an 18-year-old who went to a barrier island for the 4th of July and never came home.

His name was Nolan Wells.

And this week, a new report is forcing everyone following this case to ask the same question again, only louder this time.

What happened between 1323 and for 27 in the afternoon on Horn Island?

Let’s start with what we know for certain because in a case this loaded with speculation, the facts matter more than ever.

Nolan Wells was 18 years old.

>> Talking about if you’re just joining us.

So, this is 18-year-old Nolan Wells, disappeared during a Fourth of July boating trip to Horn Island, Mississippi.

His friends returned to the mainland without him.

The accounts have been that he chose to stay behind, possibly to talk to a young lady.

Two days later, his body was found.

His family has been fighting for answers ever since.

They have been asking for a thorough investigation by law enforcement.

They’ve >> On the 4th of July, he traveled by boat to Horn Island, Mississippi with a group of friends.

At some point that day, the group he arrived with left the island without him.

The account that circulated publicly is that he chose to stay behind.

Two days later, his body was recovered.

Since then, his family has pushed for a real investigation.

They’ve retained outside counsel, and the case has ballooned into one of the most heavily scrutinized missing persons turned death investigations in recent memory, complete with amateur siths competing narratives online, and now real consequences for people connected to it, including criminal charges against someone accused of threatening witnesses and their families.

But
Underneath all of that noise sits a set of facts that a volunteer search and recovery organization has now laid out in a formal report.

This group was on Horn Island within hours of Nolan being reported missing.

And they’ve spent time since then piecing together pH๏τographs, witness statements, and timestamps to build the clearest picture available outside of law enforcement’s own investigation.

>> Sidebar.

Now, I do want to get into what the United Kun Navy actually found because they’ve been working on this since the beginning.

Their report kind of gives us the clearest picture yet of maybe maybe potentially what happened on Horn Island that day.

So, the report includes a pH๏τo that I don’t believe we’ve seen before because this shows three boats anchored side by side.

The Palm Beach, the Triton, that’s the boat that we believe no one was on.

And the third boat labeled boat number three.

This is interesting.

The report includes a statement from an independent witness, a woman who took a pH๏τo of those same boats and said when her group left at 7:30 p.m.

That night, Nolan was quote, “Nowhere in sight.”

>> Here’s the core of what that report found.

And it centers on one thing, a gap in time that nobody has yet been able to >> basically build your investigation.

And here is where the Navy’s report identifies the core problem.

Because according to the report, the last independently corroborated sighting of Nolan occurred between 3:23 p.m.

And 4:27 p.m.

So that’s a window of just over an hour, and there has been no information yet to fill what is a gap here.

So, you know, Alex, based on your experience investigating cases like that, what could have happened?

>> According to the report, the last independently corroborated sighting of Nolan happened sometime between 3:23 and 1427 in the afternoon.

Not a single precise moment.

A window over an hour where the documentation gets thin.

Investigators reportedly cannot establish a continuous independently verified chain of Nolan’s whereabouts through forcing 31 p.m.

The time one of the boats in his group is said to have left the area.

That’s the phrase doing the heavy lifting here.

Independently corroborated.

It’s not enough for someone to say they remember seeing him.

Investigators need something that can be checked against something else.

A pH๏τo with a timestamp, a second witness, a piece of physical evidence that lines up.

Without that corroboration, a sighting is a claim, not a fact.

And that distinction becomes even more important when you look at what the report says about the boats themselves.

PH๏τographs included in the report appear to show three vessels entered side by side that day.

Investigators have given them working labels, not registration numbers, just descriptive tags to track movement across different pH๏τos.

And what those pH๏τos appear to show is change.

One boat, referred to as boat X, appears in an earlier pH๏τo anchored between two others, and is absent in a later one.

Another pH๏τo reportedly taken around 40:50 p.m., roughly 19 minutes after the group’s boat is said to have departed, shows a different vessel no longer in its original position.

In other words, the boats were moving during exactly the window investigators can’t fully account for.

Which raises the obvious question, if the boats were shifting position, who was on them and when did each >> I want you to take a look at this.

So, the report indicates how the boats were positioned and how they moved.

And they found that it appears in one pH๏τo there on the left, you can see the vessel they’re calling boat X anchored between boats one and two and then it’s not present in the pH๏τo on the right.

So you’re kind of seeing some move in a transition there.

Why is that significant?

>> Um I I mean it’s going to show if these are boats that are in question in this investigation.

One, it will show hopefully a timeline when the boats were there and sort of where they were in relation to the world, who may or may not have been on those as they relate to the case.

Uh, and then a boat not >> is careful here and it’s worth being just as careful repeating it.

It does not claim Nolan is visible in that later pH๏τograph.

It says he could be.

That’s a meaningful difference.

It’s the kind of detail that’s easy to flatten into a headline and impossible to respect if you’re actually trying to understand what investigators are working with.

And here’s where it gets really, really specific because the report includes a shoreline pH๏τograph that’s believed to have been taken at 4:50 p.m.

So 19 minutes after the Triton apparently left at 4:31 p.m.

And in that pH๏τo, the pH๏τo known as boat number two, they say it’s no longer in the original position.

So by 4:50 p.m., at least one boat had already moved.

The report notes Nolan could be in that pH๏τo at 4:50 p.m., but you know, could be.

It’s not confirmed.

And I guess this would go against what we’ve heard so much about the reporting that the last time people saw him who were with him
Was 3 p.m.

Right?

So I think that’s significant.

>> Then there’s the distress call.

You’ve probably heard some version of the audio already because it’s circulated widely online.

A voice reporting that a boat is taking on water that people need help panic underneath the words.

It’s become one of the most replayed pieces of audio in this entire case in part because some listeners believe they can hear references to Nolan in the background.

That claim has not been verified by law enforcement.

But here’s what the report actually says about that call.

>> There’s more.

Remember that audio that was released, the distress call that was made from the boat that Nolan was supposedly on or was on at one point in time.

Not clear if he was on at that point when the call was made, although we’ve seen video back and forth that would suggest he wasn’t, but remember the idea was the boat was taking on water and then you had these young people panicking.

This call,
>> hey, we’re at the uh west tip of Horn and uh our billagege pump stopped working.

We’re going we’re sinking.

Can you all please come?

We have a membership.

>> Is there a living person?

Someone breathing on the boat?

Is there anybody on the boat?

>> Yes, there’s lots of people breathing on the boat.

>> So, the audio had been later enhanced.

People online were claiming they heard people panicking about Nolan in the background, though that’s not officially been verified by law enforcement.

And here is what is important about this now, >> and it’s more restrained than a lot of what’s been said about it.

Online, investigators have not found evidence establishing when the boat actually began taking on water.

Not that it didn’t happen, not that the call was fabricated, just that the timeline connecting the call to an actual mechanical failure hasn’t been nailed down yet.

>> The boat was sinking.

That audio very important because it’s been a key part of the friend story.

They say the boat was taking on water.

That’s why they had to leave.

The Navy’s report says there’s no evidence to confirm when that happened.

And also significant, the MDMR report, that’s the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, notes that at 4:31, the boat moved at6 to 4.2 knots for nearly an hour before resuming normal operation at 5:25 p.m.

>> A separate State Marine Resources report notes the boat speed changed around 40:31 p.m.

And didn’t return to normal for nearly an hour, which is consistent with some kind of issue, but consistency isn’t conf autopsies being done.

I know one is right now saying there’s no confirmed cause of death, but let’s say for argument sake, let’s say it was a drowning.

Unlike TV, drownings aren’t always this huge event where somebody’s screaming, “Help, help, help.

” Sometimes a drowning victim will just just slips away and nobody notices it.

>> Can you clarify that for a minute?

>> There’s also a witness account that adds a strange book into all of this.

A woman who was on the island that day says that when her own group left around 7030 that evening, hours after Nolan’s friends had already gone, he was nowhere in sight.

The report treats this carefully, too, describing it as potentially useful as what’s called a negative observation.

Meaning, it tells you something >> out.

>> I want to circle back to something that I mentioned earlier.

So, according to the report, there was a woman on the island named uh Caitlyn Bashard who apparently snapped a picture of the vessels and reported that Nolan was nowhere in sight when her group left the island at 7:30 p.m.

That’s the screensH๏τ of her statement above the picture.

So, Alex, let’s talk about this for a second.

3 hours apparently after the friends had left.

>> Put those two end points together and you start to see why this case is so difficult to pin down.

On one end, a sighting window that closes around 40:27 PM.

On the other, a witness saying he wasn’t visible by 7:30 p.m.

Somewhere in between those two points is everything that actually happened to Nolan Wells.

And right now, nobody outside of active law enforcement seems to have filled that gap.

>> I think we need to be careful um for for all of the the online sleuths out there that, you know, the information that is currently available to the public may not be as much as is available to the current investigators.

You know, those that are coming on, you know, doing shows like this and and doing other things are are operating under what they know.

That’s not necessarily the same thing as what investigators know.

And investigators are not always obligated, nor should they always want to, you know, we talk a lot about transparency, but when you’re conducting an investigation, sometimes itself lists five specific things investigators still need to nail down.

Confirming the exact time and source of that last known sighting.

Verifying whether the timestamps on key pH๏τos reflect when they were taken or when they were posted.

Identifying that boat that seems to disappear from the pH๏τos and figuring out who was on it.

Confirming the 4031 p.m.

Departure using something more concrete than memory and building a full account of who was on which boat cross checked against whatever visual evidence exist.

>> They can push it up on a beach so that they’re not having to salvage the boat later and and deal with it that way.

I >> I want to get your opinion on one thing before we um before we wrap up on this.

So, the Navy report identifies five specific problems here that still need to be resolved.

According to the report, investigators need to one, authenticate the last independently corroborated sighting of Nolan, the exact time, location, source, media.

Two, authenticate the 323 and 427 media.

Determine whether those times are event times, post times, screen recording times.

Three, identify boat X.

Determine when it left the configuration, where it went, who was on board.

Four, authenticate the 431 departure using primary electronic data, not just recollection.

And five, create a complete occupant by occupant vessel roster and compare each person’s statement against the visual record.

And the Navy’s report says that until these five points are resolved, any narrative claiming certainty about Nolan, what he was doing, his movements, quote, exceeds what the supplied evidence can support.

>> Until those five things are resolved, the report says plainly, “Any claim of certainty about what Nolan was doing or where he went goes further than the evidence actually supports.”

That’s an important note to end on because it cuts against almost everything driving the public conversation around this case.

It is genuinely hard to reconstruct a single hour of one person’s life at a crowded gathering on an island 10 miles offshore, especially when you’re relying on the memories and phones of people who weren’t tracking time, weren’t filming constantly, and had no reason that day, they’d need to account for every minute of it later.

None of that is an excuse.

>> Um, yeah, that’s not unusual.

I mean, if you could imagine yourself at any large gathering, if you were plucked out of the crowd and then asked, “Could you tell me where the lady in the red dress that you see right here was at through the night?”

If you weren’t particularly paying attention to that person, how would you know that?

And so, they’re trying to take everybody’s account.

And then time is is a funny thing because if you’re you’re at an event like this or you’re at a party, how often are you like unless you have someplace to be, are you always tracking your time?

It’s a description of how investigations like this actually work slowly, methodically, and often out of step with how fast the public wants answers.

The state autopsy is complete, but under Mississippi law, in a death like this, the findings go to a grand jury before anything becomes public.

There’s still no released toxicology report, no confirmed cause of death, and no timeline for when that process wraps up >> about whether that’s accurate.

And we should also note that the state toxicology report hasn’t been publicly released yet.

That that report along with the autopsy report is all being withheld until a grand jury is a panel that makes a decision.

Remember, the sheriff’s office is still investigating this.

By all accounts, under Mississippi law, this is going to be presented to a grand jury because that’s a key point, right?

The official state autopsy is complete, but the results are sealed.

District Attorney Angel Myers Macarath says that every death in the county that isn’t natural causes or a noncriminal car wreck goes to a grand jury.

>> So, for now, the missing hour stays missing.

A family is still waiting.

An investigation is still ongoing.

And the honest answer to what happened to Nolan Wells during that window is the one nobody wants to hear.

Nobody outside of law enforcement actually knows yet.

We’ll keep following this case as new information comes out.

And we’ll keep separating what’s actually been verified from what’s just being repeated online.

If you want to stay on top of it, subscribe and we’ll bring you the next update the moment there’s something real to