26 Families in Greenland Had 4 Days to Leave Their Homes | Qaanaaq and the U.S. Base | Documentary

Qaanaaq, Greenland, began with 26 families who were given four days to leave their village in May 1953. The village was Uummannaq, the main settlement of the Inughuit, the northernmost people on Earth. Two years earlier, in the summer of 1951, the United States had built an airfield on the plain beside it in sixty days: Operation Blue Jay, the start of Thule Air Base, a Cold War bomber base designed for 4,000 people next to a village of 116. Denmark told the world that the Inughuit wished to move. The Inughuit themselves were told on May 25. On May 27 the first dog sleds left across the sea ice, and four days later the village was empty. Eleven days after that, a letter written in Copenhagen admitted what had really happened: the government had managed, in its own words, to avoid letting the cat out of the bag. This documentary follows the story from the first ship in 1818 and the boy Minik in a New York museum, through the secret American offer to buy Greenland for 100 million dollars in gold, to the four days of May 1953 and the cold wooden houses that reached Qaanaaq when the snow was already on the ground. It follows the B-52 that crashed on the sea ice beside the base on January 21, 1968, with four hydrogen bombs on board, and the hunters who drove their dog sleds into the polar night to find the crew. And it follows the people who were moved, Hingitaq 53, the discarded, who took Denmark to court for the right to go home, won an apology, and were refused the way back. In 2023 the base became Pituffik Space Base, named for the plain where the Inughuit once tied up their dogs. In September 2026, the United States, Denmark and Greenland signed a new defense agreement that allows the Americans to expand the base and open two new sites on the island. 🔔 SUBSCRIBE for new documentaries exploring Earth's most hidden, dangerous, and mysterious places. 🌍 Drop a comment and tell me which country you're watching from - I read every single one. 📚 SOURCES U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian - Foreign Relations of the United States 1947, Vol. III: Secretary Byrnes and the Danish Foreign Minister, December 14, 1946 (the offer to buy Greenland): https://history.state.gov/historicald... European Court of Human Rights - Hingitaq 53 and Others v. Denmark, decision of January 12, 2006 (full text at ELAW; the 1953 relocation and the Danish judgments of 1999 and 2003): https://elaw.org/resource/denmark-hin... BBC News - Mystery of lost US nuclear bomb, by Gordon Corera (November 10, 2008; the 1968 crash and the clean-up): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/772... Type Investigations / In These Times - The New Cold War in the Arctic, by Adam Federman (October 30, 2023; Qaanaaq today): https://typeinvestigations.org/invest... CBS News - The United States, Denmark and Greenland sign a new defense agreement (September 2026): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-gr... ⚠️ DISCLAIMER: This video is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Some visuals were AI-assisted to illustrate locations and events where original footage was unavailable. Always do your own research. #Hadavault #Documentary #Qaanaaq #Greenland #ThuleAirBase #ColdWar