The first thing you need to understand about Alaska is that it is not like其他地方 in America. You cannot simply call for help and expect it to arrive. The state is vast—two and a half times the size of Texas—with a population smaller than the city of Austin. Half of the entire nation’s federally designated wilderness is here, 57 million acres of land that has never felt the weight of a human boot. And somewhere in that frozen, beautiful, indifferent expanse, over 16,000 people have vanished since 1988.

Sixteen thousand.

That is the number you need to hold in your mind. It is not a typo. It is not an exaggeration. It is the official count of missing persons in the Alaska Triangle, a region that connects the state’s largest city of Anchorage in the south to Juneau in the southeast panhandle to Barrow, a small town on the north coast that sits above the Arctic Circle.

Every year, between 500 and 2,000 people go missing in Alaska. They do not leave notes. They do not call their families. They simply walk into the wilderness, or board a small plane, or step onto a boat, and then they are gone. No bodies. No wreckage. No explanation. Just the vast, indifferent silence of a land that does not care whether you live or die.

“Roughly one in every 250 people have vanished in the Alaskan Triangle,” I said, reading from the report. “Since 1988, over 16,000 disappearances. Statistically, Alaska has more annual missing persons reports than anywhere else in the country—twice the national average. It also has the highest number of missing people who are never found.”

A caller named Marcus from Seattle interrupted. “You’re telling me that 16,000 people just disappeared? Like, poof? No trace?”

“Not poof,” I said. “Not magic. But yes. No trace. In 2007, for instance, 2,833 people were reported missing. When you compare that to the state’s population of around 670,000 at the time, that equates to about four in every 1,000 people. A staggering amount.”

Marcus was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “What is wrong with that place?”

That is the question, isn’t it? What is wrong with Alaska?

This is the first hinge: The land does not care. And that is what makes it terrifying.

The Alaska Triangle was first named in 1972, around the same time that two prominent politicians vanished from the sky. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs and Representative Nick Begich were flying from Anchorage to Juneau in a Cessna 310 aircraft. They never arrived. An intense search lasted for 39 days.

Four hundred aircraft. An SR-71 spy plane. Dozens of boats, including twelve from the Coast Guard. The search area covered over 32,000 square miles—about the size of South Carolina. No evidence of the plane was ever found. No wreckage. No bodies. No debris.

At the time, conspiracy theories claimed the disappearance was orchestrated or covered up by then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in response to intense political struggles he had with Boggs. But those theories, like the plane itself, never landed on anything solid.

Then there was the military aircraft in the 1950s. A Douglas C-54 Skymaster carrying an eight-man crew and 36 passengers lost contact with the ground and was never heard from again. The Army conducted the largest military search and rescue mission at that time. They found nothing. To this day, it is known as one of the largest groups of military personnel to go missing in American history.

And the UFOs. Always the UFOs.

In 1986, a Japanese plane was flying from Iceland to Anchorage when it came across three unidentified flying objects. The objects followed the airliner for approximately 400 miles through the Alaska Triangle. One of them was said to be twice the size of an aircraft carrier. The crew reported seeing flashing lights following their plane.

Air traffic controllers witnessed something unidentifiable on their radar, reported as close as five miles from the plane. The pilot claimed that at one point, the two smaller ships appeared directly in front of the plane at close range. He described them disappearing and reappearing quickly, moving fast and stopping suddenly—something impossible for a normal aircraft to do.

In order to escape, the pilot received permission to fly at a lower altitude while making several turns to elude the objects. Nothing worked. After about 32 minutes, the UFOs disappeared. The pilot claimed the entire encounter felt much longer than that.

“It’s not uncommon in UFO encounters for time to stop, speed up, or stand still,” I said.

A caller named Diane from Oregon laughed nervously. “Time stood still? That’s not a UFO. That’s a horror movie.”

“Alaska is a horror movie,” I said. “It just doesn’t have a script.”

This is the second hinge: In the Alaska Triangle, even time does not behave.

The disappearances are not limited to planes and politicians. Hikers vanish. Mountain climbers vanish. A man named Richard Lyman Griffis from Spokane, Washington, invented a wilderness survival cocoon. It was a bright orange, highly visible shelter designed to keep a person alive in the harshest conditions. In the summer of 2006, Griffis headed into the wilderness of Southeast Alaska to test his invention. No one reported him missing for a year.

When authorities finally began searching, they learned that a bus had dropped Griffis off along the Alaska Highway. He stopped at a lodge near the White River, where he left some of his gear and told people he planned to hike upriver to McCarthy, a small town in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. He was never seen again. No trace of him or his bright orange cocoon has ever been found.

Then there is the case of Naomi Uemura, a famous Japanese adventurer and mountain climber. In 1984, he attempted a solo winter ascent of Denali, the highest peak in North America. He had already successfully summited Denali on his own, but he wanted to try a more challenging climb in the winter.

He made it to the top on February 13, 1984. But something happened on his descent. He never returned to base camp. Conditions near the top of Denali when Uemura disappeared included high winds and a temperature of −50°F (−46°C). Such brutal conditions leave little room for human error.

But here is the thing about Denali: it is not just cold. It is actively hostile. The mountain creates its own weather. Climbers have reported hearing voices in the wind. Seeing figures that were not there. Feeling overwhelming dread in places where no rational person would feel anything but awe.

“Some of that can be explained by hypoxia,” I said. “Low oxygen at high altitudes can cause hallucinations. But that doesn’t explain why bodies are never found. That doesn’t explain why entire aircraft disappear without a single piece of debris.”

My producer texted me during a commercial break: “Are we really doing a whole episode on this? People are going to think we’ve lost our minds.”

I texted back: “Let them.”

The number 16,000 is not a conspiracy theory. It is a statistic. It comes from the Alaska Division of Public Health, the Alaska Governor’s Office, and the National UFO Reporting Center. It is not made up. It is not exaggerated. It is just the number of people who have gone missing in this one region of the world since 1988.

And that number does not include the ones who were found.

In 2007, state troopers performed 42 search and rescue missions related to overdue hikers. Eighty-five related to overdue boaters. One hundred related to overdue snow machine operators.

The Civil Air Patrol, which assists with search and rescue, received more state funding for Alaska than for any other branch. They saved the most lives in 2006 out of all other state branches. But they did not save everyone. They could not.

Because when a person goes missing in Alaska, the clock is not their friend. The average temperature in Fairbanks in January is −15°F. Ice fog forms when tiny ice particles become suspended in the air, reducing visibility to near zero. In the summer, temperatures can reach 88°F, and lightning strikes—tens of thousands of them—can ignite wildfires that burn for months. The land is not static. It is alive. And it is hungry.

This is the third hinge: Alaska does not take. It consumes.

Let me tell you about the Kushtaka. The Tlingit people, who have lived in the region for over 11,000 years, tell stories about a shape-shifting demon that is a cross between a man and an otter.

Its name means “land otter man.” It is said to lure lost travelers to their doom by imitating the cries of children or women screaming for help. When the Kushtaka captures a person, it steals their soul. Sometimes it transforms them into another Kushtaka. Sometimes it just leaves them to die in the freezing water.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “This is folklore. This is superstition. This is not science.”

But here is the thing about folklore: it often emerges from real experiences. The Tlingit did not invent the Kushtaka because they were bored. They invented it because people kept disappearing near the water. Because bodies would wash up with strange marks. Because something in the wilderness was taking their people, and they needed a name for it.

The Kushtaka is not the only supernatural explanation for the disappearances. There are also the energy vortexes. The Alaska Triangle is one of several so-called “vile vortices” identified by American researcher and cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson. These are geographical areas around the planet that exhibit extreme electric, magnetic, and electromagnetic anomalies.

The most famous vile vortex is the Bermuda Triangle. Others include the Algerian Megaliths south of Timbuktu, the Indus Valley in Pakistan, the Hamakulia Volcano in Hawaii, the Devil’s Sea near Japan, and both the North and South Poles.

These energy vortexes are thought to affect humans in various physical, mental, and emotional ways. They can cause visions. They can induce disorientation, confusion, and both visual and auditory hallucinations. They can cause delicate electrical instrumentation to malfunction. More far-out theories suggest that vortexes are actually doorways into spiritual dimensions or gateways to other realms.

Alaska is covered with a large concentration of magnetic anomalies. Some of them can disrupt compasses to the point that they are as much as 30 degrees off. Search and rescue workers in the area have reported having auditory hallucinations, most commonly described as sounding like an angry swarm of bees.

They have reported feeling unusually disoriented or lightheaded. Some readings of areas in the Alaska Triangle have produced unusual anomalies and spikes of electromagnetic activity.

“Does that prove the vortex theory?” I asked. “No. But it does suggest that something is happening in that region that we do not fully understand.”

A caller named Kevin from Denver said, “So you’re telling me that Alaska is a giant energy vortex that makes people hallucinate and then disappear?”

“I’m telling you that 16,000 people have vanished,” I said. “I’m telling you that search and rescue missions often return empty-handed. I’m telling you that even the military has lost planes in that region without a trace. I’m not telling you what caused it. I’m just telling you that it happened.”

This is the fourth hinge: We do not have to explain a mystery to acknowledge that it exists.

The most recent high-profile disappearance in the Alaska Triangle is also one of the strangest. In 2018, two experienced climbers, Ryan Johnson and Marc-André Leclerc, failed to return from a climb on a seven-peaked mountain near Juneau. Searchers found an intact anchor rope at the top of an ice chute on one peak and then saw two climbing ropes in a crevasse midway down the same peak. The evidence showed that the climbers made it to the top and set an anchor. Then something happened. An avalanche, perhaps. A rope failure. Or something else entirely.

The Alaska State Troopers would not speculate. They simply said the climbers were presumed dead.

And then there is the case of the Mount Marathon race. In 2015, a sixty-five-year-old man named Michael LeMaitre was competing for the first time in the 85th running of the race. Starting in downtown Seward, racers run a half-mile to the bottom of Mount Marathon, then scramble about 2,900 vertical feet straight up cliffs, mud, and shale before getting to the summit. Then they go downhill over snowfields, rock fields, waterfalls, and crags until they reach the finish line.

Tom Walsh, a race steward, saw Michael ascending to the turnaround point with about 200 feet to go. The area was getting foggy and cold, but Walsh saw no reason to be concerned. He asked Michael for his bib number. Michael replied, “Five-four-eight.” Walsh texted race officials that bib number 548 would be home in about an hour and a half.

That was the last time Michael was ever seen.

Mountain rescue experts, firefighters, state troopers, search dogs, and Michael’s family spent thousands of combined hours searching the area. They found nothing. Not a single clue. Not a piece of clothing. Not a footprint. Not a body.

The official search was called off. Volunteers continued to search the mountain for months. Nothing.

“Five hundred forty-eight,” I said. “That is the number that Michael gave before he walked into the fog and never came back. No one knows what happened to him. No one ever will.”

The line went quiet. My producer gave me the wrap signal. But I was not done.

“Sixteen thousand people,” I said. “Sixteen thousand human beings who walked into the Alaska Triangle and did not walk out. Some of them were hikers. Some were pilots. Some were politicians. Some were just people who made a wrong turn or took a wrong step or trusted the wrong piece of equipment.

And some of them—maybe—were taken by something else. Something that does not have a name. Something that the Tlingit called Kushtaka. Something that lives in the energy vortexes. Something that is still out there, waiting for the next person to come too close.”

I paused.

“I am not saying I believe in aliens or demons or shape-shifting otters. But I am saying that 16,000 people do not vanish from a region without a reason. And I am saying that the reason—whatever it is—has not been found yet.”

The show ended. The lights went down. The producer came over and said, “That was dark.”

I looked at him. “Alaska is dark. That is the point.”

A final caller named Patricia from Florida said, “My brother went missing in Alaska in 1999. He was a bush pilot. He flew out one day to deliver supplies to a remote village, and he never came back. They searched for three weeks. They found nothing. Not the plane. Not him. Nothing. I have been waiting 25 years for an answer. I don’t think I’m going to get one.”

I did not know what to say to Patricia. There was nothing to say. Some mysteries do not have solutions. Some stories do not have endings. Some people walk into the wilderness and the wilderness closes its doors behind them and never lets them go.

“Patricia,” I said finally, “I am so sorry.”

She thanked me and hung up.

I sat in the studio for a long time after the cameras stopped rolling. I thought about the 16,000. I thought about the Kushtaka. I thought about the energy vortexes and the UFOs and the black pyramid that may or may not be buried under Mount McKinley.

I thought about Michael LeMaitre, bib number 548, walking into the fog.

And I thought about what the Tlingit say about the Kushtaka: that it imitates the voices of children to lure you closer. That it wants your soul. That once it has you, you are never coming back.

I do not know if I believe in the Kushtaka. But I believe in the disappearances. Sixteen thousand of them. And that is enough to keep me out of the Alaska Triangle for the rest of my life.

“Be good to yourselves and each other,” I said to the empty studio. “And if you ever find yourself in Alaska, stay on the road. Stay in the light. And whatever you do, do not follow the sound of a crying child into the woods.”

The lights went out. The door closed. And somewhere, in the vast, frozen silence of the Alaska Triangle, something that may or may not have a name was still waiting.

This is the fifth hinge: The land does not care. And the land does not forget.