Original subtitles

WILLIAM SHATNER: A mysterious hijacker

who vanished into thin air.

A transnational flight

that never reached its destination.

And a world-famous explorer

who trekked into the depths of the Amazon

and was never seen again.

When a person seems to vanish without a trace,

it's usually only a matter of time

before we learn what actually happened to them.

But there are certain disappearances

that defy conventional wisdom,

and leave us with no clear answers.

These mysteries make us wonder,

"What could have possibly gone wrong?"

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

♪ ♪

On the night before Thanksgiving,

Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305

is about to depart on a short flight to Seattle

when a middle-aged man dressed in a black suit

and carrying a black attaché case

boards the plane.

But this man is not flying to celebrate

the holiday with friends or family.

He has other plans.

GEOFFREY GRAY: As the plane took off, he passed the stewardess a note.

The note said, "I have a bomb.

I would like you to sit near me."

And at that point, she could tell he was serious.

SCOTT SELBY: The stewardess asked him if she could see the bomb.

He discreetly opens up a briefcase

and shows what appears to her to be a bomb.

SHATNER: The hijacker demands $200,000 and four parachutes

to be delivered to him when the plane lands in Seattle

or he will blow up the airliner,

killing everyone on board.

GRAY: After the plane lands in Seattle,

in comes the money and the parachutes.

And all the passengers are escorted off the plane,

and the hijacker ordered the pilots to take off

towards, of all places, Mexico City.

SHATNER: The Boeing 727 is refueled

and a four-person crew takes the hijacker back into the air,

headed for the border.

But during the flight,

the hijacker puts on two parachutes,

ties the money to his chest

and opens the aft stairs.

No one knows exactly when or where,

but at some point,

he leaps from the plane

and is never seen again.

He was gone,

and vanished into the night air.

LARRY LEVINE: There was a manhunt that was launched

over a two-state area

where they had the FBI, other federal agencies,

the Army, state police,

and they were combing that entire area,

and they didn't find anything.

SHATNER: According to the plane's manifest,

the hijacker's listed name was "Dan Cooper,"

but thanks to a news miscommunication,

he is more commonly referred to as "D.B. Cooper."

However, authorities soon learned

that this name was merely an alias

and the real identity of the man was unknown.

D.B. Cooper's escape was so ingenious,

that it was nearly ten years

before the FBI got a major break in the case.

GRAY: One day in 1980,

having a picnic on the side of this river,

a young boy found some money.

But this just wasn't any money.

This was the D.B. Cooper money.

It turned up in this sandbar.

The money was found in a completely different place

than the path of the plane.

So what that means is that the money

didn't just flutter to the ground

and land into the sand bar.

It means it had to get there by some kind of means.

SHATNER: But why would D.B. Cooper risk his life

to steal $200,000,

only to bury at least some of it in the sand?

It seems to defy all logic.

Unless D.B. Cooper had another reason

for doing the hijacking besides money.

DIANE BIRNHOLZ: Having money be the object of this case

doesn't make sense because he had

to have known that this money

would either be marked

or it would be somehow traceable.

So again, you have to wonder,

what was the real agenda here?

LEVINE: You've got a man that jumped out

of a moving jet aircraft

that was never found,

and he was like a perfect professional.

And I suspect

that he was probably former military,

possibly part of the CIA

who had a mission that needed to be carried out.

SHATNER: It may sound like a far-fetched conspiracy theory,

but according to some researchers,

there is evidence to suggest

that D.B. Cooper had military training.

For instance, Cooper knew that the Boeing 727-100

aircraft's aft staircase

was a good platform for a parachute jump.

And in fact,

the CIA had used this same tactic

with the same model airplane

to airdrop supplies and spies

during the Vietnam War.

Air America, which was the CIA's airline in Vietnam,

they used this same aircraft,

and D.B. had to have had knowledge

that the 727-100 had the stairwell

that could be lowered, and it could be lowered in flight.

This wasn't common knowledge.

And, this is something that somebody

had to have already had experience doing

in order to pull it off.

SHATNER: If D.B. Cooper was trained by the CIA,

was the hijacking something he did on his own

or could it have been a mission

that he was ordered to carry out?

And if so, for what purpose?

BIRNHOLZ: Back in 1971, there was not much security

in terms of airline travel.

And there were a lot of hijackings

happening in the early '70s.

SELBY: At the time, you could have, say,

as many guns as you wanted in your duffle bag

that you carried on, on your person.

And this meant of course,

that people were hijacking planes left and right.

It was also oftentimes political.

So the terrorism of the 1970s

in which people would hijack a plane

and then make demands

for various political prisoners to be freed.

And then you take them in the plane to Cuba

and Cuba would let you live there for free

as long as you wanted.

This was like a political act, hijackings.

People would say, "Take me to Cuba."

So much so, that the FAA and agency officials

almost reconstructed a replica

of the Havana Airport in Southern Florida.

The idea was if you got hijacked t-to Havana,

you would just fly around and then land at the fake site.

Some people theorize that the D.B. Cooper hijacking

was really some sort of false-flag event

to create a hijacking spectacular enough

that it will grab everyone's attention

and lead to some regulation changes

so that these hijackings can stop.

And that actually is what happened after D.B. Cooper

because the FAA came out

with all kinds of new regulations.

LEVINE: I wouldn't put it past the CIA

to have an agent like Dan Cooper

do whatever it took to raise public perception

and public awareness on airline security.

I mean, when you really look at it,

who was hurt? Nobody.

I mean, he had all the makings of an undercover operative.

GRAY: The D.B. Cooper case, what makes it noteworthy,

is that it's actually the only

unsolved skyjacking in the world.

And what makes it so hard to solve

is that it's mysteries and mysteries.

And once you get inside those mysteries, there's others.

It's not just a story about a hijacker.

SHATNER: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370

prepares to depart from Kuala Lumpur International Airport,

en route to Beijing.

On board are 227 passengers

and a flight crew of 12.

NANCE: Malaysia 370 was a commercial flight.

Malaysia Airlines, it was a routine procedure,

a routine flight as we say.

The flight path was more or less a straight line.

Aimed from Kuala Lumpur out over the water

in the South China Sea to the main landfall of China.

As far as everybody was concerned,

it took off normally,

was flying its route north towards China.

TUTTLE: Then all of a sudden

it turned off its communications and basically went dark.

SHATNER: At about 1:20 a.m.,

as the plane was flying over the South China Sea,

ground control lost all contact with the plane.

One second, the 240-ton Boeing aircraft

was emitting a clear transponder signal

to air traffic control.

And then, mere moments later,

there was nothing.

The fact that the signal disappeared,

that was the unusual element.

The fact that that transponder,

which was chirping back every time it was hit

by the radar beam from air traffic control, went silent.

KAKU: Flight controllers frantically tried

to communicate with the airplane.

Nothing.

What happened?

How can you lose a jetliner?

How can it vanish in thin air?

SHATNER: Although the aircraft was lost on civilian radar screens,

unbeknownst to ground control,

military radar was able to track the plane for another hour.

And what it detected was baffling.

At that point, when the radios were turned off,

the flightpath did a 90-degree turn to the left,

basically on a southwestern heading

and disappeared into the vastness of the Indian Ocean.

We don't know the motivation for doing this.

We just, we don't know.

SHATNER: Around 2:20 a.m., radar contact with the plane

was lost for good.

By 7:20 a.m., one hour after it was scheduled to land,

authorities in Beijing realized that Flight MH370

was not going to reach its destination.

A search and rescue operation was immediately launched

and it quickly became the most expensive and difficult

in aviation history.

The initial search was basically, uh,

aircraft searching for the immediate wreck,

looking for any survivors

or telltale wreckage on the sea surface.

Unfortunately, after a while, things sink.

Survivors aren't there

and you go from a search and rescue mission

to a search and recovery mission.

SHATNER: When the wreckage did not turn up,

officials were eventually forced to admit

that all 239 people on board the flight

had perished.

We were clueless as to what could have caused

this tragedy right under our noses.

In an era when we have the Internet,

satellite, radar communication,

it just disappears off the radar screen.

SHATNER: The wreckage of the plane,

despite the efforts of the world's top aviation experts

had seemingly vanished without a trace.

But then after months of searching,

investigators finally uncovered an important clue.

Boeing had included

a maintenance reporting thing that goes by satellite.

It was called an ACAR system.

And Boeing had installed the system

to report maintenance information

about the engines in the airplane every hour.

In this particular case, it was still pinging away.

It was saying essentially to the satellite,

"Hey, I'm here. You want any information?"

SHATNER: The information revealed by the ACAR system was shocking.

It showed that the plane did not crash

anywhere near where it was last detected.

It actually changed course

and kept on flying.

GREG LIEFER: It was flown for another six hours

after it made the initial diversion

from its intended flight plan

and it was flown, uh, to a very remote area.

SHATNER: Based off this data, aviation experts believe

that the plane most likely crashed

somewhere in the southern portion of the Indian Ocean

after running out of fuel.

It seems that the aircraft flew in the wrong direction

for thousands of miles,

to a distant part of the ocean

where there was no possible place to land.

But how could that have happened?

Initially, the theory that was proposed by a lot of the media

was that the pilot in command committed suicide.

But in fact, the accident report clearly stated

that the pilot had no history of emotional or physical problems

that would preclude suicide

and family, friends and coworkers said

he had no abnormal behavior before the flight.

KAKU: Other people say,

"No, it was some kind of mechanical failure."

If it were to catch on fire,

the plane could rapidly depressurize,

meaning that people would suffocate very rapidly.

And I think that what happened then

was you had a ghost airplane.

Where everyone was either dead or dying.

It was randomly going back and forth

until it finally ran out of fuel

and crashed into the Indian Ocean.

You had theories of oxygen malfunction

that incapacitated the pilots

but I don't think that makes sense

because the aircraft, it certainly appeared to me,

like it was being flown manually

for up to at least 30 minutes, if not up to an hour

after it made that hard left turn.

The thing that makes the most sense to me

was some type of hijacking.

The abrupt maneuvers that it was making,

the changes in altitude and air speed and heading,

all that indicates to me that it was a deliberate, uh,

manipulation by other people

that took control of the aircraft.

But then that poses the question,

"Well, why did they hijack the aircraft?

What was the motive and why fly to the southern Indian Ocean?"

SHATNER: While the theory

that the plane was hijacked may sound logical,

authorities thoroughly checked the background

of all the passengers and crew and none of them

fit the profile of a hijacker.

The truth is that while several of the explanations

that have been put forth seem to have merit,

we simply don't have enough information

to verify any of them.

We have no way of knowing

because the cockpit voice recorder

is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean someplace.

But the other,

and the most important thing to keep in mind is,

we found a piece of that airplane.

A piece of the wing was found and verified.

It was washed up on, I believe the shores of Madagascar.

Or close to it.

And it was definitively from this particular airplane.

So, we knew then categorically that that airplane

had gone into the Indian Ocean.

And in this case, this particular piece of the plane

had taken about a year and a half

to float all the way across the Indian Ocean.

LIEFER: It was one of 27 pieces that were eventually recovered

and it was one of three pieces out of the 27

that was positively identified as coming from the aircraft.

The aircraft wasn't found, occupants weren't found,

but yet, 17 months later,

they find these pieces of debris,

thousands of miles away.

And that's what makes this mystery, I think,

probably the biggest mystery of all the aviation mysteries.

SHATNER: Three Englishmen, accompanied by two Brazilian locals,

make their way through the dense foliage.

The men are searching for an ancient lost city

that has been rumored to be hidden

deep within the rainforest.

The leader of their quest is an ambitious explorer,

who feels that he is on the cusp of a remarkable discovery.

Colonel Percy Fawcett.

TOK THOMPSON: Colonel Percy Fawcett

is a very interesting historical character.

He was a geographer, an explorer,

a member of the World Geographic Society

and also a military man for most of his career.

So, a very capable individual.

And he was responsible for exploring and mapping

a lot of the unknown regions of South America.

So, um, Colonel Fawcett makes an interesting

and rather dashing figure.

SHATNER: After decades spent trekking through South America,

Fawcett became convinced that a massive civilization

had once existed somewhere in the Amazon jungle.

DEYERMENJIAN: Fawcett came upon this particular manuscript

that was supposed to have been written by bandeirante,

a Portuguese fortune seeker

back in the 1700s.

And it looks to be describing

a particular city there in the Brazilian Amazon.

LYNNE McNEIL: That manuscript describes

not just a lost city of ruins,

but a lost city of epic proportions.

A lost city of riches, a city of gold,

and architectural marvels, technologically developed,

things that you would absolutely not expect to find

in the middle of the South American jungle.

SHATNER: In time, Fawcett's fascination

with a lost city in the Amazon

turned to obsession.

He even came up with a name for the place he was searching for.

He called it "The Lost City of Z."

Armed with clues from the Portuguese manuscript,

he plunged into the wilderness once more,

determined to solve the mystery.

His companions were his son Jack

and his son's friend Raleigh Rimmel.

The geographical challenges along the routes

that Fawcett and his party would face

included things like rivers

that were extremely swift

that one could easily

have their feet knocked from under them.

And there would have been piranha as well

in these areas of Brazil.

And the swamps, the marshes,

were particularly virulent as far as disease,

insects, and geographical difficulties.

SHATNER: As Fawcett moved deeper into the heart of the Amazon,

he wrote about his progress

and gave his notes to native guides,

who carried them back to civilization.

The newspapers eagerly published the details

of his latest exploits,

portraying the explorer as an international hero

on the verge of making history.

DEYERMENJIAN: Colonel Fawcett was a world-known celebrity.

His exploits were followed in the press

and, uh, were quite popular and quite well known.

We know what we know of Colonel Percy Fawcett

largely from his own writings.

Stories about encounters that he had

with native peoples in Brazil.

Stories of having arrows drawn on him threateningly.

He tells the story of a 62-foot anaconda

that he shot in the spine and killed

as he was canoeing through the waters down the Amazon.

LAYNE: He writes a letter to his wife and says,

"There's no fear of failure."

He apparently thinks he's right on top of it,

that he's going to find it, this lost city.

And then he vanishes.

SHATNER: Six weeks after the expedition started,

Fawcett's letters stopped coming.

And people around the world began to fear

that something terrible had happened

to the explorer and his team.

After weeks, months, and eventually years of waiting

with no word from him,

it became clear that Colonel Percy Fawcett,

his son Jack and his son's friend Raleigh Rimmel

would never return from the jungle.

THOMPSON: There was a great interest in what could have happened.

Some people thought he might've been murdered

by the local Indigenous groups.

Other people thought that maybe some, uh, bandits

that were operating in this area might've killed him.

Some people even said that, "Look, maybe he found it,

"maybe he found his Lost City of Z

and just decided to stay there the rest of his life."

SHATNER: The Lost City of Z, found at last?

Is it possible that Fawcett's dream

actually became a reality?

Brian Fawcett, uh, his youngest son,

reported that there's a distinct possibility

that Percy Fawcett did not intend to return.

That for him, if he did find it,

it being the capstone to what he was looking for,

he might not have intended to ever leave the jungle.

LAYNE: If you have dedicated your life now

to finding this lost city of treasure and gold

and you actually find it,

maybe you don't want to reveal it to the rest of the world.

Maybe it's perfection, it's paradise,

maybe you can make the choice to stay.

Was Colonel Percy Fawcett

swallowed up by the Amazon rainforest?

Or did he actually find the lost city he was looking for?

We may never know.

But what's clear is that there are some places on Earth

where it's easy to go missing.

And one of those spots lies not in a remote jungle,

but rather in the heart of the United States.

SHATNER: On a bright, clear morning in this small desert town,

billionaire adventurer and pilot Steve Fossett

takes off for a scenic flight

and is never heard from again.

PAULIDES: Fossett should've been back within about two hours.

He didn't come back.

The airport called search and rescue

and what encompassed was the biggest search

for an aircraft in Nevada of all time.

It went on for days.

SEARCH AND RESCUE SERGEANT: We've got 200 people looking.

And we haven't just hit these areas once,

we have flown over them two, three, four times.

With different type of aircraft,

at different altitudes.

And then, on top of that,

it wasn't just the people in the air.

It wasn't just the ground pounders.

But it was also people at home that were looking.

There were thousands of people online

that were looking at Google Earth

trying to see if they could find

some remnants or a crash site.

In essence, they threw every imaginable resource

into finding Steve Fossett.

SHATNER: Federal investigators leading the search

for Steve Fossett were baffled by his disappearance,

because he was a highly experienced pilot.

Steve Fossett had set some 91 aviation records,

including being the first person

to circumnavigate the globe in an airplane solo

without refueling.

So, that's why when he went off on that day

in an airplane and disappeared, people were shocked,

because this is not something you expect

from somebody like Steve Fossett.

PAULIDES: During the search for Mr. Fossett,

the searchers came across a multitude

of other planes that had crashed.

Some they knew about. A few they didn't.

But what it tells you is

the quality of the search they made for him.

It was intensive, and they weren't finding him.

SHATNER: After a month of investigation,

authorities stopped the search for Steve Fossett.

And then, in February of 2008,

Fossett was declared legally dead,

even though both he and his plane were still missing.

But what could have caused

such a highly skilled pilot

to seemingly disappear

off the face of the Earth?

There are those who believe the answer is tied to the fact

that Fossett was flying

in what is known as the Nevada Triangle.

MORENO: The Nevada Triangle goes from Reno,

down to Las Vegas, and then over to Fresno.

And it's on the edge of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

And the reason that it's known as the Nevada Triangle

is that some 2,000, mostly small aircraft,

have crashed within that zone in the last 60 years.

It's seen as this

kind of Bermuda Triangle of the Sierra Nevada.

SHATNER: While the Bermuda Triangle may be better known,

the Nevada Triangle is actually far more deadly.

On average, nearly three planes go missing

in this mysterious area every month.

MORENO: One of the earliest planes that disappeared

in the Nevada Triangle was from a flight

taken by a man named Charles Ogle.

And Ogle, like Fossett, was a successful businessman

and a veteran pilot.

And so, for him to disappear

on a routine flight was out of the ordinary.

But he did.

And his plane is still out there somewhere.

So, that's still a mystery of the Nevada Triangle

that hasn't been resolved.

Another famous story of an airplane

that crashed in the Triangle

was a B-24 Liberator.

It was 1943 and this B-24 took off from Fresno,

reported in a few times,

and then just kind of suddenly disappeared.

And so, the U.S. military immediately sent out

nine more B-24s to do searches.

And then another one disappeared.

And so it became part of the legend

of the Nevada Triangle is you have two B-24s,

these big lumbering planes that are,

you know, supposed to drop bombs on places, et cetera,

and they both go down in the mountains somewhere

between the Nevada-California border.

SHATNER: What is going on in the Nevada Triangle

that is causing so many planes to disappear?

Perhaps the answer can be found by taking a closer look

at the Steve Fossett case.

Because two years after Fossett's plane vanished,

it then seemed to inexplicably...

reappear.

In October of 2008, there's a hiker

out in the Mammoth Mountains area, walking with his dog.

And he finds $1,000 in hundred-dollar bills

and he thinks that's kind of interesting and unusual.

But also, he found a pilot's license.

He, um, started looking at the license and he realized,

"Wait, this is that guy that was missing."

So, he took it to the local authorities.

And then they mount a new search of that area,

and they start finding other things.

They find the engine of the plane,

and they find the tail section with a number on it,

which clearly identifies it as the airplane.

Also, they find a pair of sneakers and a couple of bones.

So, they take the bones, they do DNA on them,

and it turns out that it is the remains of Steve Fossett.

PAULIDES: The intriguing part about this is that

several articles at the time stated that aircraft had flown

over the location where he was found 19 times.

And somehow, the wreckage was missed.

Also people on the ground

when they recovered his remains and the aircraft

stated that there was even a small fire on the ground

in close proximity to where all of this happened.

Discoloration of the associated foliage

would've been unusual and something to look at

by the people in the air.

And so I don't have a rational explanation

how Steve Fossett's plane was missed

19 times from the air.

ANDREW COLLINS: How is it possible that all of these searches

missed this wreckage?

I mean, there is no obvious answer.

But we have to raise the question

of whether the wreckage was not there

during the intervening period.

And that Steve Fossett encountered

one of these mysterious anomalies

that we know to be associated

with the Bermuda and Nevada Triangle regions.

Steve Fossett's plane could have actually gone

into another dimension for a year

and then be ejected out of it,

back into our own reality?

PAULIDES: When you look at the Steve Fossett case,

and you understand

that normal search and rescue is gonna find

this pilot and the plane,

and somehow or another,

it didn't happen for over a year,

you have to ask yourself, was it there or was it not?

SHATNER: Alaska. Here, among the rugged mountains,

dense forests

and towering glaciers,

lies a mysterious stretch of wilderness

where more than 16,000 people

have gone missing since 1988.

Locals refer to this area

as the Alaska Triangle.

MIKE RICKSECKER: The Alaska Triangle stretches from Juneau in the south,

to Anchorage in the middle, all the way up to Utqiagvik

at the most northern point in Alaska.

Like other triangle areas of the world, planes will crash.

People will go missing.

But the Alaska Triangle seems to be more volatile

than other areas of the world.

PAULIDES: You have to remember that Alaska has

some of the most notoriously difficult terrain,

weather,

and it has the highest number of private planes

anywhere in the United States.

So, in one sense it's not surprising

they have a number of people that go missing there.

In another sense,

it's quite fantastic when

you look at the stories behind the missing.

In January 1950, a Douglas C-54 D Skymaster

taking off from Elmendorf Air Force Base

was headed toward Montana.

It was a beautiful day, only a few clouds in the sky.

Yet, just as it passed over into Yukon Territory,

the Air Force lost complete radio contact with it.

Both United States and Canadian military forces

teamed up, about 7,000 personnel,

scanning 350,000 square miles of territory

for this missing airplane

and couldn't find a thing.

But what's even stranger is just two weeks later,

a smaller plane went down in the same area.

They were able to find that immediately.

Yet the larger airplane, the Skymaster,

they've never been able to find a thing.

It completely disappeared.

PAULIDES: When you look at the Alaska Triangle,

one of the few times a search and rescue person

has ever disappeared was an individual named Gerald DeBerry.

And he was on a search outside of Fairbanks.

And he was on an ATV,

and he never showed back up after the search.

The Alaska State Troopers bring canines in.

The canines can't find a scent.

They bring professional trackers in.

They can't find tracks.

And strangely, they couldn't find the ATV.

It was a year later, a hiker finds the ATV,

the engine's turned off,

and the Alaska State Troopers went in

and did another massive search.

He's never been found.

SHATNER: The number of people that are reported missing

in Alaska every year is twice as high as the national average.

But can all of these disappearances

be explained by Alaska's unforgiving wilderness?

It's possible, but there are those who believe

that something more extraordinary

may be taking place.

And as evidence, they point to stories in local folklore

that describe strange creatures

suddenly appearing out of thin air.

Alaska is an area where there are many unknowns,

uh, many mysteries.

Uh, and there are very common stories

of what you might call monsters and the like.

One of the very compelling examples

actually comes from the Kenai Peninsula,

in the southern part of it.

There's an abandoned town called Portlock.

It was a cannery town, very successful one, early on.

But it started getting terrorized by a monster.

And so this monster would attack people, kill people,

to the point where by 1950, the entire town was abandoned.

This creature was identified as the Nantiinaq.

Nantiinaq can be thought of very much

in the sort of wider tradition of Bigfoot or Sasquatch,

somewhere on the slippery slope between man and creature.

NEWMAN: Some people have suggested that these are entities

that live between worlds,

that they come through portals,

and they return back through portals.

What this world is they come from, we don't know,

but they're rarely seen.

They often disappear into thin air.

So, there is a good chance that it's not just

that people get lost in the wilderness.

But actually, they're being transported

with these beings to other realms.

SHATNER: Could strange creatures really be traveling

to the Alaska Triangle from other realms?

While such an idea may sound like a far-fetched fantasy,

many researchers claim that it's entirely possible.

Because scientists have discovered

that there are numerous geological anomalies

found throughout this mysterious area.

The land in Alaska is extremely volatile.

The U.S. Department of the Interior

did a geological survey in the area

and discovered negative magnetic anomalies

that are prevalent in the area.

They can wreak havoc with guidance systems, compasses,

all kinds of electronic equipment

that can cause planes and other vessels

to go missing or crash.

And there are theories that these anomalies

can spawn portals,

these doorways into other dimensions.

While geological activity in Alaska is known

to cause magnetic anomalies,

could it also be creating portals

in this area, as some believe?

At the moment, we can't say for sure,

but one thing is certain.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of people

continue to mysteriously disappear

in the Alaska Triangle every year.

SHATNER: Photographer Charles McCullar hikes around the rim

of this picturesque body of water.

But what starts out as a simple walk through nature

quickly turns tragic.

JOE ERATO: Charles planned a two-day excursion to Crater Lake

to snap winter photography.

But he trudged out through the park entrance

and was never seen again.

SHATNER: Authorities tried for months to find Charles, with no luck.

It wasn't until nearly two years later

that they got a break in the case

when his body was found in a remote part of the park.

ERATO: The most baffling aspect of the Charles McCullar case

besides the way that the remains were found

was where the remains were found.

It's about 14 miles from the park entrance.

So, he would have had to trudge over 105 inches of new snow,

with some areas having 20-foot snowdrifts,

14 miles to a remote part of the park.

So, how did Charles get that far into the park?

LAYNE: The weather conditions were so severe,

there was so much deep, fresh snow on the ground

that snowmobiles weren't even able

to travel this route at the time.

The weird part that lingers with his story

is how did his human remains

end up so far away from where he was

and why were they found

so long after the fact of his disappearance?

Search teams had been looking for him

from the week he disappeared.

SHATNER: The idea that someone could hike 14 miles

in eight feet of snow

is a little hard to imagine.

But on the other hand, Crater Lake has been the site

of similarly inexplicable occurrences, for centuries.

ERATO: Crater Lake is a hotbed for stories

about paranormal activity,

and just supernatural occurrences.

There are stories of people vanishing,

and it ties back to local native tribes

that have lived in the area thinking that it was

basically the location for the devil on the planet Earth.

SHATNER: Is it possible for a place like Crater Lake

to be imbued with some kind of dark power?

The native people of that area

had a largely sacred understanding

of that particular body of water

and when we have a place, a geographic location

that's recognized as powerful,

when individuals approach that area

unknowing or disrespectful perhaps even

of the power that's there,

the story never ends well.

Is this a place with deep enough and strong enough energy

that it's causing people to suffer repercussions?

We can't explain it,

but it's something that keeps happening.

ERATO: When someone vanishes in the wilderness,

we have a lot of modern-day technology

that's used in the recovery to go find people.

And it works most of the time.

But what drives public fascination about

a lot of these mysteries are the vanishings

where none of that technology seems to work.

We have all this stuff at our disposal,

and it turns up nothing.

And nobody can explain why.

Is Crater Lake home to supernatural forces

that spirit people away?

The answer is uncertain,

just like many disappearances

that continue to spark our curiosity.

They are puzzles we want to solve,

but like any good mystery,

digging deeper for the truth is the only way

to find answers to these baffling cases that remain...

unexplained.

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