The Alaska Triangle is a vast region bounded roughly by Utqiagvik (Barrow) in the north, Anchorage in the south, and Juneau in the southeast, encompassing some 200,000 square miles of boreal forest, tundra, and glaciated mountain. Since statehood in 1959 more than 20,000 people have disappeared inside this zone — a per-capita rate roughly double the United States average. Many cases involve aircraft that evaporated from radar without distress calls, hikers who walked into the bush on clear days and were never seen again, and entire villages rumored to have been emptied overnight.
The most famous case is the October 16, 1972 disappearance of U.S. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, Representative Nick Begich, pilot Don Jonz, and aide Russell Brown aboard a Cessna 310 flying from Anchorage to Juneau. One of the largest search efforts in American history combed 325,000 square miles for thirty-nine days and recovered nothing — no debris, no emergency beacon, no bodies. Earlier, on January 26, 1950, the C-54 carrying forty-four servicemen disappeared en route to Great Falls, Montana. In 2012 a small party hiking near Chugach State Park reported a wall of air that seemed to resist their progress.
Indigenous Tlingit and Athabaskan traditions have long held that certain stretches of the region are patrolled by the Kushtaka, shape-shifters who lure travelers into the forest and replace them with copies. Crytozoologists have catalogued anomalous sightings of saucers, orbs, and enormous bipeds throughout the Triangle. The region's combination of bottomless muskeg, electromagnetic interference from vast iron-ore deposits, sudden micro-weather systems, and near-total absence of cellular coverage provides a wholly natural explanation for some portion of the losses — but not the scale. Alaska State Troopers average about four missing-person reports every day, and most are never solved. The Triangle has become shorthand for the continent's most persistent unsolved-disappearance mystery.