First named in 1972, the Alaska Triangle stretches from Anchorage in southcentral Alaska to Juneau in the southeast panhandle to Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow) on Alaska's northern coast. Since 1988, more than sixteen-thousand people have vanished from this area, and every year, approximately four people go missing per every one-thousand Alaska residents. This rate is twice the national average.  

It is surprising to learn how many people disappear in Alaska, but they disappear throughout the state, not just in the area outlined by the hypothetical triangle. Many disappearances and other mysteries in Alaska have never been solved. Planes vanish, boats disappear, UFO sightings baffle military officers, and in one instance, the population of an entire village fled their homes to escape a giant, hairy, manlike creature. Here are a few of the stories. 

House Majority Leader Hale Boggs and Representative Nick Begich disappear 

My first book detailed the mysterious disappearance of the plane carrying House Majority Leader Hale Boggs and Alaska Representative Nick Begich. This disappearance occurred along the southern leg of the so-called triangle.

 In 1972, Hale Boggs agreed to help Nick Begich campaign for Begich's re-election to the House of Representatives. On the morning of October 16, 1972, Boggs, Begich, Begich's special assistant Russell Brown, and pilot Don Jonz departed Anchorage in a Cessna C-310 aircraft for an estimated three-hour-and-thirty-minute flight to Juneau and a planned election rally. The weather forecast en route was marginal, with turbulence, low visibility, and icing conditions. Jonz was an experienced pilot but had a reputation as a risk-taker. Jonz called the tower ten minutes after takeoff, but neither he nor his passengers were ever heard from again.  

An hour after the Cessna C-310 failed to land in Juneau, an intensive search ensued and lasted thirty-nine days. Four hundred aircraft searched for any sign of the downed plane, but nothing was found then or since. 

Conspiracy theories swirled around the apparent deaths of Boggs and Begich. The most prominent of these suggested that J Edgar Hoover had a bomb placed on the plane to silence Boggs, whom some suspected wanted to re-open the Kennedy assassination investigation. For proponents of the Alaska Triangle theory, this is the most famous case to support their beliefs. 

Alaska has some of the most intimidating terrain and geography on the planet. Huge mountains covered by glaciers pockmarked with deep crevasses and canyons descend into heavily forested slopes, and these, in turn, plunge into the North Pacific Ocean. Couple this daunting landscape with challenging weather conditions, and you can understand how and why small planes disappear in the forty-ninth state.  

Planes started vanishing in Alaska as soon as humans began to fly them there. Sometimes, hikers find wreckage from a downed plane decades after it disappeared, or a fisherman spots a seat cushion washed onto the shore, hinting at the aircraft's final resting spot. However, other times, as in the case of the Boggs-Begich flight, searchers never find a scrap of material or metal, and the fate of the plane and its occupants remains a mystery. 

Douglas C-54 Skymaster vanishes into thin air 

While troubling, one can understand how a small airplane in Alaska could crash into thick brush, slam into a mountainside and end up covered by snow, fall into a deep crevasse, or plunge into the ocean. However, when a much larger plane disappears mid-flight in fair weather, the mystery deepens. 

At 11:15 am (AST) on January 26, 1950, a Douglas C-54D Skymaster, the military version of the Douglas DC-4, departed Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage and headed for Great Falls, Montana. The plane held thirty-six passengers and eight crewmen.  

The flight from Anchorage to Great Falls was scheduled to take eight and a half hours. The pilot expected good weather with clear skies for most of the journey. The excellent visibility afforded the passengers a view of some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet.  

The pilots reported their position to the various communication stations as they passed over them. After two hours, the Skymaster flew over the Alaska border and into the Yukon Territory of Canada. When the plane crossed over the Snag Radio Range located near Beaver Creek, Yukon Territory, the pilot called the station and estimated that the aircraft would reach the next reporting point at Aishihik in twenty minutes. His call sounded routine. He did not mention any problems with the plane, and the weather remained favorable. The Aishihik station heard no call from the C-54, and received no other transmissions from the aircraft.  

When the C-54 failed to arrive in Great Falls, Montana, officials listed it as missing. An intensive search involving the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, Canadian military, and civilian aircraft failed to find any clues to what happened to the Douglas C-54D Skymaster.  

A Canadian Forest Ranger reported seeing a low-flying plane on January 26, traveling about forty miles southwest of Snag. He said the airplane suddenly disappeared, and he heard a loud explosion followed by columns of black smoke. Searchers found this sighting credible, but they found no evidence of a downed airplane in the area the ranger had indicated. Other reported sightings of the C-54 sent investigators in several different directions, but they discovered no remnant of the missing plane. 

Experts believe whatever happened to the Skymaster was both sudden and catastrophic, and structural failure, navigational error, or crew incapacitation must have caused the accident. Those who believe in the Alaska Triangle might suggest other reasons. 

Alan Foster: September 9, 2013

The previous two aviation disappearances occurred decades ago, but even with better navigational equipment, emergency gear, and transponders, planes in Alaska continue to vanish. A more recent tragic airplane disappearances in Alaska occurred on September 9, 2013. Alan Foster, a professional charter pilot with more than nine-thousand hours of flight time, was flying his recently purchased PA-32-360 airplane from Atlanta to Anchorage. He was only three-hundred-and-sixty miles from home when he landed in Yakutat, Alaska, to refuel. After he departed Yakutat, he called the Juneau flight service for a weather update, telling them he would stay in Cordova if it wasn't good enough to make it to Anchorage. Eighteen minutes later, radar showed a transponder target confirmed as Foster's plane at 1,100 feet. The aircraft was never seen again, and despite an extensive search, no one has ever sighted any sign of Foster or his plane. 

UFOs

No description of strange happenings in the Alaska Triangle would be complete without reports of UFO sightings, and one of the best-documented UFO encounters ever recorded occurred in the airspace near Fairbanks on November 17, 1986. This sighting was significant because of who saw it, what they saw, and because military radar recorded the event. 

Japan Airlines (JAL) flight 1628 was en route from Paris to Tokyo with a cargo of Beaujolais wine. The flight was scheduled to refuel in Reykjavík and in Anchorage. At 5:09 pm on November 17, 1986, JAL 1628, under the control of Captain Kenju Terauchi, was about one-hundred-and-four miles northeast of Fort Yukon. The flight controller asked the pilot to adjust his heading to fly south of Fort Yukon and Fairbanks. The copilot complied and turned the plane left about fifteen degrees. 

Meanwhile, Captain Terauchi, seated on the cockpit's left side, saw bright lights shining through his window. The lights were to the left and below JAL 1628, and Terauchi assumed they were military planes. The captain ignored the lights until he realized they were keeping pace with his aircraft.

Terauchi quickly contacted the Anchorage Center and asked if any other aircraft, either civilian or military, were in the vicinity of his plane. The Anchorage Center flight controller said there were no military aircraft in the area, and ground radar did not show any air traffic other than flight 1628. At that moment, the lights began moving erratically. They suddenly appeared directly in front of The JAL plane, and Terauchi said the inside of the cockpit shined brightly, and he felt the warmth of the UFO's thrusters on his face. 

Terauchi said he and his crew were not immediately frightened but instead watched in amazement as the lights pulsed and kept pace with the jumbo jet. When Terauchi reported the strange lights, the Anchorage Center controller said he saw nothing on his radar. The plane's radar, though, showed a large, green, round object seven to eight miles away.  

When the cargo plane arrived above Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, it was a clear night, and the bright city lights lit up the sky. Terauchi looked out his window and saw the silhouette of a gigantic spaceship following their plane. He later said the UFO was twice the size of an aircraft carrier. He could only guess this was the mother ship of the smaller UFOs the plane had previously encountered.  

The massive, unidentified aircraft struck fear in Terauchi, and he attempted evasive maneuvers to avoid it. The UFO mirrored his every move. The Anchorage Center controller offered to scramble a military jet, but Terauchi declined, fearing the enormous spaceship would consider such an action confrontational. When a United Airlines passenger jet flew into the area near the JAL cargo plane, the air traffic controller asked the United flight crew to get a visual of the situation. Terauchi said that as soon as the United Airlines plane arrived, the UFO disappeared, and he did not see it again. 

One week after the JAL 1628 incident, John Callahan, the FAA Division Chief of Accidents and Investigations in Washington D.C., received a call from a flight control supervisor in Anchorage. The Anchorage flight controller told Callahan that the Anchorage FAA office was full of media and asked him what they should do. Callahan asked what happened, and the Anchorage official replied, "It's the UFO." Callahan asked, "What UFO?" The Anchorage official explained that a week earlier, a UFO chased a 747 across Alaska's skies for approximately thirty minutes. 

Callahan told his Anchorage associate to get the data together and immediately ship it to him in Washington D.C. Callahan said he wanted everything, including the radar recordings and the recordings between the controller on the ground and Captain Terauchi. Callahan also contacted the military, but the Air Force refused to send their tapes.

 When Callahan received the tapes, he listened to the three-way conversation between Anchorage Air Traffic Control (ATC), Elmendorf Air Force Base's NORAD Regional Operations Control Center, and Captain Terauchi on JAL 1628. He also played the tape of the ATC radar sightings. Callahan noted there was no sign of the UFOs on the ATC radar. Still, from listening to the conversation, it was clear those at Elmendorf with their more sophisticated radar saw the UFOs and were tracking their maneuvers. The military controller noted the UFOs were traveling at thousands of miles per hour as they swirled around the 747. One of the most surprising findings Callahan discovered was near the end of the incident when the United Airlines flight arrived. At that moment, Captain Terauchi no longer saw the giant UFO, and the United pilot never saw the craft. However, military radar clearly showed the UFO, and it had tucked in behind the United flight and began following it. No one at Elmendorf's NORAD Regional Operations Control Center notified the United crew to inform them that a giant, unidentified aircraft was following them. 

Callahan's boss told him not to tell anyone about the UFO incident until they could meet with intelligence and security personnel. The following day, his boss set up a briefing. The meeting included three FBI agents, three CIA agents, and Ronald Reagan's scientific study team. Callahan and his staff presented everything they had and answered questions. When the meeting concluded, one of the CIA agents swore the participants to secrecy and told them this meeting never happened. The agents admitted the UFOs were not Stealth Bombers (then in development) or any other military aircraft type. The CIA agents told Callahan they could not release this information to the American public because it would cause a panic.  

The CIA confiscated all the original voice recordings and radar tapes connected to the UFO incident, but they did not know that Callahan had copies of everything at his office. Callahan said he believed Captain Terauchi saw three UFOs, and Regan's scientific team agreed with him. They said this was the only time a UFO was recorded on radar for such an extended period. 

Commercial airline pilots again reported UFO sightings in Alaska's skies in January 1987, little more than two months after Captain Terauchi claimed he and his crew saw three UFOs. On January 29, 1987, the crew of Alaska Airlines Flight 53 sighted a fast-moving object on their onboard weather radar. The plane was flying at thirty-five-thousand feet (11,000 m) and was approximately sixty miles (97 km) west of McGrath on a flight from Nome to Anchorage. The crew calculated the UFO was moving at a speed of eighteen-thousand mph (29,000km/h) as it sped away from them. 

On January 30, 1987, a U.S. Air Force KC-135 jet traveling from Anchorage to Fairbanks sighted a huge UFO. Still, other than the recording of the conversation between the Air Force crew and Anchorage Center, little was relayed about this sighting. 

Over the years, individuals have reported countless other UFOs in the skies over Alaska, but none as well documented as the sighting by the crew of JAL 1628. Since 1998 there have been more than five-hundred-and-sixty UFO sightings reported in Alaska. 

Missing Hikers and Mountain Climbers

Hundreds of people have wandered into the Alaska wilderness and were never seen again. Some of these individuals come to Alaska unprepared for the harsh climate, rugged landscape, and wild animals, but even experienced outdoorsmen, mountain climbers, and boaters disappear here. 

Richard Lyman Griffis from Spokane, Washington, invented a wilderness survival cocoon, and in the summer of 2006, he headed into the wilderness of Southeast Alaska to test his invention.  No one reported him missing for a year.  When the authorities began searching for him, they learned that a bus dropped off Griffis 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 the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.  He was never seen again.  Since Griffis told friends he might spend the winter in Alaska, no one worried about him for several months, but finally, a friend called the Canadian Mounties and reported him missing.  His friend had no idea where Griffis was planning to go to test his wilderness cocoon. No trace has ever been found of Griffis or his bright orange cocoon. 

Mountain climbing is a dangerous pursuit. In addition to Mt. Denali, the highest peak in North America, Alaska boasts many of the most challenging mountains and glaciers any daring alpinist could hope to conquer. Mountain climbers die every year in Alaska, but most climbers ascend in groups. If one or two members of the group tragically fall into a crevasse, their companions can tell the story about what happened to them. When a solo climber makes a fatal mistake, no one is there to record the details, and experts can only guess what happened. 

In 1984, Naomi Uemura, a famous Japanese adventurer and mountain climber, attempted a solo winter ascent of Denali. Uemura 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, and 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. 

More recently, on March 7, 2018, two experienced climbers, Ryan Johnson and Marc André Leclerc, failed to return from a climb on a seven-peaked mountain near Juneau. However, in this instance, searchers found a clue hinting at the fate of the two men. They 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. A spokesperson for the Alaska State Troopers said the evidence showed the climbers made it to the top and set an anchor. Then, she said, they were either taken out by an avalanche, a rope failed, or something else catastrophic occurred. 

Explanations

There's no question more people, planes, and boats disappear in Alaska than anywhere else in the United States. Is something strange happening here, or is this just a dangerous place with huge mountains, treacherous glaciers, roaring rivers, and violent storms? 

Kushtaka

The Tlingit and Tsimshian Native people indigenous to southeastern Alaska tell stories about a mythical shape-shifting demon named Kushtaka. Kushtaka roughly translates to "land-otter man." According to legend, this creature appears to travelers in an irresistible form, such as a child screaming for help. Kushtaka lures his victims to a river, where he either tears them to shreds or turns them into another Kusthtaka. 

Stories of a Big-Foot-like creature or a monster called "Hairy Man" also abound in small villages throughout Alaska. In the 1930s and 1940s, after several villagers from Portlock, Alaska, on the Kenai Peninsula disappeared under mysterious circumstances, townsfolk became convinced a giant manlike creature was preying on the residents. The remaining villagers packed their gear and left the area. The houses of the ghost town of Portlock remain. 

Vile Vortices and a Black Pyramid

One theory claims the Alaska Triangle lies on vile vortices, causing the area to have powerful electric and magnetic anomalies and negative energy vortexes.

The Bermuda Triangle is the most famous example of vile vortices, but according to the theory, vile vortices also exist in the Algerian Megaliths, Timbuktu, the Indus Valley in Pakistan, Hamakulia Volcano in Hawaii, the Devil's Sea near Japan, the South Atlantic, and the North and South Poles. These energy vortexes create various strange phenomena and can allegedly induce disorientation, confusion, and hallucinations. They can also cause electrical instrumentation to malfunction.  

According to this theory, positive energy vortexes also exist, and these are areas people actively search for to find inspiration or to recharge and feel uplifted. Humans have purposely built monuments in some of these areas, including the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge. The Sedona Desert in Arizona is also believed to lie on a positive vortex. 

Alaska is mostly wilderness, and natural elements are linked to the majority of the mysterious disappearances here. The state has 33,000 miles of coastline and more than three million lakes. Hikers and mountain climbers can fall into deep crevasses. Also, an airplane might slam into a mountain, sparking an avalanche that covers the wreckage with snow in a matter of moments and leaves no trace of the aircraft's final resting spot.  

 Accidental injuries occur at twice the national rate in Alaska and are the third-leading cause of death. People wander into the wilderness, unprepared for what to expect, and authorities rescue hundreds of individuals every year. Still, most hikers survive their wilderness adventures in the Alaska Triangle without suffering even a scratch, and most planes and boats in the area reach their destinations without issue. Alaska is beautiful and safe – until it isn't. 

Robin Barefield lives in the wilderness on Kodiak Island, where she and her husband own a remote lodge. She has a master’s degree in fish and wildlife biology and is a wildlife-viewing and fishing guide. Robin has published six novels: Big Game, Murder Over Kodiak, The Fisherman’s Daughter, Karluk Bones, Massacre at Bear Creek Lodge, and The Ultimate Hunt.

She has also published two non-fiction books: Kodiak Island Wildlife and Murder and Mystery in the Last Frontier. She draws on her love and appreciation of the Alaska wilderness as well as her scientific background when writing.  

Robin invites you to join her at her website: http://robinbarefield.com, and while you are there, sign up for her free monthly newsletter about true crime in Alaska. Robin also narrates a podcast, Murder and Mystery in the Last Frontier. You can find it at: https://murder-in-the-last-frontier.blubrry.net