Fans of fiction are well aware of the name of the American writer Andre Norton.
The heroes of her numerous novels travel either in interstellar space or in alternative witchcraft worlds. But unexpectedly for readers in 1973, in the novel "Monsters Live Here," the writer changed her role.
This time the action takes place in the USA of the 70s of the XX century. The hero of the novel, an ordinary American boy traveling on a motorcycle, is going to spend the weekend on the shore of the lake, and on the way to buy food, he stops by a cafe owned by his acquaintance.
And from the owner of the cafe, he learns about a certain short road to the lake, where people disappear without a trace together with cars. On behalf of this character, Norton quotes well-known American researchers of anomalous phenomena: Charles Fort, Ivan Sanderson, John Keel, and then completely switches to listing specific cases published in the media - who and when disappeared on this road, starting in 1946. As a result, the owner of the cafe expresses the idea that here they have the notorious Bermuda Triangle, only on land.
The writer uses such an unusual immersion in modern reality, so unusual for a science fiction writer, not so much to create an impression of the authenticity of subsequent events in the reader as to express her own version of the disappearances on the Short Road.
Unfortunately, Norton does not say where exactly she received information about the mysterious road, but only after the publication of her novel did the Americans learn about the existence of this "cursed place". When nimble journalists conducted their investigation, it turned out that near the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, there really is a short stretch of road, which local authorities unofficially call "the road to nowhere." It is on this short stretch of highway, about 15 kilometers long, that unexplained disappearances of people along with cars occur.
For a long time, neither the New Mexico state police nor the local tourism department wanted to advertise the existence of an ominous place, since Albuquerque, along with Roswell, was and is a kind of Mecca for millions of tourists - after all, according to one version, it was in the vicinity of Albuquerque that it crashed in 1947 year flying saucer.
“We have our own Bermuda Triangle,” Robert Kelly, a New Mexico police officer, told reporters. - The road literally swallows people. It leads to the San Mateo mountain range, where it ends. There is nowhere to turn from it: there is nothing around but the desert. Many tourists who come here love to drive along this highway and admire the local scenery, but the locals stay away from it. They know that at the turn, before the start of this cursed section, there is a cafe (it just appears in Norton's novel), in which many tourists stop before moving on. Some of them never come back.
Promotional video:
One of the last cases happened quite recently. Spouses Millie and Thomas Low-ruk from Chicago, along with their son and daughter, stopped near this cafe. After drinking coffee, Thomas plunged into the newspaper. And Millie decided to spend this time with benefit: for half an hour to ride with the children in a car around the neighborhood. Neither the woman nor the children ever returned, and the searches undertaken by the police were unsuccessful."
Ufologists are trying to connect all these disappearances with the intrigues of aliens. However, journalists “unearthed” cases of disappearances that occurred before 1947 (Andre Norton also mentions them). The traffic police have put forward a more realistic version: the border with Mexico is near, and all the disappearances are the work of Mexican bandits. The "road to nowhere" is usually deserted, they attack lonely travelers, kill people, and drive cars to Mexico. But the same journalists discovered cases of disappearance of such wreckage on the road, which simply would not have reached the border on their own off-road.
This is an ominous place where people disappear without a trace, although the most famous, but far from the only one even in the United States. In the forested area of the California National Park, in a relatively small area, several hundred people, mainly children and young people, disappeared in the second half of the last century alone, as a result of which it received the ominous name "Park of the Lost Children". Not only children disappear there, but even the rescuers looking for them.
In 1986, a company of three guys and two girls arrived in the area in a jeep. Leaving the car, they went for a walk, grabbing food for the picnic. According to eyewitnesses, two of them had mobile phones with them. But none of them returned to the car. And again the local police, after an unsuccessful search, put forward a prosaic version: this company simply stole someone else's car, drove to the park and left it. The policemen referred to the lack of license plates. Personal belongings left in the car were a counter-argument, but, unfortunately, they did not contain any documents of the disappeared.
There is a similar ominous place in our northern neighbors, Canada. It is called the Valley of the Headless. The valley received this ominous name in 1898, when a group of six gold diggers disappeared there. A few years later, an accidental hunter discovered their skeletons, moreover, decapitated. Later people continued to disappear there. Moreover, among the disappeared were hunters, police officers, geologists. Most of the missing are loners, but in 1965 two disappeared at once: Orville Webb and Thomas Papp.
At the same time, an entire expedition went there to unravel the mystery of the ominous place, but, according to the media, it also added to the list of the disappeared. A helicopter with two search engines was sent to search for them, but they also disappeared. Completed the list of missing at the end of the last century, several students who, for a decent fee, were going to reveal the secret of this lost place. None of them returned either, and that was already 1990.
To list similar places in modern Russia is a thankless job. At the end of perestroika, the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the first time published a list of USSR residents who disappeared without a trace in just one year. There were over 86 thousand of them. Of these, 60 thousand were found traces - 26 disappeared without a trace. Recently, another figure flashed in the media - about 100 thousand people disappear in modern Russia every year!