September 20th, 2016 0942, the dispatch service of the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, Utah, received a call.

The caller identified herself as Elena Vance, a resident of Denver.

She reported that her sister, Laura Rivers, and her brother-in-law, Michael Rivers, had not been in contact for 96 hours.

According to the trip plan, the Rivers left with relatives.

They were scheduled to return to Boulder, Colorado on the evening of September 18th.

The last contact was recorded on September 14th.

A text message from Laura.

Made it to the point.

No signal.

Love you.

The dispatcher assigned the call.

A welfare check status.

Information was relayed to patrol rangers working in the area of the supposed route, Red Hollow Basin.

This is a remote section of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, BLM.

patrol ranger David Thorne discovered a vehicle matching the description.

A silver 2011 Toyota 4Erunner with Colorado license plates was parked on a turnout of the unpaved County Road 241 4 m from the nearest paved highway.

The vehicle was parked evenly parallel to the canyon rim.

The engine was cold.

A thin layer of red dust characteristic of the region covered the body.

Thorne estimated the car had been stationary for at least 3 days.

There were no signs of struggle, skid marks, or broken glass around the vehicle.

Thorne checked the doors.

The car was locked.

The interior was visible through the tinted windows.

In his report dated September 20th, Thorne noted, “Visual contact with the subjects has not been established.

No persons are present within a 500y radius of the vehicle.

Voice commands received no response.

commencing external perimeter inspection pending the arrival of the investigative team.

Deputy Sheriff Mark Hendris arrived at the scene.

A decision was made to breach the vehicle.

Inside, there was an orderliness uncharacteristic of situations involving foul play.

On the center console next to the gear shift lay two mobile phones, an iPhone 6 belonging to Laura and a Samsung Galaxy S5 belonging to Michael.

Both devices were turned off, their batteries drained.

Nearby lay sunglasses in a map of Utah.

In the glove compartment, the couple’s wallets were found.

Cash, approximately $400 total, credit cards, and driver’s licenses remained untouched.

The back seat attracted the most attention from investigators.

A camera bag containing photography equipment was sitting there.

Inside was a Canon 5D Mark III, two L series lenses, and a tripod.

The total value of the equipment exceeded $5,000.

Laura Rivers, a professional photographer, rarely parted with this camera during trips.

Deputy Hrix noted the peculiarity of the find in a subsequent interview for the report.

Usually, if people get out of the car for 5 minutes, they take their phones.

If they go to shoot a sunset, they take their cameras.

If they go hiking, they lock valuables in the trunk so they aren’t visible.

here.

Everything was lying in plain sight, as if they intended to return in a moment.

An inventory of the trunk revealed that certain items were missing.

According to Elena Vance’s statement, the couple always carried a hiker’s emergency kit.

Missing from the car were one, two dayacks, 2030 L.

Two, trekking poles.

Three, one liter water bottles, standard nal jeans used by the Rivers’s.

Four, a portable Garmin er GPS navigator purchased by Michael Rivers in 2014.

The box for the Navigator was later found in the Rivers’s garage in Boulder.

The devices serial number was entered into the lost property database.

The Navigator was not in the car.

Its mount on the dashboard was empty.

Weather conditions in Red Hollow between September 14th and 20th remained stable.

Daytime temperatures reached 31° of 88° while night temperatures dropped to 12° 54 DOS.

There was no precipitation.

It is a dry rocky terrain with deep fissures and sparse shrubbery.

Without water, a person in these conditions begins to experience dehydration within 24 hours.

By 1600 wild on September 20th, the perimeter around the car was cordoned off.

Forensics technicians lifted fingerprints from the door handles and steering wheel.

All prints belong to Michael or Laura.

No foreign DNA traces were found.

Tire tread marks were consistent with the Toyota simply pulling off the road and stopping.

Footprints around this car had been partially swept away by the wind over the preceding days.

Experts managed to isolate only two sets of prints leading from the driver and passenger doors toward the canyon.

The tracks led north deeper into the plateau and were lost on the rocky surface after 30 yard.

The direction of the tracks did not correspond to any marked hiking trail.

On the evening of September 20th, the county sheriff announced the commencement of a search and rescue se operation.

The case status was changed from welfare check to active missing person search.

A note remained in the car.

It was tucked under the driver’s side sun visor, folded in half.

It was a receipt from a gas station in Monaceel, dated September 14th, a.m.

On the back, in Michael’s handwriting, were several numbers, latitude and longitude coordinates.

Checking these coordinates revealed a point 8 m from the parking spot.

The point was located in the middle of a smooth stretch of sandstone with no obvious landmarks.

The silence of Red Hollow Basin was broken that night by the sound of a Department of Public Safety helicopter.

By the time the search operation began, investigators had compiled detailed profiles of the missing persons.

This was necessary to understand the logic of their actions in the wilderness.

Michael Rivers, 41, a surveying engineer with 15 years of experience.

He worked for a large construction firm in Denver specializing in topographic surveys for road design.

Colleagues described him as pathologically pedantic.

From the statement of James Holden, Michael’s direct supervisor.

Mike isn’t the kind of guy who just hops in a car and drives wherever his eyes take him.

If he planned a weekend, he had an Excel spreadsheet, route, fuel consumption, alternate paths, extraction points.

He carried two compasses because one might break.

The idea that he could simply get lost seems absurd.

Laura Rivers, Navance, 38, freelance photographer.

For the last 3 years, she had been working on a series called Vanishing America, photographing ghost towns, abandoned factories, and farms.

Her work required visiting unsafe locations.

She had experience being in zones with risks of structural collapse, though she did not possess her husband’s technical skills.

Upon inspecting the Rivers’s home in Boulder, detectives discovered documents pointing to a hidden motive for the trip.

Contrary to what they told friends about a romantic weekend, the couple was in a deep financial crisis.

In 2015, Michael invested a significant portion of their savings, about $60,000, in a startup developing solar panel hardware.

In February 2016, the company declared bankruptcy.

The money could not be recovered.

On Michael’s desk lay bank notices regarding two months of overdue mortgage payments.

Also found was a printout from a land auction website.

Several lots were circled in red marker.

All were located in San Juan County, Utah.

These were scrub lands, plots in the desert unsuitable for agriculture, but sold for less than $1,000 per acre.

Among the papers was an old geological map from 1954 printed from the US Geological Survey USGS digital archives.

On the map, the Red Hollow Basin area was marked as a prospective zone for uranium exploration.

Lead investigator Detective Alan Frost proposed a hypothesis.

They weren’t just hiking.

Michael Rivers was looking for an asset.

Perhaps he believed he had found a plot with unregistered resources or old equipment that could be sold.

This explains why they chose a place where tourists don’t go.

Reconstructing the timeline of the final hours before their disappearance led investigators to the town of Monaceel, the nearest settlement to where the car was found.

September 14th, a.m.

Security cameras at the Mustang fuel stop captured the River’s Toyota 4Erunner.

The footage shows Michael fueling the car.

He is wearing a lightweight khaki windbreaker and jeans.

Laura exits the car and heads into the store.

She’s wearing a gray hoodie and leggings, her hair tied in a ponytail.

Witness Ray Walcott, 62, the gas station owner, served the couple at the register.

His testimony became key in assessing the emotional state of the missing persons.

From Ray Walcott’s interrogation protocol dated September 21st, 2016, they didn’t look like people on vacation.

Usually, tourists smile, ask about the weather, buy soda.

These two were tents.

The woman, Laura, bought two bottles of water and a bag of beef jerky.

She was silent, looking at the floor.

The man came in after her.

He was irritated.

I heard him say to her by the door, “We’re checking only one point.

If it’s empty there, we turn around.” She didn’t answer.

Walcott also recalled that Michael asked about the condition of dirt road 241.

I told him the road is trash, that after the rains, the ruts are washed out, and it’s better not to go there without a winch.

He asked about old workings on the north slope.

I told him all the mines were closed half a century ago and there’s nothing to do there except break your legs.

He just nodded, bought a county map even though he already had a GPS in his hand and they left.

He looked like a man who wasn’t going to listen to advice.

Cell phone billing analysis showed the devices connected to a tower in Monaceel at .

At , the phones lost network signal.

This corresponds to the time of entry into Red Hollow Basin, which sits in a coverage dead zone.

The phones never reconnected to the network.

However, technical analysis of activity on Laura River’s iPhone showed that at 1320 that same day, while offline, the Notes app was opened.

A new entry was created.

It contained just one word, found.

The entry was deleted 3 minutes after creation, but remained in the devices cache.

This was the last interaction with the phone before it was turned off or the battery died.

The active phase of the search and rescue s operation began at dawn on September 21st, 2016.

Coordination was handled by the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office with support from volunteer groups from Utah and Colorado.

In the first 48 hours, 45 ground personnel, two K-9 units, and a Utah Department of Public Safety DPS helicopter equipped with a effer thermal imager operated in the red hollow basin search zone.

The search zone was divided into sectors.

A 3m radius from the vehicle was considered the priority.

This is the distance an unprepared person can travel in difficult terrain under conditions of dehydration.

The terrain of Red Hollow Basin is a complex system of sandstone erosion.

It is not a flat desert, but a labyrinth of canyons, narrow slots, stone pillars, and plateaus covered in slippery smooth stone, slick rock.

Search team Captain Evan Dale described the conditions in an official report.

Aerial visual search is ineffective in 60% of the territory.

Multiple overhangs and deep shadows create blind spots.

A person lying in a crevice or under a ledge is invisible to a helicopter even from a height of 50 ft.

Thermal imagers only worked in the pre-dawn hours.

During the day, the rocks heated up to 40° C, creating a thermal background against which it is impossible to distinguish human body temperature.

Ground teams faced navigation problems.

Elevation changes were up to 300 m.

Standard radio communication worked intermittently due to signal reflection off canyon walls.

On September 21st at , handler Sarah Miller with her service dog, a blood hound named Barney, began working from the point where the car was found.

The dog was given the driver’s seat to sniff.

The dog confidently picked up a scent.

The trajectory matched the visual footprints found earlier north away from the road toward the stone plateau.

The dog traveled 540 yd, about 490 m, in a straight line.

The trail led to the edge of a shallow, dry creek bed.

At this point, the dog stopped and began to circle.

From Sarah Miller’s report, subject Barney lost the scent trail at coordinates, redacted.

The dog’s behavior indicated an abrupt interruption of the scent.

Usually, this happens when a person gets into a vehicle.

However, at this point, the terrain is impassible for any type of transport, including motorcycles and ATVs.

No signs of dragging or struggle were found.

The trail simply cut off.

A second dog deployed on the trail 2 hours later repeated the route and stopped at the exact same point.

Group alpha was sent to the coordinates found on the receipt in the car, latitude and longitude in Michael’s handwriting.

This location was 8 mi northeast of the point where the scent was lost.

The journey took rescuers nearly 6 hours due to the difficult relief.

Upon arrival, the group discovered a flat patch of sandstone the size of a football field.

No objects, caves, structures, or signs of human presence were found at this point.

Geologically, the site was no different from neighboring areas.

If Michael and Laura were aiming for this point, they did not reach it, or the coordinates pointed to something hidden from surface inspection.

By September 25th, the search zone was expanded to 15 mi.

80 people were now participating in the operation.

The main anomaly noted by all search participants was the complete absence of indirect signs of the couple’s presence.

There were no sleeping spots, fire rings, or flattened grass.

There was no trash, no wrappers, no bottles from the water bought at the gas station.

There were no markers or rock cars, which lost hikers usually leave.

It seemed as though the couple had vanished the same day they left the car.

By the end of the first week of searching, County Sheriff Garrison Wells held a briefing.

The main investigative theories at that time boiled down to an accident falling into a crevice or foul play.

Although the lack of evidence made both theories shaky, the version of a stage disappearance due to debt was also considered, but the impossibility of leaving the area unnoticed without equipment argued against this.

On September 30th, the weather turned.

A strong thunderstorm front passed over the region, causing flash floods in the canyon lowlands.

This washed away any possible remaining traces and made further work dangerous for searchers.

On October 4th, 2016, 14 days after it began, the active phase of the search was officially terminated.

Sheriff Wells stated to the press, “We have combed 40 square miles.

We have looked under every bush and into every crack accessible to a human.

The probability of finding Michael and Laura Rivers alive in this terrain is zero.

We are moving the case to missing person’s investigation status and will continue patrols on a limited basis.

The river’s relatives, including Elena Vance, refused to accept this conclusion, hiring private searchers.

But Red Hollow Basin fell silent again.

The only result of two weeks of work and thousands of man-hour was a car on the shoulder and a trail that ended in emptiness.

After the cessation of the active search phase on October 4th, 2016, the river’s case moved into the cold case category.

The winter of 2016 to 2017 in southeastern Utah was harsh.

Snowfalls and subsequent spring floods changed the landscape of Red Hollow Basin, making visual searches for remaining clues practically impossible.

Relatives of the missing, led by Elena Vance, did not stop trying to find answers.

In November 2016, the family hired the private detective agency Desert Recon, specializing in finding people in remote areas.

Private investigator Tom Hatcher spent a total of 3 weeks in the canyon between December 2016 and March 2017.

He used quadcopters to film inaccessible crevices that police had missed.

From Tom Hatcher’s report to the family, March 2017, we surveyed the receipt coordinates zone.

Nothing.

However, I noticed a strange pattern in the arrangement of scree on the north slope of the plateau.

The rocks lie as if they were moved artificially, but a very long time ago.

This resembles camouflage methods used by prospectors in the midentury to hide their claims from competitors.

But this is just a theory.

We found no physical traces of Michael and Laura.

The canyon is clean.

While physical searches hit a dead end, Detective Alan Frost continued working with documents and technology seized from the river’s home.

In January 2017, the cyber forensics unit completed a full recovery of deleted data from the MacBook Pro laptop used by Michael.

Analysis of browser history and cached map files shed light on the true purpose of the trip.

The investigation established that between September 1st and 13th, 2 weeks before departure, Michael spent 4 to 5 hours at the computer every night.

The list of search queries included Atomic Energy Commission AEC maps 19501958 San Juan County, signs of hidden ventilation shafts, ownership of mothball mining claims, how to test for radon in a cave.

Of greatest interest was Michael’s work with map overlays.

files were found in a graphics editor where Michael overlaid scans of old uranium mining maps from 1952 under modern Google Earth satellite imagery.

On the old map in the red hollow basin sector, a mine was marked under the code name Lucifer 4.

On the modern map, this location was empty desert.

Detective Frost brought in a consultant, a geologist from the University of Utah, Dr.

Simon Clark.

Clark explained the context.

In the 1950s, during the uranium boom, thousands of small mines were opened in Utah.

Many were illegal or poorly documented.

When uranium prices fell in the 1960s, mines were simply abandoned.

Some entrances were blasted shut, some bulldozed over, but the underground tunnels remained.

From Dr.

Clark’s explanatory note.

If Michael Rivers found a map marked Lucifer 4, he might have assumed the mine had not exhausted its resources.

Often such sites were mothballled for better times.

The entrance to such a mine now might look like an ordinary coyote den or a crack in the rock obscured by brush.

If they found an entrance and went down, satellites and helicopters are useless.

They are under 50 m of sandstone.

This information forced the investigation to reconsider the meaning of the note with coordinates.

Perhaps it was not a destination point on the surface, but the location of a suspected entrance underground.

Also figuring in the report was a detail regarding the missing Garmin GPS navigator.

Michael had synced the device with the laptop on September 13th.

Device logs showed he uploaded a custom map created manually.

Marked on this map was not a single point but an entire network of suspected underground tunnels which Michael had extrapolated from old schematics.

This confirmed the Riverses did not go for the scenery.

They went to explore the underground.

However, this theory had one significant flaw.

Michael Rivers was a safety engineer.

Descending into an abandoned uranium mine without gas analyzers, oxygen equipment, and safety lines is suicide, something he would unlikely do voluntarily.

Furthermore, he wouldn’t have taken his wife there.

Detective Frost noted in the file, either their curiosity overcame their caution or they found something on the surface that forced them to go down or seek shelter.

A year passed since the disappearance.

On September 14th, 2017, friends and relatives held a small memorial service.

Officially, Michael and Laura Rivers were still listed as missing.

On November 12th, 2017, 14 months after the Rivers vanished, the silence in the canyon was broken by the buzzing of a drone.

24year-old Kyle Brennan, an amateur photographer from Salt Lake City, was testing a new DJI Phantom quadcopter in the Red Hollow area.

Brennan deviated from standard routes, directing the drone into a zone known as Devil’s Drop.

This is a narrow winding crevice about 200 ft 60 m deep, located 11 km, about 7 mi northwest of where the Rivers’s car was found.

Reviewing the footage at home, Brennan noticed an anomaly at the 14-minute mark.

At the bottom of the crevice, among the gray red rocks, a bright spot of unnatural blue color stood out.

Under digital magnification, the spot resembled a fragment of fabric.

On November 14th, Brennan handed the coordinates and video footage to the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office.

On the morning of November 16th, a joint team of rangers and forensic experts arrived at the edge of Devil’s Drop.

Visual contact with the object was established using binoculars.

There was indeed a body at the bottom.

Descending into the crevice required mountaineering skills.

The operation was led by Sergeant Eric Larson, commander of the tactical rescue team.

From an audio recording made by Larsson during the descent, slope is unstable.

Scree, I see the object.

It’s a human.

Position semi-sitting back against the canyon wall.

The body is partially buried by rocks from above.

Looks like a natural rockfall that occurred after he was already here.

Raising the remains took 6 hours.

The body was in a state of advanced decomposition and partial skeletonization exacerbated by scavengers and weather conditions.

Primary identification was conducted on site based on preserved clothing fragments and personal items.

The body had remnants of a khaki windbreaker brand and one trekking boot size 11 Merryill brand.

This matched the description of Michael Rivers’s clothing on the day of the disappearance.

Final confirmation was provided by dental records.

The remains belonged to Michael Rivers.

Upon examination of the body and the discovery site, the following facts were recorded.

One, at the deceased had multiple fractures.

A broken left tibia, three ribs on the right, and a clavicle.

The nature of the leg fracture indicated the injury was sustained while alive.

The bone had begun to heal improperly.

Callus was not found, but tissue swelling was recorded based on clothing position.

This meant that after receiving the injury, Michael lived for some time, possibly several days.

Two, lack of gear.

There was no backpack with him.

The second boot was missing.

The pockets were turned inside out, but a driver’s license was in a hidden inner pocket of the jacket.

Three.

A strange detail.

Hanging around Michael’s neck on a synthetic lanyard was a compact digital camera, a Canon PowersShot, an ordinary point andoot.

This camera was not on the list of equipment compiled by relatives, nor did it appear in purchase receipts from recent years.

The camera was an old model released in 2010 and heavily scratched.

The discovery of Michael River’s body raised more questions than answers.

Devil’s Drop is 11 km from the car.

It is impossible to cover such a distance over rough terrain with a broken leg if the fracture happened earlier.

This meant Michael broke his leg here or very close to this spot.

But why did he go so far from the car and the search zone? A search of the crevice floor within a 500 me radius yielded no results.

No body of Laura, no clothes, no traces of her presence.

The Garmin GPS navigator Michael had with him was never found.

His pockets were empty.

A criminologist working at the scene noted in the protocol.

The position of the body indicates he was hiding.

He was sitting in a niche under an overhanging rock, pressed as far back into the corner as possible.

This is not the posture of a person who simply fell and couldn’t get up.

This is the posture of a person waiting out danger or hiding from observation from above.

The coroner’s official conclusion stated, “Cause of death undetermined due to the condition of the remains.

Probable death from hypothermia or dehydration compounded by traumatic shock.

Time of death was determined with a large margin of error from late September to mid-occtober 2016.

This meant Michael could have been alive during the active phase of the search, but was far outside the cordon perimeter.

The only clue capable of shedding light on what happened remained the old scratched Canon camera hanging around the dead man’s neck.

It’s H gabb8 SD memory card was removed and sent to the FBI laboratory in Quantico for data recovery.

The SanDisk SD card removed from the Canon PowersShot had physical damage to the contacts due to oxidation, but the memory chip remained intact.

Lab specialists took 3 weeks to extract the array of images.

The report was handed to Detective Frost on December 10th, 2017.

The card contained a total of 418 files.

The first 380 photos dated back to 2012, 2014.

Family holidays, picnics, a cat.

The camera was evidently a spare or forgotten item taken at the last minute.

The investigation was interested in the last 38 files.

Metadata, EXIF, was preserved.

September 14th, 2016.

1214 12 photos landscapes of red hollow.

Laura posing against rocks.

She is smiling but looks tired.

Michael does not appear in the frame.

Shots taken in bright sunlight.

1545.

A photo of an entrance to a narrow fissure blocked by rocks.

In the center of the frame is a rusty metal beam sticking out of the ground.

This confirmed they found some man-made object.

September 15th, 2016.

0920.

A photo of Michael.

He is standing by the same fissure holding a map.

His face is tense.

.

A photo inside a cave or addit.

Flash used wooden shoring supports characteristic of mid- 20th century mines is visible.

Partially erased paint on the wall reads L4 danger 1340.

A photo of Laura inside the attit.

She is sitting on a rock holding her head.

A backpack, one of the missing ones, lies nearby.

September 16th, 2016.

Gap in shooting.

Not a single frame.

September 17th, 2016.

A series of eight photos taken between O2 Suluk and 04 Hunguk A.M.

All frames are blurred, taken in motion with flash in total darkness.

In one frame, Laura’s boot is visible, stuck between rocks.

In another, Michael’s hand stained with something dark, blood or dirt, reaching toward the lens.

The last shot of this series, an absolutely black frame.

The next series of shots bears the metadata date, September 22nd, 2016.

This is 2 days after the search operation began.

By this time, helicopters were already flying over the canyon.

The photos were taken outside.

IMG0412.

A view from a high point overlooking the canyon.

In the distance, a tiny dot is visible.

A search helicopter.

The shot was taken with zoom.

Whoever was shooting saw the rescuers.

IMG0413.

A selfie, but not of Laura and not of Michael.

The photo quality is poor.

Out of focus.

The frame captures part of Michael’s face.

He is severely emaciated, eyes sunken, an abrasion on his forehead.

But the most terrifying part is his expression.

It is not a grimace of pain or a cry for help.

He is pressing a finger to his lips in a hush gesture.

Behind him, in the shadow of a rock overhang, a silhouette is visible.

It is the figure of a person sitting with their back to the camera.

The figure is wearing Lara’s gray hoodie, but the hair hair is missing from the figure.

The head is unnaturally smooth or shaved.

IMG0415.

Last frame.

Date September 24th, 2016.

Taken at night with flash.

Closeup of the ground.

Symbols are scratched into the sand.

Not letters, but geometric shapes.

A circle intersected by a line and a row of dots.

Nearby lies the Garmin GPS navigator.

The navigator’s screen has been smashed by a rock lying next to it.

Detective Frost and geologist Clark analyzed the cave photos from September 15th.

Clark identified the rock and type of shoring.

This isn’t just a mine.

This is a so-called ventilation drift.

It doesn’t lead to an exit, but deeper into the system of lower horizons, judging by the angle of the floor in the photo they were descending, the depth could reach 100 m.

But the photo with the helicopter and Michael’s gesture raised the most questions.

Why was he hiding from rescuers? Why did he destroy the communication device that could have sent a signal? Frost put forward a theory that became the unofficial version of the investigation.

Acute reactive psychosis.

Being in the confined space of the mine, possibly under the influence of radon or carbon dioxide accumulating in abandoned workings, one or both spouses may have lost their grip on reality.

Gas, CO2, or methane could cause hallucinations and paranoia.

The sound of the helicopter might have been perceived by them not as rescue, but as a threat.

Egypt, they came to kill us, or they want to take what we found.

This explains why they hid in niches.

Michael’s body position, why they destroyed the means of communication, navigator, and why they moved away from the car, avoiding open places.

Image img0443 remained the most chilling.

The silhouette in Laura’s hoodie.

Pixel analysis showed that the lack of hair might be a visual trick due to a tight fleshcoled beanie or mud covering the head, but the figure’s pose, static, hunched, resembled a catatonic stouper.

Using photos of the cliffs in the background of the September 22nd shots, the location of their bivoac was pinpointed.

It was a small shelf on a sheer wall 30 m above where Michael’s body was found.

A group of climbers ascended there in December 2017.

On the shelf, they found Michael’s second boot, a lens cap from the cannon from the large camera left in the car, meaning the cap was in a pocket, and an inscription scratched onto the stone, not with a knife, but with another stone.

The inscription read, “Lone down, I stay up.” The phrase gone down could mean died, went down into the mine, or fell.

But the context I stay up hinted at a separation.

Michael remained to die on the surface in the crevice and Laura returned to the dark.

In the spring of 2018, San Juan County Sheriff Garrison Wells held a final press conference on the Rivers case.

The investigation was officially suspended, although Laura Rivers’s file remains open as a missing person case.

The coroner’s conclusion cited Michael Rivers’s cause of death as dehydration and hypothermia amidst a psychiatric disorder induced by undetermined environmental factors.

The theory of mine gas poisoning was accepted as the most probable explanation for the irrational behavior.

Michael’s body was cremated and returned to the family.

The story of the Rivers’s gained wide publicity in the hiking and paranormal communities.

Red Hollow Basin acquired a bad reputation.

Despite warnings from the BLM, the flow of stalkers to the area increased.

In 2019, a group of enthusiasts claimed to have found the entrance to the Lucifer 4 mine, relying on the photos released by police from Michael’s camera.

They discovered a narrow crawl space under a pile of boulders 2 miles from the car’s parking spot.

The crawl space was blocked by fresh scree.

Attempts to penetrate inside were deemed too dangerous due to ground instability.

Renowned caver Mark Trenton, having examined the entrance, wrote on his blog, “The stones here didn’t fall by themselves.

They are packed tight like a cork.” Someone really didn’t want anyone to go in again or come out.

The absence of Laura Rivers spawned many theories.

The most realistic is underground psychosis.

The couple descended into the mine, inhaled gas, lost their minds, and Laura died inside.

The darker third person theory suggests someone lived in the mines, and the Riverses became unwanted witnesses.

There is one detail remaining in the file that was not included in official press releases, but is known to the family.

When experts were recovering data from Michael’s laptop, they found a draft email dated September 12th, 2 days before the trip.

The email was addressed to Michael’s brother, but was never sent.

The text read, “Dan, if this plan works, we wipe out all the debts.

I found Grandfather Vance’s Laura’s grandfather maps.

He worked there in the 50s as an engineer.

He didn’t write about uranium in his diaries.

He wrote about the echo chamber, a place where sound returns an hour later.

If this is true, it’s an acoustic anomaly that geoysicists would sell their souls for, or the military.

We are going to check the acoustics.

This email completely changed the context.

They weren’t looking for uranium.

They were looking for a natural phenomenon.

What exactly they found in the mine, an acoustic anomaly, gas causing madness, or simply death, remained a mystery.

In the evidence archive, in a cardboard box numbered 16 to 422, lies the Canon PowersShot camera.

It no longer works.

But if you insert the memory card into a computer, the last file is that very black image, I img0415.

If you increase the brightness of this black shot to the maximum in a graphics editor, two glowing dots emerge in the upper right corner at the limit of visibility, like the eyes of an animal reflecting a flash or like two flashlights deep in a tunnel.

The distance between the dots is too wide for human eyes.

The river’s case remains open.

Red Hollow Canyon keeps its silence.