For most people, the Black Rock Desert in Nevada is a symbol of absolute freedom.

A huge dried up lake where you can test your speed and build the utopian city of Burning Man for a week each year.

But beyond this temporary civilization lies another world, a world that is harsh, silent, and holds ancient secrets.

In the summer of 2002, this desert became a point of no return for the Roads family.

Their last journey ended not with vacation photos, but with a mystery burned into the very stones of this inhospitable land.

The Roads family was a typical American family from the suburbs of Reno.

Mark, a 40-year-old engineer and amateur mechanic, and Sarah, his 38-year-old wife, who worked as a school teacher, and their 10-year-old son, Leo.

Their main family treasure and Mark’s pride and joy was an old but well-maintained Winnebago motor home.

It was their home on wheels, their ticket to a world of adventure, allowing them to escape the city’s hustle and bustle on weekends.

Mark spent months preparing the motor home and assured everyone that it was ready for any challenge.

In June 2002, they planned a 3-day trip to the area adjacent to the Black Rock Desert.

They did not intend to go to the plateau itself, but wanted to find a secluded place to camp in the foothills where rocky hills meet the endless salt flats.

Sarah, being more cautious, was a little concerned about the complete isolation of these places.

But Mark assured her that they would be completely safe in their metal shell.

Leo was thrilled.

For him, the desert was another planet to explore.

Their journey began on Friday morning.

They were last seen alive at a gas station in the town of Gerlac, the last bastion of civilization before plunging into the wilderness.

An elderly cashier later recalled the family.

He remembered the old but clean Winnebago and the cheerful boy who eagerly bought soda and chips.

He exchanged a few words with Mark.

Looking at a map, Mark said he was looking for a truly wild place where there wouldn’t be a soul for miles around.

The cashier watched them leave and thought at the time that it would be too easy to find such a place in these parts.

After leaving the gas station, the Roads family turned off the paved highway onto a dirt road leading deep into the desert.

A security camera on the local government building captured their van slowly driving away toward the hills.

It was the last image ever taken of the family.

They were moving toward silence in the starry sky, unaware of what lay ahead.

As the sun set, painting the sky in incredible shades of orange and purple, their van became a tiny dot, and then its tail lights finally disappeared into the gathering twilight.

The desert had swallowed them up.

3 days passed on Monday morning, when the roads family was supposed to return, or at least call, their phones remained silent.

Sarah was meticulous about communication.

She had promised her sister Jessica that she would call as soon as they left the desert and got a signal, but there was no call.

At first, Jessica chalked it up to a normal delay.

Perhaps they liked the place so much that they decided to stay another night.

But by Monday evening, when calls to Mark and Sarah’s cell phone still went to voicemail, her concern turned to real alarm.

She knew her sister.

Sarah would never have caused her to worry without reason.

After several hours of agonizing deliberation, she dialed the number for the Persian County Sheriff’s Office, which had jurisdiction over the Black Rock Desert.

The initial response from the authorities was cautious that the dispatcher politely explained that tourists often lose track of time and get delayed, especially in such remote areas.

But Jessica’s persistence and her conviction that this was not like her sister’s behavior prompted them to take the report seriously.

An official report was filed for three missing persons.

The next morning, as soon as dawn broke, a search operation was launched.

Given the vast territory, the first step was to launch an aerial search.

A small civil air patrol plane took off from the Reno airfield and began methodically combing the area according to a predetermined grid.

From the air, the black rock desert appears as an endless, monotonous expanse of cracked earth and gray rocky hills.

The pilot and observer stared at the landscape for hours, their eyes tired from the bright sun reflecting off the salt flats.

Then after almost 3 hours of flying, the observer noticed something.

Far from any known dirt roads in a rocky depression between two hills, there was a white spot contrasting with the dark brown color of the rocks.

The plane circled, descending.

There was no doubt it was a van, and it had rolled over onto its side.

The pilot immediately relayed the coordinates to the sheriff’s command center.

Once the exact location was known, a group of two SUVs was sent to the ground.

They carried four deputy sheriffs, experienced men accustomed to the harsh desert conditions.

Their journey was long and exhausting.

They had to leave the last dirt road and drive straight across rough terrain.

The wheels of their SUVs struggled to grip the rocky ground, and they had to drive around boulders and cross dry riverbeds.

It took them almost 2 hours to cover 9 miles.

The closer they got, the more oppressive the feeling became.

The place was completely lifeless.

Finally, they saw it.

An old wnebago lay on its right side in the middle of a small rocky plateau.

It looked like a beached whale, a vast and out ofplace creature in this empty world.

There was complete deafening silence all around.

Turning off their engines, the deputies got out of their cars and approached cautiously, looking around.

The first thing that caught their eye was the nature of the damage.

The van hadn’t just overturned.

On its left side, which was now facing the sky, there were deep, long scratches, as if giant claws had rad across the metal.

But the strangest detail was what they found at the front.

The plastic radiator grill and the housing around the headlights were melted and blackened.

It didn’t appear to be an engine fire that would have damaged the entire hood.

On the contrary, the damage was localized, as if someone had held a powerful blowtorrch to the front of the van.

One of the deputies walked around the van and came to a halt.

Boss, come here and look at this.

His voice sounded tense over the radio.

There were prints on the hard compacted ground and on the flat stones around the van.

They resembled the tracks of a huge hoofed animal, possibly a bull or an elk, but the shape was slightly different.

But it wasn’t the shape that was the most frightening.

Each print had a thin black border around its outline.

Where the footprints were left on the stone, the rock changed color, covered with a light blackish coating as if hot metal had been applied to it.

These were the footprints of hot hooves.

Shocked, the police continued their investigation.

They looked inside the van through the broken windshield.

Inside, there was complete chaos.

The table was broken, the dishes were smashed, and clothes and supplies were scattered throughout the cabin.

It was obvious that the overturn had been sudden and very violent.

But here, too, the most important and frightening detail awaited them.

There was not a drop of blood in all this mess.

Not on the glass shards, not on the seats, not on the walls, nothing.

A family of three could not have survived this without a single scratch.

The deputies finished their initial inspection.

They stood in the middle of the desert next to the overturned van, which was covered with strange scratches and burn marks.

There were hot hoof prints around it.

Inside, there were signs of a struggle, but no visible injuries.

Most importantly, no human footprints were leading away from the scene.

No footprints from the Roads family, no traces of another vehicle.

It was as if they and whatever had attacked them had vanished into thin air.

The senior deputy returned to his car, picked up the radio, and called the sheriff.

“Boss,” he said after a long pause.

“You’d better come here yourself.

I don’t even know how to describe this in a report.” The arrival of the sheriff and the investigation team from the state capital, Carson City, turned a remote corner of the desert into the center of a complex forensic operation.

A wide cordon was immediately set up around the overturned Wnebago.

Forensic scientists in white coveralls began a methodical and painstaking work that resembled an archaeological excavation at the site of an alien spacecraft crash.

Every inch of ground, every rock within a hundred yards of the van was carefully examined and photographed.

The primary task was to record and collect evidence.

Particular attention was paid to the mysterious tracks.

Forensic scientists took dozens of photographs of the burnt imprints from different angles.

Then they tried to make plaster casts, but this proved almost impossible.

The imprints on the hard, rocky ground were too shallow.

Instead, they used a special silicone compound to obtain the most accurate copies possible.

Samples of blackened rock and scrapings of dark deposits around the contours of the footprints were also carefully collected for subsequent chemical analysis.

At the same time, work was carried out on the van itself.

A team of experts spent hours examining it from the outside.

They measured the depth and width of the scratches and took metal samples for microscopic analysis.

The melted area around the headlights was examined with a portable spectrometer in an attempt to determine the nature of the heat source.

Inside the van, forensic experts collected everything that could be of significance, including fingerprints, hair, and fabric fibers.

The results of this work began to arrive a few days later, only adding to the questions in an already impossible equation.

The fingerprints found inside belonged exclusively to members of the Roads family.

No outside fingerprints were found.

This made the theory of an attack by a group of people even less likely.

While forensic investigators were working at the scene, a large-scale search operation was launched in the desert.

Dozens of volunteers and police officers traveling on ATVs and on foot began combing the area square by square.

A helicopter assisted them from the air.

They searched for anything.

bodies, pieces of clothing, traces leading from the scene.

The search continued for more than a week under the scorching June sun.

They covered an area of tens of square miles and found absolutely nothing.

The desert was empty.

The Roads family had disappeared without a trace.

A week later, the complex and costly operation to evacuate the van was completed.

It was carefully lifted with a crane loaded onto a special platform and escorted to a closed hanger for further examination.

There it was literally taken apart.

The results of the laboratory tests, which were ready in a few weeks, proved to be a dead end for the investigation.

Chemical analysis of the dark residue from the traces revealed that it was primarily carbon with sulfur impurities resulting from the combustion of an organic substance at a very high temperature.

However, it was not possible to identify this substance.

No traces of known combustible materials such as gasoline or kerosene were found.

Engineers who studied the melted plastic concluded that it had been exposed to a brief temperature of at least 800° F.

An industrial cutter could have caused such an effect, but it was unclear what it was doing in the middle of the desert and how it had been used without leaving any other traces.

Investigators held a meeting to try to piece together all the facts.

Rational explanations were ruled out one by one.

An attack by humans.

The absence of foreign traces, footprints, blood, and bodies made this version untenable.

An animal attack.

No animal known to science leaves scorched hoof prints and melts metal.

A natural phenomenon.

Ball lightning or some rare geological phenomenon could explain the burns.

But not the overturned van, the scratches, or the disappearance of three people.

It was at this point when all official versions had reached a dead end that one of the detectives, an older man known for his unconventional thinking, took a desperate step.

He unofficially contacted doctor Evelyn Reed, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada who specialized in the folklore and mythology of the American West.

He anonymously sent her photos of the tracks and a brief description of the damage to the van.

Her response came two days later and read more like an excerpt from a science fiction novel than an expert opinion.

“I cannot give you a scientific explanation,” she wrote.

“I can only say that the evidence you describe, burnt hoof prints, the smell of sulfur, localized high temperature burns, corresponds exactly to descriptions of creatures from Native American and later legends of the region.

Native Americans called them by different names, but the essence is the same fiery beasts of the desert.

In later European mythology, such traces are attributed to the so-called hell hounds or Cberus, guardians standing at the border between worlds.

Legends always place them in such empty borderline places as deserts or swamps.

This answer was not added to the official case file.

It remained only an unofficial note in the detective’s personal notebook.

But for those who worked on the case, it became chilling confirmation that they were dealing with something beyond their experience and understanding.

The investigation was paralyzed.

They had physical evidence, but no crime that they could describe within the framework of human logic.

Months passed and not a single new lead appeared in the Roads family case.

The large-scale search was finally called off.

The case where which had dominated the front pages of local newspapers gradually faded from the news agenda, remaining only a topic of discussion on internet forums dedicated to mysteries.

For the Persing County Sheriff’s Office, the case became a silent thorn in their side, a professional wound that could not be healed.

In the end, the sheriff held a short press conference at which he read a prepared statement with a weary look on his face.

He reported that despite a thorough investigation, it had not been possible to locate the Roads family or determine the cause of their disappearance.

The active phase of the investigation was suspended, but the case officially remained open.

It was a formal way of admitting defeat.

The fate of the main piece of evidence, the Winnebago motor home, was prosaic.

For more than a year, it stood in a covered hanger, serving as a silent and mysterious monument to that night.

But it was impossible to keep it forever.

After experts removed all possible evidence from it, it was put up for auction by the police.

No one wanted to buy a motor home with such a history.

Ultimately, it was sold for scrap metal to a recycling company.

A few days later, a hydraulic press crushed it into a shapeless cube of metal, burying forever the secrets held by its mangled body.

All other evidence, reports, photographs, silicone casts, and that very same melted stone was placed in a cardboard box, sealed, and sent to the archives.

7 years after their disappearance in 2009, the Roads family was officially declared dead by the courts.

Their relatives never got any answers.

They had neither bodies to bury nor the consolation of justice.

All they had left were a few old photographs and the same emptiness that investigators had encountered that day in the desert.