In February 1977, a 24-year-old man named
Steven Kubacki was cross-country skiing through the snow near Lake Michigan. Once he reached the edge of the lake, he took his skis off to sit down and rest. When he got up to leave his own tracks were gone, and he became lost. The last thing he remembers was walking through the snow, feeling numb and exhausted. He blacked out. In the blink of an eye, it was spring. He was lying in a grassy field in the middle of a forest, wearing clothes that weren’t his. Sitting next to him was a stranger’s backpack containing running shoes and glasses that did not belong to him, either.
He hiked to the nearest town, and asked a local resident where he was. They told him he was in Pittsfield, Massachusetts — 700 miles away from where he had been skiing. His aunt and father lived in Pittsfield, so he knocked on his aunt’s door. His family was in shock, hugging him and asking where he had been. Kubacki had been missing for 14 months.
When Kubacki had first gone missing, the
search team found his poles and skis at the edge of the lake. There was only one set of his footprints leading toward the water, but none walking away. They could only assume he drowned himself in the freezing lake. He had been missing for so long, everyone assumed he must be dead.
The official explanation is that he had amnesia, and that he was wandering in a fugue state. But even doctors are baffled by this case. It’s incredibly rare for someone to lose their memory of such a large chunk of time. And it still leaves so many unanswered questions. His story was included in a psychology case study in a book about amnesia, but even experts have been unable to figure out what actually happened.
Kubacki had already earned a degree in linguistics before he went missing, but he was so fascinated by his own case that he went on to earn his PhD in Psychology. He wanted answers about his own disappearance, and yet he still couldn’t find them. Solving the mystery of his missing year became an obsession, and he went on to publish a book called
Meta-Mathematical Foundations of Existence: Gödel, Quantum, God & Beyond. In it, he writes about the possibility of
alternate universes.