On November 10, 2014, Las Vegas resident and avid hiker Kenny Veach set out on what would be his last expedition. He had undertaken many such walks, mostly in the high and isolated plains of the Nevada Desert.
Mr Veach filmed some of his journeys and kept a vlog on YouTube, and in one such video spoke about an eerie experience in which he came across a cave shaped like the letter “M”.
“I solo hike across mountain tops that most people wouldn’t dare go. I have been in more caves than I can count. I play with rattlesnakes for fun. But this one particular cave was beyond anything I had ever encountered,” he said in one video.
His final hike was to rediscover that cave, but we’ll never know if he did, because that was the last time Mr Veach was ever seen.
His disappearance and the mysterious cave have since sparked a global conspiracy theory frenzy, made all the more intense since Mr Veach was hiking in a part of the desert close to Area 51.
The classified US Air Force base has long been tipped as the country’s extraterrestrial garrison which allegedly holds all manner of alien spacecraft and life.
While much of the allegations are rooted in fiction and the explosion in popularity of alien films from the 1950s, it hasn’t stopped many from questioning the link between Area 51 and Mr Veach’s disappearance.
After initially stumbling across the “M” shaped cave, Mr Veach retold the story in a separate video posted to YouTube in 2014, titled, ‘Son of an Area 51 Technician’.
In it, he said: “I am a long-distance hiker. One time during one of my hikes out by Nellis Air Force Base, I found a hidden cave. The entrance to the cave was shaped like a perfect capital M.
“I always enter every cave I find, but as I began to enter this particular cave, my whole body began to vibrate. The closer I got to the cave entrance, the worse the vibrating became. Suddenly I became very scared and high-tailed it out of there. That was one of the strangest things that ever happened to me.”
No one knows where Mr Veach ended up after he set out to find the cave again that year.
Hopes were partly raised after Red Rock Search & Rescue Commander Dave Cummings announced that a search team had found his phone.
“We found his cell phone close to a very vertical old mine shaft and we can’t find another trail,” he told News 3. “It doesn’t mean that he’s down the mine shaft, but we have tracked him as far as we can. We are having our other crews come in from the search areas.”
Unfortunately, after the find little in the way of evidence turned up.
The comments section of Mr Veach’s ‘M Cave Hike’ — his last video — is filled with theories on messages Mr Veach may or may not have been trying to get out during his film.
One reoccurring comment focuses on a part of the video around the 15:40 mark when Mr Veach said: “The cave I’m looking for is deep and dark, and it’s shaped like the letter M.
“There are lots of little caves around here and is about level with the ground, like an area like this, so I really have to keep my eyes peeled because I don’t want to pass it.”
After this, Mr Veach pans the camera towards a cave that is shaped like an M and zooms into it and says: “Then there are caves like that … I’m not going up there. There are caves all around here.”
The comments suggest Mr Veach purposefully filmed the cave he was looking for but didn’t go in because of being warned by something or someone.
It is impossible to say why or how Mr Veach went missing, and the theories suggesting that Area 51 was involved in his disappearance only add to the mystery and hysteria surrounding his case.
