Vanished in The Wilderness Pt 1: The Professor Disappears
When Boris Weisfeiler embarked on a solo vacation to Chile, he never returned. What came next was a deeper and darker rabbit hole than anyone could have ever expected.
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SOURCES
https://foia.state.gov/documents/StateChile3/00007520.pdf
http://weisfeiler.com/boris/Missing_the%20long%20search.pdf
https://science.howstuffworks.com/do-persons-fingerprints-change-after-death.htm
http://boris.weisfeiler.com/letters/eyes-only_April-10-1985.pdf
http://boris.weisfeiler.com/letters/Anonymous-report-October-1997.pdf
http://www.weisfeiler.com/boris/timeline.html
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/boris-weisfeiler-desaparecido-colonia-dignidad/
TRANSCRIPT
Listener discretion is advised
It’s summer and you’re sitting at your kitchen table planning your next vacation. You’re trying to think through everything, what time will you arrive, how will you get to the hotel. even on the most relaxed and chill vacations, a lot of details need to be meticulously planned out. But there’s so much of trip planning that’s outside of your control. There’s so many unknown unknowns. And when you’re far away from home, if you find yourself in the unknown, there’s not always someone around to help.
I’ve always had a fear of disappearing while on vacation, ever since I was little. The chances of it happening are low, but I remember being in high school and hearing stories of Natalie Halloway or Britney Drexel, girls who were my age when they embarked on a trip of a lifetime and never made it back.
It seems like you can do everything right. You can book stays in the safest parts of town, you can study the neighborhoods and the political climate of the country you're traveling to to stay out of harm's way. You can be on a class trip with chaperones, like Natalee was. And you can still be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You still can’t account for the unknown unknowns
Today’s episode is exactly that. It’s about seasoned traveler, taking a vacation that should have been a relaxing recharge. But instead it turned into one of the most shocking wrong place at the wrong time cases I’ve ever heard. A hiker who stumbled upon an unknown that many of us haven’t ever heard of, still to this day. Let’s dive in
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There are many parts to today’s topic. It’s full of twists and turns, coverups, declassified documents, and historical context. I wanted to make sure I got this story right, and it took a LOT of research. So today’s story is going to be told in two parts because I wanted to take the time and do the research it would take to tell you the full story, in depth. So this is part one of the disappearance of Boris Weisfeiler
Christmas Eve, 1985, American Professor of Mathematics, Boris Weisfeiler, boarded a plane from New York to Chile. He was embarking on a 10 day solo backpacking trip through the Chilean wilderness at the foothills of the Andes mountain range.
Boris was 43 at the time, and according to his sister, Olga, the older he got, the more he liked to take vacations by himself. Forgoing relaxing beach vacations for more strenuous solo backpacking trips in foreign countries.
Even though the siblings lived thousands of miles apart, Olga and Boris were incredibly close. Boris had come to America in 1975, fleeing persecution in Russia. There, he had been a professor, but was declared “anti-soviet” after he refused to condemn one of his colleagues. Boris, a jewish man, believed that his department had anti-semetic ideology at the time, and chose to relocate to the US.
Olga stayed in Moscow, but they would chat over the phone about Boris’s various adventures. He had been all over the world. He’d seen the arctic circle, been to Siberia and the Canadian north, even Uzbekistan right above Afghanistan. He’d horrify her with stories of bears and other dangerous wildlife, but when she asked if that would ever make him stop his travels he replied that animals weren’t the danger. People were.
This solo trip to Chile was going to be like the others. Boris actually thought the travel to the remote part of Chile he was going to was probably going to be more strenuous than the actual hike. He needed to first take a short flight from Penn state where he worked to pittsburgh, then another flight from Pittsburgh to New York, where he would board a fourteen hour flight to Santiago, Chile. From there, he’d have to take a bus 400 kilometers to San Fabian where his trip would start.
On him, he had a bright red hiking backpack full of supplies, identification, his wallet as well as his plane ticket to return home on January 14th. He could pack light, though it was Winter in the states, it was a warm and pleasant summer in the southern hemisphere, so hardly a jacket would be needed.
He arrived on Christmas day, 1985. The plan was to spend a few days in San Fabian and then trek into the Chilean wilderness. When he was there, he wouldn’t have any way to contact anyone, so he called his sister Olga before he’d no longer have a way to communicate, and told her he’d talk to her when he was back. And then he trekked into the forest.
Fast forward two weeks. January 12th, 1985, the day that Boris is supposed to return to the town of San Fabian. It would be the first day since he stepped into the wilderness that he would have a way to contact the outside world, and Olga sat by the phone, eagerly awaiting his call.
But that day, Boris doesn’t call. Olga gives it some time. Plane delays, weather, missed connections. It was the 80’s and she didn’t really have another option to get in touch with him. So she figures he’ll call when he can
Hours pass and he still hadn’t called her. Boris had a flight scheduled to New York to arrive home on the 14th, so she decided to wait for him to get back to the states before freaking out, even though she was already getting nervous.
January 14th comes, and there is still no word from Boris. This was not like her brother, so Olga calls the police once she realizes that he most likely has not made it back to the states. Their response was that he probably chose to extend his stay in Chile, and that it was nothing to worry about. Why would he come back to freezing Pennsylvania so fast when he could soak up the sun a little longer?
But Boris had a firm date that he needed to be home by. Classes were supposed to start back up at Penn State on January 19th, but when that day comes with still no word from Boris, the University starts getting nervous as well.
Both Olga and the University get in touch with the US state department to notify them that Boris definitely did not make it home from Chile. Now it’s in the hands of the government to figure out exactly whats going on, there’s really not much that Olga can do right now. She keeps calling his home phone, and each time, no one picks up.
And now she is thinking that no one wants to help her. The police still think that he’s just extended his stay. But what she is unaware of, is that thousands of miles away, deep in the wilderness of Chile, there’s already an investigation happening into Boris’s disappearance.
That’s right, by the time that the State Department calls to report Boris missing, someone had already tipped off Chilean authorities to a foreigner's arrival in the area Boris was last seen, and local police are searching for the professor.
It turns out that on January 3rd, Boris was crossing the Nuble River when he ran into two local Shepherds in the area
They were kind to Boris, they offered him food and a place to stay for the night, though it’s hard to imagine how much they really spoke because Boris didn’t speak a word of Spanish.
The next day, Boris was on his way again, but as he was leaving the area that he met the two Shephards in, he runs into another man, Luis Lopez, who is a brother of one of the Shephards. Luis and Boris don’t speak, but they see each other. This sighting is important because now Luis is the last person to see Boris alive.
Luis got a weird feeling about seeing Boris in the wilderness, and ended up calling local police, or Carabineros to report his sighting. See, this was a time of political turmoil in the country of Chile, and this fact becomes really important in our story.
In 1984, Chile was under control of a dictator, Augusto Pinochet, whose rule was defined by crimes against humanity, torturing and killing political prisoners, and fiercely oppressing the citizens of Chile. But by the time Boris entered the country, Chileans had over 10 years of Pinochet's reign of terror, and they were mostly over it. It was a chaotic time politically, but that didn’t stop Boris from visiting. He told a friend he felt the current political climate made the trip more exciting. Plus, he was going to be in the wilderness, hundreds of miles away from any real threat.
But when Luis saw Boris, he saw a man, not from Chile, with military style olive pants wandering in the forest, and he was worried. Boris’s outfit resembled an army unform more than it resembled hiking clothes. Was he part of an invasion? Was he a political prisoner illegally reentering the country? Luis was worried that a political extremist was crossing back into Chile from Argentina. So, he rang the local police to tell them about a strange foreigner in military garb wandering around the woods, like he had been instructed to do under Pinochet’s regime.
Officers came to the area to search for Boris, but were unable to find him. They were able, however, to find boot tracks that they believed belonged to him, leading to the bank of the Los Sauces river where it crossed with the Nuble river, and then disappearing.
None of this was being relayed to Boris’s sister Olga, who was still in her apartment in Russia, panicked. She had no idea that Boris had met people in the mountains, or that the US government was aware of the Shepherds that spoke with him.
It wasn’t until months later that she learned anything about her brother's disappearance at all. In March, three months after Boris disappeared, she gets her hands on a private investigators report. The Sociedad de matematicas in Chile hired a private investigator, Oscar Duran, to look into the disappearance of the American professor. The sociedad was looking out for a fellow mathematics professor, and they felt that nothing was being done to find Boris. Reading this report is when Olga learns a few shocking things.
First, on January 22nd, the US was made aware that the Carabineros in Chile found something by where Boris was camping. A bright red back pack. After the break
So Olga learned that Boris’s backpack was maybe found in the report. The US was told that the backpack was found in the bank of the river and that it was soaking wet. They suggested this was probably because Boris had drowned. This doesn’t sit right with Olga. Boris drowning? He had been on much more treacherous trips, plus the rivers in the area he was hiking were slow and shallow. It’d be difficult to drown just by crossing, you’d have to fall and hit your head on something in order to drown, and that just didn’t sound like Boris.
The report mentioned how the Vice Consul of the U.S. Embassy Edward Arrizabalaga, had traveled down to Chile to get a better sense of what is going on, and he makes a few startling discoveries. First, there’s some controversy over whether or not Boris’s backpack was dry or wet when it was picked up. It sounds like a small detail, but it’s the difference between it being plausible that he drowned or not. If the backpack was washed onto the bank from the river, that looks much more like a drowning than if it was found just sitting on dry land.
Second, not all of Boris’s belongings were still in the backpack. his passport, camera, cash, and plane ticket home are missing. Inside the backpack there’s still his credit card and Pennsylvania ID.
The report said that Chilean police strongly suggest that this was a drowning. They claimed the river was deceptively strong and Boris was trying to cross at a junction where it would have been easy for him to be swept away.
In February of that year, Edward travels back to that area, but this time, he’s presented with what Chilean police believe is the body of Boris. On February 11th, around 9:00am, the body of a middle aged man was found about 70 kilometres down river from where Boris’s backpack was found.
Edward asked for fingerprints to be taken from the body to help identify Boris, but he was informed they couldn’t do that. The skin on the fingers, just where the prints would be, had peeled off. He’s told this is to be expected when finding a body in water, especially since it was the summer and decomposition would happen so quickly.
But even considering that, when Edward sees the corpse, he doesn’t think it looks like someone who drowned over a month ago. The decomposition had sunk in, but even still this person did not look like Boris.
Within a few hours, another man comes to the morgue and identifies the body as his brother, a Chilean man, who had drowned only 5 days prior.
According to the report, Police had already searched the rivers for Boris and have found nothing, so if he drowned, and this is not him, they have no idea where he could be.
Nothing about this report sits right with Olga. Those specific items missing from his backpack are setting off alarm bells. If this was a drowning, as it were being heavily suggested, it wouldn’t make sense that only a few items were missing from his bag. And what about where the bag was found? The Chilean Police now claimed it was fished out of the river by a fisherman, but the Vice Consul of the US Embassy was told that it was found dry and on land.
The report doesn’t sit well with the university that hired the PI either. They seem to think that he just spoke to local police and wrote down what they said in the report, there wasn’t a lot of actual investigating that was done.
As if this isn’t enough, there is one sentence in the report that sends a chill down Olga’s spine. At the bottom of the last page, almost written like a throw away line, the report reads quote “The possibility that Dr. Weisfeiler entered Dignidad Colony can be discarded since it is more than 100 Km. from the place where he was last seen.”
This line seems random to Olga. What is the Dignidad Colony, and what did it have to do with her brother's disappearance. Why was it even important enough to mention that he wasn’t anywhere near this place.
At the time, there was not much information available about Dignidad Colony, which is known in Chile as the Colonia Dignidad. So Olga was most likely confused seeing those words.
There were rumors of a shadowy organization operating in the wilderness near the Andes mountains, and in the 80s if you were to look into the Colonia Dignidad, you may find the words cult and nazi’s come up, but concrete information would have been hard to find. For whatever reason, the private investigator thought it was important to mention that this mysterious group had nothing to do with Boris’s disappearance.
So That was all the information that Olga was given in the report. Boris had drowned under suspicious circumstances, but there wasn’t anymore to it. The report had mentioned that it would be too much money to re search the areas they had already searched for Boris, so there wouldn’t be anymore dives in the river or helicopter searches. It seemed like they would find him if they find him, but there were no more resources to look.
And so the book was closed on Olga, Chile officially declared Boris dead in early March though the only evidence he drowned was that his backpack was maybe wet.
For the next 15 years, that’s all the information Olga had. She tried to contact the US embassy multiple times, but each time the Soviet Union would question her and give her a warning. She couldn’t go to the united states because her and Boris’s mother had a stroke that left her partially paralyzed and unable to talk, so Olga needed to be there for her.
But she wasn’t the only one fighting for information on Boris. In June of 1985, the Penn State Math Department where Boris had worked had filed a freedom of information act request to obtain more information on Boris’s disappearance. And For months, nothing came.
But then, 15 months later, there was a reply.
Fall 1986, a one page document is released to Penn State. On the top and bottom in all caps and underlined reads EYES ONLY, marking its classified information status. No copies, no photos, eyes only.
The document is from the Consul general dated April 10th, 1985, just about a month after Boris was declared dead. It reads
New information has recently been received which indicated that the boundaries of Colonia Dignidad are more extensive than had been previously thought. They extend very close to the river Nuble, if not in fact to the river itself. Thus, at the time of his disappearance, Weisfeiler was either on or very near to the Colonia property. I feel that it is vital that this new information be transmitted to the department immediately by secure telephone.”
So the weird line in the report, the one about Boris NOT being on the Colonia Dignidad’s property that Olga thought was strange WAS a lie afterall! And beyond that, here the US government was calling it a disappearance. They said Boris’s disappearance, not death. So they believed he could still be alive.
But despite this massive discovery, it was the only piece of evidence that Olga and Penn state received that Boris might be alive. So Time marched on. In 1992, Pennsylvania officially declared Boris dead. At that point, Olga was living in the united states after her mother died in 1987. She was teaching herself english and looking anywhere she could for information. But for 15 years after Boris disappeared, there wouldn’t be much.
In the late 90’s, Pinochet was ousted as the dictator of Chile and was arrested in London after he fled the country. While all of this is happening, US president Bill Clinton declassified thousands of documents related to his dictatorship. Soon, information started flowing from the government into the hands of the people, detailing the crimes against humanity Chileans faced while under Pinochet’s regime.
At this time, Olga was working and living outside of Boston, Massachusetts with her daughter Anna. She had a PHD in microbiology from Russia but she’s had to downplay her credentials in order to find work in the US. On a normal afternoon in 2000, a FedEx driver approached Olga’s front door and dropped off a nondescript box.
It’s heavy, and strange. Olga hadn’t ordered anything she could remember, and the return address isn’t anywhere she recognizes. When Olga opens the box, she sees something she could have never imagined.
Inside, There’s 250 declassified documents. All of them pertaining to Boris’s disappearance. And all of them from the years 1985-2000
It turns out, the United states had declassified thousands of documents about the Colonia Dignidad, the mysterious organization briefly mentioned in Boris’s repots. And it’s revealed that the rumors about this group were true. And it was worse than anyone imagined.
The Colonia Dignidad was a cult started by a pedofile nazi named Paul Shafer. He had fled arrest in Germany after the holocaust and established his religious compound in the foothills of the Andes mountains. Pinochet was made aware of the cults existence, and instead of shutting it down, he would send political prisoners to Shafer for the cult to torture and murder.
And if that’s not wild enough, when the US declassified all of their documents pertaining to the Colonia Dignidad, inside their filing cabinet of documents about the cult was a massive folder labeled Boris Weisfeiler. And that was what was sent to Olga.
She couldn’t believe it, she just stared at the piles of papers, unsure where to start. The first document she picked out of the pile was a translation of an interview that happened years ago.
In 1987, two years after Boris’s disappearance, an anonymous Chilean Army Official who went by Daniel, had approached the head of the Chilean human rights committee and the US embassy. He told them that he knew that the Colonia Dignidad had picked up Boris and was holding him in the prison camp as late as 1987.
This changed everything for Olga, who was now dedicated to reading through every document in the box to see what information she could learn about her brother's whereabouts.
But to really understand what was happening, and why Boris had gotten mixed up in it, we need to do a deep dive into what exactly the Colonia Dignidad was. Next week, I’m going to take you through the history of the cult, and what that meant for Boris and Olga Weisfeiler.
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