The Moonshaft

33m
Throughout history, humankind has turned its gaze towards the heavens in search of mystery. Yet time and again, it is beneath the ground where the most enduring enigmas are found. Across every continent lie tales of ancient tunnels, lost chambers, and sealed structures that predate all known civilisation. One such story emerged from the mountains of wartime Slovakia, where a wounded soldier claimed to have uncovered something buried deep within the earth, its surface smooth as glass, hard as diamond, and impossible to explain.

MUSIC

Tracks used by kind permission of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Tracks used by kind permission of CO.AG
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Press play and read along

Runtime: 33m

Transcript

Speaker 1 So, I am a big fan of the It movies, and I'd be willing to bet that a lot of you are too.

Speaker 1 Well, there's a new series coming out made by the same director, and it takes place 27 years before the movies in the 1960s. It explores the origins of Pennywise the Clown.

Speaker 1 The new HBO original series, It Welcome to Derry, is now streaming on HBO Max.

Speaker 1 But if you're a real fan like me, you're looking for more, which is why I'm also going to be listening to the It Welcome to Derry official podcast.

Speaker 1 This is where hosts Mark Bernardin and Princess Weeks dive deep into each episode after it airs.

Speaker 1 They talk to the cast and crew, including the show's creators like Andy and Barbara Muscietti about the making of the show.

Speaker 1 And I'm looking forward to what they have to say about the little Easter eggs I'm seeing in the trailer, like the Shawshank State Prison Bus.

Speaker 1 New podcast episodes drop every week after the episode airs on HBO Max.

Speaker 1 Stream new episodes of HBO's It Welcome to Derry Sundays on HBO Max and listen to the It Welcome to Derry official podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 Throughout history, humankind has turned its gaze towards the heavens in search of mystery. Yet time and again, it is beneath the ground where the most enduring enigmas are found.

Speaker 4 Across every continent lie tales of ancient tunnels, lost chambers, and sealed structures that predate all known civilization.

Speaker 4 One such story emerged from the mountains of wartime Slovakia, where a wounded soldier claimed to have uncovered something buried deep within the earth, its surface smooth as glass, hard as diamond, and impossible to explain.

Speaker 4 Tucked away in the north of Slovakia, the Tatra Mountains form a compact range of peaks and valleys that have shaped life here for generations.

Speaker 4 The settlements that cling to their lower slopes are small and scattered, built from stone and dark timber to withstand the long winters.

Speaker 4 The people of the Tatras have always lived close to the land. Livestock, forestry and simple farming provide most of what they need.

Speaker 4 In summer, the air smells of pine and wood smoke. In winter the forests fall silent beneath heavy snow.
Life is hard but predictable and that predictability has become a kind of comfort.

Speaker 4 Even so, the mountains are never entirely still.

Speaker 4 Locals speak of tremors that roll through the valleys on quiet nights and the deep, metallic sounds that sometimes echo from within the rock after heavy rain.

Speaker 4 Geologists have recorded small earthquakes in the region for centuries, but amongst villagers, these noises are said to come from the breathing caves, hidden chambers that exhale warm air in winter and draw it back in during summer.

Speaker 4 Such stories are rarely told with conviction. They are simply part of the landscape, something known but not examined too closely.

Speaker 4 Yet, the idea that there is more beneath the mountains than meets the eye has persisted for as long as anyone can remember.

Speaker 4 Miners working the nearby hills occasionally report rock formations that appear unnatural, cleanly cut walls, curved tunnels, or surfaces so hard and smooth that their tools have no effect on them.

Speaker 4 Most of these tales never leave the region, but together they've helped build an image of the Tatras as a place where the boundary between natural and man-made isn't always clear.

Speaker 4 For the people who live here, that uncertainty is just another fact of of life.

Speaker 4 By the early 1940s, Europe was at war.

Speaker 4 Slovakia's rugged terrain and isolated valleys made the mountains an ideal hiding place for partisans and deserters seeking refuge from the fighting.

Speaker 4 The forests provided cover, and the countless caves offered warmth and shelter through the bitter winters.

Speaker 4 It was during this time that one man, injured and on the run, took shelter in one of those caves.

Speaker 4 What he claimed to have found inside would later become one of the most enduring mysteries in Slovak folklore, a discovery that would haunt him for the rest of his life and leave behind one of the strangest legends in the region's history.

Speaker 4 By late 1944, Slovakia was a country divided. The Slovak National Uprising, a resistance movement against German occupation, had been crushed only months earlier.

Speaker 4 What remained were scattered groups of partisans, many of them stranded in the mountains as winter closed in.

Speaker 4 German patrols swept the valleys daily, hunting down anyone suspected of helping the resistance.

Speaker 4 Amongst those forced into hiding was an engineer and former officer named Antonin Horak.

Speaker 4 Records about his service are fragmentary, but surviving accounts describe him as an educated man in his early 30s, 30s, trained in both mining and mechanical engineering.

Speaker 4 When his unit was overrun near Libtovsky Mikulas, Horak was wounded in the leg and separated from his men.

Speaker 4 With no means of reaching friendly lines, he retreated north into the Tatra Mountains, hoping to find shelter until the front shifted.

Speaker 4 For several days he moved alone, traveling only at night and sleeping beneath the roots of fallen trees.

Speaker 4 The injury to his leg slowed him significantly, and by the fifth day, the temperature had dropped well below freezing.

Speaker 4 Local guides would later say that in those conditions, a man without shelter could not survive more than a night or two.

Speaker 4 According to his later notes, Horak followed the course of a small river that disappeared into the side of a ridge.

Speaker 4 There he noticed a narrow fissure in the rock, half hidden by moss and snow.

Speaker 4 He described it as no more than shoulder wide, a crack that seemed to breathe cold air.

Speaker 4 Believing it might lead to a hollow large enough to rest in, he widened the opening with his entrenching tool and squeezed through.

Speaker 4 Inside the air was warmer, and the sound of the wind outside faded almost immediately. He lit a candle, revealing a low chamber that descended into darkness.

Speaker 4 It was here, in that remote and nameless valley, that Horak began the journey which would define the rest of his life.

Speaker 4 For the first few hours, his account reads like that of a man simply trying to stay alive.

Speaker 4 He cleared a small space to rest, wrapped himself in his blanket and slept.

Speaker 4 When he awoke, the candle had burned out, leaving him in total darkness.

Speaker 4 Yet he wrote that the silence felt different, deeper somehow, pressing in from every side.

Speaker 4 He decided to explore further only after discovering a faint current of warm air moving through the chamber.

Speaker 4 Assuming it might connect to another exit or a geothermal vent, he gathered his few possessions, struck a match, and followed the draft into the rock.

Speaker 4 According to Horak's notes, the tunnel sloped downwards more steeply than he expected.

Speaker 4 At first it was narrow enough that he had to crawl, but after several meters it widened into a series of irregular chambers.

Speaker 4 The walls were damp, the floor uneven, littered with loose stones and patches of white mineral growth. Water dripped somewhere in the dark, echoing with a hollow, rhythmic sound.

Speaker 4 He carried a small carbide lamp from his kit, and as he advanced, the flame revealed glints of quartz in the rock.

Speaker 4 His first impression was that the cave was natural, a product of erosion rather than excavation.

Speaker 4 But as he pressed deeper, that certainty began to fade.

Speaker 4 The surfaces grew unnaturally smooth in places, as if worn down by something other than water.

Speaker 4 In several spots the stone appeared to curve inward along perfect arcs, forming shapes too regular to have occurred by chance.

Speaker 4 Horak described them as segments of a circle polished like metal.

Speaker 4 He noted that his light reflected off them, though the texture remained stone to the touch. The air was warmer the farther he went in, carrying the faint smell of iron.

Speaker 4 At one point he heard what he thought was running water, but when he reached the source of the sound, he found only a thin fissure that pulsed with air.

Speaker 4 He wrote that it felt like the breath of the mountain, steady and faintly rhythmic.

Speaker 4 Brooklyn bedding gives you that luxury mattress feel without the luxury price. My signature hybrid has been a game changer, unbelievably comfortable and honestly the best looking mattress I've owned.

Speaker 4 It feels like a first class upgrade but without the first class cost. Their mattresses are built with high quality materials made to last, so it's an investment that actually makes sense.

Speaker 4 Every Brooklyn bedding mattress is handcrafted in their Arizona factory. No middlemen, no gimmicks and no fiberglass, just honest pricing and true American craftsmanship for a better night's sleep.

Speaker 4 They have mattresses in every size and every sleep style. Take the Brooklyn Bedding Sleep Quiz and find your perfect match in under two minutes.

Speaker 4 Brooklyn Bedding is offering a 120 night comfort trial, so if you don't love it, they'll help you return or swap it.

Speaker 4 Go to brooklynbedding.com and use my promo code bedtime at checkout to get 30% off site-wide. This offer is not available anywhere else.

Speaker 4 That's brooklynbedding.com and promo code bedtime for 30% off site-wide.

Speaker 4 Support our show and let them know we sent you after checkout. Brooklynbedding.com promo code bedtime.

Speaker 5 This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today.
Smart Choice.

Speaker 5 Make another smart choice with AutoQuote Explorer to compare rates for multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it at Progressive.com.
Progressive Casualty Insurance and Affiliates.

Speaker 5 Not available in all states and situations. Prices may vary on how you buy.

Speaker 4 His original intention had been to find another way out of the cave, perhaps a lower opening that led back to the valley. But the terrain drew him on.

Speaker 4 He found signs that someone else might have been there long before him, charred fragments of wood, a rusty tin, what he thought might be the remains of a rope.

Speaker 4 Whether these were relics of shepherds or miners, he couldn't tell.

Speaker 4 Eventually, the passage forked.

Speaker 4 One branch narrowed sharply and descended further still.

Speaker 4 The other veered to the left and opened into a chamber so large that his lamp barely reached its walls.

Speaker 4 The ceiling vanished into darkness above and his voice came back to him in distorted echoes that seemed to overlap one another.

Speaker 4 Not the simple reverberation of an enclosed space, but a kind of layered repetition, as if the rock itself was answering.

Speaker 4 It was here, he wrote, that he began to feel uneasy for the first time.

Speaker 4 There was no sound except for the hiss of his lamp, yet he felt as though he was being observed.

Speaker 4 The air had grown thick, almost oppressive, and when he stopped moving, he thought he could detect a low vibration through the soles of his boots, so faint that he at first mistook it for the beating of his own heart.

Speaker 4 He considered turning back, but curiosity, or perhaps exhaustion, kept him moving.

Speaker 4 Near the far wall of the chamber, he found another passage, low and perfectly circular, its interior walls darker than the surrounding rock.

Speaker 4 The entrance measured less than two meters across, yet it appeared to continue straight for as far as his light could reach.

Speaker 4 The surface, he noted, was not rough limestone, but something altogether different.

Speaker 4 It was dark, he wrote, like coal or black glass, and so hard that my knife left no mark on it.

Speaker 4 Horak paused there for some time, testing the air with his hand.

Speaker 4 It was warm and faintly moving, as though drawn from somewhere deep within the mountain.

Speaker 4 The light from his lamp glinted off the curved surface, forming a pale reflection that seemed to retreat as he approached.

Speaker 4 He did not yet know it. but this tunnel, this smooth circular hollow cut into the living rock, was what later later writers would call the moonshaft.

Speaker 4 Horak entered the tunnel cautiously, crouching low so that his lamp would not strike the ceiling.

Speaker 4 The walls curved inward so smoothly that it felt less like a natural passage and more like a pipe bored through the stone.

Speaker 4 There were no cracks, no seams, no mineral veins. Only an unbroken surface of black material that swallowed the light instead of reflecting it.

Speaker 4 He advanced several meters before stopping to test it. With his knife he tried to scratch the wall, but the blade skidded away, leaving no mark.

Speaker 4 Next he struck it lightly with the back of the knife. The sound that followed was not the dull thud of rock, but a sharp metallic ring that echoed far down the tunnel.

Speaker 4 Horak described the noise as hollow yet vast, as if striking the side of a great bell.

Speaker 4 Convinced he had reached some buried chamber or man-made structure, he pressed his ear to the wall.

Speaker 4 It was faint, but he could hear a low vibration. Not constant, but pulsing, like machinery turning somewhere beyond the surface.

Speaker 4 He laid down his pack and examined the floor. It was coated in a thin layer of dust, pale and fine, through which he could see faint concentric rings radiating from the center of the passage.

Speaker 4 They looked to him like cooling patterns, the sort that molten metal might leave as it hardened.

Speaker 4 Further in, the tunnel ended abruptly in a smooth vertical face, perfectly circular, blocking the way forward.

Speaker 4 The barrier curved slightly outward, forming a shallow dome about 3 meters across.

Speaker 4 Even through the soot of his lamp, Horak could see his own reflection in it, distorted and colourless, but clear enough to prove it was polished.

Speaker 4 He reached out to touch it and found that the surface was warm. Not hot, not cold, simply the temperature of living skin.

Speaker 4 He pressed harder, then struck it once with his hammer. The sound rang like a single note, pure and deep, fading only after several seconds.

Speaker 4 Horak noted that the echo itself was odd. It didn't seem to simply die away, but to travel through the stone as if it was being carried deeper into the mountain.

Speaker 4 Curiosity overtook caution.

Speaker 4 He unpacked a small explosive charge from his kit, a fragment of dynamite left from his engineering work, and set it against the wall, retreating some distance before lighting the fuse.

Speaker 4 The detonation shook dust from the ceiling, but when the smoke cleared, the the black surface remained untouched.

Speaker 4 There was not a single chip nor a crack, only the echo rolling away through the tunnel.

Speaker 4 It was at this point, Horak claimed, that the vibration beneath his feet began to change.

Speaker 4 The steady pulse he had felt earlier grew irregular, almost reactive, as if responding to the blast.

Speaker 4 His lamp flickered. A thin mist began to form near the barrier, rising in slow curls before dissipating.

Speaker 4 He described the air as charged, prickling against the skin accompanied by a faint metallic taste on the tongue.

Speaker 4 For several minutes he waited, listening. The pulse subsided, the air cleared.
He began to withdraw, keeping his light fixed on the wall.

Speaker 4 Just before turning away, a flicker caught his eye, a subtle ripple moving across the polished surface.

Speaker 4 He steadied the flame, thinking it was a trick of the light, but the reflection wavered again, this time bending around a darker outline that wasn't his own.

Speaker 4 For a moment, he thought someone or something was standing behind him. its shape distorted in the shifting sheen, and he felt the distinct, paralyzing sense of being watched.

Speaker 4 The same unease he had felt in the outer chamber returned, stronger than before.

Speaker 4 He could not explain it, only that he knew he was not alone in that tunnel.

Speaker 4 Panic set in.

Speaker 4 He stumbled back through the passage, scraping his shoulders against the curved wall until he reached the larger chamber.

Speaker 4 There he stopped to listen, expecting pursuit, but the cave was silent.

Speaker 4 Only the slow drip of water broke the stillness.

Speaker 4 Horak remained there for some time, gathering the strength to climb back towards the fissure where he had entered.

Speaker 4 In his final note on the event, he wrote a single sentence, Whatever that barrier is, it was never meant to be opened.

Speaker 4 Horak's account of his return journey is brief and fragmented.

Speaker 4 He wrote that the ascent felt longer than before, as though the tunnel had stretched whilst he was inside it.

Speaker 4 His lamp sputtered several times, forcing him to move in near darkness.

Speaker 4 More than once, he thought he heard movement behind him. Not footsteps exactly, but the faint shuffle of loose stones disturbed by something following his path.

Speaker 4 When he finally reached the outer chamber, the air felt cooler, though he could no longer hear the wind outside.

Speaker 4 His original entrance had partially collapsed, most likely from the shock of the explosion. The fissure was narrower now, and it took him nearly an hour to clear enough space to squeeze through.

Speaker 4 He emerged into the snow at night. The sky was overcast, the moon hidden, and the forest around him silent.

Speaker 4 Porak later described the relief of fresh air as overwhelming, yet even as he caught his breath, he noticed something strange.

Speaker 4 The warm draught that had once flowed from the fissure had stopped entirely. The cave behind him was still.

Speaker 4 He didn't linger.

Speaker 4 With his leg worsening and his supplies nearly gone, he followed the river downstream until exhaustion forced him to stop.

Speaker 4 There, beneath a stand of fir trees, he collapsed.

Speaker 4 He was found several days later by Slovak villagers, delirious and suffering from infection.

Speaker 4 They treated his wounds and hid him until the front moved north and the area was retaken by the Red Army.

Speaker 6 Hey Fidelity,

Speaker 6 how can I remember to invest every month?

Speaker 7 With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs.

Speaker 6 Huh, that sounds easier than I thought.

Speaker 7 You got this.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I do. Now, where did I put my keys?

Speaker 7 You will find them where you left them.

Speaker 3 Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC member NYSE SIPC.

Speaker 8 I'm 32, juggling family, working full-time, and earning a bachelor's degree. At University of Phoenix, I earn career-relevant skills with every five-week course.

Speaker 8 Skills I can use now, not just after graduation.

Speaker 3 Earn skills in weeks, not years. Visit phoenix.edu.

Speaker 4 Much of what we know about his experience comes from the journal he kept during his recovery, a weathered notebook filled with sketches and technical observations.

Speaker 4 Amongst the drawings is a cross-section of the mountain, showing the tunnel as a perfect cylinder ending in a domed barrier marked simply as unknown composition.

Speaker 4 In the margins he speculated that it might be a form of tempered obsidian, possibly artificial.

Speaker 4 After the war Horak emigrated to the United States, reportedly settling in Colorado.

Speaker 4 There he worked as a mining engineer and continued to write about his wartime experiences.

Speaker 4 Friends who later saw his notes claimed he had intended to return to Slovakia to locate the site again, but he died before he could arrange the expedition.

Speaker 4 His papers, including the full moonshaft account, eventually surfaced through a Czech émigré magazine in the 1970s.

Speaker 4 Those who have studied them note several peculiarities.

Speaker 4 Porak's tone remains consistent throughout, practical, methodical and without embellishment, yet the final pages are marked by increasing agitation.

Speaker 4 He wrote of recurring dreams in which he was back inside the tunnel. listening to the same low vibration through the rock.

Speaker 4 In one passage he claimed that when he closed his eyes he could still see the faint reflection of his lamp moving across the black surface as though the barrier was waiting for him to return.

Speaker 4 The precise location of the cave was never confirmed.

Speaker 4 Subsequent searches of the Tatra foothills found nothing matching his description and the coordinates listed in his notebook lead only to dense forest and solid rock.

Speaker 4 But in the villages near Liptovsky Mikulash, locals still speak of the story of the soldier who vanished into the mountain and came back changed, warning that there was something deep beneath the Tatras that should never be disturbed.

Speaker 4 In the decade since Horak's account first surfaced, the so-called moonshaft has remained one of Eastern Europe's more persistent geological mysteries.

Speaker 4 Its imagery, a smooth circular tunnel sealed by a polished black barrier, sits somewhere between engineering acumen and folklore.

Speaker 4 An idea too specific to dismiss outright, yet too implausible to verify.

Speaker 4 Those who accept Horak's story at face value have proposed several interpretations.

Speaker 4 Some describe the structure as a relic of an ancient civilization, perhaps one that mastered a form of stone vitrification long before recorded history.

Speaker 4 Others imagine it as a natural basaltic intrusion mistaken for something artificial, a lava tube partially filled and then sealed by mineral pressure over millennia.

Speaker 4 To the few who look beyond geology altogether, the moonshaft represents something else entirely, a buried artefact, the remnant of a technology not of this earth.

Speaker 4 What fuels these interpretations is the tone of Horak's notes.

Speaker 4 They read not as the fantasies of a dying man, but as the observations of an engineer trying to reason through the unreasonable. His language is clinical, his sketches precise.

Speaker 4 The story might have remained a regional curiosity were it not for a series of parallels that emerged elsewhere in the decades that followed.

Speaker 4 In neighboring Bulgaria during the early 1990s, soldiers and psychics working under state supervision began digging at a site known as Sarichina.

Speaker 4 According to official reports, the excavation was intended to locate hidden treasure. Unofficially, it was said to be a search for a chamber described in Channellings and Dreams.

Speaker 4 What the soldiers found, or believed they found, bears striking resemblance to Horak's description.

Speaker 4 A vertical shaft descending through oddly smooth layers of rock, electromagnetic interference that disabled equipment, and finally, a sealed wall that tools could not penetrate.

Speaker 4 Where the moonshaft account came from a wounded soldier's diary, Sarichina was documented by military scientists and witnessed by dozens.

Speaker 4 Yet both stories share the same conclusion, a barrier impenetrable beyond explanation, left undisturbed when those exploring it grew afraid of what lay beyond.

Speaker 4 When the Bulgarian project was abruptly terminated, the shaft was filled in and the area declared restricted.

Speaker 4 Official statements later attributed the closure to safety concerns, though those involved privately spoke of equipment failures, sudden illness, and of anotherworldly life form encased in the rock.

Speaker 4 If these accounts are to be believed, the phenomenon is not unique to the Tatras.

Speaker 4 Reports of sealed or vitrified tunnels have surfaced elsewhere, most often in remote mountain regions where mining and natural erosion expose deep geological strata.

Speaker 4 In the United States, explorers in the Four Corners region have occasionally described glass-like passages encountered while surveying volcanic caves.

Speaker 4 In parts of Nevada and Utah, local legends tell of perfectly circular tubes found within sandstone, too regular to be natural, yet too featureless to be man-made.

Speaker 4 Few of these claims have ever been verified, but the echoes are difficult to ignore.

Speaker 4 Scientists who have reviewed the moonshaft material tend to approach it from a simpler angle.

Speaker 4 They point out that the high tatras sit above complex fault lines rich in magnetite and other conductive minerals.

Speaker 4 Under certain conditions, the friction of these rocks can produce both heat and sound, the low vibrations and metallic resonances Horak described.

Speaker 4 As for the smooth black surface, Geologists note that basalt, when cooled under pressure, can form a glassy crust almost impossible to scratch.

Speaker 4 In poor light, it could easily appear polished or artificial.

Speaker 4 There is also the matter of memory. Horak was badly wounded, suffering from blood loss and likely infection.

Speaker 4 His recollection, written weeks after the event, may have been shaped as much by fever and trauma as by observation.

Speaker 4 His sketches are consistent with the drafting style of a trained engineer, yet none include measurements or depth estimates, details he would surely have noted had he been working at full capacity.

Speaker 4 Skeptics further suggest that later writers expanded the story to fill gaps.

Speaker 4 When the account was translated and republished during the 1970s, Cold War anxieties and interest in ancient mysteries were at their height.

Speaker 4 Public fascination with hidden technologies and lost civilizations made fertile ground for reinterpretation.

Speaker 4 A cautious field report could easily become, in retelling, a narrative of buried machines and forbidden knowledge.

Speaker 4 Still, some details resist easy explanation. The concentric patterns Horax saw in the dust, the residual warmth of the wall, the pulsing vibration, each implies movement or energy, not inert stone.

Speaker 4 If these were products of geological forces, they were unusually concentrated.

Speaker 4 And whilst the description of the material could fit natural basalt glass, its placement, a sealed dome deep within sedimentary limestone, makes that scenario difficult to reconcile.

Speaker 4 For those inclined towards more speculative thinking, the moonshaft represents something larger, a recurring motif in human encounters with the unknown.

Speaker 4 Across cultures, there are stories of tunnels that lead nowhere, of gates that will not open, of voices heard through stone.

Speaker 4 Whether in the deserts of New Mexico or the mountains of Central Europe, such accounts hint at a common fear, that beneath our feet lies something older and more complex than the world we know.

Speaker 4 Perhaps that is the true power of Horak's discovery. It doesn't demand belief, it invites contemplation.

Speaker 4 It sits in the uneasy space space between science and myth, where data and imagination overlap.

Speaker 4 Even if his story was embellished or mistaken, it forces us to consider how little of the Earth's interior we have actually seen.

Speaker 4 Of course, there is a rational ending to this as well. If the moonshaft ever existed, it may by now have collapsed, sealed by the same forces that created it.

Speaker 4 The coordinates in his journal might have been copied incorrectly, or the cave misidentified.

Speaker 4 Without the physical evidence, all that remains is a description, one man's record of what he thought he saw in the dying days of a brutal war.

Speaker 4 Yet, as with the Shaftatsarichina, the absence of proof has done little to erase the fascination.

Speaker 4 The idea persists that something beneath the Tatras defies both geology and history, waiting in silence behind a surface no no tool can pierce.

Speaker 4 And if Horak's notes are genuine, if he truly stood before that smooth black barrier and felt it vibrate beneath his hand, then whatever he found in the winter of 1944 may still be there, sealed within the mountain, undisturbed for centuries.

Speaker 4 Its purpose and its makers still

Speaker 4 unknown.

Speaker 2 The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more personal info in more places that could expose you more to identity theft.

Speaker 9 But LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our U.S.-based restoration specialists will fix it guaranteed or your money back.

Speaker 2 Don't face drained accounts, fraudulent loans, or financial losses alone. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with LifeLock.

Speaker 9 Save up to 40% your first year.

Speaker 2 Visit lifelock.com/slash podcast. Terms apply.