Steven Kubacki was a student at Hope College, a small, private Christian university near the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan, when he vanished in February 1978. He’d gone off for a solo cross-country skiing trip, meant only to be gone for a day, maybe two, but didn’t return. He left a 200-yard trail of footprints in the snow, leading past the edge of the lake. The one-way path ended abruptly, leading investigators to conclude, in the absence of any other clues, that Kubacki drowned somewhere under a thick layer of unbroken ice.

How he was first reported missing depends on who is telling the story.