by Michael Bond

People who have been truly lost never forget the experience. Suddenly disconnected from all that surrounds them, they are plunged into a relationship with an utterly alien world. They think they are going to die. Horror-struck, their behavior becomes so confounding that finding them is as much a psychological challenge as a geographical one. One ranger with 30 years’ experience told me, "You’ll never be able to figure out why lost people make their decisions."

Lost is a cognitive state. Your internal map has become detached from the external world, and nothing in your spatial memory matches what you see. But at its core, it is an emotional state. It delivers a psychic double whammy: Not only are you stricken with fear, you also lose your ability to reason. You suffer what neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls a "hostile takeover of consciousness by emotion." 90 percent of people make things a lot worse for themselves when they realize they are lost—by running, for instance. Because they are afraid, they can’t solve problems or figure out what to do. They fail to notice landmarks, or fail to remember them. They lose track of how far they’ve travelled. They feel claustrophobic, as if their surroundings are closing in on them. They can’t help it; it’s a quick-fire evolutionary response. Robert Koester, a search and rescue specialist with a background in neurobiology, describes it as a "full-flown fight-or-flight catecholamine dump. It’s essentially a panic attack. If you are lost out in the woods there is a chance you will die. That’s pretty real. You feel like you’re separating from reality. You feel like you’re going crazy."

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by Andy Greenberg

Black chunks began to fly out of an access panel on the generator, which the researchers had left open to watch its internals. Inside, the black rubber grommet that linked the two halves of the generator’s shaft was tearing itself apart.

A few seconds later, the machine shook again as the protective relay code repeated its sabotage cycle, disconnecting the machine and reconnecting it out of sync. This time a cloud of gray smoke began to spill out of the generator, perhaps the result of the rubber debris burning inside it.

Assante, despite the months of effort and millions of dollars in federal funds he’d spent developing the attack they were witnessing, somehow felt a kind of sympathy for the machine as it was being torn apart from within. “You find yourself rooting for it, like the little engine that could,” Assante remembered. “I was thinking, ‘You can make it!’”

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