Persons

Antonín T. Horák

Discoverer & Original Witness (1897–1976)

A linguist and captain in the Slovak National Uprising who, while hiding from German forces in October 1944, explored a cave and documented a crescent-shaped shaft with glass-smooth, blue-black walls. He later emigrated to the United States and settled in Pueblo, Colorado, spending decades trying to persuade scientists to study his 'moonshaft.' His war journal, published in NSS News in March 1965, is the sole first-hand record of the cave and the foundation of every later search.

Walter Pavliš

Speleologist, Field & Archival Researcher

Walter Pavliš is a Czech speleologist and field researcher who has dedicated years to systematically exploring cave systems in the mountain ranges around Stará Ľubovňa in search of the Moonshaft. His expertise in cave surveying and underground navigation has been instrumental in narrowing down suspected locations. More recently, he has extended his work into genealogical and archival research, reconstructing Antonín Horák's family origins from period European records to better illuminate the discoverer's background.

Petr Sittek is a Czech researcher and archivist who has uncovered and preserved key historical documents related to the Moonshaft legend. His archival work has surfaced rare primary sources, including materials from the 1970 APRO expedition planning and documents from the MUFON UFO Journal.

Ted Phillips

Physical Trace Researcher

Ted Phillips was an American researcher widely regarded as the world's foremost authority on physical trace cases — incidents where UFOs or unidentified phenomena reportedly leave measurable effects on the environment. A colleague of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Phillips was one of the experts assembled by APRO in 1970 to evaluate Antonín Horák's Moonshaft account and plan a scientific expedition to Czechoslovakia. The expedition was ultimately called off, but his involvement illustrates the level of credibility the Moonshaft claim commanded among serious researchers of the era. Ted Phillips has since passed away. His work is continued by Thomas Ferrario.

Thomas Ferrario

Physical-Trace Researcher (continuing Ted Phillips's work)

An American researcher who continues the physical-trace work of the late Ted Phillips, including interest in the Moonshaft. As Phillips's successor he carries forward the field methodology and case files of one of the experts APRO once assembled to evaluate Horák's account.

An APRO member and deputy sheriff in Pueblo, Colorado who in June 1970 presented Antonín Horák's account at APRO headquarters in Tucson, helping set the 1970 expedition planning in motion. He was a key early link between Horák and organized research into the case.

Martin Lavay

Author & Researcher

Czech author of the 2019 book Měsíční šachta (The Moonshaft), the fullest popular synthesis of the legend, its history, and the many theories about it. For many readers — including the founder of this archive — Lavay’s book was the spark that turned curiosity into an active search.

A Slovak speleologist from Žilina with decades of caving in the Malá Fatra, Eduard Piovarči has followed the Moonshaft since the mid-1980s. His Terchová caving group joined the search in 1985 and ran its own field actions in the Low Tatras and the Belianske Tatras. In 2000 he published the first comprehensive review of the whole affair in the bulletin of the Slovak Speleological Society — a sceptical but fair account that retraces every Slovak and Czech search since 1972, weighs the theories, and closes with a bibliography and a map of the areas searched.

A caver and writer from the Prešov region, Ján Ducár has been a long-standing voice in the Slovak Moonshaft debate. In the same 2000 issue of the Slovak Speleological Society's bulletin he answered Piovarči's review with a deadpan satire proposing that Slovak cavers should simply build the Moonshaft themselves as a tourist attraction, souvenir pickaxes included — a piece that skewers the hype around the legend while quietly listing everyone who had chased it. He has since taken the search seriously, examining candidate sites in eastern Slovakia and serving as vice-president of the Club of Friends of Captain Horák.

A Slovak writer and researcher of historical mysteries, Miloš Jesenský took up the Moonshaft in the 1990s and combed the wartime archives for any trace of Horák's unit or of the shaft itself. Like every archival search before it his stalled at a dead end, and Piovarči's 2000 review records it alongside the parallel effort of G. Skřivánek in Žilina. With the Polish author Robert K. Leśniakiewicz he published "Tajemství měsíční jeskyně" in the Prague magazine Fantastické fakta (11/1998), the article that carried the story to a broad Czech and Slovak readership and set it among the wider legends of structures hidden under the Carpathians.

A Polish writer and investigator of anomalies who gave the Moonshaft its most far-reaching reading. Picking up the article he had co-written with Miloš Jesenský, he argued in Fantastické fakta 12/1998 that the shaft is evidence of a civilisation of the "Hyperborean era" some twenty thousand years ago and belongs with the "glass tunnels" tradition and its Agartha underworld — and that the mountain named in that legend may be a deliberate substitution for a range further east. Piovarči's 2000 review lists the idea among the speculative readings; it is kept here as part of the story's reception, not as a finding.

The French writer and chemist Jacques Bergier, co-author of "Le Matin des magiciens", is the reason the Moonshaft became a European story at all. He picked up Horák's account after its 1965 publication in NSS News and retold it in "Le livre de l'inexplicable" (1972), calling the shaft the greatest mystery of the century and reading it, first of anyone in print, as the work of an unknown cosmic civilisation. Most of the Czechoslovak searchers who followed came to the case through that book rather than the original journal: Ivan Mackerle's first search report of 1982 is explicitly based on it, and the authors who proposed a resonator theory at a Bratislava conference in 1983 had the story from Bergier too.