Lake of No Return -- called Naung Yang in Tai languages -- sits at roughly 1,136 meters elevation near the Pangsau Pass on the India-Myanmar border, south of the village of Pangsau (also called Pansaung). The surrounding hills are home to the Tangsa community, a subset of the Naga people. Just 2.5 kilometers to the northeast runs the Ledo Road, formerly called Stilwell Road -- the supply route that the Western Allies began building in 1942 to connect India with China's wartime armies under Chiang Kai-shek. The road was one of the great engineering feats of the war, carved through some of the most hostile terrain on the planet. The lake sits in the shadow of that effort, a quiet body of water surrounded by the dense jungle that consumed men and machines with equal indifference.

The most widely repeated explanation for the name comes from the Changlang District government in India's Arunachal Pradesh: Allied aircraft flying the Hump -- the dangerous air route over the eastern Himalayas that supplied China -- crashlanded in the lake with enough frequency that the name stuck. American sources confirm this version. Brendan I. Koerner's 2008 book about Herman Perry, an American soldier on the Ledo Road who deserted into the jungle and married into the Naga tribe, quotes the explanation directly. But three other stories compete for credibility. In one, a group of Japanese soldiers returning from battle stumbled upon the lake, contracted malaria, and died there. In another, American soldiers sent from the Ledo Road to examine the lake became trapped in the undergrowth and perished trying to escape. A fourth account blames retreating British troops in 1942 who got lost in quicksand near the lake's shores.

The lake's dark reputation has proved remarkably durable. As recently as 2007, the Indian newspaper The Telegraph described it as 'the local Bermuda Triangle,' reporting that 'according to folklore, aircraft that fly over the lake never return.' This is, of course, an exaggeration -- aircraft fly over it routinely -- but the name carries a power that transcends literal truth. Local authorities in Changlang District have leaned into the mystique, marketing the lake as a potential tourist attraction. 'Who knows,' one tourism pitch reads, 'the Indian Bermuda Triangle might just turn out to be the next tourist-puller of the region.' The improvement of relations between India and Myanmar in recent decades has opened the border area to visitors, and the lake now plays a small but growing role in regional tourism development.

The appeal of the Lake of No Return lies not in what it is -- a small mountain lake in dense jungle -- but in what it represents. The Pangsau Pass region was one of the deadliest corridors of World War II. The Ledo Road cost thousands of lives to build. The Hump air route killed hundreds of pilots. Malaria, typhus, and the jungle itself claimed more soldiers than enemy fire in the China-Burma-India Theater. In a landscape that swallowed armies whole, a lake that supposedly never gave back what it took became the perfect metaphor for the entire region. Whether the name comes from crashed planes, drowned soldiers, or something older still, it endures because the jungle around the Pangsau Pass earned it -- one disappearance at a time.