Beginning in July 2025, Facebook accounts and pages began sharing a story (archived) about a supposedly missing Colorado couple found dead years later in an abandoned Utah uranium mine. Several (archived) of these posts (archived) received copious views and thousands of likes. Most of the posts used the same set of three images alongside the multi-paragraph story about the "chilling discovery," though some (archived) used different arrangements or swapped out (archived) an image or two.
The story continued to be shared months (archived) later (archived), prompting people online to search for the story and see if it was true.
The posts began, "In a case that haunted both families and baffled authorities for nearly a decade, the remains of two Colorado tourists. Sarah Bennett, 26, and Andrew Miller, 28 were discovered in 2019 deep inside a sealed uranium mine in southern Utah, eight years after their mysterious disappearance."
The story was false and appeared to have been an adaptation of a similar fake story first shared on YouTube.
The story claimed that the couple's bodies were found in 2019 and that the sister of one of the victims spoke to the Denver Post in 2020. However, a Google search for any reference to the story prior to 2025 found no news reporting on the apparent discovery of the bodies.
Likewise, a Google search for reports about a missing Sarah Bennett and Andrew Miller also displayed no related results except the 2025 Facebook posts. Google searches for references to the woman's alleged sister, Emily Bennett, or her supposed quote — "They were just looking for quiet" — on the Denver Post website also returned no relevant results.
The top picture within the set of images shared alongside the story was the thumbnail of a YouTube video, titled, "I Found A Secret Mojave Desert Cave And Couldn't Believe What Was Inside!" The YouTube channel Aquachigger posted the video on June 25, 2025, and its title referenced ancient pictographs on the cave walls. While the channel did not share the exact location of the cave, the part of Utah described in the Facebook posts was not in the Mojave Desert.
The bottom pair of images was originally the thumbnail of a YouTube video that shared a similar fabricated story. The oldest version of the video Snopes could find was a June 29, 2025, video (archived), titled, "Two Tourists Vanished in Utah Desert in 2011 — in 2019 Bodies Found Seated in Abandoned Mine..." by the channel UNKNOWN Files.
The video, which was viewed hundreds of thousands of times, told a story about a Sarah Bennett and Andrew Miller from Colorado who went missing while in Utah in 2011. According to the video, the couple was discovered in an abandoned uranium mine in 2019, just like the version of the story shared on Facebook — except in this version the couple fell into the mine from above, broke their legs and were then trapped by the mine's owner.
The images in the thumbnail appeared to be generated using artificial intelligence (AI) software. Snopes could not find older versions of the pictures of the couple alive or as skeletons. Additionally, the picture of the living couple had some inconsistencies common in AI-generated images. For example, the woman's hair melts into the scenery behind her, and it appears she has an extra finger on her hand.
The YouTube channel that appeared to have first posted a video about the story, UNKNOWN Files (archived), frequently posts videos about stories in which tourists apparently go missing in the wilderness and were discovered dead years later, all of which used the same style of AI-generated thumbnail. This style of video appeared to be its own genre of fabricated content. Examples of other (archived) videos (archived) in the same style and with thousands of views popped up in July 2025, and other channels (archived) appeared to specialize in similar fictional stories.