By the fall of 1986, the emergency crews fighting to contain the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant made it into the basement. They turned a corner into a steam corridor beneath failed reactor Number 4 and found not steam, but black lava that had oozed out of the core, eaten through meters of concrete, and settled on the floor. The largest and most famous formation in the corridor was a two-ton wrinkled mass that their radiation sensors firmly told them not to approach. With cameras pushed in from around a corner, the workers documented the dimly lit mass. This is the true story of the Elephant’s Foot.