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Lost in the Wilderness--Where Do They All Go?

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DB Roy
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Lost in the Wilderness--Where Do They All Go?

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This is an essay based on the writings of the Missing 411 series. There are now 8 books in this series and one DVD as of this writing. I have seen the DVD and read several of the books. The eight books are: Missing 411: Law, Missing 411: Off the Grid, Missing 411: The Devil in the Details, Missing 411: Hunters, Missing 411: A Sobering Coincidence, Missing 411: North America, Missing 411: Western U.S. and Missing 411: Eastern U.S.. These books are written by David Paulides. Paulides is 20-year veteran of law enforcement and had done some investigative work.

I should say that I am not comfortable discussing these books because they run counter to my scientific outlook. I have noticed that some people online will not accept any explanations but the ordinary, mundane variety no matter how unusual the circumstances. There is a part of me that sides with that. That part of me feels foolish accepting what Paulides merely hints at. But when the facts are seen, the conventional explanation doesn’t really seem to apply without stretching some of the facts until they are no longer facts. When that happens, a new explanation must be found. As Sherlock Holmes, the great fictional detective, so sagely observed, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

While doing some unrelated investigative work, Paulides claims two forest rangers came to him—in civilian clothes—and had an issue they wanted to discuss with him. That issue was the sheer numbers of people who go missing in national and state parks and forests. But these disappearances weren't explainable and downright weird. These rangers were afraid to make a fuss within the National Forest Service because that organization does not want to talk of these disappearances--not good for business. When Paulides requested lists of the missing from various parks, he was told by park officials that no such lists are kept. If he wanted one compiled for that park it would cost $34,000 and if he wanted a nationwide list it would cost $1.4 million! His background as a law enforcement officer, enabled him to compile incomplete lists from various law enforcement sources and he has filled several books with them. He says these lists are by no means complete and, in many cases, he was refused certain files with no reasons being given.

The books are not sensationalized. If anything, they are rather dry reading--chapters are divided into states and the names of victim after victim with a concise synopsis consisting of a short bio and how that person vanished. Now, when a single person vanishes mysteriously, it's not such a big deal. Virtually anything can happen to someone trekking through the deep wilderness--they fall off a rock face or they get lost and can't find their way back or they trip and fall into a river and are carried away or an animal attacks them. Sometimes traces are recovered. Sometimes nothing is ever found. A person who dies in a mishap while hiking through a forest will likely be vanish before a week elapses due to predation. There is a window of only a few days before the body starts to decompose and various animals, birds, worms and bacteria start to make short work of the corpse, e.g. pulling it apart and carrying the parts away with different directions, etc. If not found quickly, there won't be much to find.

But in the cases Paulides covers, these types of common mishaps don't seem to apply and the person's disappearance is inexplicable. Moreover, there are patterns that occur in these cases. Not only are there patterns but these occurrences happen in clusters—patterns within patterns. Yosemite National Park is the world leader in these types of disappearances. Crater Lake in Oregon is another. The Great Lakes are virtually outlined by such vanishings. Strangely, though, the center of the US from Montana to Texas are basically free of this type of incident despite having wilderness areas that rival anything out West. Many of the victims vanish for a while and then return but usually have no memory of what happened. Most of the victims are children 12 and under and then seniors after that. Victims that are recovered are often unconscious or semi-conscious and dazed. Many are recovered dead but frequently with no known cause of death. Many bodies are recovered in lake beds, creek beds, boulder fields or floating in a pond or swamp. Even survivors are often found by the water. Bodies are often recovered at areas that had already been searched often several times and should have easily been found. Bodies found in water are often determined not to have been in the water nearly as long as the person was missing. Where were they prior to this?

Some examples—these are from Paulides’s books and also from the YouTube clips of Rusty West who also meticulously documents forest disappearances:
Jack Hodges, 7, vanished from Seligman, Arizona on December 29, 1956 early in the morning along with his dog. Jack and the dog were visiting a ranch along with Jack's parents. A very large search party was organized but before it was deployed, the dog returned. Jack did not. Ground searchers, searchers in Jeeps, two planes and a helicopter from the local Air Force base and bloodhounds from a state prison nearby searched for the boy through the day and night. The nights got down to 14 degrees and the boy might not survive long in that although he was apparently warmly dressed. The area is just scrub brush and bushes, no big trees. He should have been easily spotted from the air. Bloodhounds could find no scent--a very common trait in these types of vanishings. After two days, the boy was found at least 20 miles from where he vanished. They estimated he must have walked at least 50 miles mostly in circles. This is another common trait--children walking amazing distances through harsh terrain and plunging temperatures in a very short time. At the hospital, they found nothing wrong with him and he was released after one night under observation. According to experience, a child 7-9 years of age will be found no more than 7 miles from where he vanished but usually much closer than that but we are to believe this boy walked 50 miles!

Dr. Maurice "Doc" Dametz, 84, vanished from Devil's Head, Pike National Forest in Colorado on April 29, 1981 at 3:45 PM. Doc was a rock and mineral collector as was his friend, David McSherry. Both men drove out to Devil's Head to the Virgin Bath Picnic Area some 16 miles south of Highway 67. Both men had been there together over 50 times and knew the area well. They arrived about 10:00 AM and split up. Doc had two favorite spots he liked to dig at and David had his favorite spots. At a quarter of four, David called out for Doc but there was no answer. He went to both areas where Doc liked to dig but did not find him at either spot. David went back to the car and honked but Doc did not answer or appear. Worried, David flagged down three men cruising around on their motorcycles and they immediately went out to find Doc. The area had steep hills covered with tall pines and it was tough going. They were unable to find him. Later, the police commenced to search but found no trace and then bloodhounds were brought in but they could find no scent. If a wild animal had taken Doc there would be blood and the dogs would be able to track that. They found no trace. Here's the thing: Doc was on medication for blood pressure and had bad knees and was unable to walk far. How could he get away from everybody and why would he want to? If someone abducted Doc for some strange reason, they would have to carry him and how would they do that with the steep inclines with a profusion of trees? Paulides himself went to the area and couldn't believe an old man with bad knees and blood pressure problems could have left there without being found or seen by the HUNDREDS of searchers who looked for him. Not a trace of Doc Dametz has ever been found.

People vanishing with a dog is very common in these cases—too much to be coincidental. In virtually every case, the dog returns in a few days but the human does not. The dog shows no interest or ability in trying to lead others to the victim’s whereabouts. In one particularly weird case, two men pitched a camp and one of the men had brought his dog. Without warning, the dog suddenly bolted into the woods and his owner immediately bolted after him saying nothing to his friend. He ran into the woods which inclined down to a river or stream. He was not wearing shoes. He has not been seen since despite a heavy search. The dog came out of the woods three days later. A veterinarian could find nothing wrong with the dog.
In a great many cases, the weather turns bad just as the search party is about to get underway and stays bad for several days. In fact, this detail is very common. Disappearances happen in the afternoon mostly. The victims, if recovered, are frequently undressed even in winter and the shoes are especially of interest as so many victims are either recovered without their shoes or they vanish but leave the shoes behind. Those found without shoes often walk impossible distances through rugged terrain but their feet show no signs of wear.

One very strange factor is berries. Victims often vanish while picking berries or are found walking about dazed or semi-conscious carrying berries in their hands. In one case, an elderly woman vanished but was found later picking and eating berries but, upon being rescued, collapsed and died. The berry of choice is the huckleberry although other berries as well as cherries are also involved. In one case, a young girl vanished and then was recovered. She stated a wolf- or dog-man gave her berries to eat. We will come back to this detail later.

Victims vanish very quickly without any outcry. Even in groups of people, someone will vanish—usually the first person in line walks ahead of everyone else and be lost to sight around a bend in the trail or over a hill but when the rest of the party clears the bend or hill a few seconds later, the person has vanished never to be found again. This also even more frequently happens to those at the end of the line. A person following close behind the group is suddenly gone without warning and never seen again.

For example, 18-year-old Donald Siskar vanished from Grass Mountain in Washington at 3:30 PM on July 10, 1973 as part of the Neighborhood Youth Corps (NYC) clearing debris from the mountain. The party of nine was delivered to the mountain earlier by bus and now they were ending work for the day and heading down a trail to the bus parked at the trailhead. Donald was in the middle of the group as they walked down the trail but the group encountered a switchback i.e. a zig-zag in the trail. The party split up with one group pushing through the woods as a shortcut while the other party, Donald included, stayed on the trail. The party that took the shortcut then ended up in front of the other group when they reached the trail meaning Donald was now at the back of the party. They were aboard the bus and heading home when the driver noticed that Donald was missing. They turned around and went back to the trailhead. The young men returned to the switchback calling Donald’s name and searching the area but found nothing. One of them flagged down a U.S. Forestry Service truck going up the mountain and explained the situation to the driver and asked if he could ride with him to the summit to see if Donald had gone back up. However, they found no sign of Donald there. Three rangers then searched the area around the switchback and attempted to locate Donald’s footprints to see where he might have gone. They were unsuccessful. The King County sheriff’s office then took over the search at 6:30 PM and they too attempted to track Donald’s boot prints but couldn’t find them. For seven days, a very large group of ground searchers, rangers, the National Guard, scouts, a 4x4 club, a ski patrol unit, helicopters, German shepherds and bloodhounds scoured the mountain but found nothing. Donald’s father stated that he thought his son got lost and died somewhere on the mountain which has quite a rough terrain. That he could have gotten lost while walking with a group is not plausible. To this day, no trace of Donald Siskar has been found.

Paulides also notices that tracking dogs cannot pick up a scent of these vanished people. Even though these dogs are extremely well-trained and extremely good at following scents and live for the hunt, they smell the victim’s clothing and then sometimes just sit down or will track about 50 feet and then simply stop, look around and just sit down. They show either a fear of going further or appear disinterested in continuing the hunt. Nothing can induce the dogs to resume. There are those who say that sometimes the dogs are not trained well or their human handlers are not trained at interpreting the dogs’ behaviors. While this is certainly going to be the case a good deal of the time (although I have no data to offer), is it going to be the case every single time?

Regarding what recovered children remember of their ordeals shows no pattern whatsoever. In fact, they are bewilderingly diverse. Most of them remember nothing but others seem to have vivid but bizarre recollections such as the dog-man with the berries. One of the most famous cases of this type concerns a boy who went missing along a certain trail. He stated that he was taken into a cave filled with robots which didn’t or couldn’t move. He met a woman that resembled his grandmother to a very striking degree. In fact, he thought she was his grandmother at first except some kind of light or sparks would occasionally exit from her head. The boy decided that she too was a robot. She was very kind to him until one point she placed some sticky tape on the floor and told him that he must defecate on it for her. He told he couldn’t because he didn’t have to go. The woman insisted that the boy “poo” on the tape but he insisted he didn’t have to go. The woman became quite angry and demanded that he poo on the tape. The boy apparently tried to leave but then found himself back on the trail he had vanished from.

In another case, a six-year-old girl named Haley Zega vanished from Newton County, Arkansas on April 29, 2001 at about 11:30 AM in the Buffalo Wilderness Area. Police, park service, the National Guard, 200 ground searchers, at least two different fire departments, people on horseback and helicopters equipped with Forward Looking Infra-Red Radar (FLIR), scoured the surrounding area without luck. Some fifty-one hours later, Haley was discovered by two guys on mules who had joined the search. She seemed to them to be groggy, was seated by a brook and had her feet in the water. Her arms, legs and face were scratched but she was otherwise alright. When asked where she had been, she didn’t know and said she spent her first night sleeping on a bluff in the open but the helicopters which overflew the area with FLIR activated did not pick her up. She said she also slept in a cave. She stated that she was not alone but a four-year-old black-haired, brown-eyed girl named Alicia would always appear whenever she needed help. They would sing together and tell jokes. At one point, Alicia helped Haley down a steep hill by getting in front of her so she wouldn’t fall. Alicia went away when rescuers arrived. While this could be a child’s way of coping with a scary situation by creating an imaginary friend, there was another girl who vanished in this same area 23 years before. She turned up dead. Her middle name was Alana.
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Re: Lost in the Wilderness--Where Do They All Go?

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There are those who insist that every single disappearance can be explained. I’ve heard everything from wild hillbilly families living isolated in the woods to serial killers to predatory animals to accidents to crazy nutballs to killer spouses to suicides and people who wanted to disappear. And make no mistake—MOST cases of vanishings ARE the result of accidents, predatory animals, foul play and such. In some cases, serial killers actually have gone into the woods to claim victims and crazy people sometimes go into the woods to do crazy things. I do know of cases where people took off into the deep wilderness not wanting to be found. I know of many cases where people apparently got lost and couldn’t find their way back to civilization and were found dead or have never been found. Perhaps 99% of cases can be explained this way but there are some that simply cannot.

For example:

Dr. Katherine Wong, a pediatrician, disappeared during a ski trip in Bear Valley, California on February 19, 1999 at 2:00 PM. She and her husband, John, went to the Bear Valley Ski Resort. They decided at one point to go down a mountain on separate runs. John went first and then waited for his wife. She never came down. Ski patrol was notified but they found nothing. SAR teams, tracking dogs and helicopters continued the search for two days until bad weather forced them to cease operations. SAR teams searched into June for the missing woman. Finally, they found some scattered bone fragments, her driver’s license and shreds of clothing belonging to Dr. Wong. So, an animal got her? Here is what is so strange: Her remains were found half a mile south from where she disappeared. They speculated that a bear may have gotten her (in February??). Although parts of the resort were covered in as much as 20 feet of snow, there were no tracks of a bear or any other animal nor any blood leading off the mountain. How did her body end up where it was found? What happened to Dr. Wong on that mountain?

There are some who will say that her husband murdered her at the location where her body was found and then pretended that she vanished somewhere else. But cops, of course, always focus their attention on the last person to see the victim alive or to see the victim before his or her disappearance. That person will be checked out thoroughly and there was simply no indication that John Wong had in any way caused his wife’s death. Certainly, with a story as bizarre the one Wong told, the police would be naturally skeptical of it and would investigate his wife’s disappearance very thoroughly. Yet, he was never charged with anything.

To say that every vanishing can be explained is not mathematically sustainable. Statistical analysis would allow us to predict a trend from observing a great number of instances but isolated instances are not predictable a great deal of the time. We would know that most who vanish did so because they got lost, for example. Others resulted from an accident while other were taken by predatory animals. But there will always be those cases that don’t follow these norms. If every case was explainable, there would be no need for statistical analysis because there would be no variation. But there is always variation. Like a bell curve, most cases will fall into that steep middle fill. However, there will always be those cases out towards the shallow edges of the curve that simply don’t conform. These are the cases we are studying here and trying to determine why they don’t follow the norm.

Take the case of Joe Carter, 32, who disappeared on Mount St. Helens on May 21, 1950 at 3:00 PM. Joe and 20 other skiers had the idea to climb part way up the mountain above the timberline and then ski down. Joe would set up his camera at a point down the slope to photograph the men as they went by. Carter skied part way down the slope looking for a good spot and found one known in an area known as “Dog’s Head.” The witnesses say Carter made a slight left turn and passed out of their view. Later, when people went to Dog’s Head to talk to Joe and see how he was doing, he was gone. Only an empty film box was found. Joe and his equipment were nowhere to be seen. Skiers went all the way to the bottom of the mountain but Joe was not there. Perhaps he met a mishap or made a miscalculation and had fallen somewhere. Carter, however, was an excellent skier and belonged to the National Ski Patrol, the qualifications for which are very difficult to obtain. One must be a top-notch skier and pass rigid testing.

Weirdly, Carter’s ski tracks could be seen heading down the mountain. The trouble is that he seemed to be taking huge chances and must have been moving at great speed, jumping over crevasses that a lesser skier would have fallen into and that an experienced skier like Carter would never normally attempt unless forced to. At Ape Canyon, they saw to their consternation that Carter went straight down the canyon wall without even stopping! At the bottom of the canyon, they found no trace of Joe Carter. It looked to searchers that Carter seemed to be skiing from someone or something he thought was pursuing him even though this party left no tracks if this was the case. Perhaps Carter was pursuing someone or something but what and why? Joe Carter is still missing to this day—close to 70 years—and so are his skis, poles and camera.

That is another detail about the vanishings: a great many people have vanished while taking photographs. In some cases, the cameras are found and the film developed but show nothing unusual. In one case, the film of one missing woman indicated that she was running while shooting photographs although the pictures were too blurry to make out any detail. Was she running after something while trying to get a picture or was she trying to photograph something pursuing her? Has to be one or the other and either possibility is as good as the other.

We have two sides that interpret the facts of these stories to reach entirely different conclusions. One side are the rationalists who insist there is no mystery. If one looks hard enough for the answer, it will always be an accident, predation by large animals or foul play. The other side are those who are disposed towards cryptids or aliens. A cryptid is an unknown and often very bizarre animal or hybrid animal often sharing physical traits with humans—dog-men, cat-men, bear-men, lizard-men, man-size mantises and Sasquatch are examples of oft-reported cryptids.

A good example is the case of three-year-old Jaryd Atadero who disappeared in October of 1999. This case has been very hotly contested between these two camps. Jaryd’s sister even wrote about her brother’s disappearance on Reddit where she flatly rejected Missing 411 saying she does not believe that Bigfoot or aliens had anything to do with her brother’s fate (even though Missing 411 does not take any definite position). The incident occurred at Podure Canyon just north of Rocky Mountain National Park. The Ataderos ran a lodge or small hotel out that way. Members of the church the Ataderos belonged to were staying at the lodge. A group of 10 adults and some children were going to take a hike that was listed as moderately strenuous and went up about 1,000 feet. Jaryd’s father, Allyn, did not want to go as he was tired and wanted to nap instead. Jaryd, however, wanted to go. Since Allyn knew and trusted the party, he allowed Jaryd to tag along with them.

A few hours later, some of the party returned to the lodge and woke Allyn. They told him Jaryd was fine, they just couldn’t find him. Allyn immediately went out to the area to search for his son. The original party had split into two camps which had the children running back and forth between the two—a highly irresponsible thing for adults to do. During this time, Jaryd vanished. Two fisherman later claimed that Jaryd came out of the woods while they were fishing and asked them if the woods had any bears. They said yes and he vanished back into the woods. That was the last time he was seen. A great deal has been made of the actions of these fisherman. Who, people asked, would have let that young boy just run off into the forest by himself like that? But some sources say that a group of adults was nearby on the trail and the two men assumed he was with them and this sounds plausible. Others have gone so far, without a shred of evidence, as to accuse these two men of raping and murdering the boy! When I confronted one such individual about making horrible, baseless accusations about two people this person had never met, I received the response, “It’s better than saying aliens did it!” I had, in fact, made no such claim. When I reminded this person that since these men were the last to see Jaryd, they would naturally receive more attention from law enforcement who still saw no reason to detain them, this individual then informed me that certain cops and park rangers were likely in on it!

A large search with dogs and helicopters ensued to find Jaryd. A helicopter even crashed during the search which continued for five days at which point snow fell obliterating tracks and the search was called off and the boy assumed to be dead. The police told Allyn that Jaryd was probably taken by a cougar. Allyn wanted to tranquilize any cougar in the area, fit it with a tracking device and see if they could track it to its den in hopes of finding his son or at least the remains. The search for a big cat proved fruitless (in the Missing 411 dvd, Allyn stated that he no longer believes a cougar took his son). Some three and a half years later, in June of 2003, some hikers, about 500 feet above where Jaryd disappeared, discovered a child’s clothing on a cliff ledge and notified the authorities. When the clothing was shown to Allyn Atadero, he identified it as his son’s.

Ten days later, Jaryd’s cranial cap and a single tooth were discovered. Some time after that, they found Jaryd’s sneakers. But things were wrong: the sneakers were pristine. How could they have been up there exposed to the elements for almost four years and yet look virtually new? Also, Jaryd could not tie his shoes and habitually walked around with his shoes untied often kicking them off by accident and yet a cougar managed to drag the boy up 500 feet of very rough terrain without scuffing the shoes or losing either of them. The boy’s pants were pecked by birds which used the material for nest-building purposes but they were not ripped the way one would expect with a cougar. In fact, the pants were found inside out as though they had been pulled off—something no known animal would do. The tooth was found to be contaminated with mixed DNA and Allyn questions whether the tooth was even his son’s. The speculation is that the tooth was contaminated with the DNA of another victim indicating the presence of a serial killer. The question then is if the tooth does not belong to Jaryd, then whose is it? The tooth was also found sitting on a bed of pine needles completely in the open as though someone wanted it to be found. The clothing was examined for evidence of the killer and non-human hairs were found but a cougar was ruled out. The strange thing is, nobody ever concluded what animal the hairs belonged to or, if they did, they never released it to the public.

The area where Jaryd’s remains and clothing were found is very difficult to reach and requires well developed skills in climbing to reach it. It is a long climb. The idea that a serial killer was storing his trophies up there seems unlikely. In fact, it is downright absurd. How would a killer carry a body up there all that way and why bother when there much more convenient ways to store trophies? This is animal behavior not human. The only animal capable of climbing such a perilous path to such a height while dragging a body would be a cougar and yet the culprit is not a cougar. Whatever it was, it seems to exhibit traits of both animal and human. This causes people to entertain thoughts of Bigfoot and other cryptids which I don’t like to consider because it seems dumb but am forced to. What was it?

So, what are we getting at here? Either these deaths and disappearances are normal or they are not. If they are, how do we explain them? Certainly, some could be victims of some unforeseen but completely explainable phenomena. How comforting is this though? It means the forests and parks of the nation are so dangerous that not only should we never walk them alone, we should not be at the front or rear of the pack. We should be tied to together and never get out of eyeshot with one another lest a bear, cougar, bobcat, wolf, eagle or other animal nab one of us so fast no one has any idea of where we went. We could suddenly fall off a precipice or into a river or sink into quicksand so quickly that no one notices we’re gone right away. And, certainly, this has happened. But how often?

We’ll look at one famous case, that of 14-year-old Stacy Arras who disappeared from Yosemite on July 25, 1981. According to one source I discussed this case with, Arras was “very obviously” abducted by a sexual deviant. Let’s review the facts surrounding this case: Stacy was part of a party of nine who were riding horseback. They arrived after some hours at the Sunrise High Sierra Camp where there were nine cabins that could accommodate up to 35 or so people. I do not know if there were other parties in any of the cabins. They were not far from the Sunrise Lakes and Tenaya Lake lay beyond that. Stacy washed and changed clothes and wanted to walk around a bit and take pictures and stretch her muscles after the long horse ride. Her father declined to join her. She grabbed her camera and headed out toward a member of her party, a 71-year-old man, who was seated on a boulder about 100 feet from the cabins. She told him she was going to go photograph a body of water. Whether she meant a flooded portion of Long Meadow (visible from the camp), Tenaya Lake or out to one of Sunrise Lakes—probably Sunrise Lake #3—is not clear. Sunrise Lake #3 was about a mile and half away while Tenaya Lake was about three miles and neither was visible from the camp so she very likely intended to go to Long Meadow.

The elderly man wanted to accompany Stacy at first but decided not to. He felt fatigued and just wanted to rest for a while. Stacy walked on without him and he watched her until she disappeared behind a distant line of trees and was lost to sight. After some time, although I don’t know how long, Stacy did not return and the man got worried. He stated later that he encountered a group of hikers coming back from the general direction that Stacy had went but they told him they had seen no one. He went back to camp and told the rest of the party that he feared for Stacy because she should have been back. They immediately went out in search of her but after a couple of hours they called for assistance. For the next 10 days, park rangers, emergency mountain services, horseback riders—up to 150 people in all—and blood hounds searched in a five square mile area around the camp. Three helicopters joined in the search and racked up 40 hours in the air. After 10 days, the funding ran out and the search ended except for volunteers who carried on. The only thing ever found of Stacy’s was the lens cap of her camera located just inside the tree line where she disappeared from view of the camp. Nearly four decades later, not a single further bit of evidence nor any clues have surfaced concerning the fate or whereabouts of Stacy Arras.

While foul play cannot be ruled out, what are the chances of a sexual deviant abducting this girl? First, where did he or they take her? The Arras party occupied that last part of the Sunrise High Sierra Camp. Beyond that, it is all wilderness (I verified this using Google Earth). No cabins, no roads, no little shops or stores, no out-of-the-way greasy spoon cafes, no gas stations, no lodges, no vehicles, not even power lines. Pure wilderness. The blood hounds should have been able to track her if she had been abducted but the dogs picked up no scent whatsoever. They were completely useless in the search effort. While dogs have been known to miss persons who were later found within a few hundred feet from areas the dogs had searched, this area was straightforward—no deep canyons or cliffs or crevasses, no heavy forests, no inclement weather. If she had gone into any of the lakes, her body would have become bloated with gas and floated to the surface well within the 10-day search window. If the hiking party that exited the area after Stacy had entered it had had anything to do with her disappearance, again, what did they do with the body? The dogs would have keyed in on a decomposing body easily. If she was carried out of the area, how? And to where? Why couldn’t the dogs track it? Plus, it is very difficult to carry a body through miles of wilderness at a 10,000-foot elevation. The chances of Stacy Arras being abducted by a pervert is very low.

The idea that a predatory animal had taken her is even more improbable as this would have left blood and torn clothing. Moreover, the idea that a predatory animal would have dragged the body more than perhaps 200 feet much less a mile or more is too much to believe and, again, blood hounds would have easily tracked that. There would be some trace of the victim. There are, at most, 500 bears in Yosemite. These are black bears spread over 750,000 acres and they simply aren’t going to be found in the Sunrise Lakes region because there is little up there for them to eat. As for grizzlies, forget it. There are no grizzlies in California. In fact, there has never been a single known bear-related fatality in the history of Yosemite National Park. As for cougars, they are so rare in Yosemite that no one actually knows how many there are. They are so shy that they are very rarely seen by human beings and very rarely attack humans. I cannot find a single cougar-related fatality in Yosemite in the park’s history. The idea that a cougar was lying in wait for Stacy Arras is highly unlikely. Ah, but what about a wolf? There are very few, if any, wolves in Yosemite. The last known wolf-kill in Yosemite was 1924 and this wolf was thought to be the last. Any wolf reports in Yosemite are very likely the result of mistaken identification. In fact, Yellowstone National Park has far more bears and wolves than Yosemite but not anywhere close to the number of these types mysterious deaths and disappearances, pretty much zero. The chance that Stacy Arras was taken by a predatory animal is virtually nonexistent.

So what happened to her? The answer I got about an “obvious” sexual predator was posited on the following: It makes more sense than saying aliens got her. That, by itself, doesn’t make an “obvious” case of foul play. The truth is, her disappearance cannot be explained. To quote Sherlock Holmes again, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Since animals, sexual predators, accidents and also running away can be eliminated in this case, just what are we left with here?
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Re: Lost in the Wilderness--Where Do They All Go?

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Some feel aliens in UFOs are abducting people for experimental purposes and either keeping some of them while releasing others—alive or dead. Both sides often ridicule the other. It’s hard not to ridicule both sides. But to not entertain the merits and faults of either side is a cop-out. As I stated earlier, I feel uncomfortable taking up with the cryptid and UFO camps. After all, we have no scientific proof of cryptids or UFOs and this group is often vehemently anti-science. They have a problem with natural skepticism and refuse to employ Occam’s Razor and so are constantly raising unprovable and embarrassing speculation that actually turns ordinary people against them and yet they plunge onward in this vein heedless of the damage they do to their own cause. An example is the speculating of blatantly ridiculous claims that these bizarre creatures, should they exist, come from other dimensions or are “inter-dimensional travelers.” When I read that kind of thing, I cringe. And yet…and yet…how do we account for these cases?

So while dog-men or cat-men or Bigfoot seem ridiculous speculation, we can’t eliminate it. The selection process for victims seems to be one of opportunity. Race, for example, seems to play no factor. While white males are the primary victims, white males are also far more numerous and also tend to be much more enthusiastic about hunting, camping and hiking than minorities or women and so we would expect the majority of victims to be white and male. For some reason, Paulides found that most of them have German surnames. But when black victims vanish or are found dead, their disappearances are often as mysterious and eerie as those of white victims.

A case in point would be Dr. Teleka Patrick, 30, who vanished in December of 2014 from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her car was later discovered in a ditch off I-94 in rural Indiana 115 miles away. Nobody knows why she was out there or where she was going. Dogs were employed to track her and they tracked east to a wooded area but then stopped. When police searched her car, they found nothing to indicate foul play but she had left her purse and belongings behind—not something someone would normally do if they decided to leave the car behind indicating a confused mental state or being in a great hurry. On April 6, 2015, the body of Teleka Patrick was found not far from where she vanished—floating in Lake Charles. Her death was determined to be accidental drowning. But how did she end up in the water in the first place? Dr. Patrick’s friends and colleagues say she was not suicidal, did not drink nor do drugs but they noted she had undergone a weird personality change just shortly before her disappearance. They said she was nervous, suspicious and told people that “something was after her.” It would be interesting to know if her body had been in the lake for four months or much less than that as often happens in these cases but I have no information on that.

Dr. Patrick’s death, strictly speaking, deviates from the others I’ve mentioned because she was not camping or hiking but, for some strange reason, abandoned her car and fled into a thick woodland she was totally unfamiliar with. But her death does tie into another Paulides book I have mentioned—Missing 411: A Sobering Coincidence—even though I actually learned of Dr. Patrick through Rusty West. After writing several books on park and forest disappearances, Paulides was doing an interview on Coast-to-Coast Radio and the interviewer asked Paulides if he had covered any urban disappearances and Paulides said no. The interviewer told him that sooner or later, these vanishings were going to take him into the city. Paulides realized the man was right. When he researched deaths and vanishings in urban areas looking for the same eerie patterns he used in the wilderness cases, he found one and wrote ASC as a result. The pattern is that young people—usually white male college students—often go out drinking with some friends but either end up getting separated from the others or state that they don’t feel well and say they are going home to lay down and then they vanish for a time but their corpses eventually turn up in bodies of water—lakes, canals, rivers, bays and the like. Although they usually didn’t appear to be drunk when they vanished, they often show an excessively high blood alcohol level (BAL) upon recovery of the body or are at least legally drunk (.08 percent).

An example is Keith Noble, 19, who disappeared in Athens, Ohio on April 25, 1998 at 1:10 AM. Noble was a student at Ohio University on the Hocking River. Keith left his dorm at about 10:20 PM to attend a party which he then left to attend another party. He left the second party to attend a third one. He left that party at about 1:10 AM according to friends who saw him leaving. He was never seen alive again. He was reported missing at 5:00 PM. A massive search including the use of dogs was initiated but Noble had vanished. On May 6 at 2:45 PM, two students spotted a body in the Hocking River. Police fished out the body and identified it as that of Keith Noble. He was wearing only pants. His wallet was in one of the pockets and in remarkably good shape for supposedly being in the water for 11 days. The coroner attributed the death to accidental drowning due to intoxication. His BAL was determined to be .24 percent. The question is how he ended up in the water. His dorm was nowhere close to the river and the way the river is enclosed, it would take effort to fall in and so could not be accidental but Noble had no psychological issues that anyone knew of.

Alan Sun-Long Lin, 22, went missing from Newport Beach, California on February 5, 2011 at 1:00 AM. Alan was known to possess an extraordinarily high intellect as a student at the University of California at Irvine majoring in mechanical engineering. He was drinking at Rudy’s Pub on the night of February 5th and left about 1:00 AM. A closed-circuit television caught Alan walking off by himself. That would be the last time he was seen alive. I don’t know exactly when he was reported missing but the search effort was quite large and extensive but he was not found until February 13th when Lin’s body was spotted floating in the Rhine Channel about 200 yards from Rudy’s. His body was determined to have been in the water for about a week. There were no visible signs of trauma but his BAL was determined to be between .16 and .19 percent. As usual, nobody knows how he managed to wind up in the water.
One of the strangest cases that Paulides catalogued for ASC was that of Steven R. Kubacki, 23, who vanished from Holland, Michigan on February 19, 1978. Steven was a student at Hope College. He told his roommates that he was going cross-country skiing along the Lake Michigan coastline to Saugatuck. When he didn’t return, they called the police. State police and the Coast Guard used helicopters and tracking dogs to try to locate the missing student. His skis, poles and backpack were found and his footprints were tracked about 200 yards onto Lake Michigan and then stopped. For fourteen months, no one saw nor heard from Kubacki and police assumed that he had fallen through the ice and drowned although why he removed his equipment to venture out onto the frozen lake was not determined. His family mourned and Hope College issued his degree to him in absentia.

Then on May 5, 1979, Kubacki suddenly turned up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He woke up in a meadow on Saturday night in Pittsfield wearing someone else’s clothing. A backpack near him was full of maps. “I would guess I was hitchhiking,” Kubacki recalled. Kubacki walked into town and looked at a newspaper. He was shocked to find that 14 months had passed and that he was 700 miles away from where he vanished. He may have been heading to his father’s house which was about 40 miles from Pittsfield but he doesn’t know for sure since he had made no plans to visit him there. He has no recollection of anything that happened during his 14-month absence. Where he slept, bathed, ate meals for 14 months and whose clothes he was wearing are all still mysteries.

It bears mentioning that Holland always has been and still is a hotbed of UFO sightings. Again, UFO speculation is something I don’t like to get into. I am not a believer in beings from another planet coming here to abduct people nor do I care for inter-dimensional beings or time-travelers. But in the Kubacki case, we have to explain where he went after he walked onto Lake Michigan (or even WHY he walked onto it), where he spent the next 14 months and how he stayed alive. I recall in the early 1990s the story of James Hyssong, 19, of Toledo which ran in the Detroit Free Press. He was a pilot studying to be an instructor and was taking courses in Jackson, Michigan. He would fly himself in his own plane to and from his lessons. One day, ground observers in Jackson watched Hyssong approach the airfield and then passed over it. Surprised, they tried to hail him on radio to inform him that he had missed his target. He did not answer. They watched Hyssong on radar as he veered sharply to the west and made a beeline for Lake Michigan. They watched as he passed out of their range of their radar somewhere over the lake. No airfields in Illinois or Wisconsin picked him up. The NTSB issued a statement that it was not believed that Hyssong crashed into the lake. Where on earth, then, did he go? His plane would have passed directly over Holland which was experiencing a rash of UFO sightings at the time. To the best of my knowledge, Hyssong has not been seen since. He actually fits Paulides’s profile somewhat—young, white, male, student, behaving strangely just before he disappears, last seen near a body of water. The only difference is that he was never found at least as far as I know.

So what are we to make if it all? Surely bigfoot isn’t abducting people in the cities. The UFO scenario fits better. But then, again, there are a great many reports of bigfoot appearing near or even dropping from UFOs which certainly calls into question that this beast, if real, is an ape. What is it then?

Another case that bears mentioning is that of 20-year-old Kenji Ohmi who disappeared from Madison, Wisconsin on the 28th of January 2006. Kenji was a transfer student from Kyoto, Japan and enrolled at the Wisconsin English as a Second Language Institute (WESLI) and lived in an apartment at 202 North Hamilton Street. He was described as a fine student who was punctual, attentive and well-liked. He was not a problem student. He wrote to his parents back in Japan that he was happy at his new school and was doing well. At about 6:20 AM, Kenji Ohmi was spotted on CCTV leaving his apartment in the cold January rain. He wore a black jacket, blue jeans and sneakers. No one who viewed the footage had any idea where he was going or why. When he didn’t return after a day, his roommates reported his absence to the police. For the next six months, no one reported seeing or hearing anything about the fate of Kenji Ohmi. Kenji’s parents even came over from Japan to look for their son. Not until June 19th, would Kenji’s disappearance be solved when a 46-year-old man out wind surfboarding on Lake Mendota reported seeing a body floating face down about a quarter of a mile offshore. It was Kenji Ohmi. The cause of death was apparent drowning but the coroner’s report wasn’t conclusive. His body was about four blocks from his apartment. He was wearing a dark shirt, shorts, socks and sneakers. His black coat and blue jeans were nowhere to be found. Why did he remove them and what did he do with them? Odd indeed that his pants were gone but his shoes were still on. It would be nearly impossible to remove his pants without first removing his shoes. Why would he remove his coat and pants in the winter and then put his shoes back on? Where did he go after leaving his apartment? What was he intent on doing? How did he then end up in the lake? Police did not believe he committed suicide. What then did happen to Kenji Ohmi during his six-month absence?
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Re: Lost in the Wilderness--Where Do They All Go?

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In 1967, Australian author, Joan Lindsay, saw the publication of her fourth novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock. The plot centered around several girls and a female teacher from a girl’s school in 1900 who went to Australia’s famous Hanging Rock for a picnic and vanished. One girl, Edith, witnesses the incident and runs away screaming but afterwards cannot remember the incident. When word gets around about the mysterious disappearances, families begin withdrawing their girls from the school while teachers and other staff begin quitting. The book was made into a movie in 1975 directed by Peter Weir. The story is entirely fictional and Lindsay claimed she wrote it from a series of dreams she had about a picnic taking place at the turn of the century at Hanging Rock. The parallels between what Lindsay imagines and what has apparently really happened in the accounts of the Missing 411 series are striking.

Lindsay’s book deals not with old ways of the aboriginal people clashing with the modern European way but rather the reverse. In the standard story, it is always the aboriginal peoples who cannot cope with the overwhelming technology of the Western peoples. The aboriginals also die of Western diseases they had no natural protection from as well as alcohol and suicide. In this case, however, it is the Western way that is unable to cope or accept the reality that something in the New World is far more powerful than they and never was and never could be understood much less conquered. Hanging Rock, located in Victoria at the southernmost tip of Australia, has a tragic history dating from the 19th century when the three aboriginal tribes that had occupied it for seemingly thousands of years, were driven from it by white settlers from England.

In Kathleen Steele’s excellent essay, Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush: Gothic Landscapes in Bush Studies and Picnic at Hanging Rock (http://files.hangingrock.webnode.com/20 ... anging.pdf), we can draw the same parallels between the Indian and the white man. In Lindsay’s story, the white settlers “are steeped in tradition. They display an obsession with time: constantly watching clocks, observing daily rituals…” In the United States, attempts to coerce the Indian into accepting the white man’s way were hampered by entirely different concepts of time. To an Indian, to be told by a white man to “be here tomorrow morning at eight AM sharp!” had no meaning. The Indian did not and could not divide up the day into neat, little imaginary slices. A day was a day. Consequently, he might arrive at noon or 5 pm and did not consider this to be even the slightest bit late. This actually ties into the inability of whites to accept the mystery presented in Paulides’s books. Everything must have an explanation, everything must fit into the neat, little space in which we have already consigned it. If it does not fit, we will pummel it into submission and dismember it like a corpse stuffed into a trunk otherwise too small to otherwise contain it.

Steele writes:

To cite one quasi-scientific conjecture given more consideration than it warrants: the “funny sort of cloud” of a “nasty red colour” that Edith notices when the girls disappear, is attributed to the possible changes in gravitational effects to the curvature of space-time capable of creating a pull strong enough to “alter the wavelength of light.” The obsessive urge to accept Lindsay’s landscape as a manifestation of reality arises from a desire to dismantle the mysteries of literary, gothic landscapes through empirical analysis.

As if finding some kind of “rational” explanation will bring us any closer to understanding the mystery or enable us to deny that there is, in fact, any mystery at all. If we retreat into our world of punctuality and technology and rationality, any mystery can be dismissed, pushed aside and denied simply because it doesn’t fit into that world. The mystery is not that poor Stacy Arras or Doc Dametz have vanished. That part is easy to brush aside—they are simply lost. That is the only mystery—they are lost. What really upsets the Westerner is the apparent final silence of the disappearance. The individual is gone—just gone. If they come back, they have no memory of the ordeal, nothing to tell us. Only silence. Like death itself, we cannot learn anything about it unless it is our turn to go and then we will not be able to return to tell others. The mystery will always remain.

It’s as though time had stopped for those who vanished and returned. They remembered nothing because there was nothing to remember. Nothing happened because perhaps there was no time in which anything could happen. Like a video program on pause. If anything did happen, even so, we have no proof of what it was and who or what was behind it. The European American is a self-centered cultural creature. She carries with her the idea that there was no time in America before she came here and holds to this view in spite of knowing this is impossible. History begins with the white man before that was just a blurry myth-time. That time, once set forward, cannot be stopped. A permanent, continuous record remains once the white man shows up. Therefore, no one can vanish without a trace and no one can come back from vanishing and remember nothing of it. Such discontinuities in the white man’s historical fabric spoil the image. No one can walk an impossible distance is an impossibly short time, especially a child. Time must be obeyed and observed. It cannot be violated so easily as these vanishings suggest.

Steele writes that “in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the threat, while emanating from the landscape, remains unspecified and unconsummated.” We notice the same thing in the Missing 411 cases. There is definitely something in the landscape at work but we are totally clueless as to what it is. When the Indian warned the early white settlers not to settle in a certain area because bad spirits are there, the whites ignored them and settled and built there only to eventually find out ages later that there is indeed something funny about the area, something bad but unspecified. But how can this be admitted in a culture that demands a rational explanation that can be empirically tested and confirmed? Paulides’s book, Devil in the Details, deals with disappearances in areas containing “Devil” or “Demon” or “Satan” or other such appellations. How did these places get these names? Apparently, whoever named the areas, which often appear to be pristine and lovely rather than menacing, did so for a reason, that they were acknowledging that something is not quite about that particular area. Why? The Indian in me stirs when I read these accounts.

The European-American is, when all is said and done, an alien, an interloper, a thief who came to steal a land he knew nothing about and inherited all its dark secrets without understanding anything about them and refusing to believe in them even in the face of a silent, terrible mystery that defied and obliterates all the culture, tradition and knowledge developed in Europe and transported to America to help the European navigate the land and which seemed at first so successful even though the results of it were terribly tragic. And yet…the ultimate reality and mystery was never wiped out nor swept aside. It was always here. As though once the noise and dust of the conquest from Europe had finally settled and all was quiet and still, the land—parceled and handed out, plowed and farmed, littered with trash, poisoned with toxic waste and covered over with concrete and asphalt and seemingly subjugated and tamed—is still a mystery.

As Steele writes: “European linear time no longer contains the girls who climbed the Rock: they pass into myth, becoming both historical and timeless.” The same is now true of those who have vanished so mysteriously in our woodlands. Without a clue as to who is behind it, without even a psychopathic taunt to reassure us that we are at least dealing with something human after all. Instead the names of the vanished and the dead and the recovered amnesiacs will be whispered and written about just as I have done here into the unforeseeable future to reach the status of legend. There is now the coming of a new myth for America governed by the same forces that carved out the old myth. And we still have no idea, and indeed may never know, what that force is. Or even if there is a force.

Legends of Bigfoot are rampant in American Indian lore. To the Indian, the existence of this creature, for the most part, is not under dispute—he exists. Different tribes have their own beliefs and opinions on what Bigfoot is. Indians differ from many of the white Sasquatch-hunters (a.k.a. Bigfooters) on the nature of the creature. Whereas many whites that believe in the existence of Bigfoot regard him as an ape probably an offshoot of the same branch of primates that human race also belongs to, most Indians regard Bigfoot as a human, a different type of man and even a different type of Indian.
Another mythical being that Indians believe in and for which there are also legends all over the world are the Little People a.k.a. elves, gremlins, gnomes, imps, trolls, leprechauns, fairies, etc. I once knew an old Indian lady who had told me when I was a boy about the time she was about eight-years-old and alone in a forest and saw the Little People in a stream riding by her as they stood or sat on leaves, using them as rafts. She referred to this incident so often I have to believe that she really believed it happened. I heard another tale of a man who, as a boy, was out picking and eating berries when he came upon a Sasquatch creature. They seemed to surprise one another. The creature was apparently also picking and eating berries. The boy backed away in fright and the creature lunged forward and grabbed the boy’s arm roughly. This caused such pain that the boy screamed loudly and the Sasquatch dropped him and ran off through the woods as people came running. According to another Indian woman I knew, the Sasquatch is always hungry, ravenously hungry. This ties into the Wendigo—a cannibalistic creature of Indian lore. Some tribes express the belief that Bigfoot and the elf are the same creature! Some include the Wendigo also. Like the particle-wave duality of quantum physics, this creature can appear as a hairy giant or a small humanoid. Yes, many tribal beliefs also regard these creatures as—dare I say it? Interdimensional. They are able to pass from different “planes” of existence at will and can also assume invisibility. They are also said to possess telepathy and the power of illusion, e.g. making someone see or hear something that isn’t there to lure them somewhere or away from somewhere. In European lore, the elves can be helpful or malicious and some even cause human deaths. Strangely, some are even serial killers that constantly kill humans for the apparent fun of it and this makes me think of the urban deaths that Paulides has catalogued.

The great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, wrote a poem published in 1889 that eerily strikes a familiar chime in these records of mysterious disappearances. That poem is, of course, The Stolen Child. Even the title draws our attention to the disappearances of people who seem to have been stolen from this world. Note also the references to berries and bodies of water, both of which figure very prominently in these disappearances:

The Stolen Child

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

Although Paulides has been careful about revealing his own thoughts on what is happening, he once stated that the opening paragraph of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” expresses his thoughts on the matter better than he ever could:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

I see in Paulides’s work the white man truly encountering the Indian’s world and learning it isn’t simply the superstitious ramblings of stupid savages. That perhaps there is something out there they haven’t yet discovered and that they will never conquer or defeat. Perhaps it is a power that whites find themselves at the mercy of and that they will inevitably find themselves unbelieving and yet in awe over. Something that will, in one swoop, blot out their Christianity for a real and terrible god that will show them that it is they were the stupid, unwitting, superstitious savages all along. Something that they may feel themselves obligated, as Algernon Blackwood wrote in his bizarre and strangely beautiful short story, The Willows, to fall to their knees and “worship...absolutely worship.”
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Re: Lost in the Wilderness--Where Do They All Go?

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... t-him-safe

So, do you believe a 3 yo disappears into the woods for two days in freezing temps (North Carolina is so cold right now that alligators are frozen in position in their pools) and says a bear kept him so warm and fed that all he asked for was water when they rescued him? Maybe?
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Re: Lost in the Wilderness--Where Do They All Go?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UsdtAOev1k
The strange story of Henry McCabe. It follows the pattern Paulides mapped out for urban vanishings: He went out with friends in Minnesota, apparently became intoxicated or was drugged (Paulides has found that some of the victims have GHB in their systems but who gave it to them and why?) and was dropped off at a gas station not far from his house but never made it home. His wife in California received a phone call from Henry sometime after 2 am full of weird screaming, moaning and growling and then a voice that says "Stop it" coming from Henry's phone. Henry vanished for two months and then his body was found in Rush Lake without a mark on him. In this clip, they try to make a rational explanation for how it could have happened saying McCabe was probably drugged but it doesn't pass muster. Suppose Henry was drugged, who drugged him and why?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XooQ22R1N8U
The case of Kayelyn Louder of Utah. At age 30, she began to exhibit weird behavior. She began calling 911 to report fights that were not occurring and robbers in her house that weren't there even with her roommate standing there with her insisting no one else was in the place. But she insisted that she could hear them talking. This was behavior no one had ever noticed in her before. On Sept 27, 2014, she is seen on surveillance footage walking around the parking lot of her condo with her dog with whom she appears to be having an animated conversation. Later, witnesses saw her in the lot crying. Footage then shows her running across the lot, leaving her dog and her entire life behind. On Dec 1, her body was found in a local river about 5 miles from where she was last seen. What is strange is that she drowned in a stream that she could have easily stood up in. It was so shallow that police don't believe she could have been carried in it for five miles. So she apparently went those five miles by foot and then somehow drowned in the river. Again, the Paulides pattern often has victims acting weird or disoriented just prior to disappearing even though they've never had any such behavioral problems before. Running from something or after something is very common. Often, the victims state that someone is after them--usually a large man or several men but no one else reports seeing them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsqATIHqAqg
The case of Lars Mittank, 28, who disappeared in Bulgaria in 2014. Without warning, he began acting very strangely saying 4 men were stalking him, ran away and has not been seen since. They might want to check all bodies of water within a 10-mile radius. They might just find him then.

If you take any of these types of cases individually, you can make a case that the person was bipolar--something often not known until adulthood--and freaked out and drowned accidentally. Seems reasonable. But when you look at ALL these types of cases, they are so weirdly similar and don't make any sense. Very, very strange.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geO7-E5xsEg
Here is a Rusty West clip vol 24 of 10 More Strangest National Park differences. Pay attention especially starting at 12:07, the case of Christopher Thompkins. It is a typical Paulides-type park disappearance and the second I've encountered where one of the victim's shoes in found hanging--tjhis one from a fence and the other in a tree. And this kind of thing goes on all the time. If you get anything from this clip, it's don't ever be at the end of the line.

Some weird, eerie shit.
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Re: Lost in the Wilderness--Where Do They All Go?

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I re-watched Picnic at Hanging Rock today as I hadn't seen it in quite a number of years. I was struck by one scene where these 4 girls go up the rock. At a point, three of them inexplicably remove their shoes and stockings. They continue to climb. Then all four lay down and go to sleep. When they awake, the three girls who are barefoot resume their climb while the 4th one wants to go back down. The other three act like they don't even hear her and continue walking through the trail in the rock. When she goes after them, they are gone and runs back down the rock screaming. The governess climbs up the path and she too disappears. A search is conducted but no trace of the girls, not even their shoes and stockings, are found. Some time later, one of the vanished girls is found unconscious. When she recovers, she has no memory of what happened but her classmates don't believe her.

Man, the parallels between this 1975 fiction movie and the actual disappearances covered in Missing 411 are shocking! Vanishing without shoes, person recovered in an area already thoroughly searched, person found unconscious and having no memory of what happened. Very weird.
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