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.”

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.