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Oct. 16, 2013 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:09:51
Edition 128 - David Paulides

This time we speak with the author of “Missing 411″, David Paulides , who researches strangedisappearances in the US and Canada...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Thank you very much for the snowball down a mountainside of emails that I've had lately.
So many and so many new listeners.
It's always nice to see people who've been listening for years to the show.
But I really get a kick out of the emails that I get from both the US and the UK and other parts of the world, where you say, I have just discovered your show and I am now going back through the catalogue all the way to the beginning.
And I had one email very recently from somebody who's been sort of listening to them six at a time.
Thank you very much.
You've said some good things.
Please keep up your support to this show and tell your friends about it, too.
Thank you for your donations.
They've started to come in after I said recently that we really do need those donations.
We don't have bottomless pits of cash here, unfortunately.
And we discussed how big corporations, of course, should fund things for free on the net.
But us little guys who are having hard times like everybody else, we need a little bit of support.
So thank you for that.
www.theunexplained.tv is my website, and you can go there if you'd like to make a donation or if you want to make a comment about the show.
I get to see all of your emails, and that's the place to go.
The website designed and created by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who's been doing top work.
Martin is still working on our new version of the theme tune.
That is coming soon.
As soon as I get it, you're going to hear it.
Interesting times in this world of ours once again.
What else is happening in our world?
Well, here, depressingly enough, power prices have started to creep up again.
One company has just announced a rise, and by the time you hear this, I guess there'll be others.
Just in time for the winter, of course, where we tend to consume the most energy.
I have no idea where these companies think that we're getting the money from.
But I did make a prediction.
The Labour Party here, who are not in government in the UK, promised that they would peg or cap or control energy prices if they got in.
And I said, one thing is damn certain to happen.
You're going to see energy prices go up in the run-up to the next election, just in case the Labour Party wins it and they fulfill that promise.
And that's exactly what appears to be happening.
But the prices of everything seem to be really, since you started drawing my attention to it, I now look at food prices.
They just seem to be going through the roof.
And I think in some cases, too, the big supermarkets are lowering quality and quantity of food simply so they can keep their bottom lines going.
But that's a whole other debate for a whole other time.
A very exciting show that may be coming up soon.
We're working on this at the moment.
It looks like the deal is about to be done, but we could be getting Jesse Ventura on this show.
That I am massively looking forward to.
I'm a big admirer of his work on conspiracies and just the way the guy carries himself around, you know.
So we could be having Jesse Ventura here.
This time, I'm pleased to say that we have a guest that you've been asking for for about a year.
And I emailed a number of times.
Finally, we've been able to tie this one down.
David Paulidis is an author in the U.S. He has a police research background, so he's used to investigating things, and he has done some remarkable, detailed, incredible research on the many people who go missing in North America's wild places every year.
Some of those are in the oddest of circumstances.
Some of those cases are seemingly connected.
Some of the cases involving very young children.
Some of the cases involving people who are really used to being out in the great outdoors.
They have experience of it.
And yet they too go missing and they're either found or never found.
The bodies are discovered.
Or they might return or they're just simply never found.
And there are a lot of these cases every year.
I didn't realize this.
I know people go missing and I just thought that was part of life, but there could be more to this than meets the eye, as the Beatles once said in one of their famous movies.
So David Paul Diddis coming up on this show too, and I'm really excited about Jesse Ventura coming on here.
And we also plan to get into Comet ISON, which is due to light up the skies very soon.
So I'm going to be doing a special about that coming up here on The Unexplained.
So an awful lot of things in the pipeline and happening here.
Please keep your support coming.tv.
I love to hear from you.
All right.
Let's cross to the United States now to David Paul Midis.
It's been a long wait to get him on, and I am really pleased that we've now been able to tie this down.
David, thank you for coming on The Unexplained.
My pleasure, Howard.
I appreciate the invitation.
Hey, listen, this has taken some time to set up, but I'm really, really thrilled that we're able to do this because the story that we're about to get into and the network of tales that we're about to unfold here is truly amazing.
And the amount of hard work that you've done with this is quite remarkable.
So kudos to you for doing something like that.
One thing to get clear from the start, is it over here we would say David Paulidis.
I've heard some American stuff with you and they call you David Paulides.
Is that how you're known?
Either way works, but we say Politis.
Right.
Got you.
Okay.
Well, I can't tell you how many emails that I've had from listeners asking me to get you on.
Over the last year or so, there seem to be three people that my listeners have wanted me to get on.
You, Jesse Ventura, and Graham Hancock.
So I'm getting there.
I'm going to get Jesse Ventura.
Graham Hancock, we're working on still, and I've got you.
So I'm really pleased.
But you seem to have grabbed my listeners' attention.
Well, it's one of those topics, I think, that everyone can understand because we've all been to the woods before, we've all been hiking, and to think that something unusual is going on out there and there's validation for it even makes it more touchy.
And we have to explain to listeners in Europe who may not be quite aware of the American dimension that the outdoors, the great outdoors and being part of it, that's part of your heritage as Americans.
You know, you own this.
The wilds are yours.
The people who conquered the continent at the beginning, they blazed the trail and carved out the path.
And in this day and age, You're all kind of expected from childhood to make sure that you're part of that too.
Even people in big cities are taught about that.
And they have their all-terrain vehicles and their Winnebagos and all the rest of it.
And it's just part of life there in a way that that kind of thing is not here.
It is big.
We learned in school about the explorers moving across the continent, and they were the quote-unquote men of the world.
And they went into places where no one had went before.
And I think there's always that mystifying aspect of going places that are remote, that are unusual, and being able to see wildlife that most people in a car maybe couldn't see.
So, yeah, it is a pretty common practice for Americans to travel across North America and visit national parks.
But when you do that, with it comes a certain amount of risk, because you've got things out there that we don't have here in the U.K. You've got bears, for example, and pretty horrendous snakes that we don't have here, rattlers and that kind of stuff, depending on which part of the U.S. you've gone to.
There is risk there, and there is the chance that you may get killed or disappear.
That's just part of the territory, isn't it?
Yes, and I think that there's probably even a different type of risk since our books have come out that wasn't identified before.
And the snake part of it, I would say that I've been on the trails for thousands and thousands and thousands of hours.
I've never seen a deadly snake, but I've seen a lot of bears.
I was walking down a trail one time and on my way back about seven miles, right in the middle of my track was a mountain lion or cougar track that appeared to be tracking me as I was going out.
Now, I've never seen a mountain lion or a cougar in the wild either.
So these things are very rare.
Okay, is it true that if you encounter a bear, and part of me would like to and most of me probably wouldn't like to, that you've got to move very slowly and make a lot of noise?
I would say 95% of the time that bears are more afraid of you than you are of them.
And I'm talking about black bears.
There's another type of bear in the northern side of the continent called grizzly bears that can be very nasty and very dangerous.
And that's why most of us that go into those areas carry a big firearm with us.
Which I guess you would discharge and that would scare them off.
Oh, yes.
And in the ultimate, of course, you may have to deploy it in other ways.
All right.
Now, from what I hear about you and have read about you, you have a police background.
That's something we have in common because my dad was a policeman for 30 years.
And what I know about police officers and operatives is that they take meticulous...
meticulous, you're...
You're taught to observe things, but they take meticulous statements.
They have an eye and an ear for detail.
And I'm guessing that that is what brought you to all of this research that you've done.
I think that that part of the natural migration for me, I spent 20 years in that area, and I came out and went into technology and worked in an arena of technology where I used that investigative background to search out certain parts of different businesses on acquisitions and partnerships.
But since then, I don't know why this has come to me the way it has, but it did.
And I think it's been natural for myself and the guys that are working this with me to find out really what's going on.
So that brings me to the question then, and you partly answered it.
What is the thing that fired that starting flare for you to investigate the cases of people who disappeared?
There must have been one event or something or maybe just a connection of events that fired that off in your mind and made you want to do this.
Absolutely.
I was in a national park doing some research on a peripheral topic.
I'd already written a couple of books.
And when you go to a national park in the United States, the businesses inside the park, whether it's registration for a hike or staying in the park at a hotel or purchasing items inside, are run by concessionaires and they aren't national park employees.
So if you really want to get stories, really interesting stories, you go to the concessionaires that are people just like you and me.
And I'd gone to this one park and I'd talked to a series of concessionaires and I noticed that a couple of park employees were watching.
I left the park, went back to my hotel off the property, and I get one of those knocks on the doors, and there's two off-duty park rangers standing there, and they said, hey, Dave, we know who you are.
We know you've written some books, and we want to talk to you.
And they came in, and they laid out a story that was pretty phenomenal, and that is that they've worked at a series of parks during their careers.
They had seen people disappear, and they had seen an initial big push to find the people.
Lots of publicity, lots of effort.
After that seven to ten day cycle, it essentially stopped.
Everything stopped.
And the people went home, the relatives went away, the searchers went home, and that would be the last thing that they'd ever hear about that search.
And then when they attempted to figure out from their own agency what happened to these people or trying to find lists of people who were missing, they couldn't find it.
And in the United States, every, say, medium-sized municipal police department and every large police department online has a segment about missing people.
Most of them have a section that lists the names and has photos of people who are missing.
The National Park Service, one of the larger federal institutions that has a law enforcement agency attached to it, has nothing of the sort.
And they couldn't find any lists at their local parks that they worked at or at the national level.
And they thought that this was unusual based on the numbers of people that were disappearing, the lack of follow-up, the lack of attention, and the lack of any website note about missing people.
But is it that odd?
I know that certainly your book and everything about you indicates that that made you very curious.
But the fact of the matter is that America is a big country.
It is not just one nation.
It's a series of states that have their own law enforcement.
A lot of individuals involved in this thing, a lot of terrain and territory, and not a whole lot of money.
When you put those things together, then the fact that people don't coordinate logs of these disappearances is not very surprising, is it?
It's shocking.
So the National Park Service has 183 different institutions that they supervise.
At the end of every month, there's a monthly report that's put in from these locations into the National Park headquarters.
In the United States, there are several very large and politically powerful missing persons organizations.
And these people have tried to get rights for the victims of missing people, etc.
And the National Park Service, in their inability to account for the numbers of missing people, who they are, when they disappeared, where they are, are doing a disservice to the public and to the families and to the employees.
Here's why.
When we did what's called a Freedom of Information Act request against the Park Service for their numbers, they stated that they didn't keep track of missing people.
And what they determined was that they used the quote-unquote institutional knowledge of their employees to go back and account for missing people.
Meaning that if they found a body in a certain part of the park, they talked to the park employees and say, well, do you guys remember where someone went missing in this location?
And this is completely irresponsible.
In a modern country, in a modern democracy, that's almost like relying on folklore, isn't it?
Correct.
Plus, these Park Service employees, every seven to 10 years, they move, so there's a new influx, and there's a knowledge base that's wiped out.
And as I explained to people, this isn't rocket science to keep track of this information.
The only thing you need is one laptop and a clipboard in every office of these 183 institutions with a certain categorized list on the laptop and on the paper of name, date, location, case number, disposition.
At the end of every month, they have to send a report in anyhow, and somebody at headquarters on a small laptop is keeping track of all this information.
It's not a hard thing to do.
But if you go with it from the assumption, David, that these things are just kind of accidents of fate, people do die, go missing, whatever.
These things just happen, what would be the point for those officials to want to catalog them?
Isn't it a waste of their time?
Well, how would they ever know if there is, say, a danger area in a park if they don't keep track of where people disappear?
That's almost negligent, isn't it, not to do that?
Or say, how would they ever know if I don't believe this is happening, some people do, if there is a serial killer inside the park service and he's moving or she's moving park to park doing these killings?
That must have happened at some point in America's history, I would have thought.
You know, if it has, we don't know about it as far as a park employee.
The more I think about it and the more you talk to me about it, it is astonishing that some kind of detail is not collated.
Okay, we don't necessarily need to know every single detail about every case because I'm sure some of them are quite routine.
But if there was nobody collating the specifics, you know, the initial specifics of those cases, then there's something amiss.
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
So, there you are.
You see a gap in the market, a need for this kind of research.
What do you do?
So, and we must remember that this need was identified by their own employees who came to us.
It wasn't something that was pulled out of the sky.
And when we filed these Freedom of Information Act requests, and they state that, well, they don't have this information, there's an exemption in the law called an author's exemption, a published author.
And you can have a government agency give you that information at no cost.
I had two published books.
I claimed an author's exemption, and an attorney from the Park Service called me, which is very strange.
And they stated that we don't have the information, but that if you want the information on missing people from Yosemite National Park, we can do that historical search, and that will cost you $34,000.
What?
Because we aren't going to abide by your author's exemption because the book isn't in enough libraries.
And we have searched high and low, and there is no such requirement that you have to be in a certain number of libraries in the United States in order to get that exemption.
Hey, David, I was going to say they've had to search high and low for that get out, didn't they?
It doesn't exist, the best we can tell.
So they came up with this idea almost as if somebody invented it.
Why would somebody do that?
Why would they say, first of all, it's going to cost you $34,000, Witcher?
Who's got that kind of cash?
And then they say, well, the reason for this is that you're not in enough libraries, and that rule doesn't even exist.
That sounds like somebody's trying to obstruct.
Well, the craziness even gets worse, because then the next thing out of his mouth is that, well, if you want it for the entire 183 parks, that'll cost you $1.4 million.
Okay, so clearly they didn't want you to do this research because it was either just too much hard work or they felt you might find something, maybe?
It sure seems highly unusual.
Yeah, highly unusual.
So there you are, you get in that situation.
They say it's going to cost you a million dollars if you want to do this nationwide.
So, you know, please go away.
What do you do?
So we had a meeting, and there's a group of former law enforcement retired people that I work with, and we kicked this around, and this really got us upset because this is negligence.
Like I said before, there isn't, and we came from large police departments, there isn't one around that would ever handle this information like this.
It's sensitive information, it's a hot topic, and to completely disregard its importance is unbelievable.
And so we decided, okay, we'll just do the laborous work, and we'll do it the hard way.
We'll actually go out to some of these locations and we'll go into the libraries, we'll search the archives, and we'll figure out what is here that they don't want us to know because there is something here.
And most of these cases would have been documented to some extent by local papers, so there's a good starting point.
Absolutely.
And then the other side of that coin is sometimes in these national parks, they bring in sheriff's departments.
A sheriff Is a county, it's a wide area that encompasses a lot of these rural areas, and the sheriff in that county is sometimes the person that comes in and assists in the search, and they also write reports about the incident.
And so sometimes we got those reports that clarified what happened.
And if we knew a name of a person and a date they disappeared, then we could file another Freedom of Information Act against the Park Service for the reports on that specific person.
So if you spoon feed them the information, then they have to comply and they have to give you that report.
You've got to play them at their own game.
It's exactly right.
Wow.
So not the easiest task in the world then.
I mean, you're talking about a life's work, really, aren't you?
You're talking about a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of patience.
And that's you and how many other people?
Three.
Three of you.
That's very few people to do a hell of a lot of work, a million dollars worth of work, among three people.
And we're the first to admit that there's no way that we are even probably scratching the surface on the numbers here.
We're trying to do yeoman's work on a penny budget, but we are slowly getting there.
Just by the words of you, Howard, and others, slowly the pressure starts to mount, and I think the information will start to be disseminated sooner or later.
Before we start picking away into the specifics of this, I just want to try and talk around the motivation that the authorities might have for not wanting you to get this information out there.
And the only thing I can think of, other than very sinister things, which I'm sure can't be true, but who knows, is that it's bad for business.
If you're trying to attract people to the national parks, if you're trying to get foreign tourists in there, if you're trying to get Americans to enjoy their heritage, what is theirs, if you start telling people people disappear and bad things happen there, they're not going to go.
And there is, I think, really the core to what we're talking about.
So in the National Park Service, they have a National Park Police unit, and it's huge.
And within that, they have what's called special agents.
So if an incident happens at a park, say a crime, then the police officers write a report, and then the detectives are called special agents.
They do the follow-up.
Through a completely fluky and inordinate piece of luck, I was at a national park with a friend, and we ran into a retired special agent from the Park Service.
And it's a long story how I actually ran into him and met him, but we ended up talking for a long time.
And I explained what I was doing, and I asked him for some explanation about how the Park Service can justify what they're doing.
And this man was super smart and knew exactly what I was talking about.
And he said, Dave, it's a complete lack of integrity.
And that's a quote from him.
And he said that they want you to believe that the National Park Service is this pure, safe, nice place and that Smokey the Bear walks around hugging kids and there's no problems.
And he says, in the reality of it, he says there's crime here.
There's deadly crime at times.
And they don't want you to know anything is really going on here and they don't want anything publicized.
Truth of it is, I listen to a lot of American radio.
I always have, but now the internet makes it so much easier.
Those syndicated smoky bear commercials to try and make sure that there are no forest fires started by people and if you see smoke, you report it.
That seems to be the only kind of publicity these parks get.
True.
And to your point that you made earlier about the dollars and cents behind this issue, there's a park called Great Smoky Mountain National Park in Tennessee, and it's a big park, and it's a gorgeous place.
I've been there many times.
There was a statistic that came out that the Park Service draws $750 million to that local economy every year by being open and attracting visitors.
So if you look at that number alone and why publicity about the park needs to be positive, I think that could be indicative about one reason why DA don't want this stuff publicized.
Well, that's the only reason that makes any kind of logical sense.
It's not a justifiable reason.
It's not a defensible one, but that is the only one that I can think of, and that's clearly the one that you thought of, too, and that guy who spoke to you and said what he said about integrity.
There are a number of conclusions in your researches that you started coming up with pretty quickly.
And before we start talking about specific cases and unpicking some of those, I'd like to talk about this.
The things that appear in your work are clusters of disappearances, similar kinds of disappearances in similar places, clusters of very similar cases.
And many of these people who disappear are people who you wouldn't expect to disappear.
They're people who are used to being out there.
Those things struck me as being very, very odd, and they must have hit you, too.
It is.
It's surprising when you dig into, say, a certain national park.
And right off the top, let's just talk about Crater Lake in southern Oregon.
One of the most beautiful parks.
It's a pristine lake at an alpine level.
It has really no water other than rainwater going in and no natural outlet.
I think the lake is 2,000 feet deep or deeper.
It's very, very deep.
It's got this deep blue look to it, surrounded in almost this volcano kind of atmosphere.
It has a history going back almost 150 years with people disappearing.
In the last 30 years, we found that five different boys under the age of 14 have disappeared in or around that lake under highly unusual conditions.
And I know the nature of who we are as people is we go to that place and say, well, it's got to be a person, maybe a serial killer, a kidnapper, or something like that.
But then when you read and you get into the minutia of the data on the cases, you realize that that's an impossibility based on where these kids disappeared, how they disappeared.
It can't be a person.
It can't be a human abduction because of the impossibility of the location and the topography Of the area would indicate that that wouldn't work.
And if your research is any guide, there are a disturbing number of children who disappear, right?
They're either their bodies are found or they're just never discovered again.
They just go.
It is a real concern, isn't it?
It's a huge concern.
And I think if the people understood how quickly your child can disappear under and in pristine conditions, in places that you thought to be completely safe and gorgeous, and your guard gets down and you think your child is right behind you on the trail and you turn around and they're not there.
And I mean right behind 5, 10, 15 feet.
And we're going to discuss at least one of those cases that I've got down here to talk with you about.
But that's a fact.
You know, the first thing the tabloid newspapers would say in the UK, if a kid goes missing in those circumstances, they would first of all question the parents, what kind of eye are they keeping on those kids?
But we've got to say that in cases that you're documenting here, as you rightly say, sometimes the kids are really, really close.
And there would be no reason for any decent, rational person to suspect anything bad might happen.
No, and usually in these areas where these people have disappeared, there's usually other people within, say, a quarter of a mile or a half a mile.
And if it is a human abduction, then how far can you really carry somebody on a trail while they're fighting and screaming and yelling?
And other people on the trail are going to see this.
There's going to be witnesses.
You're going to be identified.
It doesn't work.
And when you realize the numbers of kids that have disappeared under those conditions, in various parts of North America, you start to realize, wow, this isn't a parent issue watching their kids.
When you look at it, it's really a consistent element of the disappearances we've identified.
And there are details that are similar in some of these cases.
I mean, for example, it may sound like a trivial detail, but it certainly isn't.
The fact is that if bodies are found, they're found without shoes, aren't they?
How come people are found, and this doesn't just go for the kids, this goes for some of the adults, they're found without footwear.
And they're found without footwear in areas where you wouldn't want to go without footwear.
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly.
But that is from your book and from your research, that's a pattern.
That's something that appears to keep happening.
And that's unusual in and of itself.
But then you add another element to it is that when these people go missing, hundreds, sometimes thousands of searchers go into that area and they're bringing in canines, etc., to search for that person and that scent.
I would say 90% of the time, they never find the footwear that these people lost, which doesn't make sense because you've got tracking dogs looking for the scent.
The scent would be in the shoe.
You have people searching foot by foot on the ground sometimes for these people or kids, and you're not finding these items.
So where did they go?
And in your book, is it missing 411 or missing 411?
Whichever you'd like to call it.
Okay, but in your book, I was struck by the number of cases where the searches are pretty similar, where you have maybe helicopters involved, they bring in perhaps an Indian tracker, somebody like that.
They get local volunteers and hikers, people who know the area involved, and of course all the resources of the police and the state, federal officials, whoever might be involved in that.
Everybody deployed on this thing.
And yet, as you rightly say, things that you would expect to find, you don't.
It is bizarre, isn't it?
So let's start with the canines that are searching.
As someone in the police side of things that worked with canines and they searched for us and they worked with us, these dogs live for the search and they love to search.
And it's like their life to finally get out there and do it.
And many times these dogs are taken to the trail where the person was last seen.
They're given the scent.
And a lot of times they'll lay down.
They'll walk in a circle and lay down.
They're uninterested.
It's like something in their mind has said, uh-uh, we're not going there.
There's nothing here.
We're not searching.
Other times, the handler will force them out into the field.
They won't find anything.
So that's canines.
Second thing is what we have here in the States, and I know you have it there too, is helicopters with forward-looking infrared radar that's looking for a heat signature on the ground, which could be a bear, could be a mountain lion, but they're looking for people.
And a FLIR will cover an area and they'll do it in a grid pattern, and they will never find these people using FLIR.
So proven methods, canines, FLIR, nothing.
Then you do the ground search where you do a grid pattern with 100, 200, 500, 1,000 people, and you walk an area and everyone's 10 feet apart and you're looking for an actual body or you're looking for evidence.
People aren't found.
But in a most unusual part of this that we can figure out that is just strikingly strange is that at a point where the searchers are starting to back off, and in some instances they completely pull out and leave only family members or relatives or locals,
then on a trail that they've used a thousand times or in an area within a quarter of a mile from the search location, they'll go out and they'll find the body.
I was going to get to exactly that.
That's a theme in some of these cases that I've read in your book.
That they'll cover an area and then almost as if the victim of the crime or the disappearance or whatever it might be, we don't know, or some vital clue that they should have found before, it's almost as if it's been put there by something or someone.
That's almost as it appears, yes.
Other things which appear anomalous are clothing found in neat piles, no sign of the person but their clothing, sometimes clothing that they would absolutely depend on in an area where maybe the weather was not so good, but clothing found in neat piles, that doesn't stack up.
Really, really not.
Sorry.
That's okay.
The clothing part of it has been debated around, but I'll put the end to the debate, is many times the clothes of the victims is found within such a short distance of the point they were last seen that weather can have really little or no effect on that decision to take the clothing out.
A lot of people say, well, if people are extremely hypothermic, they start to strip their clothing off.
Well, yeah, but it was, say, 4 o'clock in the afternoon, the person disappeared, and during the search, they happened to find some of the clothing a quarter or half a mile away, indicating that if the person was moving at a normal pace, it was within a half an hour or an hour from the time they disappeared, they stripped their clothing.
So it wasn't hypothermic reaction that caused the clothing to come off.
It's very, very strange, the clothing angle.
And there's something else that one of the reviews of your book, and I think this was George Knapp's report about this TV reporter and guy well known on Coast to Coast AM radio in America.
George Knapp pointed out that some of these people who go missing, they appear to, even if they know they're lost, they appear to walk uphill.
Now, if you are missing and lost, if I was lost somewhere near where I live, there are hills not too far away from here.
I would instinctively try and head downhill.
I wouldn't head uphill, but some of these people who vanish head uphill, yeah?
And if you look at search and rescue guidelines, the vast, vast percentage of people that go missing do go downhill.
But in the books that I've written, we talk about small children, two to three years old, that disappear in high mountain elevations, say at 4,000 to 7,000 feet.
They disappear, and some of these kids are found 3,000 feet up a mountain, a couple of them, up two mountains.
One child disappeared at two years old, supposedly went over three or four barbed wire fences in two mountain ranges, and was found 12 miles away 19 hours later.
The distances that some of these kids have traveled is too unbelievable for any parent to digest.
That almost sounds like one of these paranormal stories that maybe they've been snatched by something and left there.
I heard Wickley Striber on radio last week talking about something very, very similar.
Do you believe there's any credence to be given to stories like that, that maybe it's like aliens or something paranormal actually grabbing these people and transporting them?
Well, as the father of two kids, I wholeheartedly don't believe that the kids could make that distance on their own.
There's just no way.
Well, 12 miles for a child.
I mean, my God, 12 miles for me would be a major thing.
But 12 miles away within a very short space of time, that just doesn't compute.
Correct.
All right.
I want to ask you about just one other thing on my list here, having been through this book, and it's a wonderful book, 472 pages of it.
Cover-ups of facts, sometimes not only are the authorities, the officials, not particularly efficient, maybe negligent, but actually in some cases, facts are actually covered up.
And that's a whole step further.
That's even worse.
Well, the one case that comes to my mind where there's something wrong and the government knows it and they'll never say it is that there's a case regarding a 14-year-old girl in Yosemite National Park named Stacey Arris.
And Stacey disappeared in the early 1980s.
She actually lived in a town right next to where I lived for years, and that's one reason I got onto it.
And she rode on horseback with her dad and six other people on a guided tour into the backcountry of Yosemite.
And they rode into a series of cabins that you stay in in the middle of the backcountry.
It's just absolutely gorgeous.
And she went in and she changed, and she came out of her cabin with her dad and told him that she was going to walk over 100 feet, 200 feet from the cabin and sit on a boulder and take pictures of the countryside.
And this 71-year-old man that was with them walked over there, and everyone watched him sit down on the boulder, and Stacy took pictures.
She told the man that she was going to walk down the hill to this lake not far away and take some pictures and be right back.
Everybody saw the older man just sit on the boulder.
Stacy left, walked down the hill.
Half an hour, hour goes by, people start to get nervous, and she didn't come back.
So they're into the backcountry.
They're not near where you and I would drive up, park our car, and sightsee.
They're way into the backcountry.
So eventually search and rescue is called and there's a massive, massive search.
And they searched for 10 days.
And the only thing they ever found is they found the lens cap of her camera on the trail right inside the perimeter of a big thick line of trees that were the perimeter of this lake.
And Stacy was never found.
I filed a Freedom of Information Act on this with the Park Service, names, dates.
We nailed exactly all the facts of the case that we could find.
And in fact, her uncle that was on the search heard what we were doing, called, and I spoke to him.
And he said, Dave, it was a massive search.
You know, nobody really knows what happened to her, blah, blah, blah.
I get a call from the Park Service from a special agent in Yosemite.
And the first thing he asked me is, why do you want this case?
And according to the law of the Freedom of Information Act with our government, a federal agency can't use why you want the case on a decision about why they're going to give you the case, and they can't ask you that question.
And as law enforcement guys, we know this stuff, and I'm trying to be polite to this agent.
I said, well, that's an inappropriate question, but we're using it because we're looking into disappearances in the park.
And he says, oh, okay.
And he says, well, you're never going to get this case.
Right.
Why would that be?
Well, I'm trying to understand that.
And I said, well, so is this a missing persons case?
Yes.
So I said, it's not a criminal investigation.
Correct.
And I said, are there any suspects?
No.
And I said, so correct me if I'm wrong.
Nobody's probably looked at this case in 20 years, correct?
And I said, so there's no suspects.
It's not a criminal case.
It's a missing person's case.
And no one's touched it in 20 years, but I'm never going to get it.
You're never going to get this one, he said.
That is a congressman, and there's an appeal process, and we lost on appeal, which was shocking.
At what level were you doing that?
Were you doing that at state level?
It would be a federal congressman attached to our local district in our state.
Okay.
That almost sounds like it's against the law.
You can't lose a case like that because you have an absolute justification.
It was, it's completely...
And they're the people, of course, you've got to feel for because not only are you asking the questions, but it's directly personal to them.
They're never going to know the truth either.
But the more important question that we kicked around for weeks, and we still talk about it, is why would they deny us access to that case?
Why do you think?
Why do you think?
Well, what is there or what could be in that case that they would never want us to see?
And what's your best guess on that, if you have one?
That's a hard question, isn't it?
It must be something monumental that would make huge press in a negative way for the National Park Service.
Could it be something to do with Bigfoot?
I don't even know if that's a Bigfoot sighting area.
I have no idea.
I can tell you that the Park Service made a great effort to find the girl, so I know that it's not a lack of effort on the searcher side.
It may be something that they found in the investigation that they don't want to let loose, but I know her mom and her dad have since died.
Her uncle's alive, and she has cousins alive.
I don't understand the secrecy.
What a tragedy for those people, Dave.
Terrible.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Let's get into some of the specific cases here, and we'll start with one.
I hesitate to say that this is a routine case from your research, but it's very similar to others.
But let's start here.
Guy in his 50s, a mountaineer called Eric Lewis.
Hugely experienced climber, climbing Mount Rainier in Washington state, left his colleagues behind, apparently unhooked himself from them, left behind all of his gear.
There was no sign of him after a four-day search.
And he was so experienced that those things don't stack up.
Somebody who's experienced at climbing would never unhook themselves and leave behind all their gear and supplies.
What happened there?
That is a great case.
Eric is from the Washington area.
He was 57 years old, phenomenal shape.
It happened on July 1st, 2010.
People described him as a climbing junkie.
He had climbed peaks in Nepal, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina.
He was in a location called the Gibraltar Legend, Mount Rainier.
And this is a mountain, it's a tough mountain to climb, but he had summited it 10 times.
He was probably more experienced on that mountain than anybody as far as pure knowledge.
He was with a group of super experienced hikers.
They were going up, and he's called on belay.
He had the rope attached to his carabiner.
Fog was starting to move in, and so the people up above didn't see him starting to move up, but they felt he was on belay.
They felt the rope go slack, and they pulled it up.
He wasn't on the end.
So they weren't sure what was going on, and they yelled down to him.
They didn't get an answer.
So they went back down the mountain, and they found his backpack and a shovel, which is, you wouldn't drop your backpack if you were a climber.
That's sort of your lifeline, at 13,600 feet.
Mountain's a little over 14,000.
And then they found a small snow cave that they didn't know if it was his or not, but the weather started to turn bad at about this point.
Again, a giant search, never found the man.
And one of the elements that you find in these cases is that either at the time the person disappears or immediately afterwards, there's a drastic change in the weather in a vast majority of these.
And a lot of people could say, well, yeah, that's why you're not finding the person.
But it's those unusual elements leading up to it that can't be explained.
Eric Lewis, being the experienced person he was, the rational guy he was, all of his actions are irrational.
And no suggestion that the man's mental state may have made him almost commit suicide here.
I don't want to suggest this, but it's something that people might say.
No, and that's an excellent question.
In fact, if in any of the reports that we get, there's a question about mental stability, suicide, we throw the case and we don't work it.
Also, if there's any possibility of a drowning in a case, we won't work it.
So those are some of the parameters we set down.
That's why Eric was, no, he was a man's man, super stable.
You would trust him with your life at the end of a rope.
It's completely, completely unexplainable.
All right, let's move to another case now.
I'll get through as many of these.
I carry picked some cases from the book.
Let's get through as many of them as we can.
The case of 53-year-old Margaret Kohler.
Now, here's somebody who knew, again, somebody who knew the area, like the back of her hand.
She liked to go out and hike with her dog.
She drove to a place called Cummins Creek in Oregon in February 2011.
Her car was found abandoned or parked up.
There was a five-day search.
Dog was found.
No sign of her.
So one of these things that you also find in these areas where people disappear are names that will strike you as strange.
Now, where Margaret disappeared is an area called Devil's Churn, C-H-U-R-N.
Devil's Peak, Devil's Den.
The name Devil comes up in a lot of these areas where these people disappear.
Now, Margaret knew this area like the back of her hand.
She went mushroom hunting in this area before many times.
She told friends that she was going to go walk her dog in this area.
Many of the cases that we have, people disappear with their dog.
And that's a hard one to understand because a lot of people feel a little safer with their dog.
But her dog returned and was found by searchers 2.2 miles from where she disappeared.
She didn't get lost.
That's a guarantee.
And why or how she went missing and where she went is a complete mystery to those Oregon searchers?
Here's another mystery, and this is a child case, but thankfully the child did not die here.
But it's quite a moving case one way or another.
It's a three-year-old boy that you named John Doe to protect the identities of those involved.
This happened in the Mount Shasta area, a very beautiful area of California, October 2010.
This boy disappeared from the site where his parents were camping on the banks, again, of a creek.
Creek, common factor with a lot of these things, it seems, at 6.30 p.m.
There was a search.
Parents found no sign.
Boy found five hours later and told his grandmother later that while he was missing, he saw her twin.
He said that this person was in a cave and he'd seen sparks come from the woman's head.
There was a ladder and a bright light where he was.
And he was apparently taken to the place where he was eventually found, which was under or by a bush.
And the thing about that is here's a boy of three.
He's not fantasizing because he kept on consistently telling the same story.
That struck me as remarkable.
It's the only story that we have like this.
And the boy was found on a trail that searchers were using under a bush next to that trail.
So again, found in a location that's been previously walked and searched many times.
I've actually been to this area probably 50 times.
Used to live in California, and this area, Mount Shasta, is absolutely phenomenally beautiful.
And in fact, there's a lot of movie stars that own big chunks of property right in this region where this boy disappeared because it is so gorgeous.
And it's a very spiritual area, too, isn't it?
A lot of spiritual-type people go there.
We used to call them hippies, but a lot of those people go there.
Yeah, it used to be hippies.
Now the property values are so high in that area.
It's a lot of wealthy people that moved in there and appreciate how gorgeous it is.
Yeah, that happens.
But Mount Shasta has a history of having strange stories attached to them.
I mean, one of the folklore stories is that there's a group of people called the Lemurians, L-E-M-U-R-I-A-N-S, that actually live inside the mountain.
And there's been supposed UFOs seen around the mountain.
A lot of strange stuff.
I mean, even a lot for any strange area for the number of things that have happened in that region.
Now, for this boy, some of the things that happened to him that were unusual is obviously a story about going down into a cave, a story about seeing a woman that looked just like his grandmother, the boy coming back out after five hours and being found next to a trail.
And a three-year-old kid making up this much data is pretty unusual.
And there was no sign that the child had been assaulted in any way.
Nothing.
Well, that's just a very, very strange story.
I want to work through as many of these as I can.
Another child, nine-year-old Roger Shadiga or Shadiga, this is back in the early 50s, so this is not a recent one, on holiday near Truckee with his parents.
There seem to be connections with other cases here, you say, in the book, but he went missing near a place called Adler Creek.
There's that word again, creek.
Search involving hundreds of people after more than a day and with the help of an Indian tracker guide.
He was found a thousand feet higher than where he'd last been seen.
That's quite a distance.
And he said that he'd been hiding during the period he'd vanished from the people.
He didn't say that he was hiding from the people who were searching for him or hiding from any specific person, but from the people.
Plural.
That struck me as being odd.
And you know, we have three or four of these stories like this where people that went missing saw what they described as people in the woods.
And most recently, there was one about a year ago where a woman went missing and said that there were people hiding behind bushes looking at her.
And when she tried to communicate with them, they wouldn't communicate with her and they wouldn't get close to her.
And that was the only description that was ever had.
Shattiger's case is up by, just north of Lake Tahoe in Nevada in California.
It's at about 6,000 or 7,000 feet in elevation.
For a boy like that to go even higher seems highly unusual.
And the point was that the boy wasn't found for 28 hours.
And that is very, very strange for that area.
There's a lot of big trees.
It's a beautiful region, but that boy should have been found quicker if he was in that general area.
Because viewers got to understand that one of the way the searchers work is they're yelling, they're screaming for people, hey, where are you?
Come on out, we're here to help you.
Things like that.
So if you're in the area and you hear it and you're lost, you're going to migrate towards those searchers.
Well, that is something that also struck me because those are the methods they use.
And in these remote areas, sound carries miles sometimes.
Sometimes there's echo and it goes across valleys.
Here's another case.
14-year-old Ted Nolman.
This is also back in the 50s in Idaho.
Seems to be very disturbing to me in that whatever happened to him happened very quickly.
Now, he and his father, they were hunters.
A lot of people go hunting, don't they, in the States.
He was found face down on a ridge four days later, only three quarters of a mile away from the place where he was camping with his dad.
And again, he was found without shoes.
An autopsy said he died of exposure, very close to the place where they were camping, and again without shoes.
So a few things about that case that don't add up.
So from somebody who spends a lot of time in the woods, this case hit us right in the face as far as peculiarity.
Because not only did he not have shoes on, but he also didn't have his rifle.
And when you're lost, one of the first things they teach you in hunting classes is that your rifle is your lifeline.
Because if you fire that a couple times, people can hear that for miles.
And if you shoot it three times, it's a sign that people know that there's a problem.
And we all know this.
And nobody ever heard any shots.
His shoes not being there is unreal.
And he was found a short distance from a location where a fisherman saw him and a short location from where his camp was at.
And after you look at thousands of cases, you start to see an underlying element amongst them.
And in this case, one exists as well.
And that is when Ted was found, he was found face down, meaning as though he was almost unconscious and laid down.
Well, that was the first thing that I thought.
Could he have had some kind of seizure of some kind that made him collapse like that?
But the autopsy didn't indicate that, did it?
No.
And when people die of exposure, it's almost a throw-up-your-hands kind of thing because they can't find much else to go by.
You didn't die of a seizure.
You didn't die from bronchitis or pneumonia.
Exposure is a common thing that they say in a lot of these cases, but they don't find other things to support it.
So it's a very unusual incident.
Here's another one, and this is much more recent 2011, isn't it?
The mountain disappearance of Dr. Michael and his university student daughter, Makana von Gautler, in Colorado.
They went hiking and climbing together.
She texted her boyfriend saying she and her dad were going to try a 14er.
A 14er in her terms was a 14,000-foot peak, Mount Missouri.
A few days later, a text from the boyfriend to her got no response, and that's when the alarm was raised.
Then an eight-day search on day 10 that they'd been missing.
So they'd obviously been missing a couple of days before the search began.
The weather had been good, but reports vary about how they died because they both died.
And the conclusion at the end of it all was that they fell.
Now, that would add up, apart from the fact that the injuries that they had both were to the head and neck, trauma to the head and neck, but not to any other part of the body.
If you fall, everything gets bashed.
Yeah?
This is the reason this case is in the book, and this is one of the reasons why our research is starting to include an area that we never did before, and that is falling deaths.
This is one of the strangest cases anyone has seen, even in law enforcement.
And the sheriff in the county was interviewed at length by several different news organizations trying to understand what happened to these people.
So in Colorado, there's a lot of hikers that climb 14ers.
We have 53 peaks in Colorado.
They're 14,000 feet or higher.
And it's almost a hobby of some to say, hey, you know, I've climbed 20 14ers.
Well, Michael von Gortler, 53 years old, he was an ER physician, superb shape, very safety-conscious guy.
He and his daughter liked to climb together.
And when they disappeared, two days after they disappeared, a huge search was mounted because these were predominant people from Colorado.
Eight days they find nothing.
And you've got to understand, Howard, that at these high elevations, there's nothing up there but rock.
There's nothing that can grow that high out here.
So after you get above timberline, and timberline in certain areas, you will find some shrubbery and such.
And there was some at about 12,000 feet on this one mountain.
And this is where they found the two bodies.
Now, again, head and neck trauma, correct, but no broken neck.
And they asked, the news organizations asked the sheriff and the searchers what happened and why they couldn't be found for eight days if they were right below the peak.
And they said they didn't know why.
Well, in fact, that's bizarre in itself, isn't it?
Because if there is so little vegetation at that height, which is common to most mountains, you don't get a lot of vegetation the higher up you go.
Anything that is there that is not vegetation is going to stand out to you.
Well, and these trails that go to these peaks on Mount Missouri, this isn't a super treacherous 14er to hike.
There's a pretty pronounced trail in the rocks that goes to the peak.
So this is like a difficult hike as far as altitude, but it's not a dangerous hike.
Meaning you're not using ropes and carabiners and pitons.
You're just walking.
So the people were not attached to each other.
The day that they summited, it was a gorgeous day.
There's no wind, there's no rain, there's no nothing.
So there's no reason for them to fall.
And also, if there was a fall, because they weren't tied together, they would not have necessarily fallen together.
But here they are found in identical circumstances.
Exactly.
Now, the coroner, and in the States, a coroner is a medical doctor that looks at the body and tries to determine a cause of death.
He had very unusual wording.
And I'll tell you what he said.
He said he couldn't say the hikers fell, but their injuries were not inconsistent with a fall.
Okay, well, that's a nice little bit of legal ease there.
That's saying, I'm not quite sure, but here's what I think.
Here's my best guess, really.
But I don't entirely know.
And so, again, the reason this is in here, two people fall off the top of a mountain, supposedly.
They determined that they summited and were coming back down.
Perfect weather.
They're not attached to each other.
They both come off the top of that mountain and are found eight days after a search starts, ten days after they disappeared.
So essentially, they're missing, and nobody can find them, even though they have Cobra helicopters and flare in the air.
They can't find them for eight days.
And they're found with head and neck trauma, and the coroner can't exactly say what happened.
And the sheriff doesn't understand what happened or why they fell.
And he also said he wasn't even sure where they fell.
That is just staggering.
All right, let's get to.
We've got two more cases to work through, and I don't want to do too many cases because I don't want to spoil the enjoyment of the book, you know, the experience of the book for people who are going to read it, and they should.
49-year-old Earl Funk, missing in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia 2008.
He had a cabin, and this is not the only case like this in your book, a cabin on the fringes of the park, and he wanted to go and harvest ginseng.
So he left in his ATV, to British listeners, that's all-terrain vehicle, and didn't return.
12-day search, bloodhounds, hikers.
They found the ATV where it was expected to be.
Then they searched within half a mile of the ATV and found a trail of items.
Here we go again, including a machete and a boot.
But these are not items that you'd have in your pocket if you were walking away.
And you say in the book that this indicates that he may have been carried away.
No footwear again.
Found dead of exposure at the edge of a cliff, lying down.
So as you say, and I quote from the book, the idea that he'd walk to the edge of a cliff, lie down, then die is, your word, absurd.
What about that?
So all of that is absolutely correct.
They couldn't figure out why he did what he did if he did it voluntarily because he knew that area like the back of his hand.
He had a cabin there for years.
That's why he was going to that specific area.
Now, what makes this case really unusual is approximately a month before that, at Great Smoky Mountain National Park in Tennessee, not a great distance from Shenandoah, a guy named Mike Heron, 51 years old, two years older than Earl, and a month earlier, was on his ATV just outside the perimeter of the park, and he was taking a drive to check on a person's house.
They found his ATV in this little tiny roadside turnout right near the park.
Mike was gone.
They never found him.
He's completely gone.
And these incidents happen a month apart, both on the perimeter of the park, both in areas that these guys had cabins or homes in.
It's completely unbelievable.
Now, one thing you would think is that maybe an animal did this, but in the case of Mr. Funk and this guy, 49 years of age, he knew the area, knew what he was doing.
The thing that struck me as oddest is this logical trail of items.
Items that you wouldn't necessarily carry, but a trail of items as if they'd been put...
Not as if they'd randomly been dropped there, but as if they'd been put there.
That's not the kind of thing that if there was an animal involved in this or the person had decided to do this to themselves, it doesn't stack up.
Well, if the person decided to do it for themselves, they'd have to be under the influence of some type of narcotic, and that was never found in Funk's body.
And the other part of it is that if he was going to be dropping things, there'd have to be some reason why he was, and there is no logical rationale for that.
And if you were lost in the middle of nowhere, you wouldn't, if you had a machete, which is very good for hacking your way through undergrowth, you wouldn't drop it.
For sure.
And again, the idea that he was lost is another absurd point because he'd probably been to this area a hundred times.
Now, your part about an animal attack, that's another criteria.
If any of these people had any evidence that they were attacked by an animal, that is excluded from this as well.
And his body was perfectly intact, no injuries.
Now, the shoe thing, though, doesn't that tie into animals?
I say this for a strange and ridiculous, probably, reason.
That we have foxes where I live.
And a few years ago, I lost my wallet just by my car.
But I lost, you know, credit cards and some cash and stuff like that.
And I thought I'd kind of dropped it or had it stolen or something.
And it was found a few days later.
Everything had been, the notes in the wallet had been chewed, and the wallet itself, only tiny pieces with teeth marks, still existed.
And I was told that the foxes love leather.
They'd eaten it.
Could that indicate that it's, assuming that most of these shoes were made of leather, not all of them, I'm sure, but most of them probably were, that it was some animal that liked to eat leather?
That would be possible if there were bite marks and shoe marks on the leather of the shoe, but in these cases, that's not the case.
And the issue is, is in the vast majority of these hiking cases, people that wear hiking boots, the boots have to be cinched on your foot real tight or you develop blisters.
Yep, how do you get those off so quickly and so readily?
Well, again, we're assuming it happened quickly and readily, but we don't know.
Gee.
All right.
I don't want to spoil your book by giving away too many of the stories.
Here's the last one I want to do, and I'm doing this for a reason, because you say yourself, this case, and it's not in America, it's up in Canada, is of a guy who really should by rights not have disappeared at all.
This is Daniel Trask, 28-year-old, disappeared in a remote area of Ontario.
Very well used to being out in the Canadian wilds.
It had been his life by the looks of it.
It's not clear how long he was missing for.
Items and his clothing were found.
And that was odd because it was ice cold up there.
It is, you know, in that part of Canada, certain times of year.
You have to have every bit of clothing, bit of protection that you can.
But no, the things that would have protected him and saved him had apparently been discarded.
Ski pants and coat, for example.
He would have needed those to survive.
They were found, and apparently he wasn't.
What's that all about?
So Daniel was somebody.
This is in an area where Native Canadians, Native Americans had a history in this region, and pictograss drawing on rocks right around the Temagami Lake area of Canada and where he was at.
And Daniel enjoyed going to this area in the wintertime.
This occurred November 3rd of 2011.
This area gets really cold.
So here you have to kind of put on your law enforcement hat and figure out what might have happened here.
And the only thing we could come up with that makes any kind of sense at all is that he was sleeping in his tent.
And he had his snowpants, boots, coat off.
He was in his sleeping Bag and something happened because they never have found Daniel.
There's not a lot of places to go.
There's no bears that are out in November.
They're hibernating.
And at this point, there's no evidence of any animal attack on the tent or in the sleeping bag.
He just completely vanished.
They found his coat.
They found his snowpants.
And they found a campsite.
In a strange sort of flicky way, they didn't find his day pack.
He knew this area super well, and this is one of those cases.
His dad is a fireman in Canada, and there was a huge effort to find him.
It's amazing that they were able to find the coat and the pants, and they found those quite a distance from the campsite.
But somebody at 28 years old, in phenomenal shape, knew the area like the back of his hand, doesn't make any sense.
An amazing book.
It's called Missing 411, and it's just part of your body of work, David Paulitis.
I'm really thrilled that we got this chance to talk.
And I think something that we have to say before we wrap this up is that, yes, these make great reading and they're great stories.
But as you read them, we all must have a thought for the people who are left behind, the people for whom there are dots that will never be joined together, facts that they may never know.
We have to have some feeling for those people while we're poring through these stories because behind each of these is a human tragedy, yeah?
Absolutely.
Okay, what would you like to happen now?
What sort of, presumably you're looking for some kind of national action on all of this.
What do you want to be done?
I think the National Park Service should open their books and allow the public in to see what is really happening here.
I know that they've done investigations.
I know that they understand a lot more than what they're saying.
And rather than us treading on ground that's probably already been investigated before, why don't they open up and tell the public what's happening?
And the only sorts of things that I can come up with, because I've been doing shows like this for a while, maybe there's a civilization of ancient inhabitants that we didn't really know about.
Perhaps there's a tribe somewhere.
Perhaps that's their work.
Maybe this is to do with extraterrestrials, aliens that people say exist.
The possibilities are pretty scary.
I can tell you that the way I walk in the woods, the way I travel now, has changed drastically since we started this work.
And that I can totally believe.
I think I'm going to take more care.
We're a very small country.
I think I'm going to take a bit more care myself after this.
Which brings me to a final question.
You've taken on a huge research project here, and I guess it's ongoing in the States and in Canada.
Have you ever thought about bringing this to Europe?
You know, in the last six months, we've started to look worldwide now, and I think it all depends on how much intellectual data we can gather from these areas online since we can't actually go there.
And in certain countries, a lot of this is accessible.
In certain countries, it isn't.
So I think at this point, we're probably open to the idea it's a worldwide phenomenon.
Well, I think if you come to the UK, you've got to start in the far north of our nation up in Scotland.
There are some very, very lonely places there that get a lot of snow through a lot of the year and some mountains up there, and there are people who do disappear, and those disappearances get documented.
So that might be a place to start.
But also, you know, you're looking up to Norway and out towards Russia.
There's a lot of expanse out there.
David Paulitis, I'm very, very pleased to have had you on here.
Thank you so much for being such a great guest and a good guy to work with.
The book is Missing 41.
And if people want to know more about you and your work, where do they go, David?
They could go to the Can Am Missing Project.
That's C-A-N-A-Z-N-Nancy-A-M-A-N-America.
Missing.com.
Can AmMissing.com.
David Paulitis, thank you so much for making time for me.
Thank you, Albert.
Appreciate it.
Well, I knew that he would be a good guest because you told me so.
I don't think I knew even at the beginning of this that he'd be such a good guest.
What a gripping hour that's been.
I hope you enjoyed that.
I hope you found that interesting and stimulating.
His name is David Paulitis, and I'll put a link to him and his work on my website, www.theunexplained.tv.
The website brought to you by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who's done all the web development and has kept me on the straight and narrow since we've been doing this show.
Thanks, Adam, for your work.
We're going to bring you more good shows.
Hopefully, we're going to get Jesse Ventura soon.
I'll also be bringing you an update about Comet ISON, which is heading our way pretty fast.
Those shows and many more coming soon.
Thank you very much for all of your support.
Please keep your emails coming and your donations.
They are vital.
www.theunexplained.tv.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I'm in London.
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