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Sept. 21, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:17:35
Edition 175 - Missing 411 Update

David Paulides - ex US cop who now investigates the world's unexplained disappearances - amust hear show!

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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 Unexplained.
Thank you very much for spreading the word, telling your friends about this show.
I know that you are because my email inbox is absolutely swelling right now.
We are definitely getting somewhere, and thank you very much.
And thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, for devising the website.
WWTUnexplained.tv.
The one-stop shop, if you want to make a donation to the show or send me an email, a lot of you have, in fact.
The Courtney Brown show on remote viewing, very controversial.
I'll talk about that in just a moment.
But first, I want to talk about this.
Last time I was on, I told you that I was getting itchy feet about wanting to expand this show and the simple economic realities of life.
I mean, you would laugh if you knew the amounts of money that I was trying to live on.
Maybe you are, too, in the same sort of situation.
But the economic realities of life mean that I have to go out and make some money by doing work to be able to fund this show.
I want to develop it, but at the moment, I just couldn't do that.
So we have to come up with another way of doing it.
So, bearing in mind, the Scots have just voted in their referendum, and they've given the politicians a shock because it very nearly went the other way, but they've voted to stay in the United Kingdom, even so 1.6 million Scots voted to be out of the United Kingdom.
And like I say, the politicians are still kind of reeling from that.
We're going to have our own referendum here.
Adam is devising a mechanic for it, and it will appear probably on the homepage of the Unexplained website, www.theunexplained.tv, asking your thoughts about where we should go with all of this.
So watch this space.
I did say Courtley Brown Remote Viewing 9-11, controversial show, the last one.
I have now tied down an interview, and I don't think he's done one before, with one of the remote viewing team, Dick Olga in Hawaii, and I will put some of your points to him.
Bob in Boston, for example, says remote viewing, meaningless mumbo-jumbo.
I'll ask him about that.
We'll try and do an experiment with him, too, if we can.
Mark, old friend of mine and the show, he has or had visions.
One was about the Pentagon attack on 9-11 and says, as far as I could tell, it seemed there were explosions being set off within the building by an unknown group.
I remember this.
I could feel the terror of the people not in the know within the building and also feel the satisfaction that all was going to plan among certain people.
That's interesting.
Other emails that I've had in recently, Olivier Franayette, I hope I pronounced that right in Brittany, France, bonjour et merci, suggesting French researcher Jean-Coupille, I must improve my French.
I've only got schoolboy French, and I love France.
I need to do better.
Stephen Beasley gets in touch to say, if you want to try and introduce a subscription for the show, don't go there.
Three words, he says, don't go there.
All right.
Jimmy Gannon in Houston, some good thoughts from you.
Thank you.
Pauline says, she doesn't like the idea of paid for shows.
Okay, Pauline, I'm listening to what you say.
Garrett in the U.S. likes the idea of a free show plus extra content that you pay for, like premium content.
We'll look into that.
Like I say, we're still tossing around ideas here.
Paul, nice to hear from you, Paul.
A UK policeman doing some very important work.
And Paul, I'm going to record those voice lines for you.
I'll try and get around to them in the next week or so.
If I don't do them in the next week or so, send me an email.
Remind me.
Life is a bit silly at the moment.
It's a bit mad.
Jerome in the UK, thank you for your email.
Emma, who lives not very far from where I live, works in central London, has offered to help the show.
Many thanks for that, Emma.
That's really kind of you to say that.
When the show grows, if it does, I might well be in contact.
But a very kind thought, Emma.
Sergio in Montreal wants somebody to remote view MH370.
Well, at the moment, maybe there are issues of good and bad taste about that, but maybe in a year or so, that should be done.
Maybe somebody's doing it now, who knows?
Adam in Washington State would like me to do live shows.
Now, that's interesting because most of you, it seems from the email that I've had, prefer the podcasting method so that you can maybe listen to half the show on the way to work and half the show on the way back from work.
Podcasting looks like the way to go, from what I can see.
Kristen Johansson says your show is a true gem, oh, Kristen.
That's kind.
Thank you very much.
And somebody special, Rose Writer.
She is a well-known singer-songwriter in Canada and a big fan, which I didn't know until she got in touch with me this week of this show.
Now, I've listened to her work just as she's listened to mine.
This lady, Rose Writer, R-E-I-T-E-R, based in Canada, grew up there, to me is incredibly talented sounding.
Her work sounds like, to my ears, a cross between Cheryl Crowe, a bit of Joni Mitchell there, a bit of Suzanne Vega, and a lot of herself.
Very, very good.
So Rose Writer, thank you very much for your support.
We will hear more of her, I think.
This time, we're going to catch up with David Paulidas.
He is the former detective who investigates missing persons cases very, very thoroughly, as you will remember from the last show that we did with him.
We're going to get in touch with him very soon because we're going to talk about his new book, Missing 411, The Devil is in the Detail.
More incredible cases, and some of them with common features, like missing shoes or missing clothes, where people you would not think would discard their shoes because they were lost in very rough country.
A lot of them do.
And then there are people who disappear and are found yards from where they vanished.
And yet, teams of searchers have searched for them for days and haven't found them.
How can that be?
Very, very fascinating stuff.
If you want to get in touch with me, please go to the website www.theunexplained.tv.
There you can send me an email or make a donation to the show if you'd like to.
And thanks again for all of your support and all of your good comments.
You know that the difference between me and the mainstream media, which I know all too well, is that I listen to you and do something about it.
So it's hopefully democratic from that point of view.
That's the way I want it to be because you and I have been together on this journey now for a few years.
And I want it to stay that way.
So as Tina Turner once sang, let's stay together.
Right, let's get to the U.S. now.
Dave Paulitis is there.
David, thank you very much for coming on the show again.
Oh, it's my pleasure, Howard.
Thank you for having me.
Now, you were a very, very popular guest last time you were on, Dave.
People clearly saw a great deal in you, and that's why they've been asking me when's he coming back on.
So I'm glad we were able eventually through a very circuitous route to get you back on here to talk about the new book.
And before we do that, I just want to talk around the book in a way, if I may.
Now, this is missing 411, The Devil's in the Detail, as distinct from the other books that you've written.
How do you get the time to do the masses of research?
I mean, this is not a small book.
This is a big, thick volume.
And I'm just counting the pages here.
I should have done that before.
It's 400.
If you count the index at the back, it's 420.
You'll know this, 422 pages total.
That is a hell of a book.
How do you get the time to be able to churn them out like this?
Well, Howard, in the same way you have the passion to do your radio show and to do your things on the BBC, I think people need to have a passion in life.
And at this point, mine is the missing people scenario.
And I am somewhat retired from my primary job.
I was a policeman for 20 years, and then I worked in technology for a number of years.
And so fortunately, I have the time to do this kind of work.
And I'm working with some people who have similar backgrounds to myself who also have that same passion.
So, I mean, to truthfully say I work 50 to 60 hours a week, that would be appropriate.
And we work year-round.
So it is a passion, I can say.
And the more we dig into this, the more it becomes convoluted and confusing.
I mean, two things I'd like to say about that.
You know, kudos to you for the quality of the work that you do.
I mean, the latest book comes with this fantastic map, or you certainly sent me an incredible map of missing people, which is fabulously detailed.
And I don't know of anything else like that in existence.
Maybe there is, but I've never seen it.
And the other thing is that there are a lot of people doing vanity publishing here, and they write books based on stuff that they've read elsewhere.
You don't do that.
Reading this book and the last one, some of these cases, you couldn't do it with all of them, but some of these cases, you've actually gone to the scene of them.
So you put in the shoe leather in a way that very few people do these days.
Well, we've tried to do that because it helps with your understanding of the evolution of events in the different scenarios.
And just in the last six months, we've put up three, we've actually gone into the field and reproduced the events as they happened at the locations.
And so there's three videos up on our website that show you how seemingly impossible it would be for some of these things to have occurred as they state they did.
And it gives people an understanding of the complexity of the location that these people have disappeared.
And specifically, there's a young child scenario where he disappeared and supposedly went 550 feet up the side of this cliff, which I could barely do it.
Yeah, and there are a few cases like that, quite a few cases like that in the book, where it is simply beyond credulity that such things could happen.
The other point I was going to make to you at the start here, before we get stuck into the cases that we're going to outline, and we can by no means get into all of them.
I've cherry-picked some of them, and hopefully they're good ones that will illustrate how detailed your work is.
The other point that I would make is that if you didn't do this work, it seemed to me reading this latest book particularly, a lot of these people, if not all of them, would be completely forgotten other than by their still living relatives, if there are any.
You are the last beacon of hope that the truth will come out about some of these cases.
And therein lies an interesting scenario to us because when the word generally goes out to the public and you're people that are listening, they think, okay, well, Dave and his team are investigating people who have disappeared in the wilds and the forests of the world, and that's a great task.
In reality, we have a specific profile after reading about 5,000 cases now, a specific profile that we're looking for that includes specific elements that match what we're studying.
And a few of those things are sometimes lost on people who don't read the books.
And I think it's hard for people, and I'm not trying to push the reading of the books, but I am trying to say that it's hard to understand that in four books, we can develop something that is found and it replicates itself year after year, time after time.
And there's a case right now as we're speaking, a little boy, three-year-old boy who disappeared from Australia named William Tyrell.
And the elements in that disappearance replicate almost identical to what we've talked about in the books.
Namely, it's a wilderness setting.
Tyrell was at his grandparents' house.
He wasn't at his own house.
He was playing in the front yard with his sister.
He disappeared.
The sister can't explain what happened.
A massive search.
Canines can't find a scent.
They can't find any tracks.
Police are baffled that he disappeared so quickly.
All of these things that are explained by the police in Williams' case are incidents that we've described in cases in Australia, the United States, and nine other countries.
But these things are specific.
These just aren't a shotgun blast at, let's see if this sticks.
We're looking for specific things.
But it almost looks, and I don't want to sound ridiculous, and I certainly don't want to sound like a B-horror movie, but in some of these cases, the ones that have these commonalities between them, that something somehow that we don't understand is almost harvesting people.
That sounds bizarre to say, and yet when you look at the detail and you're big on the detail, that's one conclusion that I came to.
Well, and you're not alone there, Howard.
I think that's almost a...
And he read the books, and he said, Dad, it reminds me of walking into an arcade, and you see the machine that has a claw that drops down and grabs a toy and then travels across to the other end of the machine and then drops the toy and it comes out.
And he says, if you read a lot of these cases, people disappear from one location.
Somehow or another, they travel across country and they're dropped at another location and there's no evidence that they ever traveled The points in between sometimes.
Sometimes there is some evidence, but in the vast majority of the time there isn't.
And that was his rationality and his brain to explain why these dogs can't find a scent.
And also, conversely, in your book, there are cases where people disappear from point A. There is evidence that they've been at certain other points before point B, which is maybe where they're last sighted or the last trace of them.
And after the search has thoroughly investigated the place where they went missing, they or their bodies are found very close to the place where they went missing with no apparent explanation for that.
Yes, and I wrote about that a lot in this last book.
And sometimes it takes going back and rereading what you wrote four years ago and saying, you know what?
There's been over 200 times that we've written about people that have disappeared.
And then their bodies or them are found in the location that had been searched five, six, seven, eight times.
Sometimes they're found on a trail that had been used by rescuers hundreds of times.
And there's no explanation on how they got there or when they got there.
But it was almost as though they were placed there to be found because the searchers would be there.
And then there are the cases of people, and I think there were some of those in the last book, certainly in this book, we'll talk about one of them, where it really does have the elements of a horror story where somebody is using his cell phone and sounding terrified as if he's being pursued by some gang or some force or something ritualistic.
It reads like a horror story, but it really happened to somebody.
You know, in those rare instances where you have an audio track of the person, it's either the scenario you just explained or it's that the person is completely lost and they can't explain where they're at.
And that happens a lot as well.
And they're in areas where everyone says, well, you should know where you're at.
And they say something like, well, I see a light on a hill.
And they said, well, there aren't any hills around here and there shouldn't be any lights.
I don't even know what you're seeing.
So yeah, that happens more often than it should.
And it can't be explained.
And then coupling with your last thought is there's also this scenario where people are found, and we've discovered this, and again, in going back in all the cases we've done, where they find the body in an abnormal amount of times, meaning a significant amount, they can't determine the cause of death of the person.
And in this day and age, with the advancements that we have in science and medical understanding and pathology and such, for them not to be able to determine a cause of death is highly unusual.
Highly unusual and very shocking to people like me who've worked in the media, where you always think coroner's inquests and all the stuff that we have here, they always find the cause.
Very seldom is it unexplained or indeterminate.
And sometimes those things are linked maybe with the security services.
Like we had a case of a young guy over here who was working with the British security services.
He was found dead in his bath, zipped into a hold or bag.
And we were supposed to believe that he was able to do that himself, that he was able to zip himself into the bag.
And that's more or less where we left it.
But there were more questions, I think, after that than answers.
Things happen and apparent explanations are given for them or not, as the case may be.
Sometimes they say we can't explain the cause of death here and that's it.
And you would think that in cases like that, no stone would be left unturned down the years, that the file would never really be closed and eventually an answer would be found.
That's not the case in the U.S., Canada, Australia, United Kingdom.
Very, very often, once the report is written, it's never gone back to, apart from by you.
Well, one of the things that, again, because of people who are listening to this show throughout the world, there was a man in Finland that had read my books, and he went off on a different tangent.
And he, as many of your readers will, and this is appreciated because I think if you look at these cases with tunnel vision, you won't see many elements that you and I may not see as well.
And this person in Finland, he found an association with aerial issues, meaning in the cases that we've written about, he found five cases of planes that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle the same day people disappeared in the books I've written about.
If you look at the statistical odds of that happening, it's beyond belief.
And when you talk about the deaths and unknown causes of those deaths, you start to think, well, you know, maybe that just happens.
But then, again, another reader wrote to me, in fact, I got about 10 responses off this from different parts of the world, and the people said, well, Dave, maybe they were just scared to death.
Think about that statement for a second.
There is one case that we're going to talk about that appears to be exactly that, somebody who literally may have been scared, frightened to death.
Now, you have to think, and I put the book down and just had a little think and a drink of coffee.
How much fear do you have to feel, and how much pressure do you have to be under to die?
I don't even want to think about it.
It is, you know, we're not.
You know, the fact of this, people may accuse other shows of this, but the fact of this is we're not over-dramatizing any of this.
These are the facts from the reports.
This is not, you know, central casting here.
This is not Hollywood.
This is stuff that happened.
It is.
And even to give your thought there, some mileage, there's been a couple of networks, big networks on television that have looked at this and have thought about making a series out of it on TV.
And one of the executive producers said, you know, even though we're dealing with all facts, this topic is too dark to put on TV.
But if they did put it on TV, then it would probably be on a digital channel.
It would be done in a gee whiz kind of way with a cheeky chappy kind of voiceover.
And it wouldn't bring the full enormity that your book brings to it.
You've got to read the words on the page.
I don't get time to read a lot in my life.
But when you read the words on the page, they're matter-of-factly written.
You know, you're not hamming it up at all.
You're just putting the facts down.
I mean, my dad was a policeman, and so were you.
They know how to write reports, and he taught me.
That's how I learned to write.
My dad showed me how to use a typewriter because he used to use one in the police.
You're not trying to do any of this for effect.
This is just as it comes.
It kind of sounds like I'm selling your book.
It's just that I am impressed.
And I think anybody who looks at it will see that you're not going at this for dramatic effect.
And I don't know how you would do this on television other than by having total control of it yourself, Dave.
And I don't know quite how you would do that in this day and age.
Nobody has control unless they do podcasts.
Yeah, or you do your own videos like we're doing right now.
Yep.
Well, maybe, you know, I mean, part of me can see a television show out of it all.
I can sort of see, I think he's probably not with us anymore, but the late Robert Stack, you know, who was the star of the Untouchables years and years ago, you know, a big, tall guy with big, bushy eyebrows and very intense eyes, standing there looking down the camera lens, explaining the facts in a very deadpan but very powerful way.
Maybe that would work.
I'm not sure.
Let's get into the book now.
We've talked a lot.
In the introduction to the book, there's some discussion of cases in Oregon and Oregon being representative of this kind of phenomenon.
And I quote here, James Dutton, a victim I wrote about in my last book, the author did contact Oregon authorities about the number of missing in the state.
Here were his findings, quote, a staggering 189 men and 51 women remain listed as missing since 1997 by the Oregon Office of Emergency Management after trekking into Oregon's wildest places, said George Kleinbaum, search and rescue coordinator for the office.
And then you go on to say readers should take note that these numbers are only from 1997.
I believe that there are probably five to eight times that many and people are no longer tracking them.
That is a chilling little paragraph, isn't it?
It's sobering at best.
I mean, to think that this is only in a small area of Oregon.
This is only for a short timeframe.
And these aren't people that have disappeared in the middle of cities.
These are people that have disappeared in the middle of nowhere.
And the point of this is that there's different rooms throughout the state.
And for people in the UK, there are counties in each state that kind of divide the state up into jurisdictions.
And each one of these counties has a coroner.
And that coroner is responsible for identifying bodies that are found in the woods.
And as a coroner told me a couple years ago, Dave, there are these little offices throughout Oregon that are just filled with bones that can't be identified right now.
And we don't know who they belong to, but some of these rooms have, we know, have hundreds of people in them.
And there's still people out there in the woods that we haven't identified, we haven't found, and it's baffling.
The good thing about your books, though, you don't draw conclusions.
You don't say it's Bigfoot or aliens or some kind of vortex like the Bermuda Triangle.
But you do draw the commonalities between cases and you plant the seed in the reader's mind that this cannot be just coincidence.
It's not happenstance.
These things have common features and the more you write about them in these huge books that you write, the more you see that.
Let's get into the cases now.
I started at page one of the book, The Story of Anne Bragg.
This is from 1951.
We have to say that these cases go back in time as well as being incredibly current in some of the cases that we'll discuss.
This is from Alabama.
A woman of 76 lived in the mountains, hiked.
You know, it wasn't a place where you could drive a car around.
She hiked to her daughter's home, returned at about 10 o'clock that morning, but never actually got to her home.
There was an extensive search, as we often hear, by air.
Nothing at all found.
And that was a strange case, and that's the one that kicks off your book.
It is strange.
And in coordination with the search on this, heavy rains hit the area.
There were supposedly going to be a lot of low-flying planes.
All those had to be canceled.
The searchers were frustrated because they couldn't find any trace of her.
She was a grandmother, but she was in outstanding shape.
And in the words of the Alabama Anniston Star, it said, she seemingly vanished into thin air just four weeks ago today when the article was written.
And you read those words, seemingly vanished into thin air.
You read those time after time after time when you read thousands of articles.
And something else that you read in the book and looking at these cases is that these are not people who are just, they're not city dwellers who go to a place in the country and then come to some form of misadventure.
This is somebody who lived there, knew the territory intimately.
Well, yeah, and the trail was probably a very well-honed path between the homes of the relatives in the hills, something she did daily.
The idea that she got lost, the idea that, you know, I don't know, she got turned around, just didn't make any sense to anybody.
And this was in 1951, and till today, they've never found any trace of her.
Seems pretty odd.
And just think what it might be like for she had a daughter, for that daughter and other members of the family who've had to live for decades not knowing.
There is nothing worse than lack of closure, especially when it comes to a loved one.
Absolutely.
And therein lies the point on missing people that I think is sometimes lost on law enforcement, is that there's a large percentage of people who disappear who want to disappear.
And in law enforcement, the working missing persons cases is sort of like the bastard child of law enforcement.
Guys and ladies really don't want to work those cases because you can work them for months, then all of a sudden you find the person and they just wanted to fall out of society.
But then again, you have these cases that we've written about that are baffling, We don't know.
It's confusing.
And there's so many different jurisdictions involved in the cases we write about that it would take a national effort by, say, Scotland Yard in your country, the FBI in our country, for profilers to go through the cases like we are right now and to put the linkage between them for an understanding that this isn't happenstance.
But for the authorities, there's nothing in it for them.
But even if they did draw the commonalities and similarities between the cases, what are they going to do about it?
Because all you can say is that something unexplained took this person away and this person was found or not as the case may be.
And that's as far as we can go.
But in Scotland Yard and the FBI, they do this profiling to understand if there's serialization to the events.
If the same events happened in the UK and the same events happened in the U.S., in Canada, in Australia, and say there were only eight of those events, then they'd start maybe looking at visas and passports about people that traveled between the countries during those times.
That's profiling.
And in essence, that's what we're doing with these cases.
We're profiling them.
And there's so many of them, Howard, that you start to realize there's something highly unusual going on.
And a lot of children go missing, and some of them are found, we have to say.
But often the circumstances are similar.
You hear a story like this one time and time again.
The next on the list that we both have, Haley Zager, age six, Arkansas, 50 years after Anne Bragg, so 2001, went to a remote area, once again with her grandparents.
They lost sight of her, found 51 hours later by a lake, dazed and bruised, and she claimed she'd been helped by another girl during the missing time.
And indeed, another girl had gone missing in that area.
This is a strange case, isn't it?
Very, very strange.
It was so unusual that a show in the U.S. called Dateline, it's on NBC Network, did a special segment about it because it was so unusual and there were so many elements in it that made sense after you got into it.
But Haley was with her grandparents, and this is another part.
A lot of these kids disappear when they're in the presence of relatives.
And they're in the upper Buffalo Wilderness of Arkansas, a state that has many unusual disappearances.
She asked her grandparents if they could hike to these falls nearby, and they said no.
She got upset.
They continued to walk on, and she fell behind.
Another part of the element is that on a trail, people that disappear are either way in front or way behind, and they just fall out of the trail and they can't be found.
Well, somehow or another, she fell out.
They didn't find her.
They yelled for her.
They went back to the car.
They got help.
The National Guard, airplanes, sheriffs, helicopters with forward-looking infrared radar came in.
People on horseback.
Eight teams of bloodhounds came in and they searched for two full days.
They found nothing.
And you think about this, again, eight teams of different bloodhounds searching different areas.
They come up with no scent.
Flare in the air, they're not seeing any heat signatures.
Unusual in and of itself, but those are all consistent elements in the stories we write about.
Eventually, she's found sitting on a rock near some water, and the parents interview her, and she starts to explain that she slept on a bluff the first night and in a cave the second night.
And she said that she had some difficulty getting up and down the hills, and she had some help from a girl called Alicia.
Well, some newspaper people from that area remembered that in this same area, years, decades earlier, a girl named Alicia disappeared.
She was never found and presumably died there.
And they put the pieces of the story together, and darn if it didn't match what Haley was talking about.
And at the time, the searchers, before this information ever came out, questioned how Haley got up and down and through the area she was in in heavy rain because they didn't believe she could do it.
And let's just remind people she was six years of age.
Correct.
So with the feelings of the searchers, and you don't hear these things coming out from these searchers and law enforcement very often about how they think about certain things, but they did in this instance.
And then Haley coming up with this story about Alicia and then them doing the homework and finding out that a girl named Alicia really did disappear and die there.
Pretty unusual.
Well, incredibly, which all goes to prove that there is more in heaven and earth than we actually see and are aware of.
A lot of cases in Colorado of missing children, too many to talk about now, but just I wanted to remark that fact that there were a lot of these cases in Colorado.
Now we know it's a big open area, so that is maybe no surprise, but something that you do document particularly well in the book, Dave.
Well, I appreciate that, and that is my home state, so I have a deep interest in it.
A couple of things about Colorado that stand out is we have many, many 14ers in the state.
I think we have 50 now.
And meaning that there are peaks that are 14,000 feet high.
And in those areas, there are a lot of high elevation lakes.
And for whatever reason, a lot of people disappear in high elevation.
And it doesn't make a lot of sense when you use a common sense approach because there's not a lot of area for cover in these locations other than boulder fields and a lot of granite.
And when you start looking at cases that people disappearing at these high elevations, that's a commonality.
Boulder fields, they disappear in the middle of them, and they disappear when they're alone.
And when people ask me to sign their books, I'm doing events and conferences and things, one of the things I sign is never hike alone.
I always tell them to hike with a friend and always carry a personal transponder.
Of course, at least this day and age, you can carry a personal transponder.
When we talk about the next case, which sadly is another child, four years of age, Arnie Olson, 1947, Montana went to a mountain with the family, vanished with a dog.
Four years of age again, we say the barking dog led searchers to the top of Mount Hughes.
The child died, sadly, of exposure, but how did he get to that spot was the big question, yeah?
So in four books, there's probably, I'm going to guess, maybe 25 cases that are almost identical to this.
A small, small child seemingly disappears under the auspices of the parents.
Nobody understands how they disappeared so quickly.
Many times they disappear with a canine, and the parents search.
They can't find them.
They're yelling for their son, their daughter.
They can't get a response.
They call the sheriff.
These people were cutting wood at a camp they established at 7,258 feet.
500 searchers respond.
They search for three days.
They bring in smoke jumpers from the U.S. Forest Service.
They cover a wide, wide area.
And we have what's called a grid pattern that's used for searches.
And they used what has been successful in the past, meaning that, say, a child four years old, 95% of the time, is going to be found in an area within two miles and is going to be found no higher in elevation than what they disappeared than maybe 300 feet.
Well, Arnie, I don't know why they went up there, but they did.
They go to the top of this mountain, and it's 1,000 feet uphill from where he disappeared.
It's four miles in walking distance, and they find his body under a small ledge.
Initially, they thought maybe he fell and landed and died because of that.
Turns out he died of exposure.
But Howard, your question about how did he get there, why did he get there?
When I'm at conferences, I asked people in the audience how many of them have kids.
And then I asked, well, if it was your child and they disappeared from you, would they walk uphill or downhill?
And if they're under four or five years old, most of the kids at that age aren't very strong, are pretty lazy.
And the vast, vast, vast majority will go downhill.
Yeah.
And, you know, when you think back, and I can remember being four, I found it hard to walk along the beach in Liverpool for very far because my little legs wouldn't carry me.
It's astonishing.
There was another case of a three-year-old here.
This is 1953, Myrtle Gray, in Maryland.
And you flagged this one up as a very unusual case because she went missing with her brother.
He was six, but he couldn't speak.
He had a speaking problem.
So he wasn't able, when he came back from an area of woodland and she didn't, he wasn't able to explain what happened.
I think I'm right in saying that.
There was a three-day search, no sign of her, and then she was found near a highway in a place that by rights she shouldn't have been found.
And the big question was, how did she survive?
So more question marks.
Well, and again, part of the profiling of these cases is that an abnormal number of these kids who disappear have a disability.
And this is really unusual because many of the kids with the disability don't have the ability to travel far.
And many of the kids that disappear don't have the ability to speak or explain.
As in the case of this incident, her brother didn't have the ability.
And her mom was sick and dead.
And again, another incident where the kids were being watched by somebody else, a neighbor.
Somehow or another, they disappeared.
Right after they disappeared, it starts raining.
And it doesn't stop raining for the entire time the 500th searchers are on the scene.
An Army sent a plane out to search for a while, three days, and eventually she's found in a snake-infested area that nobody believes she should have been in.
The girl cannot explain what happened to her.
Nothing is said about the event.
But the most unusual thing and the thing that just confounded searchers was that she was completely dry and seemed to be well taken care of.
And that is not unusual.
And initially, the common sense response is, well, she was abducted and somebody took her.
The reality of it is, is that there was no evidence of that.
She was still within the confines of the general area they were looking.
If somebody's going to take her, they're not going to take her and drop her back, you would think.
But when you start reading all these cases, it appears something like that is happening.
Her brother Charles, also disabled, couldn't explain and didn't explain whatever happened.
And if you read my books, again, this is a scenario that has replicated itself many times.
Time and time again, and no one else is pulling the threads together, it seems to me.
The case that probably, from reading the book, scared me most, chilled me most certainly, was the case of Cullen John Finney.
Big guy, 30 years of age, peak of fitness, had been professional sportsman, had played with the Denver Broncos.
So, you know, very serious individual, knew the outdoors.
He married somebody called Jennifer.
This is only last year.
They went to a place in Michigan called the Baldwin River.
He went fishing on a pontoon boat, which people do.
Jennifer got frantic calls.
He was saying that he was being followed.
He was calling her on his cell phone.
And he was apparently taking off his clothes, he said.
But the locations that he was tracked to didn't add up.
And he was found face down, bleeding from the nose, with his clothing oddly twisted.
The million-dollar question you say in the book is how did he get from where the boat was found, or rather, how he got from where the boat was found to where he was found, which was quite a distance.
And the conclusion that they didn't want to come to, but had to in the end, that this man was scared to death.
Now, this man was a quarterback.
Nothing much scares those people.
And if you look, you've got a photograph of him.
He's a big, confident-looking guy.
How could something like this happen?
So this is one of those cases where we spent a lot of time on it.
And we actually got the original reports and the original photos from the sheriff's office that worked this case.
And this area is north of Detroit, Michigan.
It's called Webster Township.
And when you're doing this kind of work, it's really important to understand the historical background of the area.
And this area, going back to the 1800s, has disappearances that we've written about before.
And I'm talking about really, really unusual stuff.
And it's why we don't know.
It's a swampy, very thick forested area.
And it's in the area of the Great Lakes.
And there's been a lot of strange things that have happened around the Great Lakes in the last 300 years.
And you could add Cullen's case to it.
A little bit about Cullen.
He's 6'2 inches, 240 pounds.
He was a college football quarterback.
Originally, he was going to play what's called Division I. He ended up playing Division II.
He had a 28-no record in two years of playing.
And his college coaches described him as the toughest person on the field.
Not the toughest quarterback, the toughest on the field.
And when he played a couple of games, he stopped his lineman that protect him in that pocket and said, you know what?
You're stopping a lot of these guys, and we're taking penalties for holding to make sure they don't hit me.
He goes, let him hit me.
He goes, it's not going to bother me.
And I'm big enough, I can take care of myself.
And the coach went over to him and said, did you say this to the lineman?
And he said, yeah, I don't care.
Let them hit me.
They're not going to hurt me.
And the coach said, he's never heard anything like that in his life.
And he said, he was such an unusual guy.
He wasn't afraid of anything.
He was a man from the description.
He was a man-mountain.
Oh, exactly.
And after college, he played briefly pros for a little while.
Ended up marrying a sweetheart volleyball player.
They had two kids.
And for Memorial Day weekend, that's the last weekend in May in 2013, they went up to this area of Webster Township with other family members to go fishing.
And this Baldwin River isn't a fast-moving river.
It kind of meanders its way through a fairly flat area outside of Webster.
And Colin went in alone.
And he says, hey, I just want to go fishing one more time.
No big deal.
So they put him in the river and the people were going to meet him at about 9.30 and pull him out.
And at about 9.27, his wife receives a frantic call.
And the quote was, he was being followed by two, and one of whom was 20 feet behind him.
That was essentially what he said in a frantic way.
He goes, he said something to him.
There was no reply, and the phone immediately hung up.
And his wife told law enforcement he sounded paranoid and scared.
She got other calls at 9.34 and 9.36 just saying he was being followed and he was nervous.
Now, 9.36, one of his best friends who went on the trip with him called and asked where he was, and he said he's not sure, and he says it's getting a little rough.
I think a couple of guys are following me.
Phone hung up again.
And his wife asked him on one of these calls, he had an iPhone, said, hey, get the coordinates off of the iPhone.
And he said, okay, okay.
And she talked him through it and was able to get them.
Well, they show up at 9.30.
He's not there where they were supposed to meet him.
At 10.37, a deputy from the area responds.
He starts to take a report.
And this is a small county.
This isn't a high-tech, fast-moving county.
This is a pretty rural, slow-moving place you'd think.
Well, this deputy did a lot of good things and a lot of smart things.
One of the things he did was he contacted the cell phone company and he asked him to ping the phone.
And what that does is it gives you coordinates on where that phone is located at the time the pings hit it.
And they gave the deputy four different locations.
Now I got that report from the phone company that was in the law enforcement report.
And again, Howard, most of the news people and things don't go into the detail that we're looking at, but I already knew that this was going to show something unusual, and it did.
And it showed four different locations within minutes of each other, 4.37 miles apart.
Within minutes of each other.
How can you?
Unless you're being flown or in a helicopter or a jackpack or something, you can't do that.
Exactly.
It's impossible to get to those locations.
And the other impossible fact when we mapped them is that each one of those locations crosses a paved road.
So meaning Cullen would have easily found a road and found a house.
Well, at 12, 12 a.m., searchers and his family found his boat, and there was one oar missing.
And again, this started a search, and it went on.
And on the 27th, the day after he disappeared, it started raining, and it rained hard.
And as this is going on, the sheriffs, this is big news in this area.
And the sheriff reports state that they got a series of calls from neighbors.
And I report to people whatever the reports say.
I'm not trying to screen the information.
I'm not trying to push one belief over another.
But one of the reports they got from a neighbor was, is that it was obvious to them that Cullen spooked a Bigfoot and the Bigfoot was tracking him.
I don't know if it's true.
That's what one of the things said.
Now, on the 28th, his body was found, like you said, face down.
Now, I got the crime scene photos on that, and they're gory.
And gory meaning there was no obvious sign of trauma to his body.
When they rolled him over, he was bleeding out of his nose, which is fairly common.
But the unusual part to me is I'm a fisherman, and I wear waders all the time.
And when you wear waders, they're like a plastic outer lining that goes up over your legs, sometimes goes over your waist.
And the supports for the waders crisscross over your back and go over your shoulders.
And on Cullen's, three of us looked at this and said, hey, this is weird.
The straps on his back were twisted, almost as though somebody grabbed him and twisted him as they lowered him to the ground.
Because you don't want that twisted feeling on your back, it's uncomfortable.
I can't believe any fisherman would walk around with that purposely.
Now, they sent Cullen's body to two different coroners.
One was a university.
And the original coroner said, well, they found some small amounts of prescription drug in his system, and that could have caused him to regurgitate and choke.
But that wasn't a cause of death.
And the bottom line was they couldn't figure out a cause of death, Cullen's.
Now, this is only 2013.
Are they going to leave it at that?
Exactly.
Are they going to leave it like that?
And they did leave it like that.
And the New York Times wrote a lengthy article about Cullen for a variety of reasons.
Number one, he was a big star, big name person, and he disappeared for two days.
And they find his body in the middle of this area where they were getting these pings.
But nobody wants to address a few key points.
First of all, there was no cause of death.
Number two, he reported being followed.
I don't think people make that stuff up.
And he reported being followed for a lengthy period of time.
And to find him face down like they did in the area of these pings, no one wants to address how he was able to move four plus miles in an area of super thick woods, rivers.
How was he able to traverse this?
And the other part that nobody has done, and even we haven't done it, is reach out to his family.
And I want, on these kind of things, I really want time as the ultimate healer before we approach his wife and ask her and explain to her what we found, because I don't think anybody ever has.
Good Lord.
And so it's in a book for her to read about if she wants to.
But the sad fact of the matter is that a case like that needs to be picked up and run with by somebody because there are too many inexplicable facets to it and nobody's doing that.
I think that's the thing that I find most shocking.
It's a terrifying case, and he was obviously a big and well-liked guy.
What an awful, awful thing to have to park like that.
I don't know.
If I was the wife or a family member, it would torment you day and night, wouldn't it?
I think it would for me.
So you and I, and the people out there that have read the books, have a pretty good understanding that this is happening in many parts of the world right now.
And to the common person that has no visibility to this, this is a one-time issue.
They could say, well, you know, maybe Cohen had issues.
He had problems.
He, you know, he had some anxiety in his life.
And it just got to a point maybe he had mental illness, even though no one claims that.
And he made all this stuff up and he just died.
And, you know, in your mind, you're saying, well, this happens, and you're trying to reconcile it using that common sense approach.
Well, it seems, Dave, that people are extrapolating a lot of stuff, but not looking at the evidence that they can find.
And the evidence is, look at the way that those waders, the supports for them, were twisted, and look at the readings from his cell phone.
And that couldn't have happened.
Those are the things they should be looking at, not trying to speculate whether he had any issues of any kind.
It seems weird.
It seems like someone somewhere wants to try to find some kind of explanation so we can close the book on this.
Correct.
And there is another good point, is that 90% of the searchers on a search and rescue mission are volunteers.
And they have a limited amount of training that they have to pay for themselves.
And they aren't thinking criminal.
They're thinking find and let's get home.
And I'm not saying anything bad about them because they're great people who volunteer their time.
But when they find somebody, they've done their job.
Whether that person's alive or dead, they've gotten closure for the family, they have a body or they have the person alive, and let's get out of here.
Not many have been trained to think maybe there's some kind of unusual element here.
I gave a talk in 2012 in front of the biggest search and rescue organization in the world, NASA.
And there were search and rescue people from all over the world there, and it was a huge, huge event.
At the end of my talk, there was a line of people going outside the room who wanted to talk to me about what I'd stated.
And again, I just stated overall what we found, some of the extreme cases that we found, and the commonalities.
And there was two troopers from Alaska State Troopers that were there.
And in the meeting of the present, in the middle of the presentation, they stood up and they said, you know, they looked around the room and they were probably the bravest people there.
They said, Dave, you're saying things that we all know, but nobody wants to talk about.
And they said in Alaska that each of these guys had been on over 100 search and rescues, and many of these had the elements that I explained, and they knew that something was going on, but they couldn't explain it.
And one of the things that we may say is that Bigfoot exists, but nobody really wants to acknowledge that fact.
And that's just one element of the stories that you tell.
Oh, sure.
And I think that when you get these people that have experienced this time after time, and I have many letters from search and rescue people that say, yeah, Dave, this happened to us, and blah, blah, blah.
Nobody wants to talk about it.
Nobody wants to explain it.
Nobody wants to do follow-up on it.
So how are we ever going to get anywhere?
I mean, this is a lifetime's work for you.
But really, officialdom should be doing this stuff.
But as we said way back in this conversation, probably half an hour ago, even if they did collate all of this information, it would be very hard for them to come up with conclusions.
And these people like to come up with conclusions.
I want to leap ahead, if I may, and skip forward now to a case of a nine-year-old in 1946, Raymond Howe Jr.
Pittsburgh, this is, Pennsylvania.
Went out in a park, Highland Park.
But the interesting thing about this case, and the sad thing about this case, is that this person was missing 10 days longer than he'd been dead, and there was no clear cause of death.
And it wasn't, by the looks of it, a human abduction.
What a strange case.
Again, in an area just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that has had many unusual disappearances.
In our research, the state of Pennsylvania has more kids that have disappeared than any other place in the world.
And we're just talking young kids under 10 years old.
And it's right in that 1930 to 1950 timeframe.
And again, it's in an area close to the Great Lakes.
This case, July 15th, 1946, nine-year-old Raymond Howe went with his three sisters and a brother to a park to go swimming and fishing.
They first went swimming, and then Raymond loved to fish, and he went to this lake at the park and was supposedly going to go fishing.
Well, at the end of the night, he didn't show up.
150 police officers search the park from top to bottom, nothing.
They come back August 9th, a second search, big search.
They find nothing significant.
They found one thing, one little toy that might have been his, but they couldn't confirm it.
And then 41 days after he goes missing and 20 miles southeast of the park, a guy is exercising his dogs, and he comes upon a body at the end of a trail near a bridge.
And it was Raymond's.
And the pathologist puts the time of death in an inordinate days and etc., meaning that, like you said, he should have been dead for longer than he was.
And they were saying that he was for five to ten days, they can't account for where this body might have been at.
And it goes back to what we talked about earlier, they can't account for a cause of death.
So where was Raymond for five to ten days before he died?
Why did he die?
How did he get 20 miles away?
And at the time, this was a big event in Pittsburgh.
And the events I'm explaining to you were big events, and they asked a lot of questions, more than probably any other event we've researched, including Colin Finnerty's event in Michigan, the football player.
I would say the event in Pittsburgh gathered more press than Cullen's did, even though there's many of those same elements.
How did he get from one place to another?
Why can't they determine the cause of death?
Where was he during those time frames?
We don't know.
It is staggering and very, very chilling.
More recently, there's a 28-year-old, Bill McKinnon.
This is, we're getting set to go international here, but this is very close to the Canadian border of Washington State, place called Church Mountain, 1993.
Like we said, 28-year-old, physically fit, capable climber.
He'd been with a group of people, but he knew he had the wrong clothing for snow, so didn't go on with them, if I've got that right.
And he obviously came to a difficulty, as you recall in the book, but the records of it were, and I quote, purged after five years.
How utterly, terribly bizarre.
So when you talk to parents of missing kids or relatives of missing people, this is a staggering example of what they run into.
And if I may, Howard, talk about, in relationship to this case, a petition that was started by a reader of my books and we wholly support.
And the petition's on our website, but it talks about we want the federal government to keep an online database of missing people in public places, meaning national parks, open space areas belonging to the federal government, essentially areas owned by the Department of Interior.
And at this point, the government isn't required to keep reports.
The government isn't required to release information.
We have something called the Freedom of Information Act, but the reality of it is that they can maneuver their way around it and not release the information.
As an example, we've tried to get a list of missing people from national parks in the United States, and the National Park Service says they don't keep that information.
And I said, well, I'm a published author, and according to the Freedom of Information Act, there's an exemption for us to get that information.
And they came back and they stated, well, my books aren't in enough public libraries to qualify.
There is no section in the Freedom of Information Act that states that.
Boy, they were trying to get out of it on a technicality.
Of course.
And so our group said, well, let's try anyhow.
And so we demanded that they release the information from Yosemite National Park, which happens to be the biggest cluster of missing people that fit our profile anywhere in the world.
They came back and they stated that it cost us $34,000 for them to put that information together.
Well, there's 183 locations that are governed by the National Park Service.
So we said, well, if we're going to ask for that, might as well ask for the world.
We want all 183 locations.
They stated that it cost us $1.4 million.
Now, it's even gotten more extreme just in the last six months.
A National Park Ranger disappeared here in Colorado under very unusual circumstances.
His body was found eight days later, unusual circumstances.
And the National Park Service sent a special investigative team in, and they worked it for a month, and they wrote up this report.
Again, under the Freedom of Information Act, that's supposed to be released upon request.
We asked for it, and they said, well, the report is written in, it's done, but we're not going to release it until we have an executive go through it and redact information that we aren't going to release to the public.
And just to review that report, it's going to cost you $7,000.
Now, this is a missing persons case.
This is not a state secret.
What on earth would you want to hide?
That's the question, isn't it?
Unless, of course, you were hiding failings in the search process.
Maybe there were things that weren't done, should have been done, and you don't want people knowing about that.
So what I explain to people is that these are exactly that, Howard, missing persons cases.
These are not criminal cases.
There's no prosecution that's going to happen.
These are just generally written reports.
Obviously, they don't want you or me to read them, or maybe they don't want us to read them, but for whatever reason, they aren't going to release it.
And there are other cases of kids that have disappeared, and their reports don't exist in any database anywhere that we've recovered.
So, if you don't mind, if you go to the Can Am Missing Project website, that's Can Amlike Canadian American, CanAmMissing.com, you're going to see a section on our site called Petition.
And that petition, we have a couple thousand signatures on it right now.
We need everybody to sign it.
We're going to go to a senator and we're going to ask for senatorial hearings about this topic and demand that legislation be written so that this is public information.
We could just go to a website and see who's missing where and understand the circumstances.
And if they are straightforward missing, well, they're not straightforward, but if they are missing persons' cases and there are no other factors involved in this, what on earth are they afraid of?
You're asking the million-dollar question and a question we ask ourselves, Howard, day in and day out.
Okay, let's skip to 1963.
It says Wyoming.
More open country.
Edward Eskridge, 16 years of age, involved in a car crash with his younger brother.
I think the brother was younger.
The brother was hurt.
So Edward covered him up, went to get help, and the rescuers' search teams came out, found the brother.
But Edward, despite hounds being used, was not found.
Is that right?
Well, you know what?
I didn't answer your question about Bill McKinnon first.
Sure, no, do it.
Sorry.
So he was a student at Western Washington University.
He was a French major.
And he and his roommate had gone up to this area of the mountains, Church Mountain, many times in the past.
And they liked to walk up there and hike.
And they usually did this with other friends.
And they did do it with other friends on February 14, 93.
They got up to about 4,200 feet in the mountains, and they started to hit snow.
And Bill said, well, I'm not dressed to go any further, and I'm getting a little tired.
I'm just going to wait right here for you guys.
Don't worry.
Just come on back down the mountain and I'll be right here.
This exact scenario has manifested itself many times in the past.
And as happened this time, the people came down the mountain and Bill was gone, never to be found.
Again, happened many times in the past on different mountains.
When they came back down, they didn't see him.
So they said, well, he maybe went back down to the car.
They went back to the car.
He wasn't there.
Again, as you stated, very close to the Canadian border on the fringe of North Cascades National Park.
Searchers went up.
They found no tracks leaving the area.
When I wrote to the Sheriff's Department in this area, they stated that the state of Washington requires them to keep a report for five years.
That's the retention period.
Even if the person is still missing after five years, the report's destroyed.
So this happened in February 14, 93.
We put the facts together by doing an extreme archive search in the area, and that's how we were able to even determine Bill McKinnon was still missing.
Law enforcement doesn't seem to care.
Nobody seems to really pay any attention to this.
But imagine if you were Bill McKinnon's relatives and somebody was up there on the side of that mountain this year and came across a bunch of bones.
I have no idea how they'd ever figure out who that was.
How terrible.
And his poor family at one stage even engaged a psychic to try and track him down.
And, you know what, that happens more times than not.
And I am somebody who doesn't discount psychics.
In fact, there's a couple of people on our team that had worked cases with psychics before where they actually found the body with the help of a psychic.
And I don't think law enforcement is at that stage where they discount them either.
I think we'll go out, we'll go to the area that they describe and try to look and see if we can find something.
But yeah, it didn't work and they didn't find anything.
Well, I don't even have a word.
I'm not even going to attempt to try and find one.
Edward Eskridge, let's get to that now.
A 16-year-old, Wyoming, 1963, in a car with his brother, 13 years of age.
There is a car crash.
The brother is hurt.
Edward covers him up, goes to get help.
There is then a search.
The boy who's been covered up and left near the wreckage is found, and Edward Eskridge is not.
They used hounds, but they couldn't get a scent.
What was that all about?
That's a great question.
And this Green River area of Wyoming, for your people, if they're ever visiting the States, you have to get up to Wyoming and see the upper stretches of the Green River.
It's absolutely a gorgeous scenario.
It flows through a desert, but upstream from this area, the mountains, the area is beautiful.
And Edward, again, they were visiting their grandparents.
They took one of their grandparents' cars.
They drove to this area of the desert to go hunting for rabbits.
The boys didn't come home that night.
The grandparents got nervous.
They called the sheriff.
Within a day, they put a plane up in the air and they find a car that's been overturned, their car.
They get ground teams there.
And the teams find one of the brothers seemingly paralyzed, double pneumonia.
They get him to a hospital.
He ends up dying.
They take off in the snow, following the tracks that Edward had made, and they search it for two miles, and they lose it on a rocky ridge, Boulder Field.
They bring in bloodhounds.
They can't find a scent.
They can't find a track.
He's never found.
This area where he disappeared is a fairly flat desert.
It would remind you of a chaparral, small brush.
I've been in this area before.
It's pretty remote and it's pretty ugly compared to upstream 20 miles where it's absolutely gorgeous.
And the thought that you couldn't find a boy in this area is mind-boggling to me because there isn't a lot obstructing your view for 10, 15, 20 miles.
And the thought that a canine brought into this area couldn't find a scent didn't make any sense to us either because there's essentially nothing out there to obstruct or remove the scent.
They should have found Edward and they didn't.
We've only got time for one more.
But it's somebody who was originally English.
This one is in Australia, New South Wales.
Gary Twedle, last year at World 2013.
Very successful guy in high-tech industry, wasn't he?
They'd gone out to a top-end restaurant and bar.
Later he called friends to say that he was lost.
Question is, why and how did he get lost?
Then he's found, sadly, dead, in very strange circumstances, but his body, by the time they found it, should have been decomposed and wasn't.
If that isn't bizarre, I don't know what is.
There's many facets of this case that are completely bizarre, but I got to say that there's some people that have friended me on Facebook that helped me on this event enormously.
And it happened in a city called L-E-U-R-A in New South Wales.
And you're right, Gary was a super successful guy.
And he was originally born in Cremorne, England, later lived in Reading.
His father was a British military officer.
And he and his dad traveled around to Scotland and the Welsh Mountains a lot.
And they did a lot of climbing together.
Well, he got his degree and he moved from Britain to the Gold Coast of Queensland and later moved to the lower shore of Sydney.
And he was one of these guys that did boot camp training and was in an outstanding physical shape.
And his friends and his family called him a junior bear grills.
That's how tough he was.
Well, he landed a job in Australia as a business intelligence sales rep for Oracle Corporation.
And Oracle is a huge software company in the Bay Area.
And when I was in technology, I knew him.
And they only hired for this level job a brilliant guy.
Well, Gary was one of these guys that did so well that he was invited to attend a special meeting at the Fairmont Resort in the Blue Mountains.
And that was directly adjacent to the Blue Mountains National Park there.
And he and his buddies, while they were at the resort, they decided to take a dinner trip down to a place called the Silks Brazier Restaurant in Luera.
Super expensive, great place, great food.
And you've got to understand that these guys working in this job are really, really professional.
And that's why they get taken to places like the Fairmont for business conferences and things.
Well, on the way back, they went inside the Fairmont.
Gary went inside and he came back out and he called his girlfriend and he had about a 17-minute conversation with her because he said that he thought his phone was going to go dead.
Well, during this time, as he was just walking around the grounds at the Fairmont, he thought he was getting lost.
And he called his buddies inside and said, if you can believe this, I think I'm lost, and I can't find my way around.
And they started talking to him, and they're trying to explain where he might be.
And he says, well, I see a light on a mountain.
I'm going to hike towards the light.
Well, there aren't any mountains around there.
And they can't figure out what he was looking at or where he might even be.
And it got more and more confusing.
So this was on April 16th, 2013.
They disappeared.
And they did a massive search for him.
And in this area, it gets rural and remote pretty quick outside of this region.
So you fast forward to September 2nd, and a New South Wales ambulance special accident reconstruction team was in a helicopter on a training mission off the cliffs of Luera and Katoomba.
And let me stop here for a second.
I was given this case by one of the people who live in Luera, and they said, you know what, Dave, this doesn't sound right.
You need to look at it because I think it fits what you're talking about.
And we went into the archives of this area and son of a gun, if there aren't a series of disappearances going back to the 1800s that match the profile of what we've researched.
So whereas we have 52 clusters of missing people in North America, which was on the map that I sent you, this is a cluster of disappearances in this area, right adjacent to a national park and fitting the profile.
So this helicopter team is flying off the cliffs because they do a lot of rescue missions in this area.
And they're in an area called Sweet Dreams.
And they're flying, and they can't believe what they're looking at, but they think that they see a body kind of on a tree, on a cliff near a tree branch.
And they say it was slumped over backwards on a fallen tree, clothed in dark blue jeans, pants, and a tattered shirt, partially covering what appeared to be a bare torso.
Two legs could barely be made out.
And so they said it was obvious that whoever this was was dead.
And they thought right away it was Gary because he was the only person in the area they knew that was gone.
And so they ended up getting the police out there and they recovered the body.
The real mystery behind this is how Gary Tweedle got to this location.
And he said he was walking towards a light.
And also, if you read the book, I think I'm right in saying that in order for him to be where he was found, he would have had to have got through some really thick bush.
That it would have been not totally impossible, but well-nigh impossible for an ordinary person dressed like that to get through.
Isn't that so?
That's correct.
This friend of mine that lives in this area said, Dave, we've walked this path that he would have had to have walked to get there.
And it's unbelievable that he would have gone this way because it would have made no sense.
And he would have come across a cliffy area that in parts has railing.
And the idea that he just ran helter-skelter and just ran off the side of this cliff would have made no sense.
So how he got there, why he wasn't, all of this area was searched extensively, Howard, as well.
They never found a body.
And why he was there or how long he was at this specific area is one of the big questions.
Now, in this area of New South Wales, they also, just like in America in Great Britain, they do autopsies and then they release the cause of death.
They've never released the cause of death to Gary's body.
Is there a reason for that?
That's a very good question.
And there was delay after delay.
You know, they're waiting for chemical analysis.
They're waiting for this.
They're waiting for that.
I think there could have been an issue whereas they don't want to say they don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe they don't want to be embarrassed.
But every indicator is this case matches every other case that we've talked about in the past.
And many of these cases involve people falling to their deaths in unusual ways.
And in Gary's instance, there's much more to the story that we don't know.
Specifically, I want to know if he was wearing shoes.
I want to know if he had his socks on.
They said that he had a bare torso.
Where's the rest of his clothing?
I want to know all these things.
And the shoe question is very important because when we talked last time and in many of the cases in the new book, people appear to discard their shoes in terrain where you wouldn't get rid of your shoes.
You might get rid of other things if it's hot or whatever.
You would not take your shoes off.
That's correct.
And that is one of the key points that we look at and that we've documented in many cases.
And those shoes are never found in many instances.
And if they are found, they're found in distances away from the body that don't make any sense at all.
Have you made any contact with Gary's family?
I wonder.
I just wonder what their input into all of this might be.
You know, we have a policy that we don't proactively contact a family.
If a family comes to us, we absolutely do, and there's been many instances of that.
And then what we'll do is we'll send them the books, we ask them to read them, because we want them to understand that this isn't a one-time shot in the dark, and we're not making a great leap of faith in what we're saying happened here.
There's a pragmatic way that we've looked at these cases, and there's elements in other cases that match what happened here.
And I think that if a parent just, if we proactively went at them, they may think, well, these people are pretty odd.
They're making a lot of claims here that they really can't justify.
If people contact us, they know something about what we're doing, and they know that we have the facts to justify a statement that we're making.
And if you went phoning people up, you would just make the pain worse in some cases, Dave.
So I think that you're doing the right thing.
I think you're right, Howard.
Sometimes when people are ready to go to that next step and research and understand, we're here to help, and we will go the distance with them to explain it.
But you're right.
I don't want to inflict, and we don't want to inflict more pain and dig up things that may cause them more anxiety.
Dave, thank you very much for another fascinating conversation.
We're out of time.
What are you working on next?
You know, as I said, this William Tyrell case is ongoing right now in Australia.
It's a very concerning case.
But I would say probably every three weeks, someplace in the world, there are these cases that are showing up, and we continue to follow them day by day and extract the elements that match.
And so we can have a better understanding of what's going on.
If people want to know about you, your work, where's the best place on the net to go to get a sense of it?
So go to the Can Am Missing Project.
That's CAN, Canadian American, C-A-N-A-S-A-N-Nancy, Am as in MaryMissing.com.
And you can get our books there.
We'll ship anywhere and read and watch the video so you can have a better understanding of what we've done.
Dave Politis, thank you for giving me your time again, Dave.
Thank you.
Howard, you're a true professional.
Thank you very much.
Missing411, Dave Politis.
Amazing man to talk with.
A very good guest you loved him last time.
Let me know what you think about him this time or anything you want to tell me about or a guest suggestion you want to make.
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And if you'd like to make a donation, the website, www.theunexplained.tv is the place to do that.
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Thank you very much for all of your support.
More great shows coming soon.
Remote viewer Dick Olgaier will be asking him some of your questions.
So if you hear this show and are pretty quick, send me a question for Dick Olga and I can try and get it on the next show.
Okay, here's the one of the team that remote viewed 9-11.
And that was part of Courtney Brown's presentation, of course, in the last show.
Thank you again for all of your support.
Until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
Stay safe, stay calm, and please stay in touch.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I'm in London.
I will see you again very soon.
Take care.
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