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July 25, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:07:16
Edition 305 - Missing 411 Movie

The return of David Paulides - an update on his new movie on people who disappear inmysterious circumstances...

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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 keeping in touch and for the nice things you say about the show.
I'm going to be doing some shout-outs on this edition.
If you'd like to email me, I do see all of your emails as they come in.
Just go to the website, theunexplained.tv, designed, honed, created by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot.
And if you follow the link, you can send me an email very easily, make a guest suggestion, tell me about the show, whatever you want to do.
Always good to hear from you.
Theunexplained.tv is my website.
And if you have been to the website and made a donation to the show recently, thank you very, very much indeed.
I'm going to do a lot of shout-outs on this edition.
Then we get to a very special guest, a man who's always welcome here, David Paulidis, the man behind the missing 411 books and now a movie.
Dave's on this show from Denver, so we'll get him on very, very soon.
And I know that he's a guest that you massively enjoy, and so do I. Shout-outs then.
Craig in Liverpool says, please carry on with your weather reports.
I think they're brilliant.
And says, whenever you mention the weather, I always think of somebody in some far-flung place hearing about your weather.
And I always smile.
Thanks, Craig.
Joe, who's also from Liverpool, says, I'm new to the podcast, always interested in the paranormal and think that my grandfather may be guiding me.
Well, listen, that's a thought that I've had over my life.
My granddad, on my mother's side, I never really knew.
I was five when he died.
And I've always felt that he's a factor somehow in my life.
I've never been quite sure how, but I'm said to look like him.
And, you know, there are just times when I think that maybe he's there looking out for me.
So I understand what you're saying.
You suggest the guest Tom Sleman for the show.
He's a Liverpool author, investigator of ghosts and time slips and all sorts of things.
I'd love to have him on the show.
We've tried many, many times to get in touch.
He doesn't return our calls, but would love to have him on.
Harry in Egbeth, nice to hear from you.
Paul in Tasmania, thank you very much for your email.
From way down south of Australia there, very good to hear from you.
Barry in Preston.
Barry, I am working my way through all the guest suggestions.
I'm going to take some time out and do more of that when I can.
But thank you very much.
And nice to know that you're listening in Preston.
Dan from nearby, painter and decorator, listens to the shows all the time.
That's nice.
Thank you very much, Dan.
Please keep listening.
Tell your friends.
Dave in West Michigan, thank you for the email.
And he says, I only discovered it fairly recently and have been enjoying the shows immensely.
I've been going through the back catalogue while working around the house and while walking my two anglophile Chiweene dogs, Buddy and Baxter.
How do you know they're anglophiles?
Whenever I play your show on the stereo, the dogs stop wrestling with each other and lie in front of the speaker and listen to the show till it's over.
My kind of dogs, those.
Thank you very much, Dave.
Sandy, thank you for your email.
James says, I think you'll be interested in the book Critical Mass by Carter Heydrich about the World War II German nuclear bomb program.
Thank you for that.
Eric, a MUFON investigator in Providence, Rhode Island, says your show gives me inspiration.
Thank you, Eric.
Peter emailed to say two things.
Number one, he thinks I talk too much about myself and I mention my late parents too much.
Well, Peter, I mean, it's meant to be a conversation when I have a guest on.
I understand, I think, what you're saying here.
But, you know, when I have to put in bits of myself, I just kind of think it adds to it.
Otherwise, it's a monologue.
But, you know, look, I read what you said, and I take it on board.
Willem, in Dulstrom, Umpumalanga, South Africa.
Thank you for your good thoughts and your nice email.
I went once to Umpumbalanga way up north.
You have the biggest and clearest skies there, don't you, Willem?
Thanks for the email.
Stephen says he plans to donate to Mars One after he heard Baz Landstorp on the show.
He'd like my radio show in the UK to continue.
Stephen, radio's a funny old game.
You never know what's going to happen next.
But I'd like it to continue too.
Thank you, Stephen.
Howard says, Adam, you're a total legend.
Keep on bopping the bop.
Thanks very much.
Shad, you made a suggestion for Michiu Kaku.
We did talk about multiverses.
We didn't get round to ghosts.
I'm really sorry about that.
Remind me to do it next time.
Thank you for the email and the suggestion, Shad.
Jonathan says, I have a suggestion.
Mary Ann Winkowski, the author of When Ghosts Speak.
I'm actually going to try and do that on my radio show.
Jonathan, thank you.
Antonio in Cambridge, thank you for your email.
Cheryl in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, thank you for getting in touch.
Tom in York, who's probably driving when he's listening to this.
Nice to hear from you, Tom.
Jim, Jim Fisher in Austin, Texas, thank you for your email.
And Stephen Grace in Essex, suggesting the topic of infrasound.
Thank you very much for your emails.
If you'd like to get in touch, go to the website, theunexplained.tv, and you can do it from there.
Let's get to the guest now.
Let's wait no longer.
David Paulitis, the return thereof.
David, thank you very much for coming back on the show.
My pleasure, Howard.
It's always great to talk with you.
Well, Dave, you know, because I've told you many times before, but I'm sure you hear this from a lot of shows.
Whenever you appear, the moment you finish, the moment the show goes out, I start getting emails saying, when's Dave Paulitis coming back?
Even if at that stage you've got nothing to give them, they just want to hear you.
You have an amazing pull with the audience.
You must find that with other shows and appearances that you do.
Well, I think a lot of it depends on how well the host does.
You always do a great job, and I think your audience supports what you do, and you kind of get to the meat of the items.
And I think that really brings out the best in me.
And I'm appreciative for those hosts doing a job that they do.
But what it comes down to, I think, is the fact that you have professional experience in this field.
I don't think somebody, say if I tried to do it.
Now, you know, my dad was a cop.
You know that.
I've told you that before.
And I come from a journalistic background, work in various places.
So investigation is something that I do.
But I could not do the forensic style of investigation and tying together all of these stories that you do.
You have to have what my dad had and what you have.
And that is the cop's ability, the cop's nose for it.
I think that comes with time and hanging around people of professional integrity that kind of show you the ropes and how to do things the right way.
yeah, I do think a lot of journalists have it.
I have a good friend, George Knapp.
I think George has that ability and a few others that I know in the States that I've read their work.
But the majority of it is you got to put in the time, you got to put in the effort, and you got to have the passion.
That's what we said last time.
It comes down to shoe leather.
And yes, George Knapp is the best in his business, I think, in this game, I would say.
Having interviewed him once and hoping to get him back on my show at some point, because when it comes to Area 51 and all the other stuff that he does, I don't think there's anybody better than George.
Now, talk to me about this movie.
You have a massively successful string of books to your name.
You have investigated, and you'll tell me how many hundred, but hundreds of cases.
You have a worldwide following.
There's a big clamor for your books whenever they come out.
Why a movie?
Well, what happened was, is my son was getting out of undergraduate school and going on to USC film school.
And he had a background in film, and he'd always dabbled in it.
And we had done several YouTube videos, and you could find him at Can Am Missing on YouTube.
And we decided that we'd sit down and we'd try to reach a different section of the world because, as we all know, some people don't like to read books.
Some people just like movies and YouTubes.
So in an effort to get the message out to a wider audience, we thought we'd try doing a movie.
So we talked to some people, put our team together, and we went out onto Kickstarter and we tried to raise just $100,000.
We ended up raising $156,000.
And after commission, you get about $140,000.
We blew through that pretty quickly.
And altogether, we ended up spending quite a bit more than that.
But we did get it done, which was a milestone.
And the movie highlights five cases of missing children.
And we kicked around what we were going to do and how we were going to do it, whether we were going to do it by geographical clusters in North America or whether we do it by just hunters or just children.
And we end up settling on doing five different children's cases, unexplained disappearances.
And the commonality there, the threads are rural areas, children, unexplained disappearances.
One case involves an incident that was ongoing as we got there, which was really interesting to do and hear all the barbs thrown around.
So yeah, it was what seemed like a real mundane project without a lot of enormous effort turned into probably the biggest project of our lives.
Now, when you do something like this, it is semi-dramatic, but the books lend themselves to this because whenever I read the books, I get pictures in my mind, not only of the people and their circumstances, but certainly of the conditions as you describe them.
So I think what we need to do is to unpick, if we can, the five cases.
And if you can lead me through these five cases, then we can take it from there.
Obviously, I don't want you to give away all of the conclusions of the movie, but I think we need to walk through these cases.
And before we do that, let me ask you, why children?
And I think I know the answer to that, but why children and why North America?
Why only North America?
Well, we were restricted by a budget.
That was number one.
Yeah.
Obviously, if we had a million dollars, we'd make it a worldwide movie and travel to New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Canada, and the U.S. and encompass all of it.
But children, I think people, when they visualize a disappearance in the wilderness, if you or I disappeared and we were found eight miles away from where we were last seen, then it could be easily rationalized that, oh, you know, they made it.
They were in good shape.
But when a two-year-old child disappears in the wilderness and is found 19 hours later over two mountain ranges and barely alive, face down in the ice, the question is, how could the child do that?
And just starting with that case, we brought in Les Stroud, famous survivalist, has a series that's been on for 14 years, Survivor Man.
And he read my books and he said, Dave, if I can ever do anything for you, you know, please bring me in.
So Les came in.
We interviewed the family of this missing boy and they laid out the route that he supposedly took, where he disappeared from, where he was found, and the times he disappeared and the times he was found.
And it was an overnight disappearance.
Where was this?
Pardon me?
Where was this?
Oh, this was in northern Oregon.
Okay, so there's some plenty wild country there.
Oh, my God.
Yes.
Yes, it's wide open.
Kind of the northeast section of the state.
It's kind of rolling mountains, wide open plains.
The visuals are very, very gorgeous in the movie.
We film this in HD and in 4K, and it's unbelievably pretty.
And a lot of drone footage, I understand.
Yes, sir.
Yes, there was.
And let's try to replicate what this boy did.
And he was with the film crew, and in the middle of the night, he said, there's no way.
He said, there's no way I can do this.
And there's no way this little boy could have done this.
And in the middle of the night, he wouldn't have kept walking.
He would have laid down and gone to sleep.
And being that the case, there's no way he could have covered the mileage he supposedly did over the mountain ranges he supposedly conquered and through the barbed wire fences he supposedly penetrated.
So he said, there's no way.
I mean, if you're going to cross two mountain ranges and you are that kind of age, very vulnerable, it is stretching the bounds of credulity that you could imagine the child would do this for themselves.
Well, I think so, Howard.
And in several of my books, I have a table in the back of the book that shows these phenomenal distances and phenomenal heights that missing children have supposedly accomplished.
And the reality of it is, is that if you're a parent and you had a two-year-old, and I said, Hey, if we set your child down in the woods and you walked away, what would they do?
I ask this at conferences all the time.
And the majority say, Oh, they'd play in the dirt, then they'd turn over and go to sleep.
Some of them say they'd walk in a circle, find something interesting close by, sit down and play with it.
Almost nobody says that their child would walk more than a half a mile at most.
So I think the parents understand that this is an easy association to say, I don't think this happened.
And how did this disappearance happen?
How does a two-year-old go missing?
Well, it's a very simple, mundane story.
I mean, the family was staying at some relatives' ranch up in the Oregon Mountains.
The kids were playing at the barn less than 200 yards from the house.
Mom calls them for dinner.
Half the kids walk one way.
Half the kids walk the other way around this barn.
And this one boy who walked around the barn the other way never came back.
And it's really, really mundane.
And there were some tracks that were found.
And it was phenomenal that this boy was found and he ended up living.
He was found face down on snow and ice.
He had some clothing laying next to him.
And he has no memory of anything.
And how long was the search?
Because one of the common threads in your book is when people go missing, whether they're a child or a man in his 60s.
Once the alarm is raised, then there is a massive search.
And then all bets are off as to what the search finds.
This is one of these very, very rural areas of northeastern Oregon.
And this happened in the late 1950s.
And the reality was, is that there were no search and rescue teams.
There were just a bunch of farmers and friends that all pitched in to search.
And 19 hours after this boy disappeared, he was found.
As far as formal, professional, orchestrated search, no, never happened.
It was absolutely pure luck that they found him on this barren mesa.
And this was reenacted.
What did the reenactment show us?
What did it tell us about this, about the experience of having covered that territory in those conditions?
I think Les Stroud showed that moving through the wilderness at night is not only hazardous, but it's very deceiving.
Because during the daylight, you may have the sun and you may have monuments way off in the distance that you can walk towards.
But at night, you're pretty much blinded and you can walk in circles real easily.
You can go the wrong direction very easily.
Get yourself into very, very deep trouble quickly walking off a cliff.
And all of those associations put together, he said, you know what?
I've had kids.
And he said, there's no way my boy would have walked through the wilderness in the dead of darkness.
He would have been tired, number one, because he would have been walking.
Number two, it's nighttime.
His mind tells him it's time to sleep.
He just would have laid down and slept.
The one thing about a child of two, at that kind of age, you're not old enough really to have evolved a sense of danger.
So, you know, we often hear stories of children having accidents.
And because they don't tense themselves up because they don't know what's happening, they don't get injured like you or I would.
Do we think that that factor in some way played into this case?
I doubt it because nobody I've met has said that this boy could have done that on his own.
But if this boy encountered something that transported him over that distance, and that is there are not many other conclusions that you can come to, really, then it would only be the kind of thing that would scare you or I. If it was you or I being picked up or taken somewhere, driven somewhere, put in a truck or grabbed by something.
If you're two, you are not going to be as terrified by that experience as somebody older.
It won't have the same effect on you.
I think that's true, yeah.
And that coupled with the fact he has no memory, something happened and he doesn't remember a thing about what happened.
Obviously, he's a lot older now, and he thinks back on this, presumably, but what does he think about it?
He's got no memory of it.
You know, what conclusions can he come to at this distance of time?
He's a very humble, quiet man, retired postal worker.
And his mom, who was in her 90s, very lucid, very, very smart lady, she brought us out the actual clothing that he wore that day that was still pressed.
That's how impactful this incident was on this family.
And they were really stumped as to how he could have accomplished this.
A bizarre case.
It's not the only case of its kind that you've covered in the books.
But to do this in the movie and to make it live like that, well, that is something else.
So what is your best guess and the expert's best guess as to what happened here?
Well, you know, Howard, all of the stories have commonality that I write about.
They have these profile points.
And the points are all similar.
The points all are in each of the cases.
So if you look at it, you've got to think, well, it's got to be something that's happening to these people, probably from one type of source or one type of unusual event.
And if that's the case, I don't see, and I have never met anybody that's read the six books that has stated that they know what's happening to these people.
I get a lot of people that watch the YouTube videos and listen to my interviews and all of a sudden think that they know.
And the truth is, is that the data in the books is a hundred times what you're going to catch in any of the interviews I do.
But it's those people that have read all the books that have come back and said, you know, no one scenario fits this that we understand.
And that makes it all the more mysterious.
And of course, there's always a clamor from people wanting to draw conclusions whenever you come out with a book or anything.
And, you know, there's a whole brigade of people that I've seen online who want you to explore more the Bigfoot option.
And I know that is one of your interests.
But, you know, could there have been a connection of that kind here, that something big and powerful made this happen in this case?
Well, if it was something land-based, some type of predator, they're going to leave tracks.
They're going to leave a scent trail.
And that should be pretty easily followed by the people that are tracking the young boy or tracking the eventual way that they walked out or the canines that were brought in.
And you can't just dismiss that on its face.
Those have to be there if that is the case.
So the only other sort of conclusion you can come to, if we rule out the fact that the child couldn't have made this trip by itself, himself, is that some force, and now we're getting into the realms of paranormality, made this happen.
And it's not the first time that this sort of stuff has appeared in your books where somebody has been supposedly scooped up from one place and then apparently dropped or put in another, sometimes with quite a lot of missing time.
You know, I get hundreds and hundreds of emails every month from people who have read the books who say that they think they know what it is.
And I've had ideas thrown at me from reptoids to UFOs to aliens to government special forces that are practicing stealth training to it runs the gamut.
And after a while, I just kind of throw up my hands and say, well, where's the evidence for any of this?
And some of the people say, well, we just know that this is it.
Where's the evidence?
And I like to say I live in this world of facts and you show me any fact that shows that this is happening or that there's a history of these things in those areas.
I'll start listening.
But the reality is, is that none of this stuff is ever reported in the area that these disappearances occur in.
And the thing that you do that possibly hasn't been done before you, and the reason why so many of these cases have gone under the radar, is that you have put them all together and drawn commonalities from them.
Because up to now, people didn't realize that there were.
In fact, it seems to me that the only people who may have realized that there were commonalities in some of these things would be organizations like the National Park Service.
If anybody would know that there's a phenomenon at work here, they would know, you would think.
Yeah, you would think.
You know, I've been interviewed by other people in the UK, and I wrote a book called Missing 411, A Sobering Coincidence, and it has to do with young men falling into rivers, canals, creeks, lakes, and not being seen going in.
And usually they were at a bar or they were at some social setting, and many times they were walking home.
And these type of cases are not only in the U.S., but they're in the UK as well.
And there have been documentaries made about these cases in Manchester specifically.
And they follow the same sort of profile points that we have in the U.S. Namely, the person's never seen when they disappear, how they enter the water isn't understood, why they left when they did, the cause of death.
Many times these things are murky at best.
And there's usually this clustering effect in those areas of the disappearance.
And from what I understand, that has been the case in Manchester.
Yes.
Yeah, there's no doubt.
And there's probably other places in the UK as well that it's been going on, but Manchester has been a hotbed of it.
And I know that one person did a documentary about it.
And I know that the police have said there's no association.
And I just scratch my head when I read these things.
And I said, how can you not say that there's commonality between all these cases?
And as much CCTV there is in this little town or in this big town, nobody ever sees the person going in.
But the tragedy of so many of these cases, and it is a tragedy, is that the process of legality, the involvement of officialdom, search teams, people who have to report, you know, all of those things come to an end.
And then a report is written, it's filed somewhere, and it's forgotten.
The only people who don't forget are the families and the loved ones of the people who disappeared and maybe died in these bizarre circumstances.
And that is the great tragedy of all of this.
And it is the reason why, if there is some phenomenon at work here, or a number of phenomena, it hasn't been tied together before now.
I know.
And that's, to me, that's a little surprising.
I'm not the brightest bulb in the room, but I think that those profile points stand out at you once you just take a hard look at it.
And you're 100% right when you say nobody really cares at the end of the day except the families that have lost their loved ones.
And in the cases where the bodies are found, there is some closure, although the circumstances as to what really happened are vague at best.
And for the police not to be an advocate to try to determine what happened is a little disconcerting.
And yet the books throw up cases time and time again where coroners have their doubts, but they will reach a conclusion because they also have to move on.
Oh, exactly.
I think a lot of the coroners work in these small town environments and they want to solve the case and they want to put the community's needs at rest, concerns at rest.
And the truth is, is that many of these coroners are coming up with conclusions that don't make sense, namely that they can't determine the cause of death.
In the last several years, I've been contacted by two coroners confidentially who have said that they know something strange is happening.
They know that they should be able to find the cause of death, and they don't know what the cause of death can be.
And they're people of science.
You know, they work on a very methodical program to determine what caused someone's death.
And when you eliminate everything, what are you left with?
And what did that person die from?
And I've been saying this for the last several years.
And I hear from people, well, you know, the victim lost their soul, so they died.
Or Dave, they got scared to death.
I hear those kind of things a lot.
And I'm not sure that a coroner would really say, oh, that's the cause of death.
But I think it's interesting.
And I think it's super, super frustrating that the coroners see the same similarities in the type of deaths.
And then the return is, let's say it's not drowning, yet they're found in a canal.
They're found face down.
What caused their death?
Well, they didn't drown.
So how did they die?
Nobody knows.
And you get clusters of cases.
And one of the interesting things that came out of all of the books for me is that you get clusters of cases in particular areas, but they may be separated by decades.
The same sorts of instances happen again and again, but over time.
And this is the part that definitely excludes a serial killer.
I mean, we have cases back to 1755 in France that match the profile for what we're looking at.
But there's 59 geographical clusters just in North America.
And in those clusters, the largest cluster of any missing person group in the world is Yosemite National Park.
And the disappearances have occurred over decades, over decades, over decades.
And it's almost as though they're spread apart enough that they're not going to raise the concern of investigators working that area before they retire.
So you have a couple of those cases in 30 years, probably not going to raise anyone's big concern.
But if you have 10, that would raise it.
But so instead of putting 10 in one area, let's spread them out over 59 areas.
And people will probably never, ever compare them and look at them together and say, hey, there's a relationship.
And one of the shockers that comes out of the movie is that the National Park Service don't keep the kind of records of these things that you might expect.
Might expect and should expect.
The National Park Service has a large contingent of federally trained federal policemen.
And they were trained at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.
They have better training than most medium-sized police departments in the world.
They know the importance of keeping statistics and lists.
And one of the things I talk about on our website is that they have a list on their national park website of all the movies that were made at national parks throughout the United States.
They have lists, inventory lists of products that's at national parks.
They know the importance of keeping lists.
And I don't know of an investigative journalist I've ever talked to that believes the national park doesn't have a list.
They all believe they do, and they all believe they're not giving it up.
And if that were the case, and neither of us definitively knows that, why would that be so?
Would it be too embarrassing?
Well, that's the million-dollar question.
When they told me that they didn't have a list, and if I wanted a list, it would cost me $1.4 million.
I would say that myself and several others got on the bandwagon and just started to churn through data and archives to find as many cases as we could.
And I would say probably conservatively, maybe we've uncovered one quarter of all the missing people at national parks in the last hundred years.
So you think there's another 75%, another welter, thousands of cases that have not been recorded, that have not been talked about?
I definitely think that's possible.
They have a classification, missing and presumed dead.
And once you reach that classification, you're off the missing person list anywhere because you're dead.
And I think that's a fascinating way to kind of flush the toilet on a missing person's case so you don't have to deal with it anymore.
But so even if they did go back and they did churn the data, would they even come back and give us those cases that people are now presumed dead?
So there's another question.
And when you look at data, and let's say we're looking at 400 cases from national parks of missing people, well, that looks a lot different than 1,200 cases would give you.
And many other profile points would come out from that.
So what would come out from them giving us the data?
I don't know.
It would be interesting to glean it and see what happens and see if the locations with the greatest disappearances changes.
Being fair to them, I guess public body, they don't have vast amounts of staff.
They don't have endless amounts of time.
So the things that you and I might like to be able to collate these reports and check them back through history and location and all the rest of the things that you would want to do, perhaps that with the budgets there are is just not practical.
Maybe so.
So each year, our government hires internists that work for the government, that do Various tasks that are paid next to nothing or nothing.
And they're given tasks to do, such as this.
Now, in the national park system, every month, each national park or national monument sends in a monthly report with major incidents on it, missing persons, murders, things like that.
So all they have to do is to go back through these monthly reports and pull off those cases from the monthly reports on missing people and put it on an Excel spreadsheet on a laptop.
This isn't rocket science.
Now, me, I could do this on my own giving, if you gave me the monthly reports, I could do that easily in a few months.
Go back 100 years.
This isn't tough stuff.
I've had hosts, radio hosts, tell me, Dave, tell the National Park System, we'll buy them the laptop.
We'll give them the Excel spreadsheet.
They find the intern to do it, and away they go.
Perhaps some of it just goes down to history.
And in the past, this was a very difficult thing to do, very hard to collate.
A lot of records to keep today, of course.
Computers make everything easy, but maybe the mindset is the thing that has to change.
You know, Howard, anything's possible, I guess.
I would find that a list of missing persons is so fundamental to any police department in any city, in any region of the world, that the idea that the National Park Police doesn't have a list of missing people, it's beyond belief.
You haven't used the word.
I don't know whether you would use the word.
Do you think this is a cover-up?
I know...
I know George Knapp has called the National Park Service straight-out liars.
They have the list.
They're not giving it to us.
That's what he said.
And again, I don't know of a police department in the United States that their chief of police couldn't get a list of missing persons in their jurisdiction in an hour.
It's that basic of a function.
And in this day and age of political correctness, that if a family came in and asked the police chief, have there been other missing people in our neighborhood?
He would have that information in an hour.
And to say, well, have there been other missing people in Yosemite?
And for the Park Service to say, yeah, but we don't know how many, that's ludicrous.
But if you start stirring up these stories, and if you start saying there is some phenomenon going on within our national parks, one of the things that may happen as a knock-on, unintended, is that people will stop visiting them.
And that is the last thing, I guess, that the people who run the national parks want.
They want people to go there.
Of course they do.
Well, and I'm the first advocate for the National Park Service as far as attending.
I mean, it's never stopped me from going.
I will always go.
It's one of my favorite pastimes.
I think it's a national treasure.
And I don't think that it should stop people from attending, but I think you should be smart about it.
And if you go on a hike, you should hike together.
You should tell people where you're going, when you're coming back.
Carry a personal locator beacon.
Carry a whistle.
I mean, those are the basics.
And if we just did that, we'd probably be able to find 90% of the people that vanish.
Do people go missing who've got these things with them?
I mean, look, you've charted stories in the 50s.
You've charted stories from just a couple of years ago.
Do people go missing who have got those protections?
I have only found one person that has disappeared with a personal locator beacon.
It's the size of a cell phone, and it sends a message up to a satellite once you activate it that you're missing.
The satellite sends a message to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and then they call the jurisdiction with the GPS coordinates, and they can find you within 10 feet.
I have found only one case where that was activated, and they found the person deceased inside of a mountain range just outside of Yosemite under very, very, very unusual conditions.
That's only one.
I have never found a case, and I tell this to all the groups I talk to, where somebody was carrying a personal locator beacon and a firearm.
And I know the firearm laws are much different.
UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
Here in the U.S., we can carry sidearms and when we go in the wilderness.
And I've never met anybody carrying a gun and a personal locator beacon that disappeared and wasn't found.
So does that suggest to us that maybe these cases are mostly sad accidents?
Or does it suggest that if there was something making phenomena happen and making people disappear, that something is going to steer clear of people who are easily trackable?
Yeah, and I've heard that hundreds of times from readers saying, well, Dave, doesn't it seem to you that something with some tremendous insight or knowledge by just viewing you says something and says, well, why would I pick a tough victim?
Let's go pick an easy victim.
I've heard that many, many, many times.
Well, it's a mystery and it's a mystery that needs to be probed.
Let's get back to the movie, Dave.
And if you don't mind, you know, people are going to want to hear details of the cases.
We don't want to give away the contents of the movie, but we have to whet their appetite.
So take me to another case.
Well, there's four little boys that disappeared around Crater Lake National Park in Oregon.
And we picked one of those cases.
And we went there, got a hold of a news crew just out of Crater Lake that covered the story.
And we have some phenomenal news footage.
And then we interviewed a local sheriff who was asked to come in by the National Park Service a couple days after the boy disappeared.
And this sheriff stated that the National Park Service waited too long before they called for assistance.
And it was his belief that when you deal with small children, you pull out all the resources from minute one and you put everybody into the woods to find them.
Now, in this circumstance, the boy was with his dad and they were on the side of a road.
He kind of ran up a small embankment next to the creek, disappeared on the other side was never found.
And the wilderness into where he disappeared to is vast.
And right when he disappeared, the weather started to change and it started to snow and it snowed feet that next night.
Now, there's two trains of thought on that.
One train of thought is that, well, the snow would have caused the boy to definitely stop, not travel far and huddle up.
Thus, they should have found his body.
Now, if there's no snow in good weather, the boy could have walked for miles and miles and miles and righteously wouldn't be found.
Well, they didn't find him, and it did snow a lot.
And it's a perplexing situation because of the change in weather that we talk about in the books, the national park scenario.
And this is the unusual part about this national park is that the profile points is that in this area, four little boys have disappeared and never been found.
And how are those cases connected?
How are they separated through time?
There's a moderate separation in time between seven to 10 years on each case.
They're all under the age of 15.
They were all out in the woods with family members, friends, or religious events.
One was fishing next to a creek.
One was looking for a Christmas tree with his grandpa and dad.
Another one was just vacationing with his dad.
So they're all kind of very generic.
But the weird, weird thing is that they all happen within this general area of Crater Lake.
My first thought, but maybe I've watched too many movies, is serial killer.
Well, of course, and that's where the mind usually will go.
But in this case, we highlighted there's no walking paths.
There's no nothing into where this boy disappeared.
This wasn't a hiking trail.
He just stopped on the side of the road with his dad and hiked up this little mound next to the road and boom, into the wilderness.
You're not going to run into any serial killer out there.
And then several other of these cases also discount a serial killer theory because of the remote nature that these boys were on.
And part of the vetting process that we do on cases, Howard, is we ensure that number one, there's no suspect, there's no criminal intent, and there's no evidence of any criminal involvement by anybody.
And if there is, then we won't work the case.
If there's any mental illness, we won't work the case.
If there's any sign of predation, animal predation, bear attack, mountain lion attack, et cetera, we won't work the case.
And how do we know this?
We know this because search and rescue goes in and vets the same things so they know how to search.
Very perplexing set of cases.
And the one case that you focus on, particularly perplexing.
How is it possible for somebody to disappear without any trace in that way?
Well, it's sort of sad because when people hear about one case that we highlighted, they tend to think, well, this is obviously just, you know, whatever, a killer or a serial killer or whatever.
But once you read the books, you understand, wow, there's not one, there's not 10, there's not 20.
There's hundreds of these kind of cases out there.
And they're all pretty much the same.
And they're spread out over centuries and over thousands of geographical miles.
So it scludes human involvement.
But how could they disappear without parents and relatives hearing a thing, without them leaving any tracks, without them leaving any scent trail, without the child not screaming or yelling?
And then if the body is found later on, there's no grab marks from a giant bird.
There's no scratch marks from a cat or a bear.
There's no marks on the body.
And when you get into territory like that, when you get into topics like that, when you get into information and detail of that kind, you are inevitably, even if you don't want to be, drawn towards paranormality.
You start with Bigfoot and you end up probably at alien abduction, don't you?
You know, I don't talk about causes of this and I never have.
And the reason being, Howard, is that there's people out there that are going to suffer disappearances of family members in the next year.
And they're going to Google assistance and help and names, and my name's going to come up.
And if the first thing they see is that this guy made some comment about a cryptozoological creature that was the suspect, then if those people come from middle UK or middle America or middle Canada, they're going to think, I don't want anything to do with this idiot.
He's got some irrational thoughts.
I just want to find my relative.
And the issue is, is that I don't want to be tagged as somebody who has these irrational thoughts, even though if you knew anything about the topic, you'd know that it is a rational idea.
But the point being is that I want these people to be able to reach out for help and understand that I'm going to take a very rational approach to that disappearance.
They're very disturbing stories, a lot of them.
This story that we're talking about now is disturbing in itself.
Of course it is.
Do these things nag at you, Dave?
Oh, every day, every hour.
Absolutely.
I've got our cluster map sitting across the room from me right now.
I look at it every day, and I know that each one of those little ribbons represents a family that's distraught and in need of help.
I dream about it, and it's sad.
It's really sad.
And when you get to know families, it's different than if you're a homicide victim or you're some type of victim of a crime.
When there's no closure, when there's this open-ended wound, your mind tends to wander.
And even if you're the most rational people, I think the mind will take you into places that cause you personal torture thinking about what May have happened to your brother, your son, your daughter.
And it's those open-ended wounds that tag somebody forever that can ruin their life.
I know one family in particular very, very well.
And it's essentially ruined this man's life, the story of his missing son.
And there's another story involving a wife that lost her husband at a national park.
And the way the national park has treated them is disgusting at best.
Yet they admit that her husband disappeared in the wilderness.
They don't know what happened.
But it's a very sad scenario all the way around, Howard.
I suppose if I was a scientist, I would want to do some kind of, I don't even know whether you can tabulate or calculate something like this, but I would want to calculate the number of trips to national parks or the various national parks in the U.S. versus the random possibility of having an accident or going missing in those national parks, and then take a look at the figures for each of the national parks and see whether they are above random.
And from the cases that you've looked at, and you said there are 75% that haven't been reported, and it's just the tip of the iceberg that you've looked into.
Compare that with the statistics that you suggest and see how far above random this is.
Well, I can tell you that there are quite a few cases in these parks and wilderness zones, but compared to the number of people that attend, it's infinitesimally small.
And that's why I say you should visit the national parks.
Again, if it was even on the upslope of concerning, meaning the numbers, then I think that there would be worldwide awareness to it.
But they keep it small enough that it's not on anyone's radar.
And people will use those same numbers to rationalize it away.
But the problem with that is there's people that go to national parks and go to the visitor center, use the bathroom, have a soda, and leave.
There's people that go to the visitor center, go get their tent, and backpack 10 days into the wilderness and leave.
There's a lot of different scenarios on people visiting national parks.
And how you really look at that and how you could vet the data is so different because really they can only tell you how many people attend a national park.
Right.
Here's a thought, and it's maybe a silly thought, but then it's been a long day and it's the time for me to have silly thoughts.
But I'll throw it out there anyway.
If this was genuinely a random phenomenon, then it would happen in a random way.
It would happen equally over most areas.
Of course, you could factor in the terrain and that sort of stuff.
But generally, a random phenomenon tends to happen in a random way.
But from all the things that we've discussed in the conversations and from what seems to be coming out from this movie that you've done, that's not how it is.
Well, I think the Missing 411, our movie, explains circumstances that are prevalent in multiple cases, in multiple areas, and in multiple decades.
And I don't see how that could be random when you look at the cumulative data across North America and those 59 clusters.
And it's just not national parks, national parks, national forests, and open spaces.
Originally, we just started with national parks, and then somebody sent some cases in that obvious were matches that weren't in national parks.
So I think you have to keep an open mind as you move forward about what you're going to exclude location-wise and what you're going to include.
There was a man from Finland that sent me this great piece of work, and he took our names off of the various lists.
And he said, Dave, do you know that there's three cases where people disappeared in North America on the same date that three ships disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle and weren't found?
Now, I don't know what that means, but I think it's fascinating data.
Yeah, I don't know what kind of extrapolations you could make for that.
Look, there will be people who will email me right after this show and say, okay, we love Dave Politis.
He tells a great story.
But if you go looking for phenomena, if you go looking for ghosts, you'll find ghost stories.
Similarly, if you go looking for missing people, you're going to find missing people stories.
In other words, you're getting these stories because you're looking for them.
And the question is?
And the question is, maybe you're simply unearthing these things because they're there to be unearthed, and there is no great phenomenon here.
This is just happenstance.
And happenstance doesn't always happen in the most random of fashions, but it happens.
So one of the things we haven't discussed on this show, but prior shows, is how I got onto this.
And how I got onto it was a tip from two different National Park Rangers that lived and worked in different parks.
They were eventually transferred to the same park.
They found each other and they compared notes on missing people.
And they determined that people were going missing in areas that they shouldn't go missing in.
And there was a lot of publicity and a lot of events surrounding that first seven to 10 days that they went missing, and then there was nothing.
And when they tried to find information on the cases, they themselves had a difficult time finding anything.
And they thought that the cases were unusual.
They thought somebody should look into it.
And they thought that somebody should take the time to really research the missing case history in the national parks.
So that's how this all got started.
It wasn't me trying to find something.
It was a distinct lead.
And a couple years ago, I was at a national park with a friend, and we were standing outside of a room that was a ranger's headquarters For another side of the park, not the primary park headquarters, it's kind of a small satellite center.
And there were three older men sitting around the table and they were talking about interesting things, criminal activity in parks and homicides.
And I could tell these guys really knew a lot.
And I told my friend, I said, We're going to wait until this person comes out.
I want to talk to him.
So eventually he comes out and I stop him in the parking lot and I explain who I am and what I've done.
And I said, I don't know who you are, but you really know a lot about what's going on.
He says, well, Dave, I just retired as a special agent with the Park Service.
And what he was is he was a detective for the National Park Service Police.
And I explained to him how the Park Service Police have told me that they can't give me the list of missing people because they don't have it, how they want to charge me $1.4 million.
And I said, how could they explain this?
And he looks me in the eye and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he goes, Dave, it's a distinct lack of integrity.
And he said, I have been told to do things in my career that compromised my integrity.
And the National Park Service has a distinct lack of integrity.
And he wasn't speaking about the front side rangers that you meet in the parks.
Those are just great people.
He was talking about the administrators that make the decision-making inside the Park Service.
And this man was very passionate about his work, very proud of what he did, but was very angry at the way the National Park Service handled themselves.
And what would he like to have seen done?
What would he like to see?
I think the feeling I had from him was that there was no integrity.
I think there needed to be new controls.
There needed to be new blood.
If you go to our website, canammissing.com, you're going to see several areas in there about the National Park Service.
There's some National Park Service Rangers that have their own private website where they've tried to Freedom of Information Act request against their own agency and were thwarted and threatened.
And I think this is a pretty unusual section of our government that is pretty upfront about what they will and won't do.
And then they aren't afraid to say it.
So there needs to be some legislation here.
There needs to be some systems put in place.
And maybe we need to get to the stage where, just for simple safety's sake, and to make everybody feel good about going to a national park and doing what they have to do, maybe everybody should register that they're going before they go.
And maybe bearing in mind the electronic technology, it would create jobs, this.
Electronic technology is so sophisticated now.
Maybe you should be able to rent for a few dollars a tracking device, something that you take with you so everybody knows where you are.
I know that goes against the whole idea of being in the great outdoors and being off the grid and all the rest of it, but maybe it's got to come down to that.
I think that's a great idea.
I can't see the Park Service doing it because if they did, they'd have to acknowledge there's some issue that propagated that idea.
Right.
And that's the whole problem, isn't it?
Because that would mean coming clean about all of this material that has been happening for so long and is such a perplexing thing.
All right, let's get back to the movie.
Give me another case.
Well, there's a boy out of Denver, Colorado, and he was the son of an Air Force officer.
And he went to a Catholic summer camp up just on the outer reaches of Rocky Mountain National Park.
And the boy was fishing in a small creek at about 5.30 at night.
And one of the camp counselors came out to get him and said, hey, it's time for dinner.
And he said, okay.
And he picked up his box of worms and his fishing pole.
And he was behind the counselor walking in.
And the counselor said he turned around and the boy wasn't there.
So he went back to camp thinking that the boy somehow ran around him or something, got more camp counselors, went back out, they looked for the boy, they couldn't find him.
This started a 10-day search and they dropped 5,000 leaflets in the mountains telling the boy to come out.
You're okay, blah, blah, blah, thinking he was there.
Well, he never came out and he wasn't found.
And this happened right near the facility for this summer camp that was rather large.
And, you know, an eight-year-old, nine-year-old boy that hears it's dinner time.
He's probably hungry.
He's going to be coming down for dinner.
So nobody could believe he didn't make it down.
Well, there was no signs of mountain lion attack, bear attack.
There was nothing.
It was all completely barren.
The next summer, three camp counselors on their day off were hiking in an area above timberline.
So approaching 11,000 feet and about 2,500 feet above the camp, behind the camp on the side of this mountain.
And they found some small remains.
And this boy was nearly deaf and he wore a hearing aid.
And they found a hearing aid, some of his clothing, some of his bones, some other items in this creekbed that was eventually identified as belonging to him.
Now, nobody in their right mind ever could get that turned around and make an arduous climb up the side of this mountain and turn around.
And once you're at this 11,000 foot marker, turn around and see the camp behind you and think you're in the right area.
If he's following the counselor, he's going downhill to the camp.
If he's going to walk uphill, he turns around and has an arduous climb for hours going back the other way on the side of this mountain.
Now, the other part is, is that all of this area was covered extensively by National Park Service Rangers and volunteers while this boy was missing the year before, and they didn't find anything.
So the reality is, is that there's no way in the world that boy is climbing that direction, walking away from the camp.
It's impossible.
So what happened to him in the intervening time?
It's a great question.
And one of the reasons it's in the books.
I mean, there are no easy answers to these things.
And I think people want to quickly forget them.
They don't want to address them.
They don't want to think about it.
A lot of people have this escape that when they go to the mountains, it's like Disneyland to them.
I think you got to think that there are some dangers out there.
And you're a fool if you go out there and you don't keep your eyes on your child all the time.
And for this boy, I don't think the camp counselor did anything wrong.
I think something happened on that short journey back to camp and took him away somehow.
Do you think whatever may have taken him away was interested in because he was wearing a hearing aid, may have been interested in that technology?
Well, one of the things I talk about in many of the books is the disparity between the type of people that are taken.
Some have some type of congenital disorder, like this boy had, he was deaf.
Well, and the boy I talked about from Crater Lake, he had autism.
So a lot of times the boys that are taken have this type of medical issue that may not be obvious to anybody standing 50 feet away, but they did have it.
On the opposite side of that intellectual spectrum, there's people that disappear that are at the genius level.
There's a series of German physicists that have disappeared in the U.S. And people laugh.
Well, then I started to dig into it.
And there's other physicists that have disappeared in the U.S. just besides German physicists.
So it's strange.
So it's a phenomenon that is spread across every age, every culture, every class, people who have maybe disabilities, people who don't, people who are well prepared to be out in the great outdoors and people who are not as well prepared as they might be.
Not only from this movie, but from your books, that's the picture that we're getting.
I think that's fair.
Yeah.
You're happy with the movie, Dave?
Oh, I'm ecstatic with the movie.
I think that the ideas that we came up with with this was a good first step towards documenting this for a different perspective from the general public.
It's available on iTunes and Amazon.
The feedback has been generally very, very good.
I think if you're a parent, you're going to have a different perspective on it than if you're a single person with no kids.
I think single people may have a more difficult time relating to what we're going to put out there.
But I think that you will definitely get it once you watch it.
Did you find yourself under pressure?
And this is, look, this is not a comment on anyone.
It's just a fact.
But when you make something that is a media presentation, as opposed to you are a writer, you have your notes, you're collating the information that goes into a book.
But when you're doing a media presentation, there is always the pressure to make things look a little better, to emphasize certain things.
And you start not exactly bending the truth, but you start refracting it a little.
How did you overcome that?
You know, that was one thing that we had discussed at the very beginning.
And one of the reasons that I didn't want to turn this over to a production company, I wanted to have my hands on it.
And my son was the co-director on it.
And that's one of the things that we adamantly stood by is that you won't find anything in that movie that isn't 100% truthful.
And if we turn it over to a production company, they're going to twist and bend it.
Not here.
Everything you see, 100% fact.
All right, the movie's out there.
What do you want to happen to it now?
Do you want a TV company to pick up on it eventually?
Would you like it to be screened in movie theaters?
What do you want to become of it?
I think the movie idea is screening is off the table.
That just doesn't happen to documentaries.
But unfortunately, I think that the movie will get, it's already surpassed everyone's idea as far as how many people would view it.
The distribution company that picked it up for us said, you blew our numbers out of the water the first two weeks, and it's still carrying mass appeal, which is great.
So that's appreciated.
I suppose just having word of mouth is the best thing.
And, you know, the books have done well.
They'll continue to do well.
But the movie was something that we've never done before, and we just needed to see how it be accepted.
They are good old-fashioned mysteries.
And the hallmark of a mystery is, you know, something that's happened that is shocking and disturbing.
The chances are it's not going to happen to me, but there's no guarantee of that.
And that's why you've got to read the book or watch the documentary.
Well, and that's so true, Howard.
No family I've ever met thought that they would be the victim of this or that their loved one would disappear.
Nobody thinks that way.
And at the end of the day, and we've discussed this before on a couple of the shows that we've done about the books, your heart has to go out to the families and the people left behind.
Because as we said at the beginning of this, once the authorities have closed the book, once the coroner's written a report, you know, once the Park Service has closed whatever books it might have, that's it.
No one's going to remember, apart from the people who have to live with it every day.
That's exactly right.
And that's the heartbreaking part of the story.
Everyone.
What are you working on at the moment, Dave?
You know, I'm still doing a load of interviews.
I'm doing a couple a day on the movie, trying to work out the fundamentals on how to move the project forward.
There's several studios right now in Hollywood that are talking to us about doing a series about the stories.
So, you know, there's a lot of things on the table.
We'll kind of see where it takes us.
Difficulty with Hollywood, though, is I guess the screenwriters will want a conclusion to each of these stories.
And as we've said, in so many of these cases, there is no answer.
There's not even an answer that you can hint at.
Yeah, and if you think about the America's Most Wanted format, where they talked about people that were wanted, people who had disappeared, there was an open-ended format there that was successful.
And whether we go that route or we go some other route, I think that some people out there understand that with the mass appeal of the books, that they see a series as being viable.
Are you going to keep writing the books?
Oh, I don't have anything imminently that's going to come out, but in the back of my mind, I'm always accumulating stories.
That's just what a writer does.
Well, I wish you luck with it all, Dave.
And, you know, you are a very popular guest on this show, and I know I'm going to get a lot of email about you.
If people want to read about you, maybe this is the first time they've heard of you.
Where do they go?
They go to the Can Am Missing Project, like Canadian American CanAmMissing.com.
And there you can get the books, the movie.
You can get it in hardback form, get a DVD, Blu-ray.
It's non-regional.
So it works all over the world and will ship anywhere in the world.
And Howard, I got to tell you that of the people I get interviewed by, you're one of my favorite people and I appreciate it.
Well, no, listen, you're one of my favorite guests because you're very clear about it.
The kind of research you do is methodical.
And one of the reasons I like you personally, if you want my view of it, is that you don't jump to conclusions.
And if you're a police officer, you can't.
Yeah, no, you can't.
You will look foolish if you do, as I'm sure your dad's told you.
It goes with the territory and it goes with having that badge.
Dave, thank you very much.
You take care.
Thank you, Howard.
Dave Paul Idis, and I will put a link to him and his work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
Thank you very much for keeping in touch with this show.
If you have made a donation to it recently, thank you very, very much.
And if you would like to make a donation to the show to allow it to develop and continue, go to the website theunexplained.tv and you can follow the link and do it there.
More great guests in the pipeline in this summertime of 2017 up here in the UK.
So until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained and please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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