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Aug. 16, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:29
Edition 408 - David Paulides, Missing 411

The return of "Missing 411" researcher David Paulides on his new movie about people who mysteriously vanish in remote places - baffling police, searchers and their families...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your communications.
No shout-outs on this edition.
I want to get straight to the guest as soon as we possibly can.
More about him in just a moment here.
But please, if you get in touch with me, and do know that if you have an urgent query, I will always get back to you.
And I see all of the email, which is more than can be said for an awful lot of the mainstream media, but I know I've said that before.
When you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
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And if you've left a donation for the show recently, thank you very much indeed.
And if you haven't left a donation, please do consider doing that to allow this work, which is independent and free, to continue.
It is massively important, even more so at the moment, for reasons that I will explain in another edition of this show.
But just to do with some stuff that's been going on lately with me, I won't bore and trouble you with that right at the moment.
Thank you very much to Adam from Creative Hotspot as ever for his work on this show.
Very much appreciated.
Adam's at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
This edition is being done with a different microphone.
It's another low-cost microphone that I think might potentially be very good.
If you're getting into podcasting or you do gaming or anything like that online, then this microphone is designed for that.
It's made by Blue.
It's called the Ember.
And you tell me what you think about it.
I think it's got a very warm sound to it.
I'm working out whether it works for me.
It sounds, in my ears, it sounds okay.
I've only had one problem with this.
I think it was some kind of production issue with this particular mic that I've got.
The grille that contains the capsule, the element of the microphone, you know, the mesh grille at the end of it, the glue on it failed for no reason.
I mean, it's only ever used sparingly and gently, but the glue failed and the grille came off.
So I've had to duct tape it back on, which I don't think affects the sound of it at all.
But that was one thing that let me down a little bit about this microphone.
But apart from that, I think it's a good sounding microphone.
But your thoughts about it, especially if you're somebody who's into podcasting or broadcasting or you want to get into those things, please let me know.
Just interested to know.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv and send me some feedback from there.
Okay, the guest on this edition of the show, I'm very pleased to welcome back somebody who is one of my most requested guests, along with people like Paul Sinclair.
David Paul Idis, former American police officer, now involved very largely for a number of years in investigating the deeply troubling cases of missing people, and in particular clusters of missing people, people who go missing in bizarre and unexplained circumstances, and sometimes more than one or two people go missing in the same sort of area and within the same span of time.
David's been drawing the threads together of this in his books, The Missing 411 series.
He's investigated 1,200 cases so far, 59 different clusters.
And he's involved in a new project, and I think it's enormously impressive.
It's a documentary that we'll be talking about on this edition of the show that Dava's been involved in producing.
It's his work.
It's beautifully put together.
I've been watching it today.
And it outlines some of these mysteries in a way that maybe the books can't, because you can hear the witnesses speak.
You can hear the law enforcement officers say, I just don't understand this.
You can hear relatives, wives of missing people, and that sort of thing.
And colleagues of missing people talk about how bizarre the circumstances of the disappearance were.
All of the people we'll be talking about here are what they call in America outdoorsmen, outdoors people, used to being in the outdoors, hunters, so people who know the terrain and yet they go missing in the most bizarre circumstances, sometimes apparently ignoring the safety information that they would have been brought up with and trained on for decades and decades.
You will hear these stories.
There are one or two other weird stories in here too, but the documentary definitely to be recommended.
Thank you for your emails.
Like I said, please email me.
Go to theunexplained.tv map.
That's my website and follow the link from there and I will get to see your email.
It gives me a nice idea of who's listening and what you think of the shows.
You know, it's a very interactive thing.
We are a kind of family here, I think.
All right, let's cross to the United States now to Dave Paulidis and his latest documentary project about mainly missing people and some very, very bizarre mysteries.
Dave, thank you very much for coming back on my show.
You know, Howard, it's always my pleasure to be on your shows and I appreciate the opportunity.
Thank you.
Well, you know, of all the guests that I've had on here, and as you know, I've had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of guests over the years that I've been doing the show on radio and online, you are probably the most requested guest.
The requests for you, even if you haven't been on the show for a year or more, which is the case now, those requests will be coming in every week.
Somebody will say, and by the way, Howard, when's Dave Paul I'm coming back on?
So there's something about you and your research that definitely chimes with people.
Well, I'm humbled by that, and I do appreciate the interest by people out there.
And it's actually that interest that has helped us along in the last eight, nine years develop more leads on missing people and, you know, kind of till through the different and various hypothesis that come up.
So I do appreciate the interest by people.
Well, you've definitely got that.
Just for people who are new to you, and I think most people who have found this know what they're looking for, but your background is police.
As my father was a police officer, you were a police officer.
You're used to investigations.
But what is it about the category of missing people that particularly interested you?
I guess it was the initial rebuff by our National Park System in the United States and our National Park Police when I sent a Freedom of Information Request Act To them asking for a list of missing people in our national parks, which national parks and monuments are patrolled by the same national park police.
It's about 280 locations.
And they came back, and their attorney said, asking me why I wanted the information.
An odd response, to say the least.
And when I said I was just doing research, they came back and said, no, we don't have any lists of missing people.
And initially, I thought that was something in the semantics of the way I made the request.
I submitted it again.
They came back and said the same thing.
And I've had a series of investigative reporters come back and say, Dave, they are absolutely lying.
There's no way they don't have a list of missing people in their system.
And now in eight years and eight books that I've written about this, I've written about the biggest cluster of missing people in the world that fit our profile.
That's Yosemite National Park.
And just this last year, the National Park System came out with a list of 50 people missing in Yosemite.
And it's ironic because it's 50 people I've written about.
So now that I've exposed it, they're willing to talk about it.
And that is the 50 people that we know about.
Exactly.
Right.
You know, there may well be other cases.
Now, in your career doing this, you have chronicled an astonishing 1,000, very nearly 1,200 cases and 59 clusters of cases.
One of the important things that comes out of your work is the notion that cases seem to be, even if this seems unlikely, if you look at the evidence, there are many places like Yosemite where there are clusters of similar kinds of cases.
Exactly.
And I think from the person who's casually listening and really doesn't know the topic, they're going to say, well, Yosemite is a big park.
They got a lot of backcountry.
People just disappear.
That's a natural occurrence.
Except that we go through a vetting process and we say, okay, if there's any evidence of animal predation, any mental illness, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, then we vet the case out and it's not included.
These are the most unexplained of the unexplained that fit our profile.
And that profile, the number one issue being they bring in canines or tracking dogs and they can't find a scent.
They can't pick up a scent.
They bring in professional trackers.
They can't track from the scene.
Many times there's a weather event in addition to this.
There's a list of profile points in my books that these cases follow.
And in Yosemite specifically, there's a lot of people missing in areas where they shouldn't be missing, meaning in the valley floor, on main trails, places you would not get lost and you would not get disoriented.
Yep.
And it follows no rational cost.
But as you say, there are these common factors that link together in many of the cases, in the clusters.
And you talk about people who may have some kind of slight, nothing that would seriously hinder them, but slight disability, maybe a sight impediment or something like that, slightly.
As you say, the canines can't detect a scent.
There is something that I'd forgotten about when you talked about this before.
A weather incident that may happen around the time.
Victims found in areas that the searchers have searched before.
That comes up all the time in your work, in all the books.
And now in this movie, the documentary.
Unknown cause of death.
Frequently the coroner is baffled.
The not wearing of shoes.
These people discard their shoes.
And it's not always a case of these people are suffering from hypothermia.
And that's when people do discard their clothing.
Sometimes there is no evidence of hypothermia at that stage.
And there can be, as you have said, in a cluster, you talked about 50 in Yosemite, but there can be up to 80 people who fit this kind of profile in certain clusters.
Oh, absolutely.
And again, that point being is that when people are missing clothing, a lot of times if it's a small child, the parents will say, well, they didn't take their clothing off because the child couldn't take their clothes off.
They couldn't dress themselves.
Other times, if there's shoes missing, they're in very close proximity to where they were last seen.
So there was no chance for hypothermia to set in.
In the movie incident, there's a case where somebody removes their shoes and walks for miles and miles and miles and then does rational things that you would never expect somebody with hypothermia to do that baffles the searchers.
So there's a lot going on with that.
Okay, we'll pick through some of the cases, but we have to say to people, and you know that I've said to you before we started recording, I think this is an absolutely brilliant production and it adds a dimension to it that we haven't seen before.
The visuals are great.
The accounts of people related to and close to the victims, the missing people, are very moving at times.
And the accounts of law enforcement officers and others directly connected with searches are absolutely compelling.
So all we can do here is give an outline of some of the cases.
So let's go through it now.
And they're all recent.
This is the one thing.
We're not talking about stuff that's deeply buried in history.
The first one is a recent case.
Somebody who's quite elderly, but fit, by and large, I think has a small sight impediment that doesn't really stop him doing anything and certainly doesn't stop him.
One thing we have to say is that all of these cases are outdoors people, hunters, people who are used to the great outdoors.
That's the commonality in all of these cases.
But this first case, it's northeastern New York, and it was a bunch of people, a story we've heard before, who go out hunting.
The person that we're talking about, I think, is, is he 80 or around 80 years of age?
82.
All right.
But he's in fantastic form.
And the important point to note here is that he knows the territory like the back of his hand.
And he's a person who is so good at what he does that he's taught other people to track and to hunt in that area.
So this man is elderly.
He went out hunting with a group of friends and his son.
And this is a group that owns a hunting camp.
And so they're used to hunting together.
And the way they hunt is there's three or four older men, say in their 70s or 80s, That sit anywhere from 50 to say 100 feet to 200 feet apart in a line.
And they walk off a road, they sit down, and the boys, the younger boys, go up to a hillside and they'll push the deer down towards the older men.
And on this day, the guys all parked right next to this lake.
They walked out on the road.
They lined up.
They said, okay, we'll step in about 50 feet.
They stepped in.
They sat down.
Everybody had a walkie-talkie.
Everybody could talk to each other.
And the young guys went up and they started pushing deer down.
Well, after about two or three hours, they came back around and they met at the vehicles in an agreed upon time.
And this older man who taught hunter safety classes for 40 years, knew hunter safety like nobody's business, didn't show up.
So the guys went out to his site, didn't find him.
They started to search more, couldn't find any evidence of him being there.
So a couple of the hunters went down, they got the forest rangers, then they got law enforcement, and pretty soon a massive, massive search is going on.
And we were able to interview some of the searchers and one of the coordinators of the search, a law enforcement deputy sheriff county of a county up there.
And probably the interesting part to me on this one that is fascinating is that the county supervising sheriff that was up there that brought his SWAT team up there to search said that they didn't see any animals at all.
No squirrels, no bears, no deers.
And I asked him in the interview, I go, is that odd?
He goes, very.
And then the other part that was odd was that the second day of the search, two FBI agents show up at the scene and they say, yeah, we're here to monitor the case.
Now, this is interesting because as you make the point from the start of the documentary, the movie, you say from the very start, it is not common for the FBI to involve themselves in missing persons' cases.
So in order for them to have involved themselves in this missing case, there had to be some other dimension in which they were interested.
So the oddity to this is that the FBI has certain protocol.
I've worked with agents when I was in law enforcement.
They are the best in law enforcement and documentation.
They are bar none the best.
And what they do is they'll write up their reports and they'll send it to their profiling unit in Virginia.
And then the profiling unit will look for similar cases.
Now, this location where the center disappeared is way out in the middle of nowhere.
It's not anywhere near New York City.
It's hundreds of miles away.
And why would two FBI agents show up in the middle of nowhere on an elderly missing person where there is no evidence of any crime?
And the FBI protocol says that they don't search for missing people.
There's only an exclusion for very young children that they can become involved.
So I asked the sheriff, I go, did you request the FBI?
No.
Do you know who requested the FBI?
No.
Do you know why they were there?
And he thought, well, maybe they were bringing in some equipment, but I didn't see it used.
So it's a very interesting topic because I've written in other books that this exact scenario happens on cases involving people where there's this mystery about it.
Did you get any idea of what sorts of questions?
Because this would give an indication as to why they weren't there.
What sort of questions were they asking?
They weren't.
They were just watching, monitoring.
They were just monitoring.
And I talked to the victim's wife about it, and I said, well, what did the agents tell you?
And she said, not a lot.
They said that it's a mystery, what happened to my husband, but it wasn't something that was a standard disappearance and that my husband was going to be entered in the National Crime Institute of Missing Persons Directory, but they had no idea what happened.
And they did, as we see documented in the film, I mean, it's very well put together, and you do see the detail, and you get a sense in a way that the books are great.
Everybody loves the Missing 411 books, but to actually see a recreation and see footage of the actual searches gives you an idea like nothing else can.
And as you say, they used something called bump lines.
In other words, they drew out, it was almost like mowing a lawn.
They drew out segments and quadrants of the search area to make absolutely sure that they covered the entire, you know, the entire distance.
The entire area was covered inch by inch.
Nothing was missed.
But as you say, they didn't come across any wildlife, which is bizarre.
But more importantly, they didn't come across any sign of this missing man.
And all of the searchers made the same statement that as somebody gets tired when they're old or even people, young people, as you're hiking away and you're lost, you'll start dropping things because you're tired.
And they expected to find his rifle, maybe a backpack, maybe a coat, things that animals would not carry away.
And in this incident, as in every incident that we monitor and work, it fit the profile.
There was no evidence of animal predation.
This individual had no mental illness.
He was extremely happy, reasonably good health.
Even if he would have died out there, cadaver dogs brought in later would have picked up his scent.
There would have been some sign, but as somebody says in the movie, there was no sign of him, not even a candy wrapper.
Right.
Right.
He did have a few pieces of candy that he would munch on while he was waiting.
And his wife said, oh, no, he was real fastidious.
He would never drop a candy wrapper.
He'd never drop anything in the woods.
And even still, we never found anything.
Now, every once in a while, when you're sitting around with witnesses and you're talking, you kind of fall into something.
And that's exactly what happened here is I was interviewing one Of his friends that was sitting maybe 150 feet away, and I asked him, Did anything unusual?
Did you guys hear anything strange?
Anything odd happen?
And this older man, he probably late 70s, early 80s, he's scratching his chin.
He goes, Yeah, I heard something weird.
And I said, Well, what do you mean?
And he goes, Well, I've been hunting for almost 50 years.
I've never heard this sound.
And I keep going at him.
What do you mean?
And he goes, It's like, it's like nothing you can imagine in the woods.
And he finally said that it was like a loud clank or a loud clap.
And his son, who assisted on the search, said, yeah, it's bothered my dad that he heard this.
And it was while the hunters were sitting down waiting for the deer to get pushed that this older man said, kind of in front of them, maybe a quarter mile or a couple hundred yards away, he wasn't sure.
He heard this loud sound like he'd never heard before.
I think it was likened at one point, if this is the right case, to the sound of a big trap shutting.
Yeah, that's it.
And he said, no, I've never heard that in the woods.
I've never heard that in the forest.
And I asked him, I said, did you tell the searchers and the law enforcement people?
I said, yeah.
But he goes, I don't think anyone took it seriously.
And I'm not putting any credence that that was related to the search, but it's quite a coincidence that this man has been hunting for 50 years, never heard this before.
And on the day his friend disappears, he hears this.
So how was it all concluded?
I mean, we see the man's wife in the documentary, and we get a sense of the anguish that the family feel about this.
It's terribly sad.
Your heart bleeds for these people and to see them on screen makes it even more poignant.
But, you know, how has it all been left for them?
Will there be any ongoing effort to get any clues as to what happened?
Or as far as the authorities are concerned, that's it.
No, that's the heartbreak of this, Howard, is that in 99% of the cases I write about, when the initial search is over, maybe occasionally they'll go out and they'll do something training related to search and rescue out there.
And as a side note, they'll kind of be looking.
But in reality, nobody's looking.
Nobody's doing anything.
He's considered deceased, missing, and doubtfully they'll ever find him.
Terribly sad.
But what makes this even more mysterious is that around about the same time, it was Thanksgiving Day 2015, another person vanished in similar circumstances.
That is a very, very unusual set of circumstances that happened in this incident.
About 30 miles away, a man owned kind of a ranch farm in New York.
There was a small river behind his location, and his wife was gone for the day doing something.
And he was out just piddling around doing things at his ranch, at his farm, and he completely vanished.
And they pulled resources off of one case to come down and search for this man.
Again, an older, elderly man in good shape.
He was actually a city councilman for the local city he was in.
He probably had maybe 10 or 15 acres.
They searched that thing upside down and sideways.
He's never been found either.
It's very odd.
And as somebody who's investigated these things, this is not a fair question, right?
Do you have any thoughts yourself as to how these people may have met their disappearance?
Your question is so common.
And some people take it as me being evasive or wanting to keep the mystery going, but I challenge anybody out there.
I've had thousands and thousands of people read all eight books.
And my email address is at the back of every book.
And I encourage people to write to me with their thoughts and ideas.
And Howard, the truth is I have never had anyone read all eight books and come up with a cogent explanation of what's happening to these people ever.
And so I may be a real good investigator in accumulating facts and presenting them, but to come across all of the ideas, I mean, there's probably 30, 40 different hypotheses I've heard over the years, you know, everywhere, everything you can imagine, crypto topics, space aliens, everything you can imagine.
But the one thing that it's not is I don't believe it's a human-to-human criminal issue because there's no tracks, there's no scent trail, there's no box.
Humans would normally leave a clue.
I mean, one of the most poignant points in the entire movie, and just for a second, skipping forward in this, you talk to in one of the cases, a guy who is well experienced in tracking, well experienced in the outdoors.
You'll know the guy I'm speaking about because you ask him, what do you think could have happened here?
He throws his hands up and he says, extraterrestrials.
I don't know.
And, you know, he's just, he's not suggesting extraterrestrials because he thinks it might be.
He's saying that because he has absolutely zero idea of what could have happened.
Exactly.
I think that's a fairly common response from some people.
In one of my books, kind of an ending point, an epilogue, I wrote down statements from search and rescue people about what their thoughts were.
And that's a pretty common response because there's absolutely no evidence what happened to these people.
They have competent people saying family members, friends, best friends, work associates, that they are at that location and everyone puts them at that location.
So there's no question they were there, but where did they go and how did they leave?
I don't think I've asked you this question before, and maybe it's a question that doesn't get asked much, but it's important.
How did the search and rescue professionals, and they are professionals, and there have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds involved in the cases that you've looked at, how do they live with these mysteries?
You know, and that's something I talk about all the time.
You brought up the point that a lot of times the victims are found in an area that has been previously searched.
And I talk about this in my book and I say, hey, number one, this is not an indictment of the search and rescue people because I personally Don't think that those victims were there when it was searched.
99% of the search and rescue people in North America are volunteers.
They're people like you and me who go out on the weekend and train and get special search and rescue certifications.
And then they volunteer their time to look for these individuals.
And they're just like you and me.
I mean, they have jobs, they have responsibilities, they have families.
And the issue is, is that after a week of searching, let's say, these people got to get back to work.
They got to get back to their families.
And so it's understood.
But the amount of strife, the amount of tension, the amount of stress, anxiety that these searchers have is, they take it as a personal failure.
Well, psychologically, the greatest problem is, and if you're in the police, you know, my father, if he was still alive, could have told you this.
It's unfinished business.
It's the case that you never got an answer to.
It's the fate of somebody that you're never going to know.
Those are the things that get you.
So I sympathize with those people.
A little further on in the movie, you talk about the Santa Fe skipping across the country, the Santa Fe cluster.
And there are three people involved in this.
Perhaps the most poignant, although they're all poignant, is the first one.
75-year-old woman.
It's July 2014.
She's with her husband.
They went out looking for mushrooms, which was something that they did in this area.
People did.
They hiked out into the wilderness, nothing unusual for them.
They were used to doing that.
It was hot.
There were thunderstorms.
Here's a weather event.
The person, the 75-year-old woman, went missing.
Searchers scoured the mountain and eventually found was a woman in a creek, naked with no shoes, something we've heard so many times with missing people before, her face in the creek.
She was in a fetal position, no sign of hypothermia there, so it wasn't a reaction to that.
And the people that you spoke to about this said that this particular case in this Santa Fe cluster made no sense.
That was the quote.
It made no sense.
And I have written about other mushroom pickers that have disappeared under similar bizarre circumstances and were never found.
Now, in this incident, she was with her husband, who was a physician.
She was in absolutely fantastic physical condition.
She was looking for some mushrooms.
They got separated.
Again, that point of separation, it's one of the profile points I talk about pretty regularly.
It's as though nothing happens when you're in a group or you're with somebody.
But once you separate and you're out of view, things start to happen.
And they happen quickly.
It's a total disconnect.
It is.
And in this incident, that area around Santa Fe has had several disappearances that are bizarre.
And it was the first time I was there when we were filming and we were there for a week.
And after roaming around those woods a little bit, they are pretty thick and they are pretty deep.
But the strangeness of this case is that we got a copy of the coroner's report from the state of New Mexico, and it doesn't even jive with the facts of the case and her being in the creek completely with her face in the creek.
I mean, there's all these circumstances that line up.
And a lot of times these medical professionals are scratching for something to explain what happened when in reality, there's no good explanation.
And was there, and so often there isn't, any sign of, you know, as we call it here, foul play, but not involving a human being, perhaps involving an animal or a creature that might have mauled her?
I don't think there was in this instance, but refresh my memory.
So none of the cases I'll ever present in a book or in a movie has there any evidence of animal predation.
I hear from people, well, you know, maybe a mountain lion attacked this person and killed them and dragged them away and blah, blah, blah.
So I always use the statistic that in the last hundred years, there have been 16 fatal mountain lion attacks in North America.
That's it.
That is not a lot.
Well, when you compare it with, I don't know how it stacks up against these cases.
Are there more missing cases of the kind that you talk about?
I suspect there are.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Times 3 miles.
Yep.
One of the other cases in Santa Fe or around Santa Fe in this cluster is another disturbing one here.
I mean, they're all disturbing in their own way.
But this was a guy who was in a car with his father and a friend.
A deer disappeared.
The person we're talking about vanished into fog and heavy rain that hit the area quickly.
There's another weather event.
There was a seven-day search after he went missing.
Canines and trackers, again, can't find any sign of him.
Five months later, an off-duty policeman finds a body.
There are skull injuries, there are broken ribs, and he was found nine miles from that point of separation.
It is presumed, and that's all they can do, that he drowned and there were no other circumstances beyond that involved in this.
But this is not only a disturbing case, which they all are, but it's also very, very mysterious, isn't it?
Because there is a weather event.
The guy almost, you can almost see it as a movie scene.
The guy disappears into this weather event and is never seen again, alive.
And the way it evolved, it was even stranger than that.
He was with his dad and another individual in their Jeep and they were driving a dirt road.
And they see a deer crossing in front of them, pretty normal.
He jumps out to get out and shoot the deer.
And his dad said, as he got out and stepped off the road, the fog came over the hill, engulfed him.
They didn't see him.
They didn't hear anything.
And he disappeared.
And there were reports of possibly this person being seen roaming the area in the days afterwards.
There was no confirmation of it.
But then to find him in a body of water in the river with injuries like this, the coroner stated, well, maybe he fell in and hurt himself.
But that's really questionable.
And how did he get that distance is bizarre?
And how could there have been a gap of five months?
Well, you're singing to the choir.
I don't know.
You know, with no sign whatsoever, then five months elapses, and an off-duty policeman in the area finds a body with the injuries that were described by the coroner, nine miles from the point of separation, which, when you're on foot, is a big distance, isn't it?
Nine miles is not just easy in the car, but not when you're on foot and not when you're in difficult terrain.
Well, you got to remember that nine miles in the wilderness is not nine straight air miles.
That's probably triple the distance that you actually walked.
And in the first movie we made, which was just titled Missing 411, we used survivor man Les Stroud to try to replicate a path that a two-year or a four-year-old child made in Oregon one time.
He supposedly traveled 12 miles in nine hours and disappeared at four in the afternoon.
And Les said, well, maybe I can do it.
And he tried to do it.
And in the middle of the trip, in the middle of the night, he stopped the film crew and said, hey, I can't do this.
This is insane.
I don't know how this little boy did it, but I can't do it.
So traveling through the wilderness, he then said, people don't walk straight distances in the wilderness.
You kind of walk wherever the easiest terrain is.
And sometimes you have to walk around things.
But he goes, you can easily triple that distance.
And, you know, the actual exhaustion factor, bearing in mind, if you're missing, if you're stressed, you know, if you haven't eaten, whatever, you do, you know, you do 27 miles effectively and you're going to be tired.
Well, tired, dehydrated.
I mean, it runs the gamut.
When you're like that, you don't sleep good in the woods during the nights that you're missing.
So that's another factor.
But the injuries that were found on this body that was discovered after five months, there was no clue as to what might have caused those other than the thought that he might have had a fall.
And again, I think that's just mere conjecture on the part of the coroner.
They never really know.
I have a lot of cases where there isn't any evidence of how a person got to a specific location.
And a lot of readers have told me it looks like they were dropped from above.
And sometimes their injuries are consistent with a, you know, falling or falling off a cliff or something like this.
So it kind of all fits in sometimes.
There is a suggestion, and there has been in the books, of something perhaps bigger than, you know, I don't know, Bigfoot or some kind of creature or a bear or something like that, but of actually a force that actually plucks people out of wherever they are in a disoriented state.
And then at some later stage, when the area has been searched, simply plops them back down again.
You know, it's disturbing beyond bizarre, I think.
You talk about some cases in the Crazy Mountains.
Now, I have to say, I've never heard about the Crazy Mountains, but in the movie you explain, it's an island of mountains.
It's part of the Rockies or almost very close to the Rockies.
38-year-old guy, so, you know, young guy.
It's September 2014.
This is not a big area.
But this area's got a bit of a backstory because it's believed to have been cursed by Native Americans who had their land taken away.
And, you know, that plays into this story in a very mysterious and spooky way.
This, to me, on the movie, looks like a milder kind of environment.
There are no signs of bears.
There may be wolves there.
This guy is one of three people.
They have two horses and a mule.
They have an incident when they start this trek.
The mule goes mad, throwing away some of the kit or scattering around some of their kit.
So that's one thing that unnerves them a bit.
But they get through the area.
They have a plan to be there for a week.
The guy in question, the 38-year-old, knows this area, like all of these people we're talking about, like the back of his hand.
He goes away to go to what they call the cache, which I think is a store of stuff.
But you can explain that to me in a second.
His friends call him on the walkie-talkie.
This walkie-talkie is equipped with a GPS reading system, so they know where he is.
The walkie-talkie readout shows that he's in a place he shouldn't have been.
He seems disoriented from what they can tell.
The next day they realize he's missing.
Then there's a snowstorm.
I mean, how many weird elements are in there?
I haven't told this as well as you do in the movie, though.
Yeah, you did a good job there, Howard.
It is as bizarre as it sounds.
This is another case where there's communications.
Everybody has a communication device.
He knows this area because he's gone in here dozens of times to scout areas for hunting, to understand an area, to put cash in.
And what that means is that maybe they'll put a backpack into an area or a bearproof container into an area for emergency supplies.
So it's a little bit like the people who climb Everest.
They leave, it's a kind of base camp in a way.
Yeah, a little bit.
And yeah, when they were coming in, their mule went nuts and took off and he lost a lot of supplies, but he was hunting with two other people, so it wasn't a big deal.
But his behavior is odd to say the least, because he ends up near a stream.
And everybody knows a stream runs downhill.
And if you eventually follow any stream, you're going to find assistance.
And Aaron, this hunter, knew this area super well.
So when he stopped communicating, that was odd.
And his friends eventually didn't hear from him, but they knew he was such a great outdoorsman.
They didn't really worry.
And they eventually had to leave the wilderness, call for search and rescue.
It was in an area where two counties come together.
So there were two counties searching.
And one of the 25-year search and rescue supervisors for the sheriff's office, we interviewed him extensively.
And he said, yeah, we went up the trail.
There was from the time he disappeared to the time we got in there, two feet of snow had occurred.
We saw no tracks leaving the area.
So we came up through virgin snow.
One of our searchers found two boots sitting next to a little tiny fire pit, and they were his.
And the boots, from the way it's described in the movie, the boots are placed carefully side by side.
They're not just discarded.
Exactly.
And they also found a water bladder for a backpack.
And they were puzzled.
And they thought, okay, this guy's got really bad hypothermia.
Let's search, you know, within 400 yards.
We're going to find his body.
Well, they searched and searched and searched and didn't find anything.
And they were just beyond themselves because they knew that nobody walked out the way they just came because there were no tracks.
They knew that he wasn't going to hike the other way because that would have been higher in elevation and more snow.
And he was an outdoors man and they weren't finding his backpack that he was carrying that had a gun in it and supplies and more things.
But didn't he remove some straps from the backpack, some straps that hold you around the middle, because it was speculated that those particular straps, the material may have had some insulation in them.
You know, maybe he might have tried to use that for warmth, but it's not clear why at that stage he'd have wanted to do that.
And he discarded his boots.
Yeah, when you're wearing a heavy backpack, the hip straps where most of the weight rests on your hips when you're carrying a backpack, he, for some reason, cut those off his backpack.
And the only thing that searchers could come up with is that there was just enough room that you could kind of slip your hands inside there to keep them warm.
But in talking to the searchers, they also said, well, the guy also had pants on, so he would have had his hands inside of his pants if he was walking.
So there really wasn't a good answer why those were cut off his backpack.
But after a lengthy, lengthy search, they give up.
Each county sheriff goes back to their county.
They can't find the guy.
But later they come across his, and even weirder in this story, and this is one of the most weird things in the movie.
They do find his backpack, left leaning as if somebody left it there against a tree.
There's food in it still.
His gun is there.
And there's a thermos cup and an open energy drink in a place where you wouldn't probably have stopped and set down your load.
So in the area where the searchers were coming up to him on the trail, where they found the boots, if you walk down that trail about six miles, you come to this spot where a rancher found these items.
And they were up from the trail, probably 150, 200 feet on this knoll.
And from that knoll, you could see this beautiful ranch house.
You could see the road.
You could see ranch buildings.
And the rancher and the rancher's father-in-law were up there mending fences for the cattle.
And the father-in-law sees this backpack and goes to his son.
He says, hey, I found a really nice backpack leaning against this tree.
What's going on?
Is there somebody missing around here?
And the rancher goes, yeah, there was.
And so they go through the backpack and they find some ID that it's the missing hunter.
They found his gun fully loaded in the pack.
They found energy bars and et cetera.
And they search around.
And just like you said, there's this thermos with this cup sitting on top of a rock.
But this was all near to buildings where there may have been people who would have seen him if he'd walked towards them.
It was also not far from a road.
So why would you, if he had stopped there and those things hadn't just been left there, why would anybody who knows the outdoors have stayed there for any length of time?
I don't think anybody would.
I think it's, I mean, the reaction from the searcher and the sheriff are just absolutely bizarre.
And the rancher, he was beside himself that somebody would stay up there and not come down and ask for help.
But there was no conclusion to this until a year later when they did find a skull.
And again, the way that it was discovered, that kind of looked like it had been put there.
It was a strange scenario.
Not real close to this site, but within probably a half a mile.
There's a dude ranch not far from this other ranch, and the people were riding along, and the person stops and says, hey, that looks like a human skull.
And it was.
So they called the sheriff back.
Now, this is the third time the sheriff comes back, and they find a skull, and they find some remnants of bones that are slightly buried under the dirt.
They couldn't tell if it was weather or what it was, but nobody was really trying to hide this.
And then they gave that to a forensic examiner.
They never could determine the cause of death.
They never found, I asked the sheriff, I said, well, did you find any footwear or any clothing?
He goes, no, we never found any feet.
No feet.
Yes, I forgot about that.
That was a bizarre aspect.
Yeah.
And then we asked him if there was any broken bones.
You know, maybe the guy broke his leg or something.
No, no broken bones.
And I said, so we had this discussion about what makes sense about this.
Nothing made sense to this 25-year search and rescue commander and head of the sheriff's department out there.
It was just a bizarre case.
And I think they found his cell phone, but I don't think there was anything on the cell phone that could have helped, sadly.
Yeah, they gave it to a computer technician and they tried to figure out, you know, if it had anything.
Nope.
Didn't have anything on it.
So another bizarre case.
That's Montana.
You have a case or series of cases in California, Sonora, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains.
Strange sense of mystery in a place called Donnell Vista, or is it Donnell?
I think it's Donnell Vista.
It's a beautiful looking place.
It's etched into the mountains.
It looks like a balcony of rock with a river Way, way, way down below.
If you fall from there, then you're gone.
But there will be signs of your fall.
2016, a fisherman, his vehicle is found, and he's never found after days of searching.
What makes this even more weird in this place near Donnell Vista is that there were two other similar cases within a period of 11 years.
A vehicle is found abandoned, and the people aren't.
They clearly haven't fallen.
So what happened to them?
There was no remains to be found.
I mean, I'm running out of superlatives of words to describe this case, but this is truly bizarre.
And again, it's in an area of lots of granite.
That's another profile point, lots of boulder fields and granite.
In this instance, there's a major river that flows through the Sierras and empties into this reservoir.
And this reservoir is lined with granite.
It's an absolutely gorgeous spot.
And the Forest Service built this lookout to look over this point.
And it's just a pristine location as you drive through the mountains.
And it's a parking lot, probably can hold 30 cars.
And over the years, it started with two cars where women parked there and disappeared.
And one of them was a nurse, another one, elderly nurse, she was probably 65.
And another one was a restaurant owner from Sonora.
They found the cars there and they never found the people.
And no suggestion of a serial killer.
I mean, this is a very, very remote area.
It's not the kind of place you would think a serial killer would work.
No, and we've kicked that around a lot.
From the main roadway, the main highway, you can't see this parking lot.
But as you turn in, you immediately do.
So it would be a very high-risk situation for a killer to abduct somebody or to have a fight with somebody there because someone could just immediately drive onto you.
So it doesn't make a lot of sense.
The third case involving a fisherman, he parked adjacent to the main highway, maybe an eighth of a mile from this turnout.
And he was supposedly thinking about going down to the river and fishing.
But he disappeared.
And it was all in this proximity to this one area.
And we did an interview with a local news reporter.
And I thought he did a really good job explaining it and explaining how the sheriffs don't even want to address this.
I thought he was one of the most excellent people in the entire movie because the sense of bafflement, I think is the word, the sense of bafflement about him was absolutely palpable.
You know, it shoots right through the screen.
This guy is really sincere.
And he says, you know, these are cases that are not going to be unless somebody else goes missing.
They're not going to be looked at again.
So they just remain on file as a mystery.
Yes.
And I should tell your viewers that another interesting part of this is we are probably 10 air miles from the perimeter of Yosemite National Park.
And that is the place with the cluster of at least 50 cases.
Right.
But it gets more bizarre because these are not just missing person cases this time.
You also talk about cases of, I suppose you could call them high strangeness.
Now, a little further away from this Donelle Vista, Donnell Vista place in Sonora, California, is a place where a bunch of guys, four people, have been camping off and on for more than 40 years.
And they have been trying to work out what's something utterly weird and terribly frightening for most of us.
I mean, God knows why they go back to the area, but they do.
They describe and have recorded strange whooping sounds, which are played back in the movie.
I recommend that you hear them for yourself because I can't describe them here.
Whooping sounds, and then they start to, whatever it is, starts to answer the guys as they try and mock or mimic the, not mock, but mimic the whooping sounds.
Whatever it is, answers back.
And then they come out with what sounds like language.
It sounds like some kinds of words almost are being spoken.
But the vocal range of whatever it is making these noises in this place is way beyond our range.
It's got more lows and more highs in it and more range and depth than we have.
And my first thought, I have to say, Dave, was Bigfoot.
Is this Bigfoot?
Well, let me preface this.
For people who haven't watched The Fail and have just listened to this, we've taken a lot of ridicule for having a couple of segments in the movie and saying, oh, so you're saying this is responsible for the missing hunters?
No, I'm saying that these are some unusual things that hunters have encountered in the woods that can be substantiated with scientific analysis.
And, you know, I certainly didn't infer from watching it, but then I'm familiar with your work that you were trying to say, okay, here's the answer.
That's, you know, there are a lot of programs on commercial television that actually would try and come to a conclusion like that.
But it's, you know, you wouldn't come to a conclusion like that, but you just say, here is an area of high strangeness.
And guess what else has been happening here for more than 40 years?
So in writing the books, again, I have people email me all the time.
And we've probably had 50 different stories since my hunter's book first came out, maybe three years ago, four years ago, about strange things happening in the woods to these hunters.
And it's not that I don't believe them, but to put something in a movie that you can't substantiate, to me, questions your integrity.
Now, in this case, there were four or five hunters that had visited this site since 1949, and they had heard sounds.
They had seen lights in the sky.
They had seen lights go through their campground.
And it's about an eight or nine mile trek on horseback through the most wild areas of the Sierras you can imagine.
It's about as remote as you can get.
They also describe a strange kind of humming noise, like a tuning fork.
Right.
Well, what we decided to do was go into that site for a week.
And it was myself and a videographer and one support member.
And we spent a week there.
Nothing unusual Happened other than we did not see one shred of wildlife in seven days, and that was really odd because the hunter said that they had gone in there and they were 100% successful in getting deer every time they went in.
That's what they said.
Every time they did, and we're talking about over a lot of years, they were highly successful.
Super successful.
Yet when we went in, we didn't see any deer.
And the other part was, is they always had bear come into their campground.
There was never a bear.
We didn't even see any scat in the area.
So what scared them off?
And they also tell stories, perhaps the weirdest part of it, strange orb-like lights.
One of them said it was like a rod of light that looked like the Star Wars lightsaber.
And we used a graphics person to illustrate that.
And the witness said that's exactly what I saw.
Now, again, when they did these recordings in the 1970s, this is so far before digital that you couldn't replicate, you couldn't manage the sound to make these sounds like you can today.
So these hunters took their recordings to an audio professor, and he said they're outside the range of what humans can make.
And he said that a couple of these are talking over the top of each other, which at the time, now you could do it easily with digital.
But at the time, he said the recording hasn't been re-recorded.
These aren't recordings placed on top of each other.
He essentially substantiated the recordings as being real, as being outside the range of humans.
They aren't mechanically replicated or mechanically made.
Now, these outdoorsmen are different in that they don't just have this experience and say we're never going back there.
Even though they do admit to being scared in the dead of night, they have been going back there on a regular basis because the place has got some kind of magnetic pull for them.
You know, I think it's one of those places, Howard, that they kind of feel it's theirs and nobody really knows where it's at.
And they have this bond to it because they've never been harmed while they're there.
They've never been injured.
They always had a lot of success.
And at the times that it's happening, you can hear that these guys are scared just in their voice.
There's no doubt about that.
But it's one of those rare occurrences in the unexplained world where a phenomenon presents itself.
We hear an awful lot of that.
But this phenomenon definitely seems to be aware of the people.
Oh, definitely.
Yeah, like you said, there almost seemed like there was some type of interaction.
And almost the use of some kind of language.
I mean, that would be one thing that would be great if you could get a scientist to go out there and investigate this and maybe spend not just a week there, but spend a couple of months there.
I wonder if that's possible.
You know, Howard, sometimes I think that science doesn't even want to acknowledge that this type of stuff goes on.
Well, that's disappointing, but not surprising.
Anyways.
All right.
And at the end of all of this, perhaps one of the most strange things that you've ever talked about.
Now, you know, a lot of listeners to shows like this will be aware of a researcher called Bruce McAbee.
Bruce McAbee has a wife called Jan, who is a hunter, goes out into the woods.
This is Lima, Ohio.
It's a place that's not, you can't say that it's deeply remote because it isn't far from civilization.
There's a school way off beyond the woods, and there's a band doing band practice there while she is there at, did she call it a deer stall or a deer halt?
I'm guessing is it a kind of platform that hunters use?
You can explain that?
Yeah, it's just a deer platform.
It's a ladder that goes up a tree.
There's a little platform up about 14 feet, just enough room to sit down in.
And it gets your scent up off the ground so the deers don't realize you're there.
They'll walk up and you can have a pretty good shot bow and arrow-wise with a deer.
And Janet hunted this area right near her house many times.
But she came across something that was, from her description, 14 foot long, something that you could only describe as a thing.
It sounds like some kind of amorphous shape-shifting thing that slid from one tree to another and then disappeared.
She took a picture of it.
When Bruce looked at the camera, the picture was taken on settings that the camera didn't even have.
How can that happen?
In the meantime, simultaneous to this, and Jan only discovered this by chance, the students doing their band practice, remember them at Shawnee High School, not far away, they were transfixed by a massive, huge light that appeared from above, a light with no edges that appeared and disappeared.
All of these things apparently happening simultaneously, Dave.
So while Jan was in the deer stand, her nephew was at band practice two air miles away.
There's like 50 kids on the field doing band, and this light appears above the group.
And it doesn't appear for a long time, but everyone stops and looks at it and is in awe.
And anyhow, so Jan, after she has this visualization, she's completely stunned.
She goes, I can't believe I saw this.
I don't know what to say.
After about an hour and it disappears, she comes in and they're having some guests for dinner.
So she doesn't say anything right away.
But after, as the guests are leaving, the phone rings, it's her nephew.
And her nephew is talking to Bruce McAbee, an optical physicist and one of the smartest men in the world I have personally ever met.
That's a fact.
He's written some great books about UFOs and things.
And the nephew's saying, hey, uncle, I had a UFO sighting.
And he starts telling him about it.
And Bruce is talking about it.
And he gets off the phone and he goes, Jan, you know, so-and-so had a UFO sighting at about 6.30, 7 o'clock.
And she goes, Bruce, I had a weird thing happen to me in the woods.
And she goes through this explanation.
And Bruce goes, Well, you had your phone.
Did you take anything?
And she goes, I might have, I might not.
So he downloads what she took.
The next, and it doesn't make sense to him because it doesn't really look like anything you would expect.
But worse, probably the weirdest thing of all is this phone made by Verizon took this photo and Bruce said, well, that doesn't make sense because the pixels that the phone took in this photo doesn't make sense because the phone can't do it according to its software.
So he calls the engineers and the engineers say, send us the photo.
So they sends them.
The engineers say, well, yeah, the phone took that picture, but that phone couldn't have taken that picture because it doesn't have the software, the hardware capable to do that picture.
In other words, the only way to be able to take a picture with those parameters would have been to completely rewrite the software.
And Jan certainly didn't do that.
Heck no.
So, you know, what could this be?
But it was all seemingly tied into what happened on that night while everybody was doing band practice at Shawnee High School.
And again, scientific evidence of high strangeness occurring while Hunter's in a blind, substantiated by her nephew and the camera that took a photo of something that makes no sense at all.
And because there is that validation, we said, you know, we're going to put this in.
Plus, it involves, to me, one of the most credible families in the world.
So I had to do it.
Yeah, no, it was great to see and hear Bruce McAbee and Jan as well.
But what a story.
Now, at the end of it, and as I say, it's a fantastic production.
In words, we can't really do it justice.
You have to see it.
You have to see the locations.
You have to hear the words of the people.
You have to see their faces.
And you see all of that brilliantly presented in this movie presentation.
So full marks for that.
But you do try and tie together all of the ends of the stories at the end of it all.
And you pose questions for your viewer.
What questions do you think, just in brief here now, would you want people to be going away and asking, having heard the stories that you've laid out?
I think the number one thing is that I want people to hike trails with competence, meaning there's a series of safety things we talk about.
Most importantly, tell somebody where you're going to go and hike, when you're going to be out, and contact them when you're out that you're safe.
I always, always tell people to carry a personal locator beacon.
It's about the size of a cell phone, costs about $200, $250 on Amazon.
It sends off a signal to a satellite where your location is, and search and rescue can find you within 10 feet.
And make sure those things are with you at all times.
Absolutely.
And if you can, always hike in pairs, always take a couple of energy bars, an extra water than you think you'll need.
Always, always check the weather before you're leaving.
And if people practice this, 95% of the cases that I'm involved in, I don't think would exist, especially if they carried that personal locator beacon.
And it strikes me that the one thing that you need to avoid if you're in that situation is avoid separation.
Don't get separated from the people you're with.
And, you know, that may be hard, especially when you're in the middle of the woods and somebody has to go use the bathroom.
But I've never heard of an incident happening during an occurrence like that.
But try to keep, you know, stay straddled to each other, next to each other.
Keep each other in view.
Keep talking.
Don't let silence happen.
Things like that.
Now, we tend to think, and I was thinking of you recently when I took what is for me a very rare few days away from London.
And I went, first of all, I did a radio show out of Liverpool.
And then I came home via Wales, which is very close to Liverpool.
And I drove the whole length and breadth of Wales.
And I drove through mountainous areas that I'd lost contact with.
I used to go there as a boy, and it was lovely to see them again.
But as you get through the mountains of North Wales, and then you get down into mid-Wales that is mountainous and forested, it struck me that the potential for these sorts of things is not only in North America.
They could happen here.
Oh, absolutely.
And I've written many stories about, have you ever heard of a mountain called Ben Nevis?
Ben Nevis, yep, in Scotland.
Right.
Yeah, I've written about cases from there.
And the UK has a series of incidents that happen just like they do in America, in the Americas.
And so does the top countries with these disappearances, US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and probably New Zealand is number five.
And all of this suggests, just as we get to the back end of this, Dave, that there is perhaps, and we want people to entertain the idea, you know, not be scared out of their wits by it, but just entertain the idea that there may be a phenomenon or series of phenomena that happen in clusters, not only in America, where there are wide open spaces, but everywhere.
There is something going on, and maybe the authorities know more about it, and certainly they seem to be collating data about it.
But for the moment, all of these things remain for us a mystery.
So if people go to our website, and it's called the Can Am Missing Project, like Canadian American, is a Nora, A-M is a MaryMissingProject.com, Can Am Missing Project.
If you go to that website, I kind of keep it updated with the latest search and rescues and missing people, theories, etc.
And if people just kept an open mind when somebody says something, I've had so many people tell me, you know, I'd talk about it, but I think people would make fun of me.
Or, you know, I'd go to law enforcement and tell them, But I'm afraid that they would never believe me.
And in the reality, Howard, like your dad was a policeman, my dad was a policeman.
I was a policeman.
And you know, if somebody came up to me with a story like that, I'd listen because I know that there's too much strangeness out there in the world that we really don't understand.
And people tend to lead sanitized lives.
They watch reality TV and this stuff is a kind of fiction for them.
But those people perhaps need to do a bit of a wake-up call on themselves, do a little reality check and realize these things are happening.
And we're not saying go freak out or drop your holiday plans, but just be aware.
That's all.
No, and people always ask me, well, do you go into national parks?
I said, every free minute I get.
Absolutely.
You know, that's one of our natural resources we have to enjoy.
Yeah, no, I was driving.
I was thinking about you and the books and the missing people as I was driving through the mountains of North Wales, heading down into mid-Wales.
In fact, I was heading towards the place where they made the TV series The Prisoner, which was made in that area.
But to get there, you have to drive through the mountains.
And the rain was beating down on my car.
It was beating down so heavily that there was no sat-nav, there was no GPS.
So, you know, I had to navigate the old-fashioned way, and I had to try and remember the locations and the directions from trips when I was a boy living in Liverpool, and we used to go to Wales.
And I thought, these are the sorts of places, and they still exist even in a little country like this, where these sorts of things happen.
So, Davey, are you now a movie mogul?
Have you stopped writing the books or are you going back to the books now?
No, I'll definitely come out with another book soon.
We tried to find a different venue to get the message out of what we just talked about, safety aspects.
And I really think that's an important aspect of what I'm doing.
And a lot of people don't want to read books.
So we started doing the first movie just called Missing 411.
And then this is the second one, Missing 411, The Hunted.
We've talked about doing a third one.
And the best part of all of this, Howard, is I think that movies reach more people than books, unfortunately.
They do.
Remind us of the title of this one.
Missing 411, The Hunted.
Wow.
I think you could do an audio book.
Unfortunately, I think the person to do it is probably too expensive for all of us.
Morgan Freeman.
He would be ideal, but I don't think you'd get him.
Yes, very good.
But it's a nice thought.
Thank you very much, Dave.
We have to talk again.
It's always a real pleasure talking with you, and you always make me think.
Thank you.
Thank you, Howard.
Well, there are many words that I can use to describe the production and to describe the work that Dave Paulitis has done.
Chilling and compelling are just two of those words, and if I had the time, I could probably come up with another 50 that would also describe this excellent piece of work, in my view.
Check it out for yourself.
It is one thing to read words in print.
It's another thing to actually see the people who were directly involved and to view the locations and get a sense of them, which you certainly do in this documentary.
So well done, Dave Paulitis.
And I know that we'll talk with him again in the future here on The Unexplained.
We have more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until next we meet here, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am definitely in London.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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