- Get link
- X
- Other Apps
A note before we begin: this piece is told the way David Paulides, the author who coined the "Missing 411" label, describes his own research. Every claim here is his, or his books', and we're not stopping to test any of it yet. That comes in this series' final part. One more thing: behind every case in this series is a real person and a real family. We've tried to tell these stories with that in mind.
By his own account, David Paulides didn't set out to find a pattern in disappearances. He set out to find Bigfoot.
Paulides is a former San Jose police officer who later worked as a private investigator, and before his name was attached to anything about missing persons, it was attached to books about Sasquatch. That detail matters to this story, and we'll return to it. But the way Paulides tells it, the thing that changed the direction of his work was a conversation, not a creature. A park ranger, speaking about Yosemite, told him about the people who go missing there, regularly, in ways that didn't add up, and hinted that the authorities weren't eager to talk about it.
A retired detective with a case-file mindset heard that and did what detectives do. He started asking for the list.
The List That Didn't Exist
The first thing Paulides says he needed was simple: a complete record of who had vanished inside the National Park system. Names, dates, places. The kind of basic ledger you'd expect any large institution responsible for millions of visitors to keep.
According to his books and his documentary, that ledger didn't exist. He filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service, asking for lists of missing people inside their system, then filed another asking the Park Service to compile one for Yosemite and for the entire park network. He has described the responses as obstruction. In one account of his, the Park Service answered that putting such records together would require fees his nonprofit, the CanAm Missing Project, couldn't afford. He also filed requests for the case files of individual missing hikers, including one for a woman named Stacy Arras in 2011 and another in 2013 concerning two missing hikers in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
To Paulides, the missing list was the first clue. If nobody was counting, he reasoned, then nobody could see the shape of what was happening. So he started counting himself. It's not the only unexplained disappearance this blog has followed. See also Amelia Earhart and the Mary Celeste.
Building the Pattern
What Paulides built, over years, was not a database in the ordinary sense. It was a set of criteria, and a very particular way of reading cases against them. He calls the criteria "profile points," and the cases that fit them are what became known as Missing 411.
The points, as he has laid them out across his books and interviews, run something like this. The disappearance happens in a cluster, a geographic area where other strange disappearances have also occurred. The person vanishes near water, a creek, a stream, a lake. Or near boulder fields and granite. Berry patches turn up again and again. Search dogs, the most reliable tracking tools rescuers have, fail to follow a scent. A sudden storm rolls in after the person disappears, hampering the search. Clothing or footwear is missing, or found in odd places. And some of those who are eventually found are discovered in places that seem physically impossible for them to have reached.
That last point carries most of the weight in his telling. Paulides has described young children found ten to fifteen miles from where they were last seen, or five thousand feet higher in elevation than the point where they disappeared. A two- or three-year-old, he says, covering distances and terrain that trained adults would struggle to cross.
He has also pointed to some stranger-sounding markers. A number of the missing, he says, were children, others had a disability or illness, and in some of his writing he has noted an unexplained overrepresentation of people with a particular family heritage.
The Details That Keep Repeating
What gives the profile its pull isn't any single point. It's the way Paulides stacks them. A missing child is a tragedy that happens, sadly, in wild country every year. A missing child whose search dogs can't find a trail, whose disappearance is followed within hours by a storm that grounds the helicopters, whose body, if it's ever found, turns up in ground the searchers had already covered, is the kind of story Paulides argues deserves a second look.
Bloodhounds and other scent dogs sit at the center of that argument. They're the best tracking tools search teams have, and Paulides describes case after case where the dogs seemed confused, circling, or simply unable to pick up a trail that should have been fresh. Missing shoes and odd clothing patterns play a similar role. In several of the cases he presents, people were found with footwear gone or clothing removed or arranged in ways that suggested neither a simple fall nor a simple animal attack.
None of this, in his telling, adds up to a single answer. It adds up to a feeling familiar to anyone who has ever worked a case long enough: the sense that too many small things are pointing the same direction to be entirely accidental. Whether that feeling reflects a real pattern or the way human minds assemble patterns out of grief and coincidence is the question this series will finally come to. For now, we're telling the stories the way their chronicler tells them.
The Map
By the time the pattern became a book series, it had a geography. Paulides mapped what he calls clusters, and the major ones read like a roll call of America's most beloved wild places: Yosemite and the surrounding Sierra Nevada. Crater Lake in Oregon. Glacier National Park in Montana. Mount Rainier and Olympic National Park in Washington. Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. The Grand Canyon. The Great Smoky Mountains along the Tennessee and North Carolina line. His books identify portions of twenty-eight such clusters across the United States and Canada.
The first volume in the series, covering the western United States and Canada, was followed by an eastern United States volume, then additional books on specific groups, including one devoted solely to hunters who vanished in four countries. Across the series, Paulides has said he's classified well over a thousand cases, with some estimates of his total running toward sixteen hundred. He appeared on late-night paranormal radio, made a documentary, and gradually became the central figure of an entire corner of the internet devoted to unexplained wilderness disappearances.
What He Says It Means
Here is where Paulides's presentation and his audience's imagination part ways. In his books, he mostly lets the cases speak. His central argument is that something is happening which conventional explanations, hypothermia, getting lost, animal attack, foul play, don't fully account for, and that the institutions responsible for investigating aren't treating the pattern seriously. By most accounts, he stops short of naming a cause.
Readers filled the gap. Some have proposed predators, human or otherwise. Some have turned to Bigfoot, a theory critics note sits close to Paulides's earlier career. Others have reached for stranger explanations still. The cases themselves, meanwhile, remain exactly what they were: people who walked into wild country and did not walk out.
But what he will say plainly is that the first step is simply acknowledging that the cases exist. And that is where this series is going to start.
Where This Series Begins
The Missing 411 files are long, and almost every case in them is a small tragedy. We're not going to try to cover them all. We're going to do what the earlier series on this blog have done: pick the stories that matter most and tell them one at a time, the way the people closest to them tell them.
The first is the one Paulides returns to more often than almost any other. It happened on Father's Day weekend in 1969, in a high grassy meadow in the Great Smoky Mountains, during a game of hide-and-seek. The boy was six years old.
In the next part of this series, we'll go to Spence Field, and to the largest search in the history of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Read the Full Missing 411 Series
Comments
Post a Comment