Thinking Sideways: Lisanne Froon and Kris Kremers

On April 1 of 2014, Lisanne Froon and Kris Kremers, young women from the Netherlands took off on an easy day hike in Panama near the town of Boquete. When they missed an appointment on the 2nd with a local guide, he checked with their host family, who had not seen them since the day prior. The girls were never found, save for some bones and a boot, however their backpack was found containing more questions than answers.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Today's episode is brought to you by audible
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at audible podcast dot com. Slash Thinking Sideways, Thinking Sideways,

(00:26):
I don't just I'm you never know stories of things
we simply don't know the answer too. Hey, it's up.
It's a Thinking Sideways the podcast. I'm Devin, joined as usual,

(00:48):
I guess by Joe and Steve. Yeah, we're sure, um,
and this week I'm kind of breaking the rules a
little bit. If you're an avid listener or like you've
been in discussions with us on like Reddit or email,
we say this a lot too. We try to not
do mysteries that are like anything under five years old.

(01:11):
We try not to do with a few exceptions. I think, um,
the Alisa Lamb one and they seventy and I think
those are the only two that we've done so far.
I think that's right. Um, I don't know. We have
a lot of episodes. I don't know, so I did
not go through every single one, but I'm pretty sure
it's just been those two. But this mystery, it was

(01:32):
too good to pass up, um, and it was one
that I literally just learned about within the last week.
And we're going to talk about it. Where did you
learn about it? Um? In internet? Uh So it's we're
going to talk about the disappearance quote unquote disappearance of
Lasanne Froun and Chris Creamer's Creamers. It's their Dutch names,

(01:57):
so it's hard not gredation there. It is Lisianne and Chris,
so I'm going to call them by their first names.
They are twenty two and twenty one years old, respectively,
and they are young women from the Netherlands. There Dutch.
They had saved up for about six months to travel

(02:17):
from the Netherlands to Panama to spend a couple of
months there. They traveled like kind of did tourist stuff
for a couple of weeks, and then their plan was
to go to this small town and kind of the
like northern kind of almost the northern border actually of
Panama and uh teach for a couple of weeks. Do
we know what they were teaching? Okay? I I didn't

(02:41):
Maybe English, maybe Spanish, I can't remember. It was a
language I think of some maybe Dutch, probably not, but maybe.
I mean it seems like the you know used for
Dutch in Panama and kind of like, you know in
rural Panama. Yeah. I was gonna say, if this was
you know, along the ports or something, it would totally
makes sense. But if you're a rural area, that doesn't

(03:02):
make a whole lot of sense. But hard saying. Yeah,
So they traveled to this small town called Bookheat. Is
that how you would say that? I believe, Yeah, I don't.
I have no idea either. They were going to stay
with a host family, which is the way that a
lot of young travelers do. That they settled in, they

(03:22):
went to check in to like work. They're like, we're here,
ready to work. It's I think Sunday or who knows
what day it is, I don't remember, but we're gonna
we're gonna start working. And the person who ran that school,
who's an American woman, said, oh, no, you can't work
until next week. You have a week to kill. They

(03:43):
had an entire week. Yeah, okay, I thought less than
time than that, I'll go play to Arista for a
while longer. Yeah. So it turns out actually lists Anne
was like very upset about that. She even reportedly wrote
in her diary about how mad she was that they
couldn't start teaching. I don't know if that was, you know,
she just wanted to get on with it. If she

(04:04):
was annoyed that the I guess maybe some communication had
gone awry. I don't know why she was so so
mad about it. Maybe she had mapped at her trip
very carefully. Maybe she wanted to do maybe she was
a planner like that. Yeah, well, anyways, it meant, you know,
this area is very jungle filled. It's like very close
to the continental divide, and so it meant they had

(04:26):
a week to kill. And the next day they contacted
a guy in in Panama. Apparently. I've never been um,
but in Panama apparently there you can hire a tour
guide for just about anything, especially trails in the area.
So one of the things they did was they booked

(04:46):
a tour guide for a trail. They booked a tour
guide to take them on this trail called the Pianist.
The Pianist, which is, depending on the source, either a
very easy few hours walk through lush jungle with a
huge payoff. You at the divide at the top of
the mountains up there, or a super treacherous path riddled

(05:10):
with hard terrain and is like really dangerous to do.
I've done a lot of research on this, and as
far as I can tell, it seems like the path
up the mountain to the divide is like pretty easy.
I mean, I wouldn't say that, you know, it's just
like a stroll. It's not paved. It's uphill. It is,

(05:31):
you know, definitely uphill, but it's not like a climb.
You don't have to be, you know, a super experienced hiker. Yeah,
a lot of It's like a lot of trails in Oregon.
You know, there's the easy part and yeah, and then
the easy part or the not easy part is on
the other side of the divide. It seems like I've
watched a lot of videos of people like walking around

(05:52):
in this area, and it does seem like, you know,
I guess if it was like flooded, if it was
super wet and soggy, maybe it would be dangerous or
hard to navigate. But on April one, which is when
these girls were in the area, it was beautiful. It
was like really nice weather and really sunny and nice

(06:13):
and so anyways, so that a tornado didn't get him.
But anyway, so they and their plan, I presume was
just to go to the top, look around, and come
back the easy way again. Well, and I you know,
that's kind of a question, honestly, is um they hired
this this guide for April second in the morning, who
was going to take them on the trail? They they

(06:36):
arranged for that and everything, and then on the first
April one, eleven am, they just decided, you know what,
let's just do that trail today, I guess, as far
as anyone can tell, which is odd to me, I'll
be honest, it's a little weird that you would, you know,
book a guide to take you on a trail and
then just hike it the day before. Yeah, that doesn't

(06:58):
make a lot of sense to me. Any Let's get
back to the story. You know, kind of just talked
for a little bit there. So at about eleven am
on April one, Lausanne and Chris took off to walk
with Lisanne's backpack with bottled water. And you know, it
doesn't seem like they had snacks or really anything. It
just seems like they did have bottles of water, and

(07:19):
they had their phones and their cameras and a little
money UM. And they had searched for directions to the
trail from where they were UM on their computers before
they left their homes day. And there are some reports
that they had brunch that morning at a cafe before
they left. It's not totally clear if that happened or not.

(07:42):
It's also not clear, uh, if it's true or not
that the reports of two young Dutch gentlemen joining them
for that meal was true. But what is certain is
that it's uncertain how they got from where they were
staying in their homes day to the trailhead. I guess

(08:02):
it was a bit of a you would have had
to take a taxi or a bus or something like that.
That was a long walk them from there. Yeah, maybe
maybe the two Dutch guys gave him a ride. That
is thrown around is this is this is this part
of Panama I really popular with Dutch people. I guess
I don't know, Like these were Dutch men that like
they didn't they apparently didn't actually know, like they weren't

(08:25):
friends with them. They just approached them and had heard
that they were speaking Dutch and they were like, oh,
we're from the Netherlands to let's talk. I was gonna say, Yeah,
if you're in a foreign country, you're in a little restaurant,
you overhear a language that you know, you automatically gravitate
to that. Of course. Yeah, I mean whenever I travel,
I always meet people and wind up hanging out with them.
So the weather this happened in two thousand fourteen, I

(08:47):
guess I haven't actually set the dates out or anything
like that. April first, two thousand fourteen, and the weather
so not that long ago. That's why she admitted she
was breaking the rules earlier, super breaking the rules. So
the weather on the first of April two thousand fourteen
was high than the like nineties fahrenheit, which is thirties celsius,

(09:08):
and lows in the kind of low seventies, low twenties celsius.
Nice weather, yeah, I mean probably humid yet nineties and
humid for hiking. I don't know, I probably would like, well,
I suppose it was a really easy trail. I just
don't like. I'm not a hot weather per sure. You know,
it's it's not as though it was you know, freezing

(09:31):
cold and covering rain and all the times it wasn't
terrible conditions. They had with them a camera, it was
like a cannon or an icon, I can't remember. It
was a canon, and they had their phones and as
you did, imagine imagine, they took a couple of photos
in these like really picturesque locations. They're gorgeous photos. I've

(09:53):
seen some of the photos too, you know, and and
they look like they're having a great time. I would be, yeah,
it's beautiful out there. And so they took photos of
each other, so they don't appear together in any photos.
You know, that's just two girls out hiking and say,
you know you, okay, you take a picture of me. Okay,
now I'll take a picture of you. It's you know.
So there's a picture of each of them at the
kind of summit at the Continental vide which is beautiful.

(10:16):
And then there are some pictures that are kind of
more like candid hiking shots of Chris that Listen presumably
took um I think it was her camera in fact,
and they show Chris not wearing a backpack, so we
presume that Lisanne was wearing the backpack as well. But
you know, they're just like from behind shots or like

(10:36):
you know, Chris standing by a waterfall and like posing,
and you know, none of those photos exist of Lissen.
They're all of Chris, so we know who like to
use the camera more than the other. Yeah, or you
know it was her camera, so you know, you would
just kind of assume if she was probably walking behind
Chris and she was just you know, snapping photos. Oh yeah, right,

(10:57):
some of them do kind of look more like, hey, Chris,
turn round, click, you know, pose for the picture. Then
on April two, when the girls failed to appear at
their appointment with the local guide, he got a little angry.
I don't think he was angry. The impression I have

(11:19):
is that he actually his first he was first concerned. Yeah.
So he went to the house where they were home
staying and said, well, you know, did they oversleep? Did
they decide to cancel and not tell me what's going on?
And the family that they were supposed to be staying with, said, oh,
we even we haven't seen them. They left yesterday and
we haven't seen him. Since. It's not a good start,
not a great start. The family quickly reported the girls missing,

(11:44):
Although they attempted to report them missing like two times before,
they were officially reported missing. They're officially reported missing. I
think it was like at nine pm, so that obviously
it wasn't ideal. But apparently as soon as they were
reported missing, it was reported that the pan p how

(12:04):
do you say Panamanian Panamanian thank you authorities, they've sent
out huge search teams and search and rescuers immediately took
to the jungle to start searching. It turns out that
might not be true. It turns out that the brother
of the guide that they had hired, who's a farmer.

(12:26):
I think that the connection heard about it and got
some local volunteer farmers and all the others, and they
started searching. But it turns out that the official search
and rescue effort didn't start for a while. So wait
did wait? Wait? So maybe I didn't ever catch that
in the research They went out on the first, people

(12:48):
figured out they were missing on the morning of the second,
and eventually they're reported being The status of being missing
was finally acknowledged, but only a farmer. I want to
look for him. A farmer and some local volunteers. You know,
this is this is a little dinky town. There's probably
not like a huge you know, search and rescue team

(13:09):
available right there. Thank you. That Okay, it seems likely,
you know, it depends on where you read it. Completely
forgot the context either it was you know, because the
Panamanian authorities didn't really care. It's that's how it's framed
for a lot of people. But I think probably Joe's correct.

(13:29):
It's just that those that wasn't available. Yeah, it probably
takes a while for the alarms to really start going
off and people can't get lost for a few days
in the journalists not necessarily gonna you know, going to
be fatal because especially on those conditions, yeah, nice weather
and everything. And now so even if they've fallen down
and broken a leg, for example, they're not going to
die of exposure in a couple of days time or
there they're starvation or anything else. They gotta get bit

(13:51):
by a lot of bugs. That's not gonna be plus well,
I mean, but but they're they're it's very easy and
obvious to just make this, you know, the observation they're
totally greenhorns. They totally have no idea what they're doing
because they're not from that area. To me, it would
seem like you would try and rustle up as many
people as possible right away, because people who don't know

(14:13):
what they're doing make stupid decisions. Yeah, well probably if
you're talking about the searchers versus Yeah, the searchers and
their locals, they probably know the area pretty well. But
still it's now you need a lot of people to
go searching the jungle, right Yeah, I mean now that
I remember the map of it, Okay, I got you. Yeah,
they probably just they probably just like headed out the
trail to see what they were, like, sitting by the

(14:34):
trail with a broken leg or something like that. On
April seven, the search was on in Earnest. That's like
a whole week after they then reported missing. And on
April eight, in fact, the parents of both of the
girls flew in from the Netherlands and came with a
couple of Dutch detectives and twelve trained Dutch dogs. Seven

(15:00):
we're searching rescue dogs and five were cadaver dogs. Um,
so these detectives were they like official or privatized or official? Yeah?
I guess it turns out the Netherlands like super cares
about their citizens or something. Yeah, I guess not that
or it was like a slow crime week the detectives

(15:22):
were like, we gotta do something like that. Seems like
it's interesting, let's go do that. Yeah, what the hell
you get to go to Panama for free? Oh? Man? No,
so that dogs would get these um what what's called
hits right when they react to the smell of the
people they're looking for. But it turns out that they
were all places that the volunteers had searched previously. You know,
on the first couple of nights. The first night that

(15:44):
the searchers spent out in the middle of the night
was April eighth, sending up white flares and making noises
and you know, having lights and all that stuff, hoping
that the girls would either hear and see these things
and call out or signal back or make their way
to them. That's a fairly typical I think search and
rescue technique in the jungle like that. Yeah, when it's

(16:06):
that vast of an area, it's an easy way to
get somebody's attention. Yeah, they didn't, the girls didn't show. Eventually,
the search was scaled back. The search party spent five
consecutive nights out in the jungle doing that same kind
of behavior of you know, flares and all that stuff
and the girls were lost presumed dead. You know, I
think this two really would have benefited from a book.

(16:28):
This book is called Alone in the Wild by Marcus Duke.
Actually the whole title is Alone in the Wild The
Essentials of Wilderness Survival. Yeah, that sounds like that would
have been helpful. Yeah, yeah, I might need to get this. Yeah,
I think I think so. Yeah. I mean I can
look it up if you want, but you know, probably
it's cliok, like, oh look, it's not audible quird. So,

(16:53):
as you know, Audible is our sponsor for this episode,
and if you would like to know how to survive
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(17:15):
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And I'm pretty sure that Audible's got an app so

(17:36):
you can put it on your phone or your tablet
or wherever, so you know, you don't have to be
online to read it, you don't have to stream it. Yeah,
that's great down yeah, man, So well, it's kind of cool.
Any when I'm lost in the woods or the wilderness
or whatever, I'd like to be able to pull up
my tablet and kill some time by reading something. You're
watching a movie, but yeah, or listening to an audible book. Yeah. Absolute.

(18:00):
So Audible podcast dot com, slash Thinking, sideways get it
for free now today. You never know when you might
get lost in the woods. That's right. I don't think
i'd take my tablet into the woods. Your phone though, maybe. Yeah, no,
I could see I could see that. Yeah, it makes sense,
just speaking of taking cell phones into the woods. Now,

(18:24):
did I remember quickly they had cell phones? Right? So
this is hey, this is where the quotation marks around
disappearance come in. On June forty four days after the
search was pretty much just you know, gone, a man
and his wife were planting I think it was rice,
but it could have been some other kind of crop
in their fields by a river and decided, well, it's hot,

(18:48):
let's go take a dip in the river to cool down.
So they did, and as they're swimming around, they looked
over and saw something very curious and bush over there.
It was a blue backpack, which you don't know because
you haven't seen the pictures and you don't know my brain,
but it is the color of the backpack that Lisanne
was carrying when the girls disappeared on April one. Was this, um,

(19:12):
I have not figured I'd not figured out if this
was like right on the edge of the river, like
it had floated down the river and wound up just
sort of lots and some stuff, and the river was
seated a little bit, or was it above the river?
It was above the river in like a bush significantly
above but the ver Yeah, but on the river path. Well, actually,

(19:34):
the water flow between April and June probably dropped quite
a bit, so it's quite possible. Yeah, And there was
a lot of in the in the forty four days
in between. There was a lot of flash flooding that
was happening and things like that. So it's it's pretty
much just generally accepted that the backpack floated there and
ended up there in the water lowered and it just
stayed there. Anyways, it was in fact Lisan's backpack. They

(19:57):
found it and they turned it in because there was
a lot of publicity around this in Panama, this disappearance
and that, you know, there were pictures of the backpack
that you know, or some a pack pack like it,
So everybody kind of knew that if you found a
backpack like that, you just turn it in. Contain neatly
packed within were two pairs of cheap sunglasses, eighty three

(20:18):
dollars in US money to cell phones, a camera, and
two broads neatly folded. The area in which the backpack
was found was about eight hours as the crow flies,
or like six and a half miles from the last
place that they were photographed. That so that's eight and
a half hours away on foot, eight hours away on

(20:42):
six and a half miles. This is where I think
our story gets a little more tragic. You know, it's
already a little tragic. But the days that followed the discovery,
the searchers found two boots, one that still had a
foot inside of it. See the sailorsh see foot phenomenon

(21:05):
the both the boots they were they weren't a match
to each other, but they were both matches to the
boots seen in the photos for each of the girls.
Well then they were also Yeah, one of them was
only manufactured them. Yeah, the other one was I think
like for some reason, presume they were both. They also

(21:26):
found part of a pelvic bone clean public bone cross shop.
DNA testing revealed that the bones belonged to Lausanne and Chris.
As the investigators started to look at the photos on
the camera and their cell phones, this kind of tragic thing,
this kind of tragic story started to take hold. Uh.

(21:47):
They started to look at the it's the exit data
is that how you say it? Yeah, on the photos,
and that contains time and GPS location for some things,
you know, kind of like basic information. Yeah. We talked
about that kind of data being attached in the Cicada
one episode, that you can attach data to photos like

(22:10):
that and they're automatically attached for most cameras, Yeah, most
modern cameras, digital cameras do it automatically. People don't even
realize that information is tagged right into the file anymore.
And you can turn it off on your iPhone I know,
I think you can turn it off on most most advices,
you have to go in and do it, so yeah,
it's not easy to do. And this kind of thing

(22:32):
that scares me. This is like my most haunting bit
of this story is that the girls, at least one
of the girls, had been alive and desperately trying to
call out for help on the night of April eight,
that night that the searchers all stayed out there are
making outgoing phone calls. No, there was no service, so

(22:54):
there are there's some data in attempts to call make calls,
but we'll talk about those in like a second. What
it was that they discovered was on the camera the
Nike Honor Cannon canon. You keep telling me, and I
just keep forgetting um. On the night of April eighth,
there were ninety photos taken between the hours of one

(23:17):
am and four am, seven of which are just pure black,
which suggests that they were trying to signal back with
the flash to the search cruise. For whatever reason, they
weren't mobile or they weren't able to find the search crew,
but they saw the signals and we're trying to signal

(23:38):
back with the flash and that didn't work. Apparently not.
They should have like climbed up a tree or found
the found some high ground that might have done it.
Probably part of the problem is is that they've they've
got flares, like probably parachute flares up in the air,
and so all that light and you know, and there
their little dickie flash was just gonna lost in the noise. Yep,

(24:01):
I'm gonna go through the timeline a little more. Joe
was bringing up the phone calls and the pictures and
stuff like that, so let's just walk through it. There's
an infographic that I got most of this information off of.
I've compensated. It's awesome. There's a couple of really great infographics.
Will post links to all of those on the website.
But I pull a lot of information off of that,
but also from other sources. So just bear with me.

(24:24):
We're going to do that thing where I sit and
talk at you for a while. Chris had an iPhone,
Lisanne had a Galaxy three S three. I'm pretty sure
that that's who had which one, But I could have
gotten them flip flopped. And some of the information, like
I said, is hidden like really deep in forums, so

(24:46):
I've forgotten where everything came from. Well, I think what
matters is that we know when was an iPhone and
one was a Galaxy S three. Yes. And the other
little tidbit is that, like the information about this story
is in either Dutch or Spanish, neither of which I

(25:07):
speak or read. Translate that, yeah, you can, you can
get Google to translate. It turns out that um Spanish
is okay to like get in Google Translate, but Dutch
it has a super hard time with. So sometimes you're
just kind of left out on the lurch. Yeah. I've
read some of the things, the articles that were from

(25:29):
the Netherlands, and people just dumped him into Google Translate
and then dumped him into the forums. And you're reading
through and you're correcting it as you read it. You're
trying to that, but you don't know if you're correcting
it correctly exactly. I read one thing there there were
some ribs found eventually, and I read somebody had translated
it um and the spare ribs were found, and yeah,

(25:53):
so just bear with me, please. On April one, at
about eleven am, they took off. They started the trail.
They arrived at the Continental Divide at about one pm.
By the sun and the XF data on the camera.
People you know, looked at the pictures and said, yeah,
it's about where the sun would be. And also this
is what the data suggest. There had been some speculation

(26:15):
about the time tables being wrong because people thought that
the cameras might have still been on the x F
data recorded on the pictures might have still been on
Dutch time. But I don't think that that's true for
a number of reasons, or if it is, they it's
been changed over. It seems they continued down the other
side of the mountain and the continental continued to follow

(26:38):
the path. And this is a fun fact about the
Continental Divide. I don't know if like a lot of
people follow this or not, but the river would have
been running the opposite way, right, so it would have
been a different river, and that it would have been
flowing a different way. So if they had tried to
follow wherever, thinking oh, this will take us back to

(27:00):
the city, it turns out no, it won't. Yeah, So
they when they went to the top of the Continental Divide,
and I've looked at the trail, and the trail does
follow a river for a period of time. They would
have been walking upstream. Yep. So if they hit the
other side of the divide and went downhill and found
a river and said, oh hey, there's the river, let's

(27:22):
follow it, they would have been heading downstream, but on
the opposite side of the peak and following a completely
different river. Right, yes, right, at about two speaking of
a river, U two pm, the last photo of Chris
was taken crossing a stream. She looks super happy and
calm and relaxed. You know, they're dressed for the weather,

(27:43):
the hot weather, tank tops and shorts or you know,
stuff like that. Then at four thirty nine PM, the
iPhone tried to dial one one two, which is the
Dutch equivalent of one, and I'm pretty sure that Panama
you two one two one as well. Sorry numbers and stuff,

(28:06):
I'm pretty sure anyways. Then at four one the Samsung
attempts to make the same call. Neither are connected to
the network, so neither go through. On April two, at
sixty six am, just right after sunrise, the Samsung attempts
the one one to call again, which does not go

(28:27):
through obviously. Then at four am, the iPhone tries the
one one to call, which was not connected, and a
screenshot was taken of the phone right after the call
for reasons unknown. I you know, the screen capture function

(28:47):
on cell phones is always kind of an awkward thing.
I accidentally take screen caps of my phone. But you
gotta hold this button and twist your nose in this
right way and or just not what you're doing, grab
it and grip it, and it randomly takes him. So
I can just see that randomly happened. It's possible. Yeah, yes,

(29:09):
between between the six am col I presume they must
have maneuvered to a higher position, hoping. I don't know.
Con No, there's no there's no data in that. I mean, right,
you have no idea and they don't. And they didn't
realize that there's no one one two in Panama. Yeah,
at ten fifty three AM, a magnitude six point earthquake

(29:35):
rocks Panama, Panama City. Um, but you they felt it
in Bokotet or however you say Boet bokhet day or whatever.
I don't know. You're both wrong, probably and at this
actually almost this exact moment when they were feeling this earthquake,
the Samsung attempts the one one two and call both.

(29:57):
I think somebody who thought you know, one of the
two must have been oh yeah, maybe it's nine one
one here. Maybe it's not well, but they've been trying
both numbers. This is the first time they die online
one one Oh okay, I was thinking that they had
been trying nine one one and one one to just
one one too. I can tell this point. The call

(30:18):
is not connected again. At one six pm, the Samsung
again attempts a one one to slash nine one one
call both and the nine one call nine one one
call is briefly connected like for a second and then
drops out. That's frustrating. Yeah, um, so, so obviously they

(30:39):
must have been moving around trying to find coverage, I think,
and move around. There's a lot of theories around that, right,
I mean, something obviously must have happened to one of
them that made it so that they could not make
it back out. Yeah. Probably somebody broke a leg, something
got bit by a spider or we'll talk about that,
you know, in theories. But this that's you know, one

(31:02):
of the things is you can only move around so much.
If one of you is not mobile. You're not gonna
want to just leave your friend and like wander because
you don't know your way back to that person. You
don't want to both be lost separately from each other.
You know, this is why you don't go into haunted
houses and then split up. Same theory if we've learned
anything from horror movies and we don't do that. Yeah,

(31:23):
and I always carry a gun. That that moment where
it's connected, where the nine one one call was connected,
is the only time any of these calls was connected,
just as a as a fact. And then at nine
pm that evening, the girls are officially reported missing. On
April three, at eight am, the search and rescue teams
start to patrol the area with a helicopter. So that's

(31:46):
when they finally deployed. So you know, the next day,
at nine thirty two, the iPhone attempts to make a
nine one one only call. At this point, I think
they had figured out that it's nine because they connected
on This is the last call that was made for
a really long time. Then, uh, and the phones are

(32:07):
starting to get switched off. They're turning them off, I
think to preserve battery. And actually, when you hear how
long these phones lasted, like, it's smart, smart move. Yeah,
because you know what Pandora trying to run in the
background and run in your battery down right totally or
like you know, your phone to be searching constantly for
a signal it'll drink. Yeah. At one fifty pm, the

(32:33):
iPhone was switched on. And I didn't realize that they
can pull data from your iPhone of when it's turned
on and when it's turned off like that it logs
every time it's turned on, but apparently they can. I
am not surprised by that at all. Yeah, and then uh,
four pm, the Samsung was turned on, and four sixteen
the iPhone was turned on. That's it for that night.

(32:55):
At four fifty am on April four the Samsung is
turn and on and then dies. The battery dies at
five am. The iPhone is switched on at one six
or ten sixteen and one forty two, and that stays
super consistent through the next few days. I don't know
if one of the girls was wearing a watch or what,

(33:17):
but like super consistent. So then on the fifth, the
iPhone was switched on at ten fifty am and one
seven pm. At one thirty seven there was no pin
entered to unlock the phone, which people think is significant
for some reason. I think it's probably not really I
have my ideas, but I'll hold it for the theory section. Well,

(33:39):
now you have a you have an iPhone, right, yeah,
and so when you turn when you turn yours on,
even without putting the pinion, can you look and see
how many bars you have? Yeah, so no sense putting
the pen and if you can see, you've got no signal.
I agree with that. And then on April six, the
iPhone is switched on at ten six am and one

(34:00):
thirty seven again pm. Again no pin ender entered at
either time, and that was it. Nothing on the seventh.
There's no data from the seventh. And then on April eight,
in the early morning from one to four am on
April eight, what many people would consider the night of
the seventh, right, but it's the early morning on the eighth.

(34:21):
That's when those nine pictures were taken with the camera.
As mentioned, seven of them are just black. A lot
of people I haven't seen them. They haven't been released,
so a lot of people think maybe the lens cap
was on. I don't think cameras take pictures with lens
caps on. This was a point and shoot. It didn't

(34:42):
have a lens cap. It has a built in shutter,
but it's one of those ones. As soon as you
turn it on, the shutter opens, it's ready to rock.
So for me, that's that means that they were just
taking pictures into the sky, possibly right, because you're if
you're covered, you're going to find an uncovered as much
of an uncovered areas possible. Otherwise you're gonna see reflections

(35:03):
of trees and stuff like that. So again, I don't
know nobody's seeing these pictures. No, I mean you don't.
None of the amateurs have seen these pictures, so I
don't know how quote unquote totally black they are. But
there are three that are not. They have all been released.
One was a blurry photo that appeared to be like

(35:23):
the back or the side of Chris's head. It's just
like her blurry hair. I'll show it to you guys
in studio in a second. Um links of course on
my website. One photo of like a rock wall with
vegetation overhanging it. And one photo that creeps a lot
of people out but doesn't creep me out. That's a
small branch with two pieces of red plastic tied on it,

(35:44):
and there's like either a gum wrapper or like one
of those single servo serving pill packets underneath it. And
I guess some people look at that and think that
the red plastic is skin, which I literally can't even
and like talk myself into it looking like No, that
that looks like if anybody's ever gone into the woods

(36:08):
in an area where they were gonna, let's say, fell
trees or they mark trees and it's set that really
thin red material. It's it's kind of elastic flagging. Yeah,
it's flagging, and that looks like shreds of stuff. That's
that same consistency of material. It's just a little pieces
of plastic. And now this is a This is a

(36:29):
picture on the right, correct, Yeah, I have a better
one of that. This is the only one. There's the
picture of the side of Chris's head in, but I
have the other other two ones. I'll show you just now.
This is the one that people talk about being the
rock wall. It looks to me more like it's a
you know, it maybe just be the orientation, but it
kind of looks like a path to me. Honestly, Um,

(36:51):
it's hard to tell. It almost looks like ruts, like
they're on the road with with wheel ruts or something
like that. And then this is that one that creeps
pe pull out. And I should say that there have
been reports that red bags similar to that were found
in their belongings, in uh, their rooms at their homestay,
um for whatever reason. You know. They're like doggie bags

(37:14):
or something. I was gonna say, it's almost like a
cheap takeout plastic yea. So I don't know if like
one of the girls was like, you know, keeping stuff
in there or like what you know, like it's totally
possible you just take them with you, maybe to put
trash in if you you know, I don't know, Well,
depending on where you're going. In some places you have
to carry your poop out. Seriously, Uh, those two handled

(37:37):
grocery bags are actually quite handy for that. But I'm
wondering if they actually took those bags out and empty
them type into the branch just as a signal flag.
That's that's the theory. Is the tiniest little signal flag
I ever did see, though, Yeah, it's not gonna do
not really. And then behind that it looks like water

(37:58):
to me. There's a lot of speculation, but it looks
like reflection of the water. Would you say that that's accurate?
It's accessible. It looks like it's a river, creeks something,
because there's a sharp delineation there. I mean, so I
think that's probably water and it's not. It doesn't look
like the ground that we saw on the previous pictures
or anything like that. And I guess the only like
kind of question on on that is like why I

(38:20):
take a picture of that. I as I look at that,
I kind of had the same initial Oh, it's a
that's they must be at the river, river or something.
But now, to me, if it's that dark out and
you can barely make out the trees in the background,
that looks like wet broadly foliage. To me, that's reflecting
moonlight or flash. Most likely it's probably the flat that

(38:43):
they've they've lit off by taken this photos. I question
that that's that they're near the river. Yeah. Actually, as
I look at it more closely, it looks like it's
maybe a little mound of mound of earth with foliage
in the background a little bit a little bit of
a little bit further away. I mean, yeah, And actually

(39:04):
when I look at it, you know, the other thing
I can make it into is like trees like they're
in a clearing and you can see like the trees
kind of in the distance a little bit reflecting, and
and that is that Is that the moon in the
upper right or is that just refraction? I don't know,
I would be I'm going to say that's refraction because
it looks like it's in a chunk of tree. Yeah,
it looks like it's speck of dust or something. Yeah. Anyways,

(39:27):
I still like it doesn't really matter, like the contents
of the background of that picture, because like I still
I am not totally clear why you take a picture
of that thing. And also a picture of the side
of Chris's head or the side or back of Chris's
head or you know, there's a lot of people The
other theory about these photos is that they were trying

(39:48):
to use it to like light their way. That's kind
of what I'm saying, you know, But I guess for me,
I have pretty good night vision, and I know that
for me, if I'm walking outside and it's dark, I
don't want to use a flashlight because it actually makes
it harder for me to see than just let your
eyes adjust to the dark and kind of navigate that way. Well, certainly,

(40:12):
especially if it's just like a bright flash too. Exactly
using a flashlight is one thing, but just blinding yourself
with the flash of your camera. Yeah, okay, So this
is presumably after moonset. It's not after moon set, but
it's after the moon went behind the mountain. And by
this time, again, what side of the mountain where they

(40:33):
have of the accoontable wide were they on? They were
on the north side, north side the trail they took.
It's kind of a north northeasterly trail. And then once
they hit the other side. We're not positive that the
things that were found were nearly directly north you know,

(40:54):
these miles away, but it's it's all. They're all on
the north side of the divide. Okay. The other thing
that people suggest with these pictures or the use of
the flashes, that they were trying to scare something away.
That seems like a long time to try and scare
something away, especially if you've been sleeping in the jungle
for a while and you have been dealing with whatever

(41:19):
you would be scaring away. Likely, you know, they didn't
know that any of the big predators that live in
the jungle there aren't actually going to try and kill you.
They're not doing they're kind of bashful. They might if
you were like a single small child, they might try,
but like to you know, even adult sized, mildly adult
sized human beings, they're not. They're not going to try.

(41:40):
And and also by this time they would have had
the brains, hopefully to secure some really big clubs from themselves,
just in the event of something like that happened. I mean, like,
I camera, which big cat it is that's in Panama.
But other than a big cat or some ginormous snake,
there's not I can't really think of any other major

(42:02):
predators that would be a threat to a human. It's
not it's the big cats, and the big cats aren't
going to attack you, and a snake might. But right,
that's again, that's that's why I'm asking. Those are very unlikely. Honestly,
the creature the things that will kill you in this
area are poison snakes, snakes, and spiders. No, I didn't
know a guy one time who backpacked through Central America

(42:24):
and he said, I'm pretty sure he said it was
in Panama. He was what's the word accosted by vampire bats. Yeah,
that wouldn't surprise me. And yeah, they were trying to
they were trying to get through his mosquito netting and
get at him, and yeah, and that would be unsettling. Yeah,
that would be So I would imagine that, you know,
maybe maybe driving away the the vampire bats with the
with the flash. Maybe and certainly not for like three hours, right,

(42:50):
I mean consistently for three hours. That seems well. But
if they're out in the middle of the night and
they smell prey, they're going to keep coming back. But
then you, like, you find a new place to be, right,
I mean, you find some more cover. You don't just
sit there and like flash for three hours, you like
any other cover, is the point. I guess, I don't

(43:11):
I don't know. This is completely conjectured, is actually um,
but that would be another explanation for their their their
stick with the bags tied to it would be with
That's true, very good point. Although they're tiny little bits
of it looks like a very small stick break if
I if I whacked you with that, it would snap. Yeah.

(43:33):
The other thing that people suggested, we're just going to like,
you know, deal with these pictures right now. One of
the other things that I saw suggested around was that
by this time it's likely that at least one of
them was could have potentially been hallucinating, either for you know,
lack of food or lack of sleep or lack of water,
just fear or whatever, and that they were trying to

(43:55):
capture pictures of what they were seeing, not what was
actually there. So that's also a theory out there. How
much it holds, what you know, I don't know, but
it's a it's a theory. Maybe they ate some bad
mushrooms or something. I mean, it's always possible if you're
starving in the wilderness and you no idea what you're doing,
it's always possible. Note to all of our listeners, if

(44:17):
you're in the jungle or the woods, never eat mushrooms. Yeah,
don't unless you know well, mushrooms basically have no caloric value,
so it's not worth even taking the chance. Just don't
do it. If I were here, that's the fact of

(44:38):
the day. Okay, don't do it. Just don't do it.
Just don't do it. But yeah, yeah, there's so many
people out there have died from eating mushrooms, So yeah, kids,
don't do it. Just take a lot of power bars
with you when you go, hey, I'm gonna go get lost. Okay. Anyway,
so the pictures on April eighth are it until April eleven,

(44:58):
at which time, uh, the iPhone was switched on again
at ten one am and then eventually dies at eleven
fifty six a m. My iPhone barely last a day. Legitimately,
I was out yesterday. I had been using it like
a little bit, but I was out and my phone

(45:18):
died while I was out at um I think seven pm.
It made it from like seven A I made it
twelve hours. That was it. So kudos on them for
finding a way to make an iPhone last what was it,
ten days? That's incredible. It seems to me that, you know,
the the off again on again strategy is a good one. Yeah,

(45:39):
And the consistency of the off again on again is
a super good strategy to you know that they were
turning them on and off at the same time they
were calling that kind of the same times. That's smart
because if you unknowingly make it through and they you know,
for whatever reason, it gets dropped because it's gonna get
dropped search and rescue or emergency services, then have like

(46:01):
a time frame they can see. They say, Okay, well
they called it this time, so let's keep an eye out.
Maybe they'll call it. But to correct me if I'm wrong,
the one call that went through to one was that
a different weird time. Well, but the point I'm getting
at is it was no, it's it's noted because it
was recorded on the phone. Is having connected but didn't

(46:23):
stick long enough for one to know and log it
r that's true, So that there there's there's a bit
of an issue that. I mean, I understand that the
whole thing. It's just the logic of it. It's not
It's kind of like it's kind of like you know
when you when you when you actually hit that number
and it goes to dial it and there's that lag
between when it actually starts ringing. I mean you connect

(46:44):
before the ring starts. Yeah, So yeah, I mean it's
like like if I were to call you right now,
your phone wouldn't start ringing for a little bit. My
phone my phone will be going like oh yeah, going through,
and your phone wouldn't know it for a while. Anyway,
That's that's neither here nor there. That's so anyway, again,
the data from the phones and also from the camera.

(47:05):
None of that stuff actually tells them what their course was.
The authorities what the course because the phones didn't have STAIN,
weren't connecting to anything. Well, the phone still have GPS
would still be working. I guess they weren't. I don't
know if they If they do know that path, they
aren't releasing it. So I don't have that information. Somebody might,

(47:31):
I don't. I also do want to mention that I
have read on a various different forums that there were
like six calls made from the iPhone at the end
of the eleventh day or the eleventh of April, the
tenth day. But I can't find a source for that,
and I don't think that's true. I don't think that

(47:51):
really happened. I think the phone just died. I don't
think that six calls were made in rapid Yeah, it's
like somebody through that in for a little drama, because
six rapid calls me something horrible. What's happening coming after us?
We've got to get the cops in here, pretty much. Yeah.
So that's that's the information that we have in terms
of timeline, and there are of course some big questions

(48:14):
here that we will probably never have answers to. One
thing that a lot of people are saying they think
is weird is that neither of the girls recorded like
a farewell of any kind. No like, no, no like video,
no like picture, nothing. And I guess that's a thing
that you see in people who die, like in the wilderness,

(48:35):
fairly frequently, people who know they're going to die, like,
you know, leave a note that says, I love you mom,
I love you dad, I'm so sorry, or this happened
to us, and like it's horrible, horrible and awful and
I'm about to die and I love everybody, you know.
But that doesn't really bother me so much, I'll be honest. Well,
probably they probably wouldn't have thought to do that until
I read that on the internet. So yeah, they they

(48:58):
maybe didn't give up hope and think I'm about to
die or anything like that. And by that time, of course,
the batteries and all the devices are dead, and by
the time they thought about making a farewell video well
too late. But a lot of those little points, she
don't they have kind of crappy little batteries, Like I've
got a little point in sheot pentachs nice little camera,
but the battery doesn't last long at all. Well, it's
also hard to tell like how long after the phones

(49:20):
died they were alive. Yeah, you know, I mean like
they could have both been alive for like ten more days.
They could have not been feeling like they were about
to die for you know, a week until after, you know,
after their stuff died. So it's also possible that that
wasn't a thing that concerned them. As I said, it
doesn't concern me, but I did want to bring it
up because I do see it a lot of places.

(49:40):
There's also this fun problem that comes up when they
did interviews with local witnesses, not witnesses of whatever happened
to them, obviously, but people who said that they saw
the girls on the first in the town. In the town,
it's pretty well confirmed that the photos that they took
gone the Continental Divide were taken out one pm, so

(50:04):
they would have had to have left town at like
eleven am at the very latest for them to have
you know, walked up there and all that stuff. But
apparently the woman who runs the school that they were
planning to work for claims that she spoke with them
at one pm that day. Further it's I mean, it's impossible,

(50:25):
It's simply impossible. Furthermore, at Yeah, the other thing is
that the innkeeper slash like coffee there's a guy who
runs like an inn and like a coffee shop, but
like basically the bottom of the trail outside a very
outside of town. You run into this in like European

(50:46):
countries a lot too. There's just like a random in there.
He said that he saw two um he's the term
gringo girls. Uh, that vaguely kind of matched the description
of Listen and Chris. I mean, certainly there couldn't have
been like that in many white folks walking around of
that age. There could have been I don't know, I

(51:07):
don't know if there's enough business for a guy to
have a guide service up and down that trail for
you know, to make money. There might be enough. And
and you know, a couple of green gold girls is
probably a very apt description of who he saw. Whoever
he saw, so his description of them is like a
little off. And you know, he said that the taller
brunette girl was wearing black leggings, but Listen was wearing

(51:30):
like a black skirt or shorts. Or something. It doesn't
super match, but he kind of described them. And he
said that girls, these two girls that he saw showed
up at his inn at about three thirty pm, which
would have been about when they were probably hitting that area. Again,
if they walked straight down from the Continental evidence going

(51:53):
over that timeline makes sense. They looked, he said, they
looked really, really tired, and they were asking for directions
back into town, and he said, you you should take
a taxi. But he described one of them as being
a brunette. Yeah, Lis ansa brunette. Ones are redhead, ones
are brunette. He He then said he didn't pay attention
to see if they had walked back into town or

(52:13):
walked to the trail. I don't know also how good
their Spanish was, and I don't know if they're kind
of regional dialects. So it's, you know, possible that I
guess it's possible that they did, in fact walk back down,
got directions they didn't totally understand, and thought that they
were in the wrong place, and walked back up the hill.

(52:33):
But that seems unlikely to me. I literally have no
idea what would possess those girls to walk back to
the trail well, and they know they know what direction
they got there somehow, so they know what direction town is.
They can't be confused about where the town is. And
you may not know, but give me a rough approximate here.

(52:55):
How high is it from where they started at the
bottom of the trail to the Continental Divide elevation? Do
you know how many? Idea? Literally, no idea? What's okay?
I know that it's a significant number. I mean, like,
you know, you you ascend. I don't know. Let's just
say a thousand feet again, I'm pulling that number out
of thin air. But it would be really hard to say, Oh,

(53:18):
I don't know. I guess we'll go back off that
thousand foot incline sense. Yeah, it's got to be two
other girls. I would agree with that. The other problem,
I guess is that these Dutch men that they had
brunch with, and actually it turns out that it's confirmed
that those the detectives who came from the Netherlands found

(53:41):
those men like they knew who those men were, and
they interviewed them and questioned them. They had returned to
the Netherlands since the Dutch detectives showed up in Panama
and they found them and interviewed them. But that's like it,
like they know, the Dutch of officials never released anything
that said these were the men, and they had literally

(54:04):
no information. They'd like, there was none of that happened.
They it's just oh yeah, we found them and we
interviewed them. End of story. So that's a bit. You know,
that's of course frustrating for us a little bit as
trying to solve this mystery. Although you know, I don't
know if that's standard operating procedure for police these days,
like say, in cases like this which are abound to

(54:24):
make it onto the internet and make it on a
web sluice and then pages like that. Maybe the guy said, hey, look,
I know this is going to wind up on web
sluices and and and millions of people are going to
start circulating like you know, all these rumors that you know,
we're the killers. I think that you don't have to
even release the name, right, you just have to say, like, oh, hey, yeah,
we we found them and they weren't involved, like we

(54:47):
interviewed them and they had lunch with the girls and
they weren't involved anymore. Like they that's fine, but they
haven't even released that amount of information. So there are
a lot of theories out there. We're gonna just kind
of talking broad terms about them. But I do want
to make sure really quickly that we're all on the
same page about all of the bones that were found

(55:08):
being like totally clean and like broken in weird places.
We're cool with that, right. We don't need to like
talk about the fact that they were they died in
the jungle and there are scavengers and weather and bugs
would have very quickly been cleaned off by animals and

(55:28):
bugs and the weather, and then likely they were all
found in riverbeds, so they were washed down the river
broken by rocks. That's what happened. The shoe, did that
only have bones in it? Or did that actually have
flesh in it as well? I think it had some
flesh in it too, But I think that's not so
weird to me. Well, no, it's not weird, but that

(55:49):
was the only place that I could see that happening,
So I just want to Yep, that's my understanding is
that it had the kind of foot in it, So
we're good. We don't need to talk about that. If
anybody has like huge questions, I guess We'll put a
link into like how bodies decomposing the jungle on the
website if you really want to do the research, really don't. Yeah,

(56:09):
so theories, Yeah you got. First off, as with most
of my stories, it turns out these days there's kind
of two camps, foul play or unfortunate accident. I'm gonna
go ahead and start out by saying I think foul
play is like super unlikely, and you can kind of
just extrapolate out, like what people you know, it's Panama.

(56:32):
It's actually it turns out one of the safest places
in Panama, but it's still Panama. So you know, people say, oh,
they were murdered, but like why really they took They
took like many many days to murder them, a lot
of days, and then somebody, well somebody was like, oh,
they could have been murdered, and then it was the
murderer was like trying to make it look like they

(56:53):
were lost in the wilderness, so they were like turning
the phone on and like faking calls. But that's the
dumbest thing I ever heard. Thank you for saying those words,
because I was almost gonna say, that's the dumbest thing
I've heard of the day, because if I live in
the you know, if I'm a commando in the jungle,
I'm not gonna leave a false trail for some woman

(57:17):
or two women that I kill. I'm just gonna kill him, yeah,
and hide the bodies really carefully. Also rape and kidnapping,
but those are also dumb. Yeah, they carried it out
for a long time. It's just yeah, it went on
for a real long time. And like, who in the
world is going to put that much effort into like
staging an unfortunate loss, Like that's dumb. Yeah, I can't

(57:40):
I can't buy that. And there's there's As just said,
this is one of the safer places in the area,
So I can't really see it just doesn't make sense.
There's not a lot of guerrilla activity or nefarious activity
for me to even count that as a viable option.
And this isn't the area of Panama where there's just
like random pot farms everywhere and stuff. That's not I mean,

(58:04):
there might be, but like it's not. They didn't likely
just wander onto you know, somebody's land or anything like that.
And so but as anybody considered, is there anybody out
there in the world, the World Wide Web is talking
about alien abduction. Because again, I'm kind of surprised it
went on too long. That's the whole thing is, like
it went on for so long that like pretty much

(58:25):
the only option is that, like there was an unfortunate
accident that happened. Yeah, I'm sure even if they were
just lost. I mean, one of them obviously probably died
before the other one died. So there's an interesting, fun,
little tidbit of information that I didn't bring up earlier,
but I will bring up now, uh when it's it's

(58:47):
interesting when they did the analysis, so I guess I
didn't mention that like a lot of other bones have
been found since that kind of initial bone find um,
some of them were leg bones, and when they did
and now a lissis on the leg bones that were
Lisan's they found, I guess you can tell via bones
this condition that causes your muscles to inflame and it

(59:12):
affects your bones as well. I can't remember what it's called,
but it's caused by over exertion. So that strongly suggests,
you know, to a lot of people they say, well,
maybe like Chris got injured and Lisan was trying to
carry her, or you know, maybe Lissan, you know, broke
her leg and was like over exerting the other leg
trying to you know anything. It also, I guess it's

(59:35):
possible that the inflammation could have been caused like by poison,
like by a bite. All possible. So I guess, you know,
my list of unfortunate accident stuff is. I think it's
it's most likely that one of them got bit by
a snake on accident or twisted an ankle and they
thought they could figure out a shortcut through the jungle

(59:59):
and got lost out there. Let me talk about the time.
I'm not going to tell you the time, and one
of these days I'll tell you the story of the
time I was in Padigo and yeah, and I took
a short cut. Yeah, I mean, it's also possible. You know,
there are a lot of like weird ravines that go off.
They just thought that was the trail and took that.
There are pictures of them on the trail that, you know,

(01:00:21):
Steve and I were kind of talking about earlier. I
was like, this picture actually creeps me out of Chris
because it kind of looks like they're just walking through
a dried up riverbed that doesn't look like a trail
at all to me, but maybe it is. And that's
not something that you know, any of the investigators have
brought up, is that like this obviously isn't the trail.
Apparently that's what the trail looks like. So it would
be pretty easy to just you know, think this other
offshoot was the trail and get lost and before you

(01:00:43):
know it, you realize, oh, it's you know, getting dark,
the sun is setting. We have no idea where we are.
Although in that instant, what do you do? You turn
around and follow the trail you were just following back
to the other trail and walk out that way, or
if you have to camp camp on the trail. It
seems like I just like, I don't know why. So

(01:01:05):
for me, I don't think it's possible that they just
got lost got lost. No, I think that one of
them had been injured, at least at least one of them.
See I disagree with that when when I looked at
the map that which is another one of the great
infographics that that somebody has put together, and there's this

(01:01:27):
map that kind of plots out their course to the
last point that we know about and then so if
you follow that course north or northeast. This is the
point that I was making earlier and we talked about,
is that you come to another river, and that river

(01:01:49):
is it's the Rio Changuinola. If I'm I pope, I'm
pronouncing that correctly. Yeah. Okay, Well that's flowing downhill on
the north side of that Continental divide, the mountain ridge
that we were talking about. Okay, well, if they're if
they're lost, I can see them being confused and one

(01:02:10):
trying to convince the other no, listen, we need to
follow this. This is totally going to take us home
and correct me if I'm wrong. But they only took
a couple of bottles of waters at right. Yeah, But
the I guess the argument is those rivers would be
kind of pure enough to I don't obviously not. You're
probably gonna get giardia or something gardia or disenter. You're

(01:02:32):
going to drink it, and you're gonna drink it and
you're gonna get something and that's going to make you
sick and ill. And so my my personal belief is
that they got sick. I don't think somebody fell and
broke a bone. I think they both got ill. And
usually those kind of things, they tear up your guts
and you can't walk. We're talking like a couple of

(01:02:54):
days later, like they got lost and then got ill,
because that doesn't it doesn't jardy. It takes a while.
It's not like you drink it and suddenly it's like
food poisoning. Two hours later you're vomiting. It takes a
while to get hole in there. It takes a day
or two. But if you were lost for a day
or two, then you're incapacitated and you're stuck, and then
the hydration sets in. No matter how much you drink

(01:03:16):
out of the river that you're laying next to, you're
gonna be dehydrated. And I think that one of them
did pa the presence of mind as we know by
the on again, off again scenario. But personally, as I
looked at the photos of what we could see from
the camera from it's the eighth day, correct, No, it's

(01:03:37):
the seventh day. It's April eight. The seventh thing. These
are all the black photos when I looked at because
I pulled up the user manual on their camera. I
wanted to know what does it take to use this thing.
It's a simple point and click. It's got the little
back and forth spring loaded dial on the front to
turn it on and off, and then it's just a

(01:03:58):
really simple push to turn on or to take a photo.
So I can see either a somebody having spasms or
a seizure of some kind and just essentially holding down
repeatedly squeezing the button consciously or unconsciously, or if they're

(01:04:21):
hardy deceased at that point and it's in their hand,
and there's some kind of critter rustling around and checking
them out because their corps and that means that they're
fair game continually hitting that and that's why we're not
seeing anything, because it's pointed up or it's rolled into
one of them the hair of is it Chris Chris's hair?

(01:04:42):
So the problem with that theory is that the camera
was found neatly packed in the backpack. Oh, the camera
was back in the background. Everything was in the backpack.
So it wasn't like somebody just passed out. It wasn't
like a seizure. It was and you know, people have
said like, oh, well, maybe it was like floating down
the river and like hitting stuff, and that we're setting

(01:05:04):
it off, but like then it would have had like
it would have been like super you know, when you
accidentally take a picture of like the inside of your hand,
the flashes like they would have been white pictures. They
wouldn't have been black pictures. You wouldn't have had the hair.
And also the I'm as saying, yeah it was and
I I'm assuming this is not a watertight camera. So
once the river, you can't use the flash anymore, or

(01:05:26):
you can can't take pictures anymore. So I'm kind of
thinking that they probably tried. Probably there was a helicopter
or some such thing flying overhead and they were just
trying to signal it. Yeah, I would agree with that. Um,
you know again, the other problems I have with that
are the pictures of you know what looked like different
areas taken on that same night, the hair, the like

(01:05:48):
fairly purposeful picture of whatever they've created on the rock there.
And I'm not gonna again, we don't have to to
go into it great length, but I don't know that
they're different in areas. I could see those pictures being
taken from pointing one direction, turning nine degrees and taking another.

(01:06:09):
So I when you say a different area. I'm just
trying to get the context. If it's not as if
they roamed right, it's just a different direction that they
were facing at the time. But but I mean, and
the only reason that I think that they were stuck
on the river bank and I caused I called out
sickness is because I don't know if we've clarified this yet.

(01:06:32):
But everything besides the backpack, every single thing was downstream. Well,
the backpack was downstream too, everything everything downstream. I think
it's it's pretty well accepted that a flash flood probably
washed their stuff down. It could be that that's what
finally did a man too, because the thing about it
is as if you're out there in rough wilderness area,

(01:06:53):
the best thing to do is to find a river
and follow it down and then and so they were
probably doing that. They're probably follow in this river, and
they might have even thought they already were on the
other side of the continental divide. They could have jumped
to that conclusion is beyond me. But maybe they realized
there's no way we're gonna get back to the top,
and we'll just follow this until it comes to a village.
I guess the flood comes along and well, that's kind

(01:07:15):
of it for them. If you look at the pictures
of that area, there are a lot of mountains, so
it's possible that they you know, crusted another one and
thought it was the same one, and you know, they
turned around in the But you know, the other thing
is there are a lot of like old huts. The
area that they were kind of in, especially the area
they were their remains were found in, is like grazing

(01:07:36):
area or farmers walked through it. Obviously, farmers have found
most of this stuff. Locals have found most of this stuff.
So it's not as though they were in an unpopulated area.
I mean, it wasn't like a city obviously, but like
certainly in that in the time of ten days, people
were like walking through that area. So you know, I

(01:07:58):
have I have no good scope of how one could
be so thoroughly lost with so many people looking for you.
They would have had to have been mobile. The jungle
is a big place. It is sort of sound quite
well that's true too, so yeah, yeah, but yeah, people
get lost. Is this this is not the first time

(01:08:19):
this kind of thing has happened. I just gotta say,
don't go out in the woods without a compass and
some food and water and all kinds of other stuff
and like emergency stuff. You know. Really, honestly, the best
advice I could give anybody is they're like fifty cents,
those survival whistles and those suckers are allowed. Yeah, those
things are good. A flair a gun. You can get

(01:08:39):
actually small flare aguns. You're not at the big, big,
big steel ones to carry on ships. You can get
small little flare aguns and stuff like that. That's also
take some survival stuff with you stuff or chip Number
one is don't go into a remote area you don't
know of on your own, especial if you've hired a

(01:09:01):
guide for the next of the day. That's what perplexes
me so much about this is why they decided, because
I mean, technically that trail does go on for hundreds
and hundreds of kilometers, you know, through the jungle. But
if you don't know what you're doing, why would you go,
What the hell, let's just give it a show. That's

(01:09:22):
you know, maybe maybe that's what I don't understand. I
don't get it either. That's but at twenty one I
might have made that decision. True that but um, maybe
they thought, you know, we've got nothing else going on.
This is the trail around here. Let's just go do
a couple of miles of it and then come back
and then we'll go to the major trek tomorrow. And
they wind up like, and I've done this before. You

(01:09:43):
go out in the woods. It's like, we're just gonna
go a couple of miles, and then you get out
there and it's like, let's go another mile, you know,
Oh wait, let's go another mile, you know, I mean,
come on, why not, you know, and you wind up
going a lot further than you originally planned on. It's
just really unfortunate situation. And then it's really sad too
that they lasted so long that they're out there. I'm

(01:10:05):
sure terrified. And if you follow the timeline, you may
or may not have realized that the parents their parents
went out with the search parties, which means that their
parents could have been within a mile of them while
they were still alive. And that's scary to me. You know,
it's not like startling, Yeah it is. It's tragic. Tragic

(01:10:28):
is definitely the word. And also, yeah, I don't know,
it's just I'm sure the parents wondering about that all
the time they do. I watched this documentary. It's all
in Dutch, so I didn't understand it. But I did
watch this documentary of a news crew from the Netherlands
came with the family and films them walking the trail,

(01:10:48):
and it's just kind of it's like pretty hard to watch.
You don't understand what they're talking about, and they seem
like in fine spirits, but it's like just to know,
you know. They have this moment where they pause and
they they're at this like waterfall, and they both just
kind of stand there and they say, well, this is
the last known place of our daughter, you know, and
they show this picture and it's the picture of her

(01:11:09):
like standing by a waterfall. You know. It's just that
moment of like, oh man, yeah, those kind of emotions
are in here. We all understand that people don't understand
the language. That's a fun story for this week. Do
you guys have any other theories you want to talk about? None? Yeah,
I don't have much to contribute on this one. Really.
I just think that, yeah, they got lost and they

(01:11:30):
got turned around and they started doing the wrong things.
That's what happens when you get lost is you get
this idea in your head. Oh well, you know this
is a way to go, and you can't get that
fixation out of your head. I've been there. I mean
I've Yeah, I've been lost in the woods and you
make mistand just mistakes, compile pile on top of mistakes.
The next thing you know, you're really lost. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:11:51):
and that's what happened to them. I'm pretty sure it's
really too bad. They couldn't find a tree high enough
to shinny up to get silk, average mountain high enough
to get up on top of Yeah, I agree, connect
with the phone call, that would have been good. There
you go. So the infographics that we've been talking about
UM as well as some links will be on our website,

(01:12:13):
UM thinking sideways podcast dot com. You are probably not
listening to us there. You're probably listening to us on iTunes.
I think that's like where most of our traffic comes
from these days. If you're on iTunes, leave us a
comment in the rating, which you know, you guys are
doing pretty good at. I guess it's how people find
us other than it's how people find us. So we've

(01:12:35):
got a lot of stuff. Yeah, so thank you. You
may be trying to stream us on Stitcher. We're again
working on that, trying, trying real hard to work with
them on that. We've got some engineers on it. I
promise you might be friends with us on Facebook. You
might have liked our page. If you haven't, feel free
to take a moment to do that. You may or

(01:12:55):
may not follow us on Twitter. If you don't, that's okay.
Don't have a Twitter, so I guess it's okay, but
you should follow us if you have a Twitter. Every
once in a while, tweet something. Usually when somebody's tweeted
at us already, it's usually it. Uh. And if you
want to talk about this case with any of us,

(01:13:18):
or you have suggestions or anything like that, please feel
free to send us an email Thinking Sideways podcast at
gmail dot com. With that, I think we're gonna get
out of here. You guys are both just like wide
eyed and like, I don't want to think about life anymore. Yeah,

(01:13:38):
I know this. This this is a rough story. Yeah,
it's very sad. Yeah, we're gonna have to do something
completely weird next week. We've done enough of these lately.
I need something completely different than people disappearing. Yeah, I
think it's my turn next week, so I'll come up
with something like that, and no more disappearances for a while.
Can you involve clowns? No int squirrels. I'm okay with that.

(01:14:03):
Love squirrels. That's totally awesome, very cool. Anyway, there's one
lesson I'm taking away from this is stay the hell
out of Panama. And also it's better not to leave
the house at all. Yeah, yeah, I think we agree
on that. Bye guys, all right, bye everybody, So long
for this week.