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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Sometimes I can't sleep after I've interviewed you. You got
me all riled up with this stuff.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Well, Georgia, that makes two of us. I mean there's
many nights where I'll go through a case and I'll
go lay in bed and just gather my thoughts. And
sometimes my thoughts are out there with the people in
the woods that have disappeared, and it's not a comforting feeling.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Oh my gosh. By the way, a couple months ago,
I had a great opportunity to interview David for our
Beyond Belief television program, and he is as riveting on
the radio and on television as in person. And David
just great information.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Well, George, you're very kind, very kind. But the truth
of the matter is is that you're probably one of
the most polite people in the public spectrum I've met
in a long time. And it was an honor to
be on your show, and I appreciated the invitation.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
So what is new in the field of these missing people?

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Well, you know about it. Two or three years ago,
when I was in the middle of investigating rural disappearances,
several people came to me and they said, you know,
I know that you're one of those people out there
that keeps an open mind, and it keeps your spectrum opened.
But one of these days you're going to move from
the woods those rural areas and you're going to come

(01:16):
into the city because the profile points that you've identified
on these cases, they're going to transition. You are just
gonna find it. It's just going to be a matter
of time. Truth of the matter is, I was so
occupied with looking at people who have disappeared in the
national parks and forests in North America that I was
probably a bit taken by that statement. And I kept

(01:38):
my mind open, and some things came along, and some
people sent me some emails, and sooner or later I
got to the point where I was looking at cases
of college aged men that disappeared in their unusual conditions,
predominantly in the Great Lakes region, but also along the
East Coast area of the US. Were some common denominators

(02:01):
there that also reflected upon the disappearances we were looking
at in rural areas. And after studying that for a year,
a few months back I came out with a fifth
book called Missing four one one A Sobering Coincidence and
the factors on that is is that canines can't track
the people to where they disappeared. They almost seemed to

(02:24):
disappear under the noses of their friends and family. And many,
many times they're found in an area that had been searched,
sometimes ten times. And this is the same profile points
that happen in the world.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Disappearances just amazing.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Now, one of the weird things is is that many
times when these people are found, the search and rescue
people are never thinking criminal act. They're always thinking, my gosh,
we found somebody, whether they're dad or alive. We found
them and we can get closure. And they're not trained investigators.
And usually when they're found, the body's turned over to
the corner. Yeah, they died in the woods, and that

(03:01):
would be the end of it. Now, with cases in
the water brings home an entirely different perspective on the
way the body reacts to water. And there's certain things
that the body does in certain periods of time in
the water that it doesn't do on land, and they're
readily identifiable. And after looking at a series of cases
where there were secondary autopsies, and in some cases where

(03:22):
the original medical examiner was honest and would face the consequences.
Say the person disappeared seven days ago, the corner would
come out and say, well, it might have disappeared seven
days ago, but they've only been in the water for
two days, and George doesn't happen once or this has
happened many and then on top of that many times

(03:48):
a corner comes back and says, yeah, we can't determine
what caused the death of these people, and this isn't
This has happened also in these world disappearances, and when
you try to stay find the certain points that you've
identified and you don't want to wander, then it excludes
a lot of perimeter cases that we might have looked at.

(04:09):
But the reality of it is is that we're trying
to state to that stayed to that straight criteria. Now,
some other detectives were working on something similar to this,
and they used the cases and they identified him as
the Smiley Face killers. And they claim that in certain
instances they would find some graffiti next to the site

(04:31):
where the people were found. And these guys, a guy
named Gannon who was retired from New York Police. I
give the guy a lot of credit because most detectives
don't want to work missing persons cases. They want to
work homicide cases, robbery, homicide, etc. But I tell you
Gannon from New York. He really paid attention to what

(04:51):
was happening to these people in the Hudson River and
in other rivers around that New York area, and he
determined that certain bodies couldn't have ended up in locations
where they did. He worked with corners to figure out
that the body's were in the rivers as long as
they were, and these guys were looking at it from
a local area perspective. And when I looked at it,

(05:12):
I knew that I had cases in rural areas that
were not only in the United States and Canada, they
were also in seven other countries that exactly met this
methis established profile. Well, I knew that if the profile
went to these young men that were disappearing in these rivers,
then it also probably was happening in other areas of

(05:33):
the world.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
What about the cases that are happening around the British Columbia,
Canada where feet are showing up on shore, just feet.
They're not finding bodies but feet.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
You know, we looked at that because in the part
of the profile points that we've identified, is that people
are missing shoes and clothing many times when they disappear.
And then we started looking at these feet and some
of them have been found on the northern California coast
and some of them found on lakes and things in

(06:08):
North America and in British Columbia. Now there's a whole
an entire series of these in the Vancouver area where
they haven't been able to identify anybody. And they've got
DNA and they have the shoe and they have the foot,
but they can't really talk much more about it because
they some corners have claimed that the foot comes off
first if they're in the water a long period of time.

(06:29):
But they should be able to put that foot with
a missing person if they have the DNA.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
You would think so somebody would report, Hey, my son's massine,
my friend whatever.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
Right exactly. And you bring up the point about British Columbia,
And I get questions all the time from Canada, and
I know that there's a lot of people from there
listening right now. And the area of Lower British Columbia,
in that Vancouver, Northern Vancouver area, there are so many
many people that have disappeared and I've got a couple

(07:03):
friends that live in that area and they tell me
all the time, Hey, there's people disappearing up here. And
the news does the same thing here as they do
in the States. They report it for the first couple
of days, maybe up to four or five days, but
then you never hear about it.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
They stop. Then they go on to the next the tragedy.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Exactly, and why are these people disappearing, how are they disappearing,
and if they're found, what are the circumstances. Then you
really don't hear a lot about it. Ninety nine percent
of the time, these people are hiking alone, they get
ahead of the group, they're behind the group one way
or another. They aren't seen when they disappear, and they're
usually found in areas that baffle the investigators. And it

(07:40):
doesn't matter if it's a Canadian or a US search
and rescue person. Sometimes when they get on the media,
they're stumped. They can't answer the question how the person
got to where they were found.

Speaker 1 (07:52):
And let me ask you this, David, of what's the
percent of those people who disappear who are found dead.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
So in this profile that we've established, that's really the
only one I can talk to, because I would say
it's probably thirty forty percent, right, maybe slightly higher. But
then the people that are found, the uniform issue with
them is they don't know how they got missing. They
don't remember how they went missing, they can't explain where

(08:24):
they were. It's like a very unusual memory loss.

Speaker 1 (08:29):
All Right, of that percent thirty to forty percent, maybe
a little higher that are found dead, then what's the
percent of those who are found alive? And again they
don't remember or anything like that, But what's that percent
found alive found alive?

Speaker 2 (08:44):
I would say probably fifty fifty five, maybe sixty percent
that high.

Speaker 1 (08:48):
Okay, So there's a percent though that we just don't
know where they are, right.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
Very high percentage. Yes, the of that forty percent that
are left, I would say those that are that are gone,
maybe ten to fifteen percent.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
We can't find totally vamished.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
And George, I'm not talking about some small effort to
find this group. There is enormous effort to find them.
We're talking about flear in the sky. We're talking about
multiple canine blood sniffing bloodhounds. We're talking about sometimes people
walking shoulder to shoulder and we're talking about covering the

(09:28):
area multiple multiple times.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
Yeah, one person sends you an email from North Carolina, James.
He said, of these people who are found, do they
still have blood in their bodies? Interesting question. I never
asked you that.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
So there are a few unusual cases. It's called exangination,
where some bodies are found and there's no blood in them.
And I've written about that in some of my books,
and it's really unusual. It's not a common trait. And
in my last book, I wrote about a woman that
disappeared and that they had that issue and they couldn't

(10:05):
find enough blood to do tests on her in the body.
And the unusual part of that was is that they
couldn't find any wounds on the body that would account
for the loss of.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
Blood, almost like their vampire people out there.

Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yeah, you know, except that you would think with a
vampire type incident there'd be marks or something or something.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
Now, in the book series, we've got what four different
books missing for one to one five five? Now, okay,
and what's the latest on your movie documentary?

Speaker 2 (10:34):
So we just got back about a week ago after
a lengthy trip up through Idaho, Washington, Oregon and back
down through northern Colorado where we did an entire series
of interviews and it was phenomenal. And I can tell
you that I'm really critical of the interviews and if

(10:55):
they'd aren't going well or if the information isn't good,
I'm one it's going to speak up and say, hey,
this is.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
That's true. You don't hold back.

Speaker 2 (11:03):
But the reality is that some of the people we
found interview George just came to the plate. And sometimes
the cases that I wrote about where we went out
to find an interview victims, sometimes the story is even
stranger after you get into the minutia of the data
than it was when I originally wrote about it. And
we've got some pretty big name people that some others

(11:25):
out there in the world are going to recognize in
the movie that stepped up and wanting to participate with us,
that are experts. And then we have some county sheriffs
in some areas that absolutely confirm the strangeness of some
of the cases that I've written about. So I think
right now we're doing really well. We should be finished
filming by the end of December. It will then go

(11:47):
to editing and that could take months. So I tell
people don't expect anything before September October.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
Okay, And initially, David, these were all around the park systems.
Have you started looking at, you know, cities were people
have disappeared too.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
You know, we're staying with that disappearance of college aged
men that have disappeared in a city environment that fit
a profile. And we can talk more about that later.
But the reality of it is, it's really exact college
age educated young men. Most of them are big time athletes,
most of them have are on scholarships for either academics

(12:23):
or athletics. We're talking about the cream and the crop
young men that have vanished.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
That's right. And what about race? Does that matter?

Speaker 2 (12:31):
Predominantly white males and I've stated in my past books
and it's staying continuous here German descent.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
Now, how in the heck if someone is taking them now,
I'm just saying if how would they know their nationality?

Speaker 2 (12:50):
That's the part that's weird. It's truly baffling. I don't
know what to say.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
I mean, would somebody have access to their dossier or
something that's strange?

Speaker 2 (13:02):
Well, when you get into it, you realize that it
can't be something normal. This has to be something so
far outside the bounds of what you and I and
everyone else understands, because these young men are so so smart,
so athletic, so easy going. Sometimes the line, yes, exactly,

(13:25):
there aren't any vagrants that I've written about that have
stumbled into the river and drowned. These are unknown circumstances
of how they got in the river that baffle the cops.

Speaker 1 (13:34):
Are they generally spotted by somebody in an hour or
two before they disappear.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
Sometimes, but again that time of the disappearance, they don't
know because a lot of times the person, in many instances,
they're in a bar drinking with friends, and their friends say,
all of a sudden, we lost contact with them. We
don't know where he went. We texted him, we phoned him,
and it was like under their noses.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
The person disappeared like a guy said, I'm going to
go to the rest of him, and maybe he does,
maybe he doesn't, but he never comes back.

Speaker 2 (14:05):
Exactly.

Speaker 1 (14:07):
Jeez, unbelievable, David. I'm going to go through some cases
with you and have you update us on some people
with basically a list of these people. But this is
this is shocking. This isn't getting solved, is it?

Speaker 2 (14:24):
Well, you know what I tell people is when I
when I give a presentation to me, it's like spokes
in a wheel. Am I started off with just one
or two spokes dismissing young men in urban areas. This
is another spoke in the wheel. And I've got a
feeling the spokes are going to increase before we really
solve this.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
And when these now the inner city disappearances are what
percent of those are found dead? Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
Yeah, it's it's a very scary, high profile. There's only
one case I know of where somebody disappeared and was down.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
We'll talk about that too. Then we'll talk about those
people disappearing in cities. And like David said, ninety nine
plus percent are found dead. And David, those books are
still available, are they not?

Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yes? And I warn people not to buy them on
Amazon because there's resellers out there that they're just ripping
people off that on our website they're twenty four ninety
five can a missing dot com.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
You know that's a good point because I've seen some
books that would sell retail for nineteen ninety five and
they're on Amazon for like one hundred bucks. Crazy.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
It's nuts and everyone's fag get an email from somebody
saying why are you charging so much? Then?

Speaker 3 (15:40):
Not me?

Speaker 1 (15:40):
Not you, No, no, not you at all. Let me
go through some names of missing people and you can
give us updates or tell us the story behind them. Okay,
sure Neville Jewel from British Columbia.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
So this kind of brings on a story about a
very experienced hikers on the Houcrest near Cyprus Mountain in
the Northern Vancouver area, parked his car on this trail,
started walking. He texted his girlfriend at two o'clock said
he was going to be home on time. It was
in the West Lion area. Didn't show up, didn't come back.

(16:16):
They started his search right away. They pulled his cell
phone forensics and it kind of was showing some activity
in a specific area and a specific ridgeline of a
in the Capilana Watershed. And for people who've been to
the Northern Vancouver before, there's a famous Capilano suspension bridge
and that's in this area. They brought search dogs in.

(16:38):
They never found a scent. Bad weather hit the area
immediately after the search started. Another profile point, the other
profile point being is that when kenines can't find a
scent in area for the victim. That's something we pay
attention to make a long story short. This happened September twelfth,
twenty fifteen. They gave up the search and Neville Jewel

(16:58):
has never been found.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
Never been fund So that's one of those percents rights
gone right. Sending texts to his girlfriend and he's gone.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
And I think that, you know, for the people who
are listening to me for the first time, one of
the vetting points that we do is that we take
out the commonalities of well, is it an animal attack?
Now search and rescue eliminates that it's not an animal attack.
Is could there be human predation in the area, Well,
there's no evidence that a crime has ever occurred in

(17:33):
this area before. So is it easy to disappear in
the wilderness? Well maybe if you wanted to. But the
people here that we're talking about, no mental illness, issues,
in happy relationships, non suicidal. If they were suicidal, if
there was sign of human predation, if there was a

(17:53):
sign of animal predation, that would eliminate it from our research.

Speaker 1 (17:58):
Next up, Calm Billings tell us about Tom.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
This is another tough one, twenty two years old in
the same area as Neville Trail runners said that they
saw billings just before he started to hike in the
area of Lynn Canyon in the same general area. Well
sent dogs that were brought up into that area. They
found nothing. Even though the searchers had people that put

(18:22):
him in a specific place after that, they found nothing.
This is in an area of Grouse Mountain again in
at Capelano area. He left his cell phone in his
room because it was broken. He left his room at
nine am that morning, telling roommates he'd be back by
nine to forty five. That night, he discussed hiking this
area of Grouse Mountain with his roommate. He was an

(18:43):
extremely experienced hiker and he had made big trips to Russia, Siberia, Velaruslavia, Israel.
It's a lengthy list. This guy was well known in
the hiking circles and it was confusing to friends and
his father why he had tried to even make a
hike on a mountain. When he finally started at that

(19:04):
base at about two pm. He knew better than to
do this, so it was confusing to him why he did.
And a massive, massive search was inhibited by bad weather
and it was also inhibited by the fact they never
found a scent in the area where they knew he
was going to be. So we have two hikers now
that have disappeared in the same area, the same profile points.

(19:24):
Both have never been found.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
How do these stories come to you? Do people share
them now? Insiders?

Speaker 2 (19:33):
It's unbelievable. Now after doing this for a number of years,
how many emails I get from people saying, you know,
you really ought to look at this area, or you
really ought to look at this case. And I will
tell people, because it's funny. They hear you and I
having a conversation, and maybe they've listened to three or
four of our interviews and they think that they understand

(19:53):
what is happening here. And I can tell you that
in all the interviews I've ever done, maybe four or
five percent of all the facts and elements have come
out in these one hundred hours of interviews. But all
the minutia of the facts is in the books, and
that's really the meat of the issue. It's these little
things where like you said, he left his cell phone

(20:14):
in his room, and a lot of the cases that
we write about that people didn't have any transmission with them.
They didn't have a SAT phone, they didn't have a
cell phone, they didn't have an emergency transplonder, beaker and
beacon that we tell people to carry, and for whatever reason,
it seems to be more of the norm than not.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
Yet so many people are disappearing from these parks. I
know some people now who have not just because of
listening to uts. They have not gone on a park trip, camping, outing,
or anything like that. They've said I'm not going.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
Well, you know, and I get this all the time.
When you make an appearance, people come up to in
and they ask you a million questions and they say, wow,
you know, I've decided not to take my family here.
And the reality is is that I tell people you
should go, but just be cognizant that this isn't the
safe haven that many have made the force in the
Woods out to be, because it's unbelievable how quickly, especially

(21:10):
a small child, can disappear, even though you think they
are in their presence, in the immediate presence of you.
And then there's also I think there's a macho noess
to some men about going into the woods and being
able to survive. Yet I know dozens and dozens of
cases of hunters that have gone into the woods and

(21:31):
they've never come out. And I know that if they
would have had an emergency transponder beacon with him, they
would have lived.

Speaker 1 (21:37):
They would have lived. That's right. David Kotch tell me
his story.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
Well, this one's a tough one. Thirty six years old.
I disappeared May twenty fifth, two thousand and five, in
the exact and I'm talking the exact same area that
Tom Billings disappeared eight years later. He was an associated
publisher and sales manager for a magazine called DM Review.
It's an it magazine. He's on a business trip to Vancouver.

(22:04):
Had a wife and I talked about going up to
Vancouver and being able to take these outdoor trips because
he was an enthusiast at the outdoors. He took a
trip to a grass mountain. He told his wife he
was going there, and he was on one of the
last trams to go up to the top of the mountain.
It was about seven thirty eight o'clock. He rode up
there with twenty five other people. It was all on videotape.

(22:26):
He's wearing sandals, a T shirt and shorts with beautiful weather,
and when he got to the top, showed him getting
off the tram and he walked over towards an atrium.
For a couple of minutes, caught him on CCTV going
back to the visitors booth and or to the bathroom.
Within a couple of minutes, the TV didn't see him

(22:49):
anymore and he disappeared. Everything at that top of that
mountain was open till ten o'clock and it was normal
for people to go up there at that hours after work.
Immediately after gave it disappears, the weather changes. The headlines
for the paper in Canada were weather hinder search for
Heartland man missing in Canada.

Speaker 1 (23:08):
That happens a lot too, doesn't The weather just quickly.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
Changes exactly, And they looked for him intensively for ten days,
four hundred rescuers, multiple helicopters with flair, multiple multiple bloodout teams,
in addition to hundreds of volunteer searchers. And it stated
that it rained almost non stop for the next five

(23:33):
days from the time he disappeared. Now fast forward and
he disappears on May twenty fifth, June seventh, in an
area twenty one hundred feet off of one of the
trails on the mountain in a pool of water, they
found him deceased. Now, that area had been searched multiple

(23:57):
multiple times, and the searchers said they were confused that
he was found there. Now, this is the part and
it goes back to the missing men who had been
drinking in and were found in rivers. This is one
of those cases that it's a dead on match. The
autopsy said that he died of hypothermia, but the medical

(24:19):
examiner stated he went missing on May twenty fifth, But
mister Conch died six days later on May thirty first.
So where was he?

Speaker 1 (24:30):
Where did he go for those days.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
And end up right and in the area in the
middle of searching. Now just for food for thought. He
was also of German heritage.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
Hmm.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
Things to think about. Where he was found was not
where he perished. Number one, there were no tracks going
in and out of that area. Searchers specifically stated they
found no broken branches, no clothing or threads float of
clothing in the area that they had searched and where
he was found. And they said that this was the
largest search in ten years in that area.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
It's almost as if David. They they go through some
kind of dimension or some kind of door and they
come back later as if they find their way back in.
It's weird.

Speaker 2 (25:22):
A lot of people have told me that that exact thing, George,
or some people use the word portal. Yeah, other people
have said, but you know what's confusing is that what
were they doing during the days that they were missing
and alive.

Speaker 1 (25:38):
Exactly? If anything? Yeah, were they suspended in some kind
of animation?

Speaker 2 (25:45):
Who knows, well what I'd be interested in, But many
times the medical examiner won't release this part of the
autopsy because I'm interested in what were the stomach contents
that they found?

Speaker 1 (25:58):
Good point, and you've had stories of people who have
had somebody walking in a group, maybe the last person,
and then they turn around and he's gone.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
Well, there's there's a story written in the Huffington Post
about my books, and they called the title of the
story was last in Mine, and subtitle was don't be
last in Mine, And that was it should have really been,
They'll be last in mine, don't be first in line,
and always stay within close proximity to the people you're
hiking with, because it seemed as though that once you

(26:35):
got out of you and out of sound, range or
just around a corner. Something, something happens in these people.

Speaker 1 (26:43):
Vanish the German connection, with so many of these people
being of German descent, Is that new? Did you just
uncover that or has that been ongoing?

Speaker 2 (26:53):
You know, it might be that maybe I'm a slow
learner and it comes to me flowing in some But
after a while, when you start seeing the same sort
of names, and when descent of a person is talked
about in an obituary, German comes up more than normal.
So for the last two years I've been paying real

(27:13):
close attention to this, and I'll just talk about this summer,
a man named Morgan Heimer, twenty two years old, was
a tour guiding a group of people along the Colorado
River in Grand Canyon National Park. They were a couple
of days into their trip and they pulled to the
side two large boats of people and they take the

(27:34):
side trip up this creek. And the people go way
up the creek, maybe a mile or so, with their guides,
and there's a big pool and a waterfall and they
kind of hang out. The creek's not even deep enough
to drown in per se. You know, you could walk
across an ankle deep but Heimer was in the back
of the line when they were coming back on this
creek excursion. He was wearing a life preserver and he disappeared.

(28:00):
And Morgan was a student at the University of Wyoming.
And I can tell you that this shook up this
tour group immensely. Somebody in that group heard about our
work and he called me and he talked to me
extensively about this and said, Dave, there was no place
for Morgan to go if he fell in the creek.

(28:20):
He wasn't going anywhere besides of that canyon were straight
up and down, and he was walking and he was
within a quarter mile of both boats and fifty people
or not fifty thirty people when he was walking. And
nobody can believe he didn't make it back because they
all thought that he was right behind him. So they
brought in huge amount of searchers from the National Park Service,

(28:44):
volunteers from the tour group. They searched that area for
a week. They didn't find one trace of Morgenheimer. Again,
German descent.

Speaker 1 (28:53):
Ba's I mean is what does law enforcement tell you, David,
And I'm sure it's not confidential. What are they think's
going on?

Speaker 2 (29:03):
Well, when I gave you a talk in front of
NASA in twenty twelve, and I gave the talk just
like i'm talking to you now. I wasn't holding anything back.
And at the end of it, there were three Alaska
State troopers there, and Alaska State Troopers are in charge
of all search and rescue in Alaska, and one in
their groups stood up and he said, Dave, you're saying

(29:23):
something that everybody in this group that if they've been
involved in search and rescue for a long period of time,
they know is truthful. Nobody wants to talk about it.
Nobody wants to admit it's happening, and they want to
analyze it away as just well that's unfortunate, or the
dogs didn't want to search, or the person must have
done something stupid to disappear. They said, you know what,

(29:45):
there's something else here and people are going to have
to wake up and listen to what you're saying. At
the end of the talk, there was a line out
the door of these searchers that want to tell their
story of unusual things that people don't want to talk about.

Speaker 4 (29:58):
You know, you would think that if law enforcement and
government agencies were told about a threat that has resulted
in hundreds of deaths, hundreds of disappearances, dating back decades,
maybe centuries, that has been happening over much of the world,
but has concentrated in particular epicenters clusters. If you will,
you'd think that officials would be interested in that. Please

(30:19):
tell us more. They might say, what could be causing this?
They might ask, you'd think, But in reality, government agencies
and law enforcement have seen the evidence for themselves. They've
been told about this. They know something is going on,
something weird and dangerous, and the response has been a
big fat zero silence. And worse than silence, they've stonewalled

(30:40):
efforts by private citizens to get to the bottom of this,
going so far as the issued veiled threats and to
throw up roadblocks to investigations. David Politis, a former police
officer now author and investigator, has chronicled this mystery in
a series of books, Missing four one one. He was
the first to spot the patterns, the first to bring

(31:01):
this to the world's attention, and he is still on
the hunt for answers. We're pleased that he chose this
forum to unveil his latest findings, as detailed in this
new book Missing for one one the devil is in
the detailed Dave.

Speaker 3 (31:13):
Great to have you back on the show.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
Hey, thanks for having me, George.

Speaker 3 (31:16):
Let's start this way.

Speaker 4 (31:17):
Did you know or did you guess back when you
started down this road that you'd still be chasing the
mystery years later, that you still would not have any
solid answers that it would take you this far, this deep.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
I think during that initial phase, maybe the first two
or three weeks, no, But then after we started to
get responses from the National Park Service about not having
lists of missing people, not wanting to give up lists
of missing people, and wanting to charge exorbitance amounts for
those lists if they had to put him together, things
started to seem peculiar at that stage.

Speaker 4 (31:50):
Let's get into the response, because I think the response
or lack thereof from the agencies, the various agencies, is
almost as interesting as the phenomena itself.

Speaker 3 (31:59):
Let's talk talk about before we.

Speaker 4 (32:01):
Get into describing the parameters of the mystery, how the
latest kind of roadblocks that have been thrown in your path.

Speaker 2 (32:10):
Well, there's a couple of women that disappeared at Crater
of the Moon National Monument in Idaho, earlier last year,
and during that while they were missing one they walked
out into the area together. They both went missing together.
They had little dogs in their truck. Their family members
said they'd never go out for a deep pike, they'd
always stayed with an eyesight of the trucks, et cetera,

(32:31):
et cetera. Well, one lady was found after a week.
The other lady wasn't found for over a month, and
at that point we filed Freedom of Information Act request
against the park Service for information about the disappearance, details
about the search, and since they now had the bodies,
information about what was the cause of death. And they

(32:52):
stonewalled this for seven months, and then they sent us
the documents about a month ago and essentially gave us nothing.
They stated that they warn't the lead investigating agency, even
though it's on their property. They stated that they didn't
write any reports other than a brief face sheet about
the initial disappearance. That's it. They stated that if we

(33:13):
want anything else, we had to go to that county
jurisdiction because they didn't have anything. And then they stated
something that we've never heard before and we don't think
it has legal precedent, and that is is that they
withheld photos of the crime scene and of various evidence,
saying that they wanted to protect the privacy of the relatives.

(33:35):
They knew that they have no standing on protecting the
privacy of a deceased person. But that's the first time
we've ever heard of make a claim that they're trying
to protect the privacy of loved ones.

Speaker 4 (33:45):
You think they know that you're one guy, that you
have limited resources, that you're not going to hire some
high powered lawyer to come after them, and they just
are going to get away with dragging their feet as
much as they can.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
Maybe they think that, but there have been some things
that come up in the last months that have been
pretty interesting. Some people I know from technology have come
to me who know about what's going on, and I've
heard the same thing on the internet and via Facebook,
et cetera from people saying that we should start a
Kickstarter campaign to get the one point four million dollars

(34:19):
to force them to cough up the list.

Speaker 3 (34:22):
One point four million. My gosh, they.

Speaker 2 (34:25):
Say that they don't have a list of missing people,
and they say my books aren't in enough libraries to
qualify for an author's exemption. But if I give them
one point four million, they'll come up with the list.

Speaker 4 (34:35):
Just off the top of my head, I think you
could do it for less if you hired a really
high powered lawyer who deals with Freedom of Information Act
stuff and sick them on them. Because this can't be legal,
it can't be right.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
It doesn't seem like. It doesn't have that feel good effect,
and I don't think that's what freedom of information was
initially brought about. For.

Speaker 4 (34:54):
You've had wildly varying estimates right when you've had you've
had them where they've complied with a request, give you
boxes of information at a low cost, and then they
tell you some outrageous figure for what would seem to
be a much smaller file.

Speaker 2 (35:09):
It seems as though that certain files that readily give
up even on their own people. There's an individual arranger
named Paul Fagate who disappeared in Arizona while he was
on duty, and they gave us a box full of
documents for forty dollars. It's still an ongoing case. There's
some accusation that there's criminal element, maybe he was abducted criminally,

(35:31):
but they just gave us that. Gave us that. Other
times they said, you'll never get a case when we
ask for it. There's specifically a Stacey Aras case out
of Yosemite. By the way, somebody the biggest cluster of
missing people in the world, the there profile the Stacy
Ara's case. They said, we'd never get it. I asked why,
and they said, you just never get it.

Speaker 4 (35:54):
You know, this idea that the National Park Service does
not keep a list, does not keep a list of
missing people in say Yosemite, It boggles the mind.

Speaker 3 (36:04):
It makes no sense.

Speaker 2 (36:07):
This summer, a friend of mine and I were up
at a national park doing some more research, and we
were at a little satellite office for this park, and
we saw this group of four older gentlemen sitting there
talking and you could tell that they really knew what
they were talking about about the Park Service. And I
kind of got the feeling that one of the guys
was either a retired law enforcement man with the Park

(36:28):
Service or current law enforcement. I just kind of waited
my turn until he walked out into the parking lot
and I walked up to him and we introduced ourselves
and I said, Hey, if you have a minute, can
I talk to you? He says absolutely, He was the
nicest person you'd ever want to meet. Turns out that
he was a retired special agent for the Park Service.
And I told him what I had encountered the books

(36:50):
I had written. I said, why is the Park Service?
Why did they take this position? And he says, Dave,
it's a lack of integrity. Those were his words exactly,
And he said they should be giving it up, but
they don't because I could tell you about many cases
I worked where there were things that were very wrong

(37:11):
and they just dropped the ball, or they compromised themselves,
or they did something that was unethical. And he says,
it's just flagrant.

Speaker 4 (37:20):
You've made the point, Dave, in your books this one
as well, that it would be pretty easy to keep
this kind of a list. It's not like some some
gargantuan task.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
I think maybe I said this on One Year Shows
last time, is that our group, the Can Have Missing
Project will go out and purchase one hundred and eighty
three clipboards for the National Park Service with a binder
full of graph paper for each one of those, and
we'll mail them to each one of those hundred and
eighty three locations, and we'll have that paper divided up
by date, name, location, time, disposition. And this is going

(37:52):
to be your list of missing people. And at the
end of every month, when the when various parks send
in their monthly report to headquarters, if there's a new
missing person, then you just send it in with your
monthly report. And somebody with a five hundred dollars laptop
could keep this list at headquarters. This isn't rocket science.
This is very easy to do. I was doing some

(38:14):
research in a National park on some other type of deal,
and I was talking to some concessionaires in the park,
and I kind of knew at the time that the
National Park Service personnel wouldn't talk to you, but the
people running the stores and things inside the park aren't
employees of the Park Service, and they would talk. And

(38:35):
I was having some success, and I noticed that during
the days a couple of people were watching me. No
big deal. The kind of knew that would happen. That night,
I was staying at a place off the Park Service property.
Get a knock on the door and there's a couple
of people standing there and they said, hey, Dave, we're
off duty, but we're National Park Service rangers and we

(38:57):
have a story we want to tell. You, and you
know who you are, and you're good investigator, and we
just want to give you some info. Kind of learly
at the beginning, but they came in. Both of them
were really nice people, and they stated that over the
years that they had worked at several different national parks
and they had seen a series of disappearances at each
of their locations over the years. And at the front end,

(39:19):
there was a lot of publicity, there's a lot of
activity that for seven to ten days, there's a lot
of interest in a lot of news coverage, and after that,
it's over. And when they say it's over, it's over.
There's really no follow up. There's really very few other searches.
It's like it goes into this hole and it's gone.
And it had them concerned because they thought that there

(39:40):
was an inordinate amount of missing people at their parks,
and they thought that there were certain circumstances inside them
that they couldn't identify it. But they said it just
felt wrong, and they said that rarely would they find somebody,
and if they did it, they were in places that
they shouldn't have been and didn't make sense. I said, thanks,
I listened, asked you more questions, and after a couple

(40:02):
hours they left. And the next day I was driving
away and I called a couple of law enforcement guys
and I said, hey, pull up these locations and see
if you see anything unusual. You see many disappearances, and
right away the response was, well, there's something here, and
that kind of the way it got started.

Speaker 3 (40:20):
I guess it would be hard. I mean, from the
vantage point of all the work you've done.

Speaker 4 (40:23):
Now, from this vantage point you can see the broad batterns,
but I guess without the benefit all the work you've done,
unless you're a park service ranger and you see them
for a year after year, it would be really hard
to spot this.

Speaker 2 (40:38):
It's really hard. And in the other books I've explained
that at the back of each book, I usually have
a index of all the missing people, and I tell
people to look at that index and look at the
dates in the locations, and there's almost a hopscotch effect
on the missing people. There aren't a lot in one
location within a short period of time, because that would

(41:01):
really raise awareness. But if you have one thin Yellowstone,
and you have another in Great Smoky Mountains, and you
have another in the Adirondacks, and they're all about three
or four or five days apart. It's not going to
raise a lot of suspicion.

Speaker 4 (41:14):
And that's what it looks like, is that you'll have
the same general location, but they'll wait a couple of years.
They I mean it, whatever it is, it will pick
them off in the same spot, but they'll wait for
things to settle down. Correct, Is there a what are
the patterns? To talk about the clusters a little bit?

Speaker 2 (41:32):
So, the biggest cluster in the world is Yosemite, and
in the books I identify that boulders granite. There's something
about being in a boulder field there being around granite
that can be dangerous, and a lot of people disappear
in those areas. And Yosemite has so many strange disappearances

(41:54):
in three of my books, it's just unbelievable. In one
of the books, I wrote about to University of California
graduate students that disappeared in the late nineteen fifties three
months apart. They didn't know each other, they were brilliant guys.
One was vacationing with a family, the other was working
there during the summer. They disappeared under very unusual circumstances.

(42:17):
Somehow or another. And I don't know how the families
found each other. They didn't know each other in school,
they didn't have the same major, everything about them was
different except they were grad students from cal The families
found each other, and they wrote letters to Eisenhower asking
him to send in special forces to search for these two. Well,
about two weeks ago from the Eisenhower Library, I got

(42:37):
twenty eight pages of documents about this, and it's very
fascinating because one thing became clear is that the Army
didn't want anything to do with this, and in fact,
they buyed in internal documents to the White House saying
that they thought these guys just go. Both got picked
up on the road and taken out of the park
and there was nothing to it. But they never said

(42:58):
that to the press, and they never said that the parents.
The best I.

Speaker 4 (43:00):
Could tell, so initially You'sementy being the biggest cluster, But
there are You started out noticing twenty eight.

Speaker 3 (43:08):
How many do you think there are?

Speaker 2 (43:09):
Now there's fifty eight in North America. Give me your
look part about it. Just in the last year, when
we started to map the missing people, the Great Lakes
comes out right away as almost the entire circumference of
the lake. At almost even geographical locations, there's a cluster

(43:31):
missing people. And so when you look at the map,
what comes out at you is mountains and water. There's
clusters in mountains, and there's clusters in water around water.

Speaker 4 (43:40):
I guess the further back you go, the more cases
you find. I mean, you can't even I can't even
guess how many the total is now? If it's certainly hundreds,
is it thousands?

Speaker 2 (43:51):
I think we're at about twelve hundred and forty.

Speaker 4 (43:53):
Right now, and you know that there are a lot more,
is just a matter of digging them up.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
After Yosemite, what's the most prominent cluster.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
That's a tough one. I would say maybe Colorado, or
maybe one of the clusters in Washington or anywhere through
the cascades. They're all about even after you leave Yosemite,
but it's very much far and away the largest.

Speaker 4 (44:18):
How many does it take to qualify as a cluster?
How many cases? Four or five?

Speaker 3 (44:22):
Six?

Speaker 2 (44:23):
Yeah, it's three will do it. If it's if they're
all within that profile and they're all geographically close, and
I'm saying within seventy to eighty miles for.

Speaker 4 (44:32):
The benefit of those who've heard you before and the
benefit of those not familiar with us, Let's go down
the laundry list of characteristics. What qualifies to count as
your kind of a case? What characteristics?

Speaker 2 (44:43):
First of all, rural location, no mental illness of the
subject or the victim, no water related death or suspicion
of drowning, no criminal suspects in the case. One thing
we found just in the last year as well, this
has come out and it's very troubling is that there's

(45:05):
people of extremely high intellect that are disappearing, and then
there's people with disabilities and very low intellect that are
disability that are disappearing. People like me, we're in that middle.
We're not disappearing at as higher rates. Canines are involved
in two different levels that a lot of people disappear

(45:27):
with their dog, and there's a lot of people that
disappear and they bring canines, tracking dogs, plug at bloodhounds
to the scene and they can never pick up a cent.
Ninety nine point five percent of the time they can't
pick up a scent, or they are unwilling to track,
or they're afraid, and it's hard to say what of
those three it is, but it probably is that there's

(45:48):
no scent.

Speaker 4 (45:50):
I think that's one of the weirdest aspects. You've told
me a couple of the stories. Maybe you can share
a typical one where a dog just acts really weird
for a dog that lives to track.

Speaker 3 (45:58):
I mean that's what they do.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
Oh absolutely. I mean they're so excited to get out
there on the trail and start doing their job. I
can't even tell you how excited they get. And there
have been times where the dog gets brought to the trailhead,
they're given the victims scent, the dog walks in a
circle and lays down at the handler's feet. They've never
seen the dog act like this before, and they can't

(46:22):
explain it. Other times, the dog will get there, it'll
walk up the trail fifty feet, it'll lay down like
that's it, there's no more, and handlers can't explain it.
And I gave a talk in front of NASA to
the National Association Search and Rescue Professionals two years ago,
and at the end there was a line out the
door that wanted to talk, and a large group of

(46:44):
handlers came up and said, you know, Dave, handlers don't
talk about this much, but you'd be surprised how often
this happens to us, and we can't explain why. And
the other thing, the other part of this is that
you won't find it newspaper articles much and unless the
victim is examined by a doctor and a doctor makes
a specific public statement about it. But the victims are

(47:06):
often found with a low grade fever. That's an unusual occurrence.
It's not something that's normal. And if the victim is
found alive, they're either found unconscious or in a semi
conscious state, but very rarely do they have all of
their wherewithal about them. And then this one is a

(47:27):
big one, and I think it's getting bigger by the day,
is that the people are missing shoes predominantly, secondarily clothing.
And I know some people are going to say, oh,
you know, it's hypothermia, except the people take the clothes
off too close to the point where they go missing,
and the weather is too nice most of the time
for the clothing to come off if they're claiming hypothermia. Secondarily,

(47:50):
the people are taking shoes off where they shouldn't be
taken shoes off, and that's a real conundrum. And in
this new book, there's a couple of cases in there
where the shoes are off and this person's found dead
at the location, and the instances don't make any sense
at all. And a couple of the last things is
that most of these disappearances occur between say, two pm

(48:13):
and six pm. That's the vast majority. Somehow or another,
berries are involved in many of the cases, blackberries, huckleberries,
and in a large, large percentage of these cases, if
the victim is found, they're found in an area that
has been previously searched. And I'm not talking once, twice,
sometimes fifty times. Sometimes they're found unconscious, face down on

(48:37):
the trail the searchers were taking every day out to search.
And lastly, swamps are involved in many of the disappearances
on the East Coast. Sometimes the kids are found in
the middle of a swamp and nobody can explain how
they got there.

Speaker 4 (48:51):
You also have some really chilling cases about in particular
about kids, how they are counterintuitive behavior. I mean, they
they don't they wander distances that are impossible for them
to have traversed, and they go into really rough terrain
that seemingly they could not possibly travel on their own.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
Well. In the new book there's a graph of two
graphs in there with elevation and distances that people kids
have traveled. And it's baffling when you first get into
this to think that say, a five year old girl
could travel seventy five miles in four days, or a
two year old boy could travel twelve miles over two

(49:32):
mountain ranges in nineteen hours. Yet those are the claims
made by the searchers that find these people. And this
isn't one or two cases. There's quite a few that
fit this exorbitant profile where it's as a parent, you
know it just can't be true.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
And they don't go downhill, they go uphill exactly.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
And in some of the elevation cases. There's one in
one of the books I wrote about where David Scott
was found three thousand feet on the east side of Yosemite,
above a campsite where his parents were camping. His parents
told that the sheriff at the time my boy was abducted.
I know he was. And he was found three thousand
feet almost straight up a mountain side on a switchback

(50:18):
down the other side, and then up another mountain, nearly naked.
Face down deceased.

Speaker 4 (50:24):
These these abductions, and will use that term forrown anyway,
they happen right under the noses of parents while in
groups where people are hiking along in the woods. I mean,
it's not just people wandering out alone getting lost, right.

Speaker 2 (50:39):
No, And that's the vast majority of these happened, just
like you said, very close to parents, and many times
the parents have no idea this is going on. I
was at a conference this weekend and a man was
talking to me. He has a couple of young kids,
and he goes, Dave, you know what you said was chilling,
and it makes me think twice about going in the woods.

(50:59):
And he says, you know, I keep my kids in
my view all the time, but you know how kids are.
Sometimes you got one in front, one behind, you can't
see them both. I said, exactly, it's difficult. And a
lot of these cases, the child is the last person
in line or the first person in line, gets just
out of view and they are gone quicker than you.

Speaker 3 (51:17):
Can believe, a matter of seconds.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
Matter of seconds, and when the person comes around the turn,
there isn't that much ground coverage for them not to
be seen. And it doesn't make sense I saw.

Speaker 4 (51:30):
Your reference in the book to an article that must
have been done on Huffington Post where they said, don't
be the last in line. It's kind of macab humor,
but it's probably true if you take these cases to
heart that you list in.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
The book, well exactly, And Roger Marsh wrote an article
about that, and what concerned him was, is that being
the last in line in a group, or being the
last in mine in a family, and then you vanish,
and then you're not found for days and days and
days and sometimes never found. Imagine the guilt associated with
your family members who allowed you to just you think

(52:04):
you're in a safe environment in a county park or
national park, and you're just gone.

Speaker 4 (52:09):
It seems like from reading all of the books that
the only people are the vast majority the people who
are found alive are those who are unable, for one
reason or another to explain where they were. Either they're
too young as kids, which is the big majority of
the cases, or they have some kind of disability that
prevents them, or they're so disoriented they can't remember.

Speaker 2 (52:28):
Anything exactly correct.

Speaker 3 (52:31):
And I mean, you think.

Speaker 4 (52:31):
That's why they're allowed to come back, because they can't
explain what happened to them.

Speaker 2 (52:36):
You know, it goes without saying that. That seems to
be it. It almost seems like before these people are
taken somehow or another, they know that they have this
specific disability. And I'm not talking about overtly obvious disabilities.
There's a national or a US Force Service US Force

(52:56):
Service ranger that disappeared in Arizona. I wrote about this
new book. And he had a sister that had He
had two sisters that had an extremely odd bone disorder
and I'm talking like one and two million or one
in three million people ever have it. And he was
the one person of the three kids that didn't have it.

(53:17):
And for some reason, this one article about his disappearance
talked about this unique point in his life, and to me,
it meant a lot because he didn't have the disability,
but there was something about his DNA that excluded him
having that disease. And he disappeared. He was never found.

Speaker 4 (53:37):
You know, you mentioned about the intellect either high people
with high intellect college graduates, high degrees, and those with
intellectually challenged people. It's as if something is culling the herd. Hey,
let's pick off the best and the brightest, and while
we're at it, we'll pick off the weakest and the
easiest to grab.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
That's a sad way to put it, but I think
that after you read all of the books, I think
you're going to come to that conclusion with you want
to or not.

Speaker 3 (54:06):
It's not mountain lions, right.

Speaker 2 (54:09):
So when they a certain rescue team goes into an area,
one of the first things they do is they bring
in trackers. They're bringing canines that look for mountain lions
and things, and they're looking for that obvious sign of
a fight, of a struggle, blood, hair, disturbed ground. That's
one of the things that's excluded on the front end.
None of these cases are associated with that.

Speaker 3 (54:28):
There's no yeah, no shredded clothes, the bodies that are
found or not ripped to shreds or eaten or I
guess there have been some of those, but they don't
fit the classic definition of the ones you're looking at.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
No, and the corners come to conclusions that no, they're
not eaten by bears. No they're not eaten by mountain
lions or mountain miin experts come in and make decisions
that this person wasn't attacked by a mountain lion for
ABC and D.

Speaker 4 (54:51):
And if it were mountain lions or bears or people,
the dogs would be able.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
To track them exactly.

Speaker 4 (54:57):
You're getting a lot of attention these days, and I
think it's long overdue. I mean, in addition to the
review from Whitley, you were featured in an article in
the Huffington Post. You've done a bunch of radio shows.
I know that there was this article. I was utterly
amazed to see that there's an article written by you
for the Moufon Journal because and I say it this way,

(55:20):
not because it's not justified, but because UFO folks over
the years have been pretty careful about avoiding any kind
of cross pollonization with other mysteries. They liked their aliens
and saucers to say, in a neat little category all
their own, not get mixed up with other weirdness.

Speaker 3 (55:34):
So how did that happen?

Speaker 2 (55:36):
That's an interesting story. The editor for the Muffon Journal
had received the initial narrative I wrote about this, and
he took it to the board of directors for the
exact reasons that you explained, and he wanted them to
review it and see if it fit and he said
it was overwhelming that they wanted it in and they
were going to push stories off of the front page

(55:58):
for these two months and put it in right now.
So it came out within the last couple of days.
And he said that they're having discussion discussions to make
this one of the priority items that they maybe should
focus on moving forward and not ignore it.

Speaker 4 (56:15):
Well that's great, because I mean, I know that field
pretty well, and those guys can be very stodgy, those
guys and gals, I could say it could be very
stodgy about expanding the parameters of the mysteries that they explore.

Speaker 3 (56:27):
How does this fit in? Though I read the article,
I don't want to give the whole thing away.

Speaker 4 (56:30):
And for those who don't subscribe to the journal, maybe
you can give us sort of a synopsis how it
fits in with the UFO mystery.

Speaker 2 (56:37):
Well, and you know, I'm not trying to put a
square peg in a round hole. But we read so
many different journals, prospecting journals, moufon journals, everything that every
once in a while you come across a coincidence that's
just too much to ignore. And I didn't draw any
conclusions to this. I just brought them to this coincidence

(56:57):
that they can't ignore. It came about is several months
ago one of the researchers in Moufon went to an
area called in Cape It's called Cape Fear in North Carolina.
And I think something that we've written about in the
past is that these incidents happened near locations where their
names will strike you as unusual. Devil's Peep, Cape Fear.

(57:21):
When I saw that right away, I thought, well, that's
kind of weird. Wonder how that got its name. And
this investigator wrote this article about an incident where a man,
two men, and a boy were fishing along the Cape
Fear River. It's kind of near an area of Hope Mills,
North Carolina, and they separated briefly and this young boy

(57:42):
happened to see some orbs, some lights in the trees
as he was walking alone. And it turns out that
this man who was separate from him at the time,
saw the same thing, and this was his dad. And
as they got further apart, the boy ended up seeing
what he described as too humanoid on the ground around
this fire pit, kind of examining the area, and above

(58:05):
it was this light hovering above them maybe two hundred
yards or less when he first saw it, and then
he kind of converged on it and got this close
up with these humanoids. Well, the boy and his dad
got together that he explained what he saw. They decided
to go home, and they went to an area about
sixteen miles west of Roseboro, North Carolina, where their house

(58:28):
was at and it's called Gray's Creek, And they went
home at about one thirty that morning. The Mofon investigator
used these to words I've never heard before. He said,
a vibrational tremor came over the house and something was
above the house and it woke the dad. The dad

(58:48):
went outside and the dog was already outside, but when
he opened the door, their dog took off on a
dead run into the woods, and he went into the
woods to look for the dog. Well, there was a
lot of things that came out of this, and move
On sent a special team out to interview these people,
and the dad and the son agreed to go under

(59:11):
reverse hypnosis to figure out what happened. And then the
father ended up agreeing to take a polygraph exam on
it too, and they ended up passing the polygraph and
during the regression. The father, it turns out, was abducted
from this riverside setting when he saw this burb and
these white so he's abducted, goes up to a ship.

(59:36):
The specifics are a bit unclear, but he confirms it
in that polygraph. A step back for a second. In
our work, we deal with rural disappearances with a set
of criteria, and at the criteria can be people with disabilities,
people that disappear with canines missing or found, and they

(59:57):
disappear in their bodies of water, and sometimes they disappear
in one of the thirty four geographical clusters we've identified
in North America. Inclement weathers associated with the disappearances. Swamps
brier patches play a predominant role, and the vast majority
of the cases these occur in the late afternoon or evening.

(01:00:17):
If the missing are found alive, majority of the times
they either refuse to discuss the incident or they don't
remember the incident, And a vast majority of the times
they're find they're found semi conscious or unconscious. And the
last one is many of the missing are found in
areas previously searched, sometimes as mitch as fifty times, sometimes

(01:00:38):
they're found on the main trail. Coming back to the
search and rescue locations. The last time I forgot to
mention was berries are inextricably related somehow with the disappearance.
Sometimes their kids found eating them. Sometimes the people who
are very pick and they vanish. Go on back to
this instance, there are a couple of cases, and this
is highly, highly unusual that two small boys disappear from

(01:01:03):
the same town. One of the things that I explain
in the books is it's very hard to understand how
this phenomena was discovered because there's usually twenty or thirty
years sometimes between the disappearances if they're in the same area.
So it's almost like a generation of say law enforcement
has already cycled through and the next group in is

(01:01:25):
going to remember the last time it happened.

Speaker 4 (01:01:28):
I commend the Moufon Journal for being willing to explore this,
you know, because it is it does open them up
probably the criticism, but it's it's courageous to go ahead
and follow the evidence, to to follow the evidence that
you've accumulated. And I know you've been very careful, very
meticulous about not giving an answer, not saying what your
pet theory is, or even giving any kind of indication

(01:01:50):
at all what you think of it. But by putting
this article in the Mufon Journal, you're making comparisons to
what we know as alien abduction stories.

Speaker 3 (01:01:59):
I mean, it's an evident that.

Speaker 4 (01:02:00):
People would would say, hey, maybe there's a connection there.

Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
I think it would be negligent on our part not
to identify the coincidence. And I put a list together
this morning. I was going through all the emails we
had about some of the things that people have focused
on in the past and said, hey, Dave, you've nailed it.
You guys have really exposed what's going on here. It's obvious.
And here are some of the things that people have said.

(01:02:26):
It's dog man, it's reptilians, it's aliens, it's bigfoot, fast
squatched skin walkers, serial killers in the woods, mossman, and
a list of a variety of crypto creatures. And if
you start thinking about all these things, it's hard to
be an expert in all those areas. And what I

(01:02:46):
tell people is that your mind kind of goes where
that comfort level's at and where your knowledge base is at.
And that's one thing that we try not to do,
is we tried to read as much literature from these
various areas that we can, because it's a complex it's
a complex issue, and there are no easy answers here.
And I've never had anybody say, oh yeah after they've

(01:03:09):
read the book, you know. It's The strangest one we
had was is somebody said, well, it's obvious that there's
some park rangers that are serial killers that are in
their parks. And if you look at the number of
years that are between some of these disappearances, one hundred
years in some areas, one hundred and twenty years, so

(01:03:29):
that throws out that theory.

Speaker 4 (01:03:31):
Well, there are comparisons, I mean, there are similarities to
the stories we've heard over the years about alien abductions.
Some of the cases you described, especially in the first
two books of Missing four one one, it's as if
these victims are plucked out of the sky and dropped somewhere,
you know, as if by saucers or eagles or pterodactyls

(01:03:51):
or something.

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
Right, Oh no, and some of the One of the
things when we first got started with this, we tried
to learn as much as we can about search and
rescue and setting grids and their parameters. That they use,
and there's a couple of books out there that tell you, Okay,
if a child is between the age of one and three,
you know they'll be found at ninety five percent of
the time and two point eight miles or less from

(01:04:13):
the point they're last seen. Well, one of the things
that we found is that the majority of the cases
we work blow those numbers completely out of the water.
There's a couple of cases that I talk about in
this recent book where a couple of girls disappear at
one was found I think seventy five miles away, they
were on foot, she was dead, and then her sister

(01:04:33):
was signed I think twelve to fifteen miles away. And
these were fairly young girls. But then there's also cases
right on the fringe of Yosemite where a two year
old boy disappears and he climbs not one mountain, he
climbs one mountain, goes down the backside of another, and
up another over three thousand feet in a for a
two year old kid. And there's a lot of these examples.

(01:04:55):
Just like you said, anyone with any rational sense knows
that they're not going to get there on their own,
especially if you have kids and you know, kids, they're
going to take the normally ninety five percent of the time,
the path of least resistance of downhill.

Speaker 4 (01:05:10):
We haven't covered this yet about the factors that you
use to sort of exclude cases that come your way,
because I can hear people's minds clicking all, Hi, it's
a serial killer, it's plot farmers out there in the
national forest, it's it's mountain lions, it's bears. I mean,
you're pretty meticulous about weeding those out, and cases that
would meet those kind of characteristics, you don't consider them.

Speaker 3 (01:05:32):
You don't put them into your database.

Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
Right absolutely, And we exclude a lot just because of that. So,
first of all, if there's any type of mental illness
or suicide thoughts that go with the case, we don't
work it. If there's any possibility that the child or
the adult might have been washed away in a river
or drowned in a lake, we won't work it. And

(01:05:55):
the reason for that is is that you want to
take the ambiguity away if it's one of those cases,
and it's real easy to pull the trigger on one
of those cases and say, oh, yeah, that's what's happened.
But if you just eliminate it, and I know we're
probably eliminating some cases that could be here. The reality
of it is, it's just our safety mechanism. One of
the other big things. Any incident where it could have

(01:06:18):
been an animal attack, we won't work it. And those
are I've heard a lot of people discuss this and say, well,
you know, a mountain lion running twenty miles an hour
can knock a kid out of his docks. But when
a mountain lion or a bear attack a human, there's
usually some carnage there. There's hair, there's a scene in
the dirt, there's blood, There's a lot that goes on

(01:06:41):
there that can be readily identifiable for somebody who knows
what they're looking for, and when search and rescue gets
on the scene, it's one of the first things they're
looking for. When trackers get on a scene, one of
the first things they're looking for a couple with the
type of tracks that are in that area from a
type a predator there, a mountain lion c So if
that was ever thought of, then we throw that case out.

(01:07:05):
One of the one of the things that is a
criteria on ours is that a canine can't track sent
on these cases ninety nine point five percent of the time.
Sometimes they get put on the track where the person
was last seen. Sometimes the canines walk in a circle
and lay down. Sometimes they walk around and the handler

(01:07:27):
will say, I've never seen that before. My dog wasn't
even interested, or my dog I've heard this before, my
dog acts afraid. So it's very unusual behavior because these
tracking dogs live for this stuff, and if anyone's ever
been around one or helped train one, they know. I mean,
they're going out of their minds. They want to do this.
They're excited.

Speaker 4 (01:07:47):
Not in these cases you mentioned about the dog connection
on the other side of it, where the two cases
on the East Coast where the boys the dogs disappeared
with the boys and then came back. Are the dog
is the dog connection as part of the disappearance? Does
that happen fairly frequently? I know, I saw a couple
of other cases in the book where dogs are involved

(01:08:08):
and the dog's vanished as well. Is it always that the
dogs come back? Are they mostly disappear as well with
the with the child or the individual.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
I'd say ninety to ninety five percent of the time
they come back. A lot of the times the dog
if the child's found a lot of times the dog
is found with the child. But then there are times
where the parents will say, hey, these people that the
dog and my child are inseparable, and the dog will
come back. They try to get the dog to go
back and help them look, and the dog won't go back,

(01:08:39):
and the parents say, I can't believe I'm seeing this.
Other times the dogs will go back and they'll take
them to a spot and the child's not there, And
then a couple days later, the child's found on the
main trail. They search and rescue are looking for the
child on and how that child got there Nobody understands and.

Speaker 3 (01:08:59):
Been searched fifty times.

Speaker 4 (01:09:00):
Right, There's a case that jumps out at me in
the new book The Missing for on North America and Beyond,
because it happened right near, maybe a couple of miles
from where I was born. It's in New Jersey, and
it's it's not exactly the same as the other cases.
This didn't happen in some national forest, but it's perplexing,
and it too involves a dog. The little girl in

(01:09:21):
the closet tell me that story.

Speaker 2 (01:09:24):
So that's an unusual case for a couple of reasons,
and the reason we included it is because of the
house backs up to kind of a wildlife area in
a creek area, and a lot of the cases that
we work involved creeks and rivers and kids either going
missing while in that creek, and I don't mean drowned

(01:09:45):
or washed away or later on they're found there. And
as many of the listeners have identified to us and
we get it, is that a creek, especially a dry
creek bed or a river that's shallow, if you walk
up that creek or you walk down that creek in
that river, the chances of anyone finding any footprints or

(01:10:07):
tracks are almost zero. So that's a very efficient way
to move through an area and not be identified. And
this girl, Mary Jane Barker, three years old, she was
playing in her backyard on February twenty fifth, nineteen fifty seven,
in the morning hours, and she was in a place
called Bellmour, b Elmawr and New Jersey, and it's just

(01:10:29):
across the river from Billy and her mom came out
looked at her. She's playing in the backyard with her
Cocker spaniel. Her mom comes out five ten minutes later,
the dog's gone, the girl's gone, and she can't believe
it because she thought she had everything locked up solid
and she looked in the back the creek, didn't see anything.

(01:10:51):
Started to get some neighbors together. They searched, they've quickly
called the police. The police come out and essentially three
days of searching, and the police start to bring up
this word kid damping again. Now the dog's gone and
the girl's gone, So they start to spread out more
and they bring in some professional trackers, and on that
fourth day they think that they see an area in

(01:11:14):
that creek bed and they think they see some tracks
of a large man with a dog and a child.
They're not sure, but they think so. So we're going
into the sixth day now, and this is an area
that's not really developed yet. There's a few houses scattered
in the area, not a lot, and two blocks away
they're building this people were building a new house. Now

(01:11:36):
you've got to remember the area probably a mile has
been searched five or six times. The houses that are
being built have been searched five or six times. Well,
the house was going up for sale and a mom
and a daughter, unknown to the victim's family was inside
this new house looking at it, and this little girl

(01:11:57):
opens up a closet door and Mary Jane's dog bolts
out of the closet and jumps on the little girl,
and inside the closet is Mary Jane deceased. So they
call on the sheriff. They do an autopsy and it
shows that Mary Jane hadn't eaten anything for six days.

(01:12:20):
But the strange thing about this was it's the police
chief confirmed that that house in that area had been
searched three times minimum. And the very odd thing is
that there was no excrement inside that closet from a
dog or her. And the workers that said they'd been
in that house almost every day and they never heard
any sounds and they never heard any barks, nothing. So

(01:12:43):
the corner thought initially, well, she just must have been
in there, and he can't explain why there's no excrement.
They actually brought in a veterinarian, and the veterinarian found
out the dog hadn't been trained about where to defecate
or where not to, and he had absolutely no explanation
while there was no excrement from the dog or anything

(01:13:04):
in that closet so the question comes up, was she
in that closet for six days? Was a dog in
that closet for six days? And if they weren't, where
were they and how long had they've been in there?

Speaker 3 (01:13:16):
And how searchers would have missed them as well.

Speaker 2 (01:13:20):
Well, that's a common theme that you'll see. And trust me,
I am not saying that the searchers are missing these people.
I don't believe it because in a large percentage of
the cases we turn here is that people make the statement,
but we search this area five times, we search area
ten times, we search a area fifty times, and they

(01:13:41):
weren't there. They come back to fifty first time, there
they are.

Speaker 4 (01:13:45):
It's as if they the victims are taken, they're taken
somewhere else, and then they're brought back and sort.

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):
Of dumped kind of the way it appears.

Speaker 3 (01:13:54):
Leive me this. Are you making any headway?

Speaker 4 (01:13:56):
We can talk about the National Park Service a little
bit later if you want, but just to summarize our
previous interviews, you've presented a lot of this evidence about
clusters in particular and national parks. The National Park Service
is not only uninterested but hostile to you. I was
wondering if you've made any headway with local police agencies
who are investigating missing persons cases. It seems to me

(01:14:16):
they would be maybe more sympathetic or more willing to
hear what you had to say, and.

Speaker 2 (01:14:22):
Many of them are. But you've got to understand the
mentality of the police. And I think the best example
of how to understand what we're doing is in this
latest article in the Huffington Journal. The reviewer said, this
what's happening here is not going to jump out at
you in the first fifteen and thirty pages, But after

(01:14:42):
you read ten to fifteen cases, you're going to see
a pattern evolved, and then you're going to have this
moment with the light goes on in your head and
you say, I get it right. And it's hard to
explain in an hour or two, but I can tell you,
and I'm sure you realize that, George, that there's circumstances

(01:15:03):
in these cases that you can't ignore that kind of
run right underneath.

Speaker 3 (01:15:08):
All of them.

Speaker 2 (01:15:09):
And when you start to look at the clusters and
the timing of the clusters and the disappearances and the facts,
start to realize, Wow, this is like profile, this is
like what the FBI does when they're trying to find
a serial killer. They're looking for these underlying elements so
they can tie these cases together. Kind of what we're
doing here as far as law enforcement, it's very hard

(01:15:30):
to explain to them what we're doing other than we're
just investigating missing people. Some of the jurisdictions are super,
super helpful. Others they're kind of questioning sometimes whether you're
going to out them for doing a bad job, and
sometimes they hold the information back. A few of them.

(01:15:51):
You can't believe how much information they'll behavior. A few
of these cases, they gave us crime scene photos on them.
And I work with a guy named Harvey Pratt from
the Oklahoma Your Investigation needs to be their director. He's
a forensic artist, one of the smartest guys in the
world I've ever known that's an investigator. And we spend
days sometimes kicking this information around because it doesn't make sense.
And yes, these agencies are helping us, but the Park Service,

(01:16:16):
if anything, they've gone the other way. They don't want
to help. And when they bring tracking dogs in canines floodhounds,
they do strange things and a lot of times they
can't even find a sense. But at other times, when
you read the search and rescue logs or you read
the articles in the papers from years and years ago,

(01:16:39):
every once in a while there's something very critical in
there that a lot of writers and a lot of
search and rescue people won't put in. But that is
the dog sits down and won't search. It'll walk up
to a say, a fork in the trail, and it'll
just stop, and the handler will put a note in
their unusual dog won't move or dog doesn't feel like searching,

(01:17:00):
or whatever it might be. The other part that's unusually strange,
and search and rescue people have faced this hundreds of times,
and that is that the canine or the bloodhound will
track to a river, and we're talking a big river,
a tough one for you and I to cross, but
any kid under ten would never cross it. And they

(01:17:22):
track it to the river. What assessment is the kid
went and the river kid drowned, and that's essentially the
end of the search. If they're really thorough, and this
has happened a couple of times, they'll dam the river,
get permission from fish and game, shut it down and
search and every one of the times they've done that
they never find the missing child. Now a few of

(01:17:43):
the times, under very unusual circumstances, search and rescue professional says, hmm,
you know, we'll search the other side just for the
heck of it, and son of a gun, if not
on the other side miles away to find the kid. Now,
how did the kid cross the river? Now, search and
rescue people won't answer it, and and it's left in
the dark, and it's never answered in a report. But

(01:18:07):
the question is how did the kid get across?

Speaker 4 (01:18:10):
Well, not only rivers, I should say that that's the
I think that was the eeriest part of the book
is reading about the distance that some of these kids travel,
dead of winter, no shoes on. They are found and
they're going counterintuitively up mountains. Talk about that in generalities,
and then we'll get into it in specifics.

Speaker 2 (01:18:32):
So in the search and rescue world, there's parameters that
are set down based on topography, whether it's chilly, ground,
flat ground, river, water, cold, wet, dry, hot, and they
base it on the age, the health, and on these
topographical conditions about how far to set out the grid

(01:18:53):
patterns and many many and we'll talk about kids here,
many many of these times in these cases, these kids
are found way way outside the parameters. And I'm not
talking twenty five percent outside. I'm talking several hundred percent outside.
And just like you said, one of the common themes
that you'll read about in these stories is that the

(01:19:15):
kids are found without shoes. Now, what I keep looking
to find in the reports is when the child's found,
I want to know what the condition of their feet are,
But it's never mentioned. Because my question is is that
if their feet locked fourteen miles over three mountain ranges
in fourteen hours at the age of eight years old,
while those feet must be destroyed. But they never mentioned it.

(01:19:39):
And if you read the guidelines on the search and
rescue versus what's found here, they make completely no sense.
And I think a lot of times the search and
rescue people are perplexed, but they do an extremely competent
job with the parameters that they have, and when they
reach these cases that are completely outside the norm, I

(01:20:00):
think many times the kids may never be found because
there's no rational reason to search out that far.

Speaker 4 (01:20:06):
One of the other things I will talk about this
generally too and then get specifics as we go along,
is the clothing and you mentioned about having kids having
no shoes on, that you would find pieces of clothing
here or there, But there's some really weird stuff goes
on with clothing that further or perplexes the whole thing.
And that you know, a bear attack somebody and eats them,

(01:20:28):
there are going to be bits and pieces of clothing.

Speaker 3 (01:20:30):
Show up in the scat. It doesn't happen in these cases.

Speaker 4 (01:20:33):
In fact, some of the clothes look like they're taken
off and just folded there kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):
Yeah, there's several cases where people are eaten up and
there's just bits and pieces of them, and they find
a pair of pants nearby where one of the pant
lakes or both pant lakes are turned inside out, so
something has taken the pants off of the people before
they eat them. And then scat of a bear is

(01:21:01):
analyzed and there's no human remains in a scat and
there's no clothing remains. And later we can talk about
a case out of the Yukon territory with a really
famous guy named Bart Schleier, exactly what happened. Another case
out of Northern Canada, Canada with young girl, same thing happened. Now,
if I talked about this by itself, say Schleier's case

(01:21:21):
or the girl in Northern Canada. No one would think
much about it, and it was an anomaly. But I
know that nobody has ever put multiple cases together like
this and said, Wow, what's happening. This can't be coincidence.
There's got to be a reason. Somebody wrote to me
a while ago and they said, Dave, we just read

(01:21:42):
your book and oh my god, this applies. And it's
a theme out of James Bond and he said, once
this happenstance twice is coincidence. Three time is enemy action.
And that's kind of what I think sometimes with this,
because it happens too many times to be the coincidence.

Speaker 4 (01:22:00):
Well, as I said, we're going to get into specifics,
I intentionally want to focus after this break. I want
to focus on the National Park Service, federal agencies, I
guess including the FBI, because am I correct in putting
it this way?

Speaker 3 (01:22:15):
That you ran into a stone wall right from the
get go?

Speaker 2 (01:22:18):
That'd be a fair assessment.

Speaker 4 (01:22:21):
And so were you able to? I can't tell if
you were able to. I know a lot of these files.
You rely on media reports, so you know that these
incidents happened, but did you ultimately fail in getting all
the information that you wanted to get using freedom of information.

Speaker 2 (01:22:38):
So one thing I say in the book is that
the people that work in the park that you and
I see when we drive in, these people are phenomenal.
They service us, They work for the good of the
Park Service. They know nothing about what we're talking about.
I'm talking about probably the top fifteen people in the
Park Service know what we're talking about right now and

(01:22:58):
know what they're doing, and they're doing it methodically and logically.
And that is that they When we first started off,
we knew that the Park Service have one of the
largest federal contingent law enforcement groups of any that patrol
open spaces. With a park with a law enforcement group
that size and the number of there's over three hundred

(01:23:19):
and fifty different monuments, parks, et cetera that they patrol,
they've got to have a pretty good database of knowledge.
And we have the Freedom of Information Act that's given
to us by the government where we can retrieve information
and data from our federal agencies. Almost all of them
have a website, and almost all of them have a
missing person aspect to that site, meaning that they list

(01:23:40):
the people missing in that jurisdiction, date, time, location, et cetera.
And it allows the public keep an eye out for
these people, let you know what's going on in the community,
et cetera. Well, the National Park Service has a big website.
It has a lot of things on it. There's no
missing person website. A portions to that website, there's no links,
there's no mention of it anywhere. But you know with

(01:24:02):
the knowledge that if I was running a National park
and I had limited resources, I'd buy a clipboard with
some graph paper, and every time somebody disappeared, I'd write
their name down, the location they disappeared, aged, et cetera.
And if that would be the inexpensive way to keep
a ledger of who was missing, if I could afford

(01:24:24):
a laptop, I could keep five thousand locations of people
missing in every month when the monthly reports roll in
from the National Park Services other locations dead quarters, I
could easily keep track of that on a laptop. Well,
through FOYA, we've filed a request to have a list
of missing people inside their system, and this went through

(01:24:45):
the Western Regional office out of Denver, and a woman
named cheris her Chris Wilson. She is a phenomenal person.
She's done us a lot of she does everything she
can to help us, and she's running into a bureaucratic headstorm.
And she sends me back a message after we make
the request, and she says, Dave. Headquarters says they don't
have any lists. Well, all of us in law enforcement think, wait,

(01:25:10):
it must be semantics. It can't be true. So I
filed it a second time, rewording it. She comes back
again and she says, Dave, I'm really sorry. They say
they don't have any list of any missing people. And
I says, okay, how about individual parks? And she says
Headquarters says, as far as they know, no parks keep
lists of missing people. And I says, okay, if somebody's

(01:25:32):
pretty close to my house, that's a pretty big national park.
They should have sufficient resources to do this. FOYA Yosemite
and ask them. They come back and said, Nope, somebody
has no list of missing people. So in FOYA there's
an exemption to get data if you're a published author.
So I'm not the world famous author. I'm just your

(01:25:52):
immediately little author of two books. I asked for an
author's exemption, and I asked for the data from Yosemite.
I'm missing people and to give them to give me
that data. They come back and an attorney through FOYA
for the Park Service says that my books aren't in
enough libraries to get the publishers and author's exemption from

(01:26:14):
paying the price. So one of the guys we work with,
he was the head of a state's law enforcement branch.
He's a really, really smart guy, and we sat down
and we talked about this, and he said, Dave, these
people are not stupid. They obviously don't want the public
to know, and they obviously don't want you to have it,

(01:26:35):
and that's probably the best way it could be put.

Speaker 3 (01:26:37):
So how did you get all the files?

Speaker 2 (01:26:39):
Then? Well, that's a monumental piece of work right there.
So every community, just outside of a national park or
national monument, keeps pretty good tabs on what happens. And
the choice is you either go there and you sit
in the library and you work it out and you
get in tight with the librarian and you say, hey,

(01:26:59):
do you have a a lot of these libraries have
files specifically for certain things, and some of these libraries
have those files on missing people and there's certain archives
sites on the web that you can subscribe to, and
if you're patient enough, and if you have the time
and you know how to query, you can get certain

(01:27:20):
data out of there that's available. And through all of
the above, in three plus years worth of work, eventually
this started to roll in.

Speaker 3 (01:27:28):
So, for example, once you get a name of a
missing person, say from a newspaper article, are you able
to use that name and then force the file out
of the Park Service or some other agency?

Speaker 2 (01:27:39):
Sometimes yes, it usually works the other way. Your queries
a missing Glacier National Park, and sometimes it'll go back
thirty forty fifty years on some of the archives locations,
other times not. And then you get the name and
yet foia the National Park for the file. Now, the
interesting thing about that is one of the clusters of

(01:28:00):
disappearances is Creator Lake. So we for Creator Lake on
a series of disappearances there and again Cheris from Denver
comes back at the State. I'm embarrassed to tell you
we lost all the files in twelve years at that park. Huh, books,
Come on, she goes, no, we really don't have them.
I mean, I believe her, because I believe what she's

(01:28:21):
saying is the truth. Where are they.

Speaker 4 (01:28:26):
Now that they know that they've they should have one
of these and they know you're you're going to stir
up a lot of trouble over the fact that they
don't have one, any response from them indicating they're putting
one together, or any indication that they're budging from this
this horrendous position.

Speaker 2 (01:28:43):
So, starting three and a half, approaching four years ago,
when this all started, they told me back then that
they were obtaining a grant to start an intensive computer
network amongst all of their parks, and this was something
that they were going to implement. But like I told
you at the beginning, this isn't rocket science, George, I mean,

(01:29:05):
honest to God, with a clipboard and a piece of
graph paper, you could start tracking this today. And then
every month, each park or each monument sends in a
report to National Park headquarters. Well, somebody's reading these, somebody's
taking notes and deriving statistical data, and knowing that missing

(01:29:27):
people is a hot topic, that you would think that
those statistics would be very important.

Speaker 3 (01:29:36):
One other question on this.

Speaker 4 (01:29:37):
You got a call from some agent for the Park
Service who went beyond just saying no to you. I
mean he really gave you some attitude, and you detail
that in the book. Tell me about that.

Speaker 2 (01:29:48):
So Yosemite is one of the biggest clusters of missing
people anywhere. And if anyone's been to Yosemite, had there's
a lot of rock walls, there's a lot of canyons
and things. But again, these disappearances don't fall into the
realm of normality in any shape, way or form. And
I live in a suburb of San Jose right near

(01:30:10):
a city called Saratoga, and it just so happens a
fifteen year old girl from Saratoga went missing in the
early nineteen eighties on a trip with her dad, and
she was on horseback and her and her dad with
seven other people, and they rode into a remote area
called Sunrise Camps, just outside of Tenaya Lake, and they

(01:30:31):
were about eight nine thousand feet up and they rode
into an area where there are remote cabins that you
can stay at. Her name Stacy, gets off her horse,
her dad gets off her horse, she goes in the cabin,
she changes and there's a seventy one year old man
that went along with the group, and she tells her that, hey,
I'm going to go with mister Solinsille, and we're going

(01:30:52):
to walk out here to this point one hundred feet
away that everybody could see. And she brought her camera
and she's going to take some pictures. And the man
walks out. It's high elevation, and he tells Stacey, Hey,
I'm tired. I'm just going to sit down right here.
Everybody sees the man sit down. Stacy tells the man, hey,
I'm going to walk down this trail. And it's a
very easy trail. It's almost all granite out cropping, very

(01:31:15):
few trees, and I'm going to this lake that almost
everybody can see. And she has to walk through a
few trees to get to the lake. The man says
he sees her walk through the trees, and she doesn't
come back, and a large search ensues, and in years
and years they never find anything in Stacey. The only

(01:31:36):
thing they found of hers was right inside that tree line.
They found the cap to her camera, her lens cap.
And that story intrigued me for several reasons. First of all,
it's in an area of Yosemite that doesn't have a
lot of trees. There's not a lot of places to hide,
the elevations hide, there's a lot of lakes in that area.
But it's an unusual case. A fifteen year old girl

(01:31:59):
just vanished and did not find a body, not find clothing,
not find shoes, something about her is really an unusual event.
So I filed the FOYA against the park Service. And
this is probably the twenty fifth or twenty eighth time
we filed one on an open missing person's case, meaning

(01:32:20):
the person wasn't found. And just so the audience understands,
a missing person's case in law enforcement is not considered
a criminal event. It's a It's one of those strange
things that the police departments and sheriffs and law enforcement
in general investigate, even though it's not a crime for
a person to go missing. So it's not a crime.

(01:32:40):
And we get almost ninety nine point nine percent of
all the foyers we ask for when the person is
still missing, and the only one we've never gotten back
is Stacy, and we got a refusal. And so I
went back to Cheris and denversa Charis, what's going on.
She was Dave, I don't know, it doesn't make sense
to me. Somebody's being strange about this. So it gets

(01:33:04):
back to the special Agent and that's the detective for
the Park Service that does follow up. And at about
this time, there's a book written about life and death
in Yosemite by a retired ranger named Butch Ferraban. Butch
spent thirty years at various national parks and there's so
much death and strange events going on in Yosebody. He
wrote a masterful book about it. And it wasn't just

(01:33:26):
about deaths. It was about disappearances and things, and which
wrote about Stacy. So I called them, said, Butch, this
is what I'm doing. It's a little different than your
myscope's a little wider. But you did a great job
in your book, and I want to know what happened
with Stacy's his day. I saw the file. There shouldn't
be any reason you don't have it. They looked at

(01:33:48):
a lot of people at the time. There's no suspects,
there's no nothing. Dave. I don't think they have anything
on this, and I doubt if anybody's looked on it
in twenty five or thirty years. Well, out of the blue,
I get this call from a special agent Yosemite and
he says, uh. Right off the bat, he says, what
do you want to file for Well, if you know

(01:34:08):
when you go ask them for something, you know the
law behind it before you start looking. And we know
the law. And one of the criteria is in FOYA,
the rationale on why you want something from the government
can't be a reason why they ask, or why they
grant or why they deny. And they can't even ask.
This guy asked. I said, well, why are you asking
me that? He says, Hey, I know, I know who

(01:34:30):
you are, and I know your background, and I want
to know why you want it so well, I want
it because I'm looking at missing people. I'm right, I'm
looking about missing people. Your case is highly unusual and
it's in my backyard. He says, well, you're not going
to get it. I said, what do you mean, I'm
not going to get It's an open missing person's case.
And I said, is there any criminal elements of that? Nope?
I said, are there any suspects? Nope? I said, well,

(01:34:52):
why wouldn't you give it to me that? He says, well,
because we never give away these cases. Let's just way
a minute. I have dozens in dozens of these cases
from your agency all over the US. He goes, no,
you don't, but yes I do. And we get into
this talk and he challenges me. He's rude. He says,
right from the get go, I'm never going to get this,

(01:35:13):
and so far he's right. I've appealed this to the
National Park Service, I've gone to a congressman. They cannot
get that file. Today, out of the blue, I get
a call from the cousin of George Eros, who since
is deceased, who actually went to the scene when Stacy
disappeared and helped with search efforts. And I explained to

(01:35:34):
him what's going on, and he says he's going to
try to intervene on behalf of the family to find
out why this case isn't getting opened and released, and
he's upset about it. So the point being is that,
I mean, if you have nothing to conceal, why not
show it. The agent said, well, if I give you
the case, that'll compromise any future Prosecution's a prosecution for what.

(01:35:55):
Most of the people involved in this are dead. One
year old man is gone, her dad's gong gone. Half
the people involved on that trip are deceased. Do you
have a suspect? No? Are you investigating your crime? No,
it's baffling.

Speaker 3 (01:36:11):
Tell me this.

Speaker 4 (01:36:13):
Within your research, were you able to develop relationships with
NPS staff members, former maybe retired folks who would talk
to you off the record about this, And if so,
were you able to get any idea why they would
cover this up. I mean, they must have some kind
of idea what's going on. But either that or they

(01:36:34):
just don't want to alarm the public so people don't
would stop going to National parks.

Speaker 2 (01:36:39):
So the perspective is is that the average National Park
Service employee is having a difficult life enough, just doing
their job day in and day out, and their vision
of things is probably from one thousand feet. You and
I right now are rolling at fifty thousand feet and
looking at three hundred and fifty plus different locations and
seeing things from an entirely different perspectives. The people, I

(01:37:04):
would say, like I said, nine point five percent of
the Park Service doesn't have any fathom of a thought
what you and I are discussing right now. And I
don't blame them in the least for what's happening. It's
that top, top realm in the Park Service that knows.
One of the conversations I had was with the head
of the Law Enforcement Bureau for the National Park Service.

(01:37:25):
He kind of laughed and joked when when I started
to talk about the same things you or and I
are talking about here, same thing. Oh Dave, people disappear.
You know, it's not unusual. We deal with hundreds and
hundreds of these events. And then they threw out this
thing that you're gonna hear many times, and I'm sure
you're gonna we're all gonna hear it in the next
few weeks. Do you know how many millions of people

(01:37:46):
visit our park and have a safe trip? And I
told him, I said, you know what, that's I know
that that is true. But the reality is that the
Eris family have their life ruined. The Dennis Martin family
in the Great Smoking Mountains said their life ruined. The
Trinny Gibson family in the Great Smokey Mountains had their
life ruined, The Dennis Johnson family in Yellowstone National Parks

(01:38:07):
had their life ruined. And you know what, I don't
care if you had twenty million people there. Something happened
to those kids and they were never found inside your system.
So to throw around big numbers like that that you
have so many millions of visitors. It only takes one
to ruin your whole life, and that ruined these people's lives,
and they have no advocates and they're not on any database.

Speaker 4 (01:38:27):
Why it would be like the FAA saying, yeah, I know,
we had this terrible air disaster and a plane crashed
and killed two hundred people. But most planes don't crash,
they land safely.

Speaker 2 (01:38:36):
You know, same analogy exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:38:40):
The other part of that question was whether you were
able to develop any confidential sources within the NPS or
former folks who worked for them.

Speaker 2 (01:38:48):
So in Crater Lake there's a cluster of young men
and boys that have disappeared, and these disappearances go back
nearly one hundred years to individual named B. B. Boikowski
who back when the park was just very very young. Uh,
he pulled a sled in in the middle of winter

(01:39:10):
and was gonna he's a landscape photographer and he was
taking photos of the lake, first time anyone had ever
done it during the winter. And Bakowski was a pretty
strong guy. He built a snow cave, he had all
his equipment there. Unexplicably just

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