If you ask David Paulides, a 20 year law enforcement veteran, and human resources analyst just where you are most likely to be when you vanish without a trace you might find the answers unnerving. Since his completion of 7 books on the subject of disappearances throughout American national forests, wildlife preserves, monument acreage, and other federally managed lands dozens of US citizens and even visiting foreign nationals continue to seemingly be plucked from the face of the earth with inexplicable circumstances surrounding such incidents.

Logical explanations

One can always accept that a certain number of hikers, campers, scouts, or just visitors will fall victim to accidents, bear maulings, cougar attacks, broken ankles, falling down steep slopes, snake bites, being lost, exposure, and perhaps even foul play. Yet, a surprisingly small number of such fatalities actually occur. It seems that the unexplained vanishings of perfectly capable people fall prey to the unknown with a disturbing frequency while the federal park and forestry systems either refuse to reveal such details to the public or perhaps know a lot more about who or what is behind this phenomenon than they are willing to divulge.

Perplexing secrecy

We know, thanks to David Paulides steadfast investigation that there are Federal Special agents trained better than many police forces who regularly review missing cases and may keep cold case files under inspection for years unbeknownst to the public. These cases are intentional kept from the conscientious efforts of people like David Paulides, who is merely attempting to get at the truth while wondering all the time why the federal agencies responsible for the forests, and parks such as the BLM, and Department of Interior who simply are evasive when a definite problem is known and not solved.

The enigma

Among cluster areas where the disappearance of several people has occurred over a number of years in close proximity local authorities, mobilized teams of expert search parties, and even the military at times just seem to run into a brick wall of the unknown when attempting to recover those who slipped into another dimension or have seemingly fallen into a black hole that makes no sense at all. With limited funding by sheriffs or small town that can only maintain a thorough effort for a limited time chances are that search and rescue attempts will close shop after a couple of weeks and then it is up to the family of the lost loved one to remain and continue to urge authorities to remain involved or the disappearance will simply fade into the forgotten pages of a “Case Unsolved” report.

Despite best efforts

What constitutes a “Cluster Region” of vanishings? According to Paulides it can be 3 disappearances within a particular park area over a period of decades or it can be in such a place as Yosemite in Northern California that is legendary for the most unsolved missing persons and remains the official swallower of souls over the entire US. It is here that fascinating disappearances of armed hunters, climbers, and campers happens regularly despite well-organized search efforts that include helicopters, cadaver dogs, tracking dogs, and thermal imaging equipment used by US Border Patrol Agents, yet experienced hikers, healthy and capable woodsman, photographers, and even well-armed individuals turn up missing.

Ripe for a vanishing

According to David Paulides, if you are on an old logging road in the Pacific Northwest, you are a candidate for going missing and never being seen or heard from again. If you are athletic, familiar with the terrain, and youthful, this will not save you! If you are in a rural area close to a body of water, this is a prime situation for your disappearance! If you have a rifle or firearm you are still a candidate for your own untimely disappearance! If you have a personal locating beacon you have a chance. David Paulides has said that he knows of no one who had been armed with a gun and a personal locating device that has vanished. Yet, he does know of a case of a missing person who did have a personal locating beacon but no firearm who did vanish!

Overwhelmed

The problem of logistics and age of the missing cases presents a challenge for continuity. If one disappearance occurred 20 years ago while another with similar location and circumstance happens today due to the duration of most law enforcer’s careers the amount of time passed makes it unlikely that records will be correlated to furnish data that might connect the two incidents. The passage of time, available resources, and the reluctance of authorities to amass statistical reference becomes a part of a confounding puzzle that makes the explanation of the unknown more difficult. For instance overlapping missing persons with other events such as abductions, serial murders, weather conditions, and even Sasquatch reports which are very common in cluster regions of disappearances!

Confounding

One common denominator among those who have vanished is the sudden change in weather conditions right after the reported disappearance either due to rain storms, snowfall, or freakish conditions like fog. Under these repeated circumstances normal, law abiding folk simply never show up again. After analyzing his data on disappearances David has found that strange nocturnal lights in the sky accompany many of the reported missing persons incidents from the west coast to the eastern seaboard when nocturnal disappearances happen.

Continuing questions

According to Paulides reports of strange disappearances can be traced back with reasonable accuracy at least 70 years particularly in cluster regions where several such missing person reports have been made and recorded by law enforcement agencies or in newspaper notices. David believes that these odd and unusual incidents of vanishings could easily have been going on in the US for more than a hundred years but due to sketchy information have simply not been logged or correlated by the authorities. The damning question remains. Why are the Forestry and Park administrations so secretive about those who have gone missing in their jurisdictions while they are conducting their own private investigations?

He won’t say

Even though David Paulides is also a Bigfoot research proponent and volunteers his efforts, he is reluctant to make his own determination on the 4-11 Disappearances public so that others will not attach an agenda to his data. He leaves it to others to draw their own conclusions while giving them all the astonishing details to sift through. After writing 7 books about the subject and assisting in several searches himself David has not jumped to any premature findings. His job as he sees it is to provide the facts as astonishing as they are and allow others to make up their own judgment about who or what is responsible.

Gone

In one case a man armed with a hunting rifle, an erected tent, has provisions, and is in the process of starting dinner is never seen again by his partner who merely went to town in order to get gasoline for the truck and lanterns. After returning 90 minutes later his buddy is never seen or heard from again even after searchers are on the move hours later. The missing hunter is in familiar territory not far from his family’s property.

Impossible circumstance

In another case a child vanishes for two days and is found walking in the woods 30 miles away separated from his last known whereabouts with his parents by mountains, bodies of water, and rough terrain. When asked about what happened they typically was unable to remember or acted as though the experience was so terrifying they have blocked it from their mind. A young fit man camping with a friend hears a strange noise early in the evening just as he and a his buddy are ready to sit down over dinner at their camp fire and suddenly races into the woods without a shirt or even a pair of shoes or boots on and is never seen again. Obviously unable to travel very far without footwear the missing man might as well have fallen off the face of the earth. Search efforts revealed nothing.

The missing who returned

In one case of a reported disappearance where the victim is finally found in an area that had been scoured repeatedly he gave a strange account of his experience saying that the woods he was in seemed weirdly unfamiliar and misty. It seemed to him that the air and visibility had become disturbingly changed as though he were in a different dimension. He then claimed that he had no recollection of what had taken place for the last two days. One might recall Travis Walton in Snowflake, Arizona who disappeared for 5 days and whom a large manhunt could never find until he did finally make contact, dazed, dehydrated, naked, and having disturbing nightmarish flashbacks of being abducted by space aliens who subjected him to medical experiments.

Deadly locations

 The main geographic regions of the US that harbor cluster areas of frequent disappearances can be identified from the Appalachian Mountains in New York to the Smoky Mountain slopes. From the American Midwest to Northern Oklahoma and Idaho. From there, the west coast has the largest share of disappearances largely unsolved with several of the most frequently occurring cluster regions in Oregon and California. Missing children in Oregon State are horrifyingly numerous and unsolved. There are seven cluster regions in the state of California alone. In Washington State in the vicinity of Mount Hood and Mount Rainier seem to be a hot spot overlapped with a history of UFO sightings and air to air encounters with US Air Force war planes. One might recall Kenneth Arnold’s, a bush pilot’s historic sighting of 9 silvery flying saucers in the area.

Weird overlapping incidents

In this region a US Air Force B-25 crashed killing 2 intelligence officers in 1948 during the Maury Island Mystery. Here in this swatch of lush pines and clear running streams a US Airforce Fighter jet was repeatedly harassed by a red aerial disk that panicked the air crew. Bigfoot encounters have also been frequent in this Washington, State habitat of fishing, mountain climbing, and camping. It is any coincidence that a large number of disappearances have plagued this remote forested terrain? To David Paulides it seems a perpetual legacy of unsuspecting missing visitors enter these seemingly placid sanctuaries each year expecting only the natural beauty of the North American continent and vanish without a trace. While authorities remain tight lipped over an ominous mystery that refuses to be solved, he continues chipping away at this paradox.