He's an ex-cop who had gotten into investigations of Sasquatch, which apparently put him in many of the national parks out west. He then heard some stories regarding the unusually high number of people who vanish without any trace from our national parks.
Paulides carefully vets all the cases he discusses in his books chronicling these disappearances, which have been going on for more than a century, or for as long as the US has had national parks. He doesn't include accidents, animal attacks, possible suicides, people who might have wanted to disappear to start a new life.
The Park Service when queried apparently refuses to disclose how many missing they have had, but are quick to point out all the national parks entertain many millions of visitors each year without any problems of any kind. That's great, except for all the families who had a loved one disappear and never be seen or heard from again.
There are a number of things that all these disappearance share in whole or in part. It's a strange mixture of oddities that would not create a lot of stir when viewed one at a time, but when you sift through hundreds, then thousands of these cases where there is no trace found, you see there are definite patterns that emerge.
Here are a few of these strange things ~ people literally vanish in the twinkle of an eye. Parents will look away from their child for mere seconds, then turn around the child is gone without a whisper, without a trace, and the vast majority are never found again. Children who are found will often be found miles from where they went missing. Distances that an adult would have a problem trying to cover on foot walking down a highway, let alone a child from 2 or 3-years old stumbling through a thick forest in the dead of night.
These children will sometimes talk about being accompanied by a bear, or a wolf or some other animal which provides it with warmth and even perhaps a paw full of berries to eat. Others have no clear memory of anything that occurred after they vanished. Most are found without their shoes, but their feet aren't all torn up and bruised from covering rough terrain, climbing mountains, etc. But those are the lucky ones. Most of the children are never found, those who are found are usually dead.
But there are other strange elements to the missing children. Often they are found with their clothes neatly folded nearby. Some are found with their clothing put on backwards or inside out. When the children are found dead, there is no obvious sign of death; no animal attacks, stab wounds, bullet wounds, etc. and most all these deaths are attributed to exposure. Also quite often these children are found in areas that have already been searched, sometimes dozens of times. A search group will find a missing child lying dead across a well-traveled path they have used every day for a week to go to their search grid. Where was the child for the previous four or five days? Others are found dead in places that would have been impossible for them to have reached without help.
Another thing worthy of mention that makes these disappearances so much more puzzling is the massive manpower and resources often expended in the search for missing children, especially in the first week when it is more likely the child is still alive. Hundreds and thousands of trained search and rescue teams with planes and helicopters and volunteer searchers sometimes comb literally every inch of ground in a two-mile radius and beyond. Strangely, when tracking dogs are brought in to aid these searches, they either can't pick up a scent, or just lay down and refuse to search. Dog trainers say this behavior is completely bizarre for these animals love doing their job.
en.wikipedia.org
