Baffling Disappearances:
On Monday's show, former lawman turned investigative journalist, David Paulides, discussed patterns of missing persons in America's national parks and other rugged wilderness areas, and how these disappearances fit a peculiar set of circumstances that defy logic. The number of these unusual cases has risen to around 1,100 and some of them date back decades. The majority of the cases were associated with bad weather, berries (people picking berries for instance), near a swamp or water, and of the children who disappeared most were with dogs at the time, he detailed. Most of those who vanish are under the age of 12, and about 50% are found alive, but semi-conscious with little memory of what happened, he continued.
Paulides said that there's been a geographical clustering of cases in places such as Yosemite, which can occur in cycles of every 12-15 years, and typically bloodhounds are unable to find a scent during searches. In the case of Keith Parkins, a young boy who disappeared near his grandparents' home in Oregon in 1952, he was found unconscious 20 hours later, over a dozen miles away, an unlikely distance for him to have traveled on his own. In the 1969 case of Dennis Lloyd Martin, a six-year-old visiting Great Smoky Mountain National Park with his family, an "enormous sickening scream" was heard at the time of his disappearance that was deemed too loud to be coming from the boy.
Some in the Martin family thought they saw something like a bear, and reportedly admitted that there was a figure carrying something on its shoulder, Paulides recounted, adding that he believed this case involved an abduction. There have been accounts of "wild people"-- individuals who wear animal pelts and live up in the mountains. There was one incident the same year as the Martin disappearance involving a park ranger being attacked by one of the wild people, he noted. Paulides also suggested that the government's seeming lack of interest in these odd disappearances indicates a cover-up of some type.