Ron: 0:13

Thank you very much. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Uncannery. It's me, Ron, and I am joined here by my two good friends. Oh, I'm.

Don: 0:37

Don and oh, I'm Doug.

Ron: 0:39

And oh, am I glad that you all are here both my real Flesh World friends and my digital realm friends who are listening anywhere in the world.

Don: 0:51

What are they made of, if not made of flesh?

Ron: 0:53

They are only abstractions, really, in my mind, some of them say they are real, but until I meet them at our upcoming UncannaCon, at our upcoming UncannaCon Wasn't Fleshworld the name of the magazine in Twin Peaks that they found.

Doug: 1:12

That was like what started the investigation of Laura Palmer. It's just a little bit of your unconscious coming back and we're in the red curtain room again.

Ron: 1:20

I'm consistently drawn back into Fleshworld. Don't want to talk too much about Fleshworld today, but I do want drawn back into flesh world. Don't want to talk too much about flesh world today, but I do want to talk about the world and in particular I wanted to talk today about what we might call the natural world.

Ron: 1:34

I think we are not alien to the idea that there are two worlds there is the natural world and there is the world of human design or construction, what we might call the civilized world right what we might call it like there's the urban world and there's the rural world, and most of us live in the urban, civilized world but we like to take excursions out into the natural world because we think it's good for us. Right, it's healing, it has healing properties. We touch grass when we have been too long in the non-flesh world, the digital space or the civilized space, you mean like the lawn and stuff.

Don: 2:08

Right, yeah, exactly yeah.

Ron: 2:10

But what if the lawn is but a simulacrum or a pale imitation of something that used to exist, which was the open natural world that had not yet been trod upon. I guess what I'm trying to say. Is you guys ever going out into the great outdoors? Say, is you guys ever going out into the great outdoors? Do you have memories of going out into the great outdoors, you camping people? What's your history?

Doug: 2:30

I sadly started much later in life. My family was very much it's been a couple of years heading out to Vegas again and we would do stuff during the day and then my sister and I were like locked in the room at night, flipping through channels and jumping on the bed. I was on vacations. It wasn't until college that I started taking trips. I think I saw Yosemite for the first time when I was 32. It was like either 31 or 32. Being local to California, it seems like that's absurd compared to when most people have seen it.

Ron: 3:02

I've never really seen Yosemite. I drove through it once when I was like a kid. We didn't even stay, it was like a drive-through on a road trip. But I still haven't gone. I've had trips where I was supposed to go and they all got canceled for some reason.

Doug: 3:15

Can we get you there?

Ron: 3:16

Yeah, yeah, please get me Fans, get me to Yosemite. Please subscribe to our Patreon Anyway. Don you like outdoors.

Don: 3:36

I do so. When I was little, we did a lot of RV type camping. That was my mother's version of camping. But then I was a scout. I spent between the ages of 11 and 18. I did actually calculate this once. I spent an average of 100 nights a year sleeping in the dirt wow you.

Ron: 3:48

So you're a real one. You're like a real outdoor man.

Don: 3:51

So I, I don't know, I I have, I didn't have good memories of it.

Ron: 3:54

Yeah, it was fun what do we like about going like doug?

Doug: 3:57

you're saying you, you feel like you failed in some way because you didn't go into the outdoors until you were 32 or I said I was robbed, not that I failed. I think he put that in my mouth and now I'm hostile towards you you're just a big failure, doug, but why have you failed?

Don: 4:10

okay, so clearly we, we think there's good things about going out I have been to yosemite okay, both the front side and I have walked through the back side that you can only access by trail so I know very little about yosemite.

Ron: 4:24

This is news to me that there is a front and a back.

Don: 4:26

There is there's the part that's paved, that has the visitor center, and then there's the part where you have to walk in from the woods Is the visitor center, like the valley, where you can see Half Dome and all that stuff.

Ron: 4:36

Yeah, Okay, yeah, okay. So you were a scout. What did you like about scouting? Why did you spend so much time in the dirt you like about?

Don: 4:43

scouting. Why did you spend so much time in the dirt? Because it was because it was challenging and it and, like you say, it was an escape from the walls that exist in our everyday life. I spent a lot of time in school and I happened to go to a school that was built in the 1960s, when the school architecture theory was let's not put windows because those will distract the children from learning.

Ron: 5:05

I wouldn't want them to see a bird.

Don: 5:08

So I really liked getting out there and and and. Not only that, but also the experience in scouts of introducing it to other people. At some point I was the young scout, though everything was new, and at some point I was the older scout who was bringing the young ones into the fold.

Doug: 5:23

And to be clear, young scout is a great rap name for you. If we had to pick young scout on the track today.

Don: 5:30

Absolutely, when we get to that, when we get to the the rap episode, we'll pull that out.

Ron: 5:34

I have a lot of great memories going camping also. It was mostly like tent camping, car camping, like we'd go to a place with a lot and stuff like that. But even, yeah, when I was older, doug and on my own, we would go off-roading. I have a jeep wrangler and we would take it out and we'd go on some government land and and just make fires and talk and laugh and all that kind of fun stuff. It is a fun, freeing experience. But are you guys aware that the outdoors are dangerous.

Doug: 6:00

Oh yeah, when I did go to yosemite I had, uh, my mother-in-law saw a baby bear running alongside the area that we were in and said baby bear, and of course I'm thinking where's mama bear? Immediately, and not too far behind, you could see, we escaped that one unscathed and went back to flesh world. After that I thought my flesh was not going to be in the world for very long when we saw that baby bears only scratch you a little bit yeah you can take a baby it was more looking at the mom's face not too far behind who decided not to be upset that day.

Ron: 6:36

I'll always be grateful, but that was terrifying yeah, yeah, any encounter, encounters in those 101 nights in the dirt that you can regale us with any close calls the closest call we ever had was we had bear come into into our camp area one night and we had to, we had to chase it out.

Don: 6:53

I was actually an adult at that point, but a younger adult, so I think I was about 20 years old, having to. So the responsibility was, you know, a little bit greater than it would have been if I'd been 16. But not too, too bad, just literally walking through and no because a lot of it has to do with being able to prevent and I saw bears, for sure, but never any close calls or anything like that. And how did you get the bear out of the?

Doug: 7:14

camp. I chased it with a pot, so I wanted a big scream.

Ron: 7:21

But that's all right. You two have been very fortunate in your encounters in the wilderness, but sadly there are people who do not have very fortunate results to their adventures in the outdoor realm, and I want to talk today about a couple of those because I think they reveal a very interesting thing about how we as people report on or think about or discuss those we have lost. Sorry if that suddenly changes a very fun outdoor camping episode into something a little bit weirder, but I wanted to start by explaining or telling you this story of James and Carol Duffy who, in 1973, took their two young children on a camping trip to Wenatchee Lake in the great state of Washington. According to James and Carol Duffy, they arrived in October to their hunting ground. James wanted to do a little bit of hunting, carol was just happy to be outdoors. They have two kids. Their youngest is Jimmy. He's two years old. They have a uh, uh even a young daughter, natalie, I think she's three or four. They go on a little walk with their children, but apparently the children are annoying, they don't want to be walking in the wilderness. Like 15 minutes into their walk they say okay and they take them back to their RV. They put the two kids asleep in the RV and James goes out to go do a little hunting.

Ron: 8:45

Put the two kids asleep in the rv and james goes out to go do a little hunting. Carol decides to take another kind of walk around their campground and only 15 minutes into them, having left the rv, james says he hears a scream and so he returns to the rv and they find the doors, both the front and the back door of the rv is. He goes inside. They have two cats and their daughter, natalie, who are all asleep in the RV. However, their two-year-old son, jimmy, is missing. They immediately start looking in the surrounding area. They don't find anything. They call the park rangers. They arrive within an hour. They start searching around and this eventually becomes a full-blown search and rescue operation that never results in any findings that can lead them to Jimmy Duffy. He's never found no clues as to what may have happened to Jimmy.

Don: 9:43

Duffy, the scream that he heard. Was that a two-year-old scream? Was that his wife screaming? So when?

Ron: 9:48

he's asked this about the police. James says it sounds like it could have been a child, like a young child scream. So it's not his wife, because his wife is not there. He just says his initial thing is he hears a scream and then when he's asked later, he says it could have been a young child. Where is the wife? The wife was walking. She eventually returns and assists with the kind of helping them find their son.

Ron: 10:13

I don't like that. So obviously the police missing child case. They take the two parents, they separate them, they administer polygraph tests. I don't I feel like the polygraph tests. I don't. I feel like the polygraph test is now regarded as a not so great method of procuring evidence. Is that correct? Am I wrong in that assumption?

Don: 10:31

There's a lot of ways that you can. It's just measuring your body systems at the time, and there's a lot of reasons that your body systems would react in different ways, besides lying.

Ron: 10:40

But at the time, in 1973, both James and Carol take the test and they are considered and they are considered to pass the test, the police do not consider them suspects in the disappearance of their son. What happened here? Where is Jimmy?

Doug: 10:56

First question what state are we in?

Don: 10:58

Washington.

Doug: 11:00

It's not close enough to that facility in Nevada. I can rule that one out. You mean Caesars, caesars Palace, they're always finding you the RV.

Don: 11:12

Yeah, I'm still thinking this is a two-year-old missing boy. Can he reach the knob on the door?

Ron: 11:17

Is it a door that he could open himself, because RVs are tricky sometimes they are so unfortunately that is not a detail I have are tricky sometimes they are, so unfortunately that is not a detail I have. This story comes from a book called Missing 411, western United States and Canada, which is written by a man named David Politis. David Politis is the person I'm actually interested in today. David Politis, if you haven't heard, is a investigator who became famous around, like I don't 2015, somewhere around there.

Ron: 11:45

That's when he started. Actually, no, sorry, 2010, he starts this 411 project. He was originally in law enforcement. His kind of past is unclear. We think that he was fired from the police department for committing some kind of fraud that pertains to false solicitation of autographs. This is, I can't say, 100%. No, the only article I could find about this is scrubbed from the internet or I didn't have access to it. It was like a local article from the 1990s. But anyways, he's a guy with an investigative past and in 2010, he begins this 411 project, where he starts realizing that there are lots of strange cases of people going missing, not just in the wilderness, but specifically in in, like north american national parks. And when he starts looking into these disappearances, he of course goes to the national parks and says hey, really, can I receive information about these missing people? And what frequently is the case is that he is told by the park system no, we either don't have that information or we're not going to give it to you. And David Paulides being a sort of investigative truth seeker that he is, this infuriates and incenses him, and so he creates this entire project called the 411 Project, where he basically lists all the people and cases he is able to receive any sort of information about and he publishes them in these books. This is one of two volumes that I think are out of print now.

Ron: 13:17

I first came. David Paulides first came to my attention. I was listening to Coast AM. Are any of you familiar with Coast to Coast AM?

Don: 13:24

No.

Ron: 13:25

Coast to Coast AM is like a. Unfortunately it's really gone downhill, but it used to be phenomenal. I guess it was always downhill, but it's basically like an AM talk show late night talk show.

Ron: 13:35

It used to be run by a guy named Art Bell who passed a few years ago, but even before then they moved it on to another guy but basically, this is a show where people who would call in and they'd share their paranormal experiences right, I've seen a ghost, or oh, I'm a researcher talking about ufo experiences in the southwest, or or I'm a guy who they used to do like really weird stunts, like they the devil. A guy who was a conduit to the devil called in and they would layer weird stuff on his voice. It was really fun, fun.

Doug: 14:03

But anyway.

Ron: 14:03

So you say I'm watching you, ron. It was a great show and now it's just become conservative, typical culture, war type stuff, I think. Anyways, though, but it was a place where people on the fringes could come and talk to an audience about interesting things A lot of Bigfoot and Nessie and cryptozoology, that kind of stuff. Anyways, david Paulides I heard him on this show once and he was really interesting because he wasn't talking about crazy stuff. This seemed very real, Like. These are real people. They have gone missing in the national parks, and the national parks does not maintain a database of them, and a lot of the, a lot of these cases they've never been found Right, and this is sort of. David Platt is going around and saying this is a problem.

Don: 14:46

So the people that we're discussing are not found. So this little boy the end of the story spoiler is that we don't know where he is.

Ron: 14:53

We do not know where Jimmy is, and to your original question could he have reached the doorknob on the RV? We don't know. So all of the information I have is information that david politis thinks is relevant to the case, and that's what he gives us.

Don: 15:07

Uh, he does yeah so the first thing that I'm thinking is if the jimmy's only two years old, right like they don't, their legs are little, very low, so they can't get very far, and so it was only 15 minutes before that that we think he was available for him to be missing like how far could he have gotten on his own. So if they can't find him like, my eyebrows are raised that there's somebody else involved here.

Ron: 15:33

That's why I asked about mom and another piece of information we get about Jimmy. The police interview neighbors back home and friends and family and all that stuff and it is revealed that Jimmy is probably a little bit slower than other kids his age. There's accusations that he might be neurodivergent and he's very frail, that he cannot walk very well, like he couldn't even keep up with the family on this short walk when they first arrived. And, as David Politis points out, the search and rescue they only search for two mile radius around the campsite, right, and their kind of assumption is a kid can't get farther than that, right.

Ron: 16:08

So if we check everything within two miles and he's not there, then we don't know. We give up. And David, I think, is correct to say no, that's not the right method. You need to be searching. How far can a person abduct him?

Don: 16:22

Right.

Ron: 16:22

Because this is very clearly some sort of abduction case.

Don: 16:26

And the parents had no indication that anyone else was around in that campground or in that area.

Ron: 16:30

There are people in the area. They are other hunters. David says that the police in search and rescue are able to account for everyone in the area.

Doug: 16:37

I don't exactly know how that works.

Ron: 16:39

But apparently all of the people hunting in the area are interviewed and talked to and are accounted for. But David says in this report, in the book obviously someone there would be people in the area and clearly someone who, like, was watching the family and would know when the time to go and abduct someone would be.

Don: 16:57

And it's clearly. Why would they take Jimmy and not his sister, his sister's older?

Doug: 17:02

Yeah, I believe the sister is older. She can probably run a 730 mile at least.

Ron: 17:07

The other weird thing is that, according to James, they're all asleep in the RV when he arrives.

Don: 17:13

If someone goes in to take Jimmy, he didn't make any noise.

Ron: 17:16

Even the cats are asleep. And apparently he screamed which was loud enough for James to hear when he was 15 minutes away from the campground, or something like that. Come on, James, I don't, it's very. It's a strange case, right? I'm not saying we are here to solve this case. We cannot solve this case, but it's. It's weird. You want another weird one? Sure, Let me take you down to sorry, up to the Alaskan Yukon, and I've been there the halcyon days of 2004. This is the case of Bart Schleyer. Bart Schleyer was a pretty incredible dude.

Don: 17:52

He sounds like a Simpsons character.

Doug: 17:56

Bart, is you just?

Ron: 17:57

think the word Bart is. Bart Schleyer is a biologist. He's apparently like a bear expert. He's considered the foremost bear trapper in the United States. He was. He moved to Siberia at once and he was trapping tigers.

Ron: 18:11

Like this, guy knows dangerous animals and he's also a hunter. He's a bow hunter and in 2004, in September of 2004, he decides to go on a hunting trip alone to a series of lakes in the Yukon. Now, these lakes are so remote that you have to be flown in and dropped off. He has a friend who's a pilot. He flies him in, he drops him off with his stuff. He's going to be there for two weeks and then his pilot's going to return, pick him up and go home.

Ron: 18:38

When the pilot does return, it is very clear that Bart is not at his campground. His tent has been knocked over, he still has a lot of his supplies out and there's no real sign of where Bart is. After a brief period of searching, the pilot finally calls in the authorities. Some of Bart's personal friends come in and try to help search him out. Eventually, on the other side of the lake, they find his raft and his hangout spot and their conclusion is he was probably calling moose from this of the lake.

Ron: 19:05

They find his raft and his hangout spot and their conclusion is he was probably calling moose from this position. And they find his bow and his arrows. They're leaning up against a tree. There's no real sign of distress or anything but, again, bart's gone right. There's no real sign of bart anywhere. Eventually, the authorities are able to find a skull and teeth are in the vicinity of the area. Um, they are identified as Bart's. Um they find Bart's pants, but they don't find any other of his clothes. Um the there's no sign of like tearing or damage or basic normal signs of an animal attack.

Don: 19:41

So just like he took his clothes off, they find his clothes.

Ron: 19:43

They, they find just his pants they don't find any other just as hard as skull and his skull.

Doug: 19:48

So he took off his teeth, took off his skull, took off his pants yeah just getting ready for the end times, I don't know

Ron: 19:57

so david politis says he talks to one of, he interviews one of bart's friends and he considers this the the strangest case in the history of the Yukon. Right, he says this is the most fit guy, he's the most prepared, he's got the most experience with wild animals. He even says I don't know why he's fishing and hunting on these lakes. There's not a lot of wildlife. But then later the police say yeah, there are a lot of bears and there's a lot of wolves in the area. To all these people and to david politis, this doesn't fit a bear attack because one, bart's too smart, he knows bears. How could he be killed by a bear? Two, there are no major gashes or like wounds on his skull this is contradictory evidence.

Ron: 20:37

Apparently the skull is found with no real damage to it, but then later the coroner says there is signs of being nibbled by animals.

Don: 20:45

It's not explained what animals they are how long was it that between when he was dropped off from when we find his skull?

Ron: 20:52

so, based on, the coroner says it is likely he was only alive for one night on this campground. It's two weeks later that they come back and find that he has passed Right, but the coroner says he was probably only alive for one night before whatever happened. There's no sign of blood. There's no sign of like tracks. Apparently, bears usually take and cash their like dead victims to eat later. They don't find that. They do find lots of bear and wolf scat, but again, none of it has clothing or any artifacts of humans that are usually found in sorts of things. So this becomes another, according to david pleitis, a very weird case that has not been solved and has a very strange. Uh defies expectation and how long?

Don: 21:40

what season was it when he went? This is September.

Ron: 21:44

September.

Don: 21:47

How long does it, like a body just existing in the wilderness, takes time to turn into a skull, doesn't it? Yeah, because you're not saying they found his head. That would be different.

Ron: 21:57

They found a skull and teeth that were removed from the skull, so I don't like this, like he had an encounter with a wilderness dentist, that's right all.

Ron: 22:06

So I don't like this. I don't know how to encounter with a wilderness dentist. So this is what I find fascinating and frustrating about the the these cases as presented by David Politis, which is I do not know I. This is the question I want to explore, which is why is David interested in this topic and what is his central thesis? And sometimes it's hard for me to tell when David is giving me all the information he knows or when he is framing a case to be mysterious.

Don: 22:36

Okay, so he's purposefully making it seem more sinister he might be.

Ron: 22:40

I don't know All right he might be. To be fair, this guy has got hundreds of these cases all in this book and another volume and I think he's pumping out even other more books, collecting even more cases, and a lot of times like he is pulling these from newspaper articles about the case at the time, and maybe every now and then he gets to interview someone who was close to the case, but oftentimes he doesn't, and the National Park Service and the FBI usually are not very cooperative in giving him case files. So I don't want to say, oh, he's purposely misleading us. I think he also has imperfect amounts of information, but it's hard to tell which is which right. When did he just not have enough space in the book to give us more detail?

Don: 23:19

And he seems to think that the National Park Service and the FBI are like withholding information, or they just are not interested in pursuing finding more information.

Ron: 23:30

Both right. He frequently spends time in this book saying, like why was the search called off? Why didn't people continue looking for him when they didn't find someone? It's not acceptable to stop looking for them. Right? This is a person, they have a family and in a lot of ways he's right. I think it's hard for us to acknowledge that there are maybe realities to why we cannot search for a missing person forever, right, and a lot of times these searches go on what they consider a reasonable amount of time and cover what they consider a reasonable area that a person could traverse, and frequently these are the cases where that person seems to have disappeared, right, or the usual search and rescue operations don't work right, like they escape detection in some way. So, yeah, this is one of those cases where, again to me, I think Bart got killed by a bear, but David Plata says, no, that can't be Nibbled on by a bear.

Don: 24:25

That's right, it was nibbled, nibbled to death.

Ron: 24:27

He cites a lot of experts who say, oh, it couldn't be a bear, it couldn't be a bear. And one of them is just, our bears don't attack people and it's like sure they haven't, until they attack a person. So like that to. To me it's not strong evidence. Yes, there are peculiarities. They didn't find clothes in the scat. Bears usually eat a person and their clothes, but they don't find his clothes. They don't take the wrappers off.

Doug: 24:49

No, they're absolute rude dudes when it comes to eating people, I stand by bears. I think that they're not as rude as you're saying.

Don: 24:59

You ran away from a bear. You didn't stand next to it.

Ron: 25:04

Because I respected it so much and it understood respect yeah, like to what you're saying, though, don, which is is the park service purposefully withholding information? This brings us to another case, which is the case of stacy and aros aris. Aros, aas, I can never pronounce this word. It appears in in Hamlet a bunch.

Doug: 25:23

I never know how to say it.

Ron: 25:24

I know it's a curtain, whatever, but I'm sorry. Stacey Ann Arras in 1981 went on a hike with a group of people that had a hike leader. I think it was actually like a horseback riding experience. And this is in Yosemite, where you two have been in love. And this is in Yosemite where you two have been and love. And Yosemite is actually what David Politis calls a hotspot or a cluster of missing people's cases. There's a greater proportionality of people that go missing in Yosemite National Park.

Don: 25:55

It's one of the most popular parks, though, too.

Ron: 25:56

No, there's more people go missing in.

Doug: 25:58

Yosemite than they do. More people visit.

Ron: 25:59

Yosemite.

Don: 26:00

People go missing in Yosemite. More people visit Yosemite. No, that can't be it so anyway, stacey's 14.

Ron: 26:04

When she goes on this horseback riding trip with her father, she goes missing. And there is. They pause for the night, you know. Stop at this cabin where the whole group is. Stacey decides to go on a little hike on her own. She says goodbye to her dad, she puts on hiking boots, she goes out. At some point they see her standing on top of a boulder out in the horizon and that's apparently the last time anyone sees her. When she doesn't come back by the time she said she would, that's when they call people and they start searching for her. This is directly from the book I'm quoting here. David Plata says that a nine-day search for Stacey included 8,004 man hours, 57 hours of helicopter time, four separate agencies and not one clue about what happened to Stacey. The search cost the National Park Service $99,845 in 1981. So again, a nine-day search that produces zero clues about what happens to Stacey. She's still never been found.

Ron: 27:05

This is considered a cold case and this is one of the cases that David Politis talks about, where he contacts the National Park Service and he says this one is particularly frustrating to him because apparently he just had to talk to a really rude guy who wouldn't give him any information about this case at all. And this is where David Politis says why, like, why won't they give me this information? This is a it's almost a 30, it's more than 30 year old case. There's clearly no suspects. It was never considered a criminal case. Like, why can't I just see what you guys got on it? Right, and this is, if you'll allow me, to quote sizably from the book. But I do think this is interesting and this tells us a lot about David Paulides. Right, he says the idea that these are the only missing people in this area would not be accurate. Before this he lists other people in the sort of vicinity of Stacey. There's like four other people over the course of a couple of decades who have gone missing in the same particular area of Yosemite. The idea that these are the only missing people in this area would not be accurate. It was an extensive periodical search that produced these results. And there are others. Stacey Aras, timothy Barnes, jeff Estes did not disappear. Human beings cannot disappear. They are probably somewhere inside that park.

Ron: 28:13

Why are we giving up the search when we know exactly where they disappeared? I believe the paradigm of searching for missing people needs to drastically change. Why should we ever give up searching for people when we know exactly where they were located 15 minutes prior to their disappearance? How far can a 14-year-old girl travel on her own? I can guarantee that the loss of Stacey Aris was the worst life-changing event in her father's life. I have no idea how a parent would cope with the loss of a child. It would be horrific. I also don't understand how the NPS can stop searching for a girl after just nine days. They know this child is still in the park. Why aren't they continuing to search? Do they know something that allows them to reconcile this decision in their minds? Amen, david, and he's right. I get that there's a certain fury to why are we stopping? But Don, why are they stopping?

Don: 28:59

Because there's a limited window that you'll be able to find anything that will help you either indicate that she was removed from the park, which would tell you that your search is now a lot wider, or that she's going to be able to survive in the park without any kind of resources. We were looking for that submarine a year ago and there was a clock countdown on the news the exact minute that everybody on board. There was a clock countdown on the news right at the exact minute that everybody on board. There was no more hope. Of course, we found out later there was no more hope in the first place, but there's a window and outside that window, like, what's the likelihood of finding somebody? That's the.

Ron: 29:35

It's a statistics problem for the park service and, like he said earlier, this cost them 91 000. This search right and like. At the end of nine days they haven't found anything right. There is a real sort of financial reality that the park has to consider yeah.

Ron: 29:51

And I looked into this thing. Are the parks resources limited? And the answer is yes. David seems astonished that so many people go missing inside of the national parks, but in 2018, this is the closest information, the most current information I could find 318 million people visited the parks in the United States.

Ron: 30:09

Right, there are 419 park units. They employ 21,000 full-time and part-time employees and they mostly rely on the work of volunteers about 280,000 of them. A report from 2022 stated that government appropriations for the NPS increased by 14% from 2013 to 2022, when they were adjusted for inflation. However, staffing had decreased by 9% in the same time frame, despite 25 new parks being added to the National Parks Service. This report also notes that the NPS has a multi-billion dollar backlog of deferred maintenance projects. So while they are receiving funding, they're also expanding in a way where they one can't use that funding to actually improve infrastructure and things like that, and two employ people, and these are the people who know the parks get called on to protect and search for the park goers, and I don't want to sound heartless either, like I understand for that father.

Don: 31:08

Finding his daughter, I'm sure, would be priority number one.

Ron: 31:11

No, of course but and I'm not even really accusing david politis of being unrealistic or silly or fantastical or, yes, like it would be we should. I agree we should search for people when we know, like he's, he's right, people don't just disappear, they are somewhere. And that closure, I know, is important. But the parks do have less resources than they used to and this actually came about in the 70s. Right In 1972, they passed a bill. The parks never charged people for any admittance fees until 1972, when the government had to start being more efficient and paying for itself. So that's when they started charging people admittance fees and campground fees and things like that. And a report in 1977 assessed these and said that actually the parks lost revenue when they started charging for these kinds of fees because they actually cut down. The amount of people who went it actually drastically was reduced.

Don: 32:08

And probably reduced the number of people who went missing too.

Ron: 32:10

Yeah, so maybe it works. Silver linings.

Don: 32:13

Okay.

Ron: 32:18

But, points aside, david still goes to this thing. What are they hiding Right? And why would they? Why would the Parks not give?

Doug: 32:25

an investigator this information.

Ron: 32:27

What's so bad about information? What's so bad about the truth?

Don: 32:30

About a 30-year-old case and you randomly call up and say, hey, can you give me this information? And you find a grumpy person on the other end of the phone. I think that's probably what I would expect.

Ron: 32:39

Yeah, I agree, Really sir that's probably what I would expect. Yeah, really sure yeah yeah, so yeah david says the freedom of information act. On the foia, you could any uh american private citizen can make a foia request and they have a right to any government document almost. But yeah, yeah, I know, but you know still any government document don, I think they just don't have it. This is from the 1980s. You're telling me. How many times has that? A lot of the records are probably not digital.

Ron: 33:10

Yes, they haven't been digitized? That file's probably just gone. Or how many times have they renovate the office and they threw out a couple of cabinets or whatever? It's just probably not there. But I think David does attribute some sort of malice to the NPS for not cooperating with him, and I think this is actually why I find him an interesting person and where I think we get closer to what David actually believes and why he's telling us these stories order to do that.

Ron: 33:44

I also want to tell you the story about Teresa Beyer, who went missing in the Sierra Nevada sorry, Sierra National Forest. This is a very short case, but it is a case that David begins by saying. If there's only one case in this book that strikes the reader as odd, this is it. Teresa Beyer was 16 when she went on a camping trip with her neighbor. Her neighbor claimed to be an expert on the topic of Bigfoot and the two were supposedly looking for the biped. Also, I think it's a good clue when someone calls Bigfoot a biped, but anyway, it seems like a show off sometime during the trip.

Ron: 34:24

Russell claims that theresa was abducted quote by a tribe of bigfoot. That was the wording he used in 1987, says david politis who? Who claims she was abducted by a big russell is the neighbor who takes theresa byer, who is 16, to a camping trip. We do not know russell's age, we only know that he is her neighbor. Russell is eventually charged with abduction once police go to the site where he said she was abducted by a tribe of.

Ron: 34:48

Bigfoot. They find no evidence of anything Of Bigfeet no, no Bigfeet. Charges are later dropped against him, though, and that's it. That's literally all he gives us about this most interesting case. So why? What makes this interesting, do you think?

Ron: 35:08

the non-flesh world entity bigfoot yeah, if I picked up this book and I could only read. There's hundreds of cases, probably like 140, 50 cases in this book, and I picked up one. David politis says this is the one I should read. Yeah, and did you just read the whole thing? That's all we have. I read most of it. Here's the last part. Teresa Beyer case inspired me to conduct additional research on the Shuteye Peak area. It is interesting that Teresa disappeared in an area that topographically matches many associated with missing people in the greater yosemite area rocky, large granite outcroppings that's well.

Don: 35:45

That's all of yep that's describes the sierra nevada. That's not.

Ron: 35:49

That's what it's made this idea of the rocky granite outcroppings, featuring in a lot of these disappearances, is something he carps on again and again. He seems to think those are easy places to find people. Don, in your experience, are granite outcroppings easy places to find people?

Don: 36:08

It depends what it looks like. So hiking in the Sierra Nevadas is an unusual experience because it is so rocky and granite base, especially when you get up above the tree line, like there's not even soil to walk on, so finding a trail can be difficult. And so when I used to go and I understand the recent methods have changed, but we used to have trail they called them trail ducks, right, and so they're just like little stacks of rocks and so you'd be walking through maybe a small wooded area and then you'd get to a large like plane that was just one giant bubble of granite and to find the the trail you had to just follow the stacked rocks. So if it's like that, where it's just a plane of granite like a moonscape, I would think it'd be very easy to find somebody because they would stand out. However, those also decompose into piles of rocks which then are all craggy and have holes in them and places that a body could slip into, and that I think would be much more difficult.

Don: 37:03

So it depends what you mean. It almost looks like it's paved with granite. That I think would be easy for somebody to stand out on. But if it's the decomposed granite, then I know, I think it'd be very hard, and even in those moonscapes that I'm talking about, the granite has cracks in it and there's places where you could fall in. There's lots of reasonable explanations that don't involve a cryptozoological biped as the culprit, so that doesn't strike me as the most interesting case. I think that Russell was telling a story.

Ron: 37:35

Yeah, and I think I neglected one piece of information when I described David Paulides' background, I'm afraid.

Ron: 37:42

I've misled you all. He has really big feet. I don't know about the size of his big feet. He has a big mustache. But prior to starting this 411 Missing Project, he also co-founded the North American Bigfoot Search. Yeah, and today you can buy tickets to a Bigfoot cruise and you can hear David Paulides, amongst others luminaries in the field, speak to you about Bigfoot. A Bigfoot cruise Like Jungle Cruise. We should talk about this on a different podcast, but the ways in which paranormal science and conspiracy have just developed into obscene revenue fields for people, but anyways, yeah, David Paulides is a Bigfoot guy. Now, in this 411 book, he uses the words Bigfoot only when other people use it.

Ron: 38:38

He does not come out and say these people are missing because of Bigfoot. However, if we read between the lines, I think it's very clear that David Paulides he does not come out and say these people are missing because of bigfoot. However, we know if we read between the lines. I think it's very clear that david politis thinks these people are missing because of bigfoot.

Don: 38:51

So jimmy bigfoot came to jimmy's rv.

Ron: 38:54

Jimmy was taken by a bigfoot quietly, there were no tracks found. Probably pet the cat to keep it asleep and then yeah, his natural animal ability.

Ron: 39:04

He cast what's the dnd animal spell. Animal friend, yes, he cast animal friend. Bigfoot cast animal friend on the cats and and is so sneaky that he walked away without leaving any tracks. Bart schlayer wasn't killed by a bear, because bart schlayer knows bears but he doesn't know bigfoot, so he's probably killed by a bigfoot. He see, couldn't walk that far she, she's only 14. So she was also abducted by a Bigfoot. Teresa Byer is abducted by a family of Bigfoot, but if they were, wouldn't they still be taken somewhere?

Don: 39:34

Yeah, there still would be a, whether it's a Bigfoot or an elephant or a bad guy, somebody abducts you. There's still like a destination that you arrive at and there's going to be clues that that take you there. And I would think that a bigfoot, which we don't, of course, know their intellectual abilities and their ability don't underestimate obfuscate clues and things like that.

Don: 39:55

But assuming that they are animals like all other animals, there would still be evidence left behind that they had been there, that they had taken a child away that didn't want to go with them, and if Stacy were abducted, it would make a lot more sense to me that a human would be able to convince Stacy hey, come with me, trust me, I will do something to take care of you versus a giant, hairy ape-smelly. Hey, we don't know. If they're smelly, that we do. That's all the evidence that I'm sure. Ask, david politis. That's one of the. That's one of the. The signs that bigfoot isn't here is they smell doug. Where are you on bigfoot?

Doug: 40:32

I think he'd be a little bit too politis to tell us about the smell I just had to it's tough because he obviously it's hard because, like you can tell conclusively by all of this evidence that this is definitely done by unidentified flying objects with tractor beams taking these people and he just wants to hold on to the bigfoot thing so badly like all of this lines up perfectly with ufos and yet he won't accept it. And this is what I find is so tough about people who do their research. Is they?

Don: 41:05

get hung up on one thing. That's what they say.

Ron: 41:07

Yosemite is the bermuda triangle of of wilderness areas doug, I'm so glad you brought that up, because later tonight you and I should go on to amazon prime where we can purchase a documentary film created by david polite is called missing 411 the the UFO Connection. Oh man.

Doug: 41:25

So he got in late. He just got in late. Is that what this is? He got in a little late, but he's there.

Ron: 41:30

So this is. I think David Polite is doing a very good service by-.

Doug: 41:35

Entertaining me.

Ron: 41:37

Yes, he's definitely creating entertainment to a degree, and that's why I encountered him on Coast to Coast AM, a ridiculous AM program that is designed to be entertainment, but I do think he I find him fascinating because he's stumbled upon a real problem, which is, yes, people do go missing in the national parks, and the national park system is not at all equipped to actually find and rescue many of them, and they also don't keep a database of those people, which would be useful for finishing those cases in some degree. That's a real problem. That's a real thing. David sidesteps that, though, in order to say the real problem actually, though, is that Bigfoot is in the park and that the people who run the park know this, and they are hiding this from us, and that's why they won't give me access to these files and bigfoot only goes to national parks yeah, through many states, let's be clear

Ron: 42:32

yeah david says there are several things that link many, if not all, of the cases in this book. Let me go through them and let's see if we can't potentially find any explanations for them. All right, first thing he says is that there is frequently there are frequently storms or inclement weather at the time that people go missing. This is odd. Why is this odd, don?

Don: 42:55

I have no idea. There's weather all over the place every day.

Ron: 42:58

That seems perfectly natural, can you think of any link between storms and us having an impaired ability to find people who've gone missing? It would wash away all the evidence if tracks were laid and it would move things.

Don: 43:12

It would move a body, it could move the clothing, it could move anything that we would normally use to trace or track somebody, but it would be not in the location that it was left.

Ron: 43:21

Sure, sure, sure, sure that could be the case, but it would be not in the location that it was left.

Doug: 43:24

Sure, sure, sure sure that could be the case.

Ron: 43:27

But also, Doug, we know that UFOs have strong electromagnetic fields that produce storms when they enter the atmosphere. So anyways, okay, Also frequently.

Don: 43:34

How do you know that? How do you know? Oh, we know You've been abducted. We know that UFOs have you been probed.

Ron: 43:40

Not probed, but inspired. Bermuda Triangle is a big, stormy UFO place, yep.

Don: 43:46

It's the Atlantic Ocean. It's where hurricanes go. Yeah, it's big and stormy.

Ron: 43:50

Frequently in these cases, dogs are brought into track and sent for the missing people. However, they won't. The dogs choose not to send Bigfoot sons. Yeah, that, I think, is what David Paulides might say.

Don: 44:04

How do we know? The dogs are choosing not to scent? The dogs are sitting there saying, oh yeah, I smell that, but I'm not moving.

Ron: 44:12

Give me a jerky treat. Ever since we let the dogs unionize, there is actually, however, a fact that in particularly dry conditions, dogs just cannot or will not track. Most of the depictions David Politis notes occur between 2 pm and 5 pm, when people are awake yes, when people are awake and when they're supposed to return. Right and so then of course they get Sun's getting down.

Doug: 44:40

That's when you get.

Ron: 44:41

Oh, they're missing because they're not here. Okay, that one's not so weird, okay, but this one is weird. Frequently, people are found. There are cases in this book where the body is found, sometimes months, sometimes a year later, and it's always in a weird place. For instance is the case of um jean heschel schwert, who also went missing in yosemite in 1995. She was on a hike with her boyfriend. They were only gone for 15 minutes when she didn't return and they start a whole search. They don't find her. But eventually, two months later, fishermen find her at the bottom of a Creek. Her remains, she has no clothes on, and this is the 2000 feet below where she went disappearing, where she disappeared. And so this is also considered. How could she have? It's very rocky terrain, how could she have gotten there? Obviously, she was abducted and brought there by a Bigfoot right, this is.

Don: 45:27

And then just left in the pool Cause that was like Bigfoot got tired. Yeah, this is as far as I can take her.

Ron: 45:33

Yeah, but oftentimes these bodies are found and they're missing their clothes, as in the case of Bart Schleyer. Also, he says this is it makes no sense. People who are missing in the wilderness why would they take off their clothes?

Don: 45:46

That makes perfect sense.

Ron: 45:48

Why does it make perfect sense, Don? That's crazy.

Don: 45:50

Because Bart Schleyer right, it was our Alaska guy in September. In Alaska it's a cold place. One of the dangers of being lost in the wilderness is your ability to regulate your temperature, and when you start to experience hypothermia, it's a documented phenomenon that one of the things that happens in late hypothermia is you get a sensation of being too hot. Even though you're freezing to death, you feel like you're too hot, so it's not at all uncommon for people who are experiencing hypothermia to be found in states of undress.

Ron: 46:20

Yeah, exactly this is called paradoxical undressing. It's about 25% of hypothermia cases that people completely disrobe, and frequently they also exhibit what they call terminal burrowing behavior, which is they will be found in really weird places. Sometimes people, if there's a power outage in the winter in small towns, they'll be found wedged inside of the not the engine block, but inside of their car, like in these like just trying to get as warm as possible, like hugging the engine block right or they'll be found under rocks, or they'll be found half buried in the ground, right, because they're seeking warmth, right?

Ron: 46:57

And this also explains why maybe these people never get found in these rocky areas because they're under the rocks or something. Maybe these people never get found in these rocky areas because they're under the rocks or something, right? Okay, so we explained that. One. David also says that frequently these people are found around berries. He says berries, there's always berries.

Doug: 47:15

This is what he says.

Ron: 47:15

He says berries feature prominently in a lot of these cases. They do and they grow all over the place. Berries grow all over the place, but why would david find berries particularly interesting?

Don: 47:26

because yogi bear I don't they're.

Ron: 47:29

They're a bigfoot food source, right, oh, people are in the bigfoot food territory but then why is he taking people?

Don: 47:37

to work on the berry farm yeah, there's probably some giant. Bigfoot.

Doug: 47:43

The Bigfoot cruise ends at Bigfoot's human trafficking.

Ron: 47:47

Like we said, david says there are clusters of these missing cases which I think he attributes to populations of Bigfoot. Oh, these people keep going missing because they're within Bigfoot territory. But, like you said, don, all of these places, all these hotspots, are Yosemite and Glacier National Park and they're the most visited parks in the country. And he also says coincidentally, these people frequently go disappearing in july right when vacation starts.

Don: 48:15

Yeah, yeah also travel.

Ron: 48:17

Yeah, the most popular month for all of the national parks.

Don: 48:20

so if the national parks knew that Bigfoot was a danger in these places, why would they keep it a secret?

Ron: 48:26

What's the Because obviously people in power must keep secrets.

Doug: 48:34

It's as simple as that. It's Teddy Roosevelt, I think.

Don: 48:37

If you go to the Everglades National Park, even if you go to Disney World, there's alligators in the water and there's a sign that says there's alligators in the water. If you go into the wilderness you might not come back. So if it was something that was known like, why keep it a secret? Is it the government have some kind of secret pact with Bigfoot that?

Ron: 48:57

In the case of Barsh Slayer, david Politis writes. A recurring theme in this book is that many of these stories have never had significant press coverage and the vast majority of North Americans have never heard of these victims. I would hope that making the reader aware of the dangers that exist in the wilds of North America would elevate their senses and take additional precaution, precautionary measures when enjoying the wild. And I think he's right.

Doug: 49:17

I think you could just stop there.

Ron: 49:20

Wilderness is a dangerous place and no matter how expert or experienced someone is, these things happen right. There is always a danger of some random storm coming in right and locking you out, or you getting disoriented or actually attacked by an animal that we have evidence exists, like a mountain lion or a bear.

Don: 49:40

And even aside from the violent ends, that way, like just being in the wilderness, is dangerous. If you walk away from where your campsite is, like all of the trees look the same and it's super easy to get disoriented and then not know which way you're headed and believe you're heading back the way that you came and instead you're actually going much deeper into the wilderness. So it's if you're not an experienced person in the outdoors, it can be super dangerous. And it sounds like all of these people who are missing are not super experienced in the outdoors, with the exception of Slayer, but he was by himself, which increases the danger exponentially. Yeah, exactly.

Ron: 50:20

These are people who are just casually enjoying the wilderness and unfortunately, a very terrible thing happened to them. And I think david this is why I think I do think david's being a little bit callous and he's clearly made sort of an industry out of this I don't think he's really trying to solve these cases or to bring awareness to them so that they can be solved or so that the national park will change its system. It apparently does have digital database. Apparently all national agencies use this incident management analysis and reporting system, or imars, which is instituted after 9-11 so that the whole nation could track and watch out for potential threats and things like that. But apparently the imars system is like notoriously terrible, like whole departments just don't use it or engage with it because it's such a pain in the butt.

Ron: 51:09

And you can, I mean, if you go to the National Park Service website, they have a cold cases page where they do now have a couple dozen missing persons listed there. Some of them are from the 411 project project, but they do have a disclaimer that says missing person and other open case records are maintained in the incident management and reporting system, which is a privacy act system of records in accordance with the privacy act system of records, notice access to both open and closed case files may be limited. Like this thing that david is accusing them of is also just it's like it's governmental red tape stuff like it's again.

Ron: 51:46

I don't think you need to explain it, yeah yeah, and this is why I do think he's taking advantage of the situation, especially when he's releasing documentaries called the ufo connection, yeah, which is hey, let's, we haven't talked about that at all.

Don: 51:57

How come, how can we judge that without?

Ron: 52:00

I don't have that book. I don't't know what the UFO connection is. I'm sorry. I know very little about UFO today. I could tell you a lot about UFO ufology in the 1990s, but I think I'm not a big Bigfoot guy anymore. I used to really like Bigfoot stories. I know a guy who loves Bigfoot. I think the current theory about Bigfoot is not that he is an organic creature, but that he is an organic creature but that he is. I've had this told to me that he is interdimensional yeah and that he is connected to ufos.

Ron: 52:30

Ufos are also interdimensional. I think the evidence for these things has become so poor that we have to jump to interdimensionality. I think we're using string theory now.

Doug: 52:42

Why do you think that Mulder, on the X-Files, the phrase was I want to believe.

Ron: 52:48

Yeah, you have to want to. Guys and David Paulides and I think all people want to believe that when people die, there is meaning to it, and I think the unfortunate truth that many of us know is that there is frequently I would say 99% of the time no meaning to our deaths and that sometimes a 14-year-old girl can walk into the wilderness, get lost and that can be the end of her life and we will never see them again, and that is a tragedy. And I think one way we try to address that tragedy is to find a reason. No, it couldn't be that simple, it couldn't be that tragic and horrible. It had to be an abduction by a creature who smells.

Don: 53:33

But see, I think there is meaning there right, because the meaning is the object lesson right, that the wilderness is dangerous and sure, go have fun, but be careful when you do, because there's wander off by yourself and it's it's not as much fun.

Doug: 53:46

I was going to ask the same thing, because I think that we often attribute, especially in death, being the undiscovered country. What do you do with this thing that you will not know and is only experienced once, or is the experience of not experiencing? And I like what you said, don, because the truth is that it's probably in our own egos that we look at something like the wilderness, that is again we talked about this at the beginning we create environments that are the opposite of wilderness to become our habitat, and so, of course, we want to create these stories because and then the wilderness and its infinite vastness swallows whole another person.

Don: 54:29

Yeah, it's too hard for us to hold onto as that being simply the end of the story when we want something else, but there is, I agree, there's tremendous meaning in that there's a a complication, I think, for us humans recognizing how small we are in that right, because your own personality makes you think that you're the center of the universe and on the planet like I'm barely a blip yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think those stories tend to be ones we try to avoid, right, we try to ascribe yeah, even, yeah, even if it is the moral is be careful when you're in the wilderness, right, the wilderness is still something to be feared.

Ron: 55:08

The wilderness is still something to be respected, whatever it is and I've been at work.

Doug: 55:22

Things have been stressful. Boss is breathing down my neck. When am I gonna get these deadlines done? At least I've got that week of vacation to look forward to, and then being out and looking at the mountains and realizing how small your problems seem to be in the vast and infinite universe that we live on. This one rock of you get to let all of that float away. The sublime right Indeed.

Ron: 55:42

Edmund Burke Wow, good poll. You guys ever been up PCH and, like around Monterey or, as the Redwoods, big Sur, get seen the coastline. What do you feel when you see the coastline up high? You're up high, you're hundreds of feet up in the air. You're looking at this ruined kind of coastline, this rocky coastline.

Don: 56:03

What do you feel? Sublimity is the word for it. It's it I cause. It's not what you just described, doug. I think it's the. I think it's the desire you're talking about, but I like feeling small in the wilderness, that's. I don't like feeling like I'm the man in control and right. I like the cliffs are big and and I can recognize that in my minuscule position, and that is actually the freeing feeling for me is because it provides that physical recognition of how small I am in comparison.

Ron: 56:33

Because it's truer right. That's the truth. I've been stuck in the world where I thought I was big, I need to, and that doesn't actually gel. So I need to go out and remind myself I'm small and therefore also the things I face are small, and there's comfort in that.

Doug: 56:49

I even remember I took a trip during the height of the pandemic. My wife and I went to Big Sur and I remember winding around the cliffs and literally hearing my wife's breathing pattern change because there was just the steep drop off that could happen, going even 10 miles an hour faster than we were driving. To acknowledge, even my car is not fit for this terrain, to the point that we have to go so slowly around this to make sure that we make this safely because it is such a. I think that was a great selection. That terrain does it more than any, yeah.

Ron: 57:26

All right, folks, I think we're going to call it there. Thank you all so much for being with us. Thank you, don Doug, for exploring this topic with me. Be safe in the wilderness, do not fear the wilderness, but do respect it, and we will see you all on the other side and another can of uncannery. Thank you.