Missing 411
 

So my son came over today and was telling me about "Missing 411". An author has been researching the odd disappearances of people in national parks. It sounds apocryphal to me, and he's leaning skeptical. I can't find mention of it on the main site, so I was wondering if anyone had heard of this "strange" phenomenon? As my son described it to me, it sounded like the typical, "No one knows what's really going on!11!!!" and you find out that, "why yes someone does."

I stumbled across a YouTube video series a week or two ago about that - think it was "Top 10 mysterious Disappearances in National Parks" or something, with several others in the series. Didn't view, as they were "recommended" videos not actually in the subject I was pursuing. But I did see that there were videos on the subject.

ETA: yeah, a quick Google search yields everything from a New York Post article from September to dozens of videos on the subject. It's a thing.

I saw quite a few references to it when I used to lurk around Bigfoot believer forums. The 411 guy David Paulides was very active in Bigfoot 'research' and he was actually the guy who brought Melba Ketchum in to test alleged Bigfoot DNA which lead to the ridiculous conclusion that Bigfoots were a crossbreed of humans and extinct giant lemurs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Paulides


Edit: here's a youtube video of skeptic/data analyst Kyle Polich investigated the Missing 411 claims
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQhv3dEMFOc

I'm sure people do go missing in National Parks all the time, sometimes under mysterious circumstances. The problem is that these days it's not always easy to tell the difference between a legitimate story and a creepypasta.

I know right? My son sort of kinda' wants to believe it for some reason. He's always marched to the beat of a different drummer. Anyway, I told him to watch the video, after he questioned the wiki link. I told him the very fact the guy was a big foot enthusiast should put his credibility into question. My son told me, "Yeah, but he was a cop for 15 years, that's got to have some credibility." I told him that it didn't cut it for me. My son will eventually know it's hooey but I think he likes to play with the idea.

I was going to say something about how this conspiracy theory has a low level of woo and that might make it more accessible/believable to many people when the obviously crazy conspiracy theories would be harder to swallow but I just had a quick browse through the thread titles of the Missing 411 subreddit and it turns out there's LOTS of woo connected to this.

That's the logical fallacy known as appeal to authority.

If you want to read about disappearances in the National Parks, a very reputable book (without a single Bigfoot in sight) is Death, Daring & Disaster: search and rescue in the National Parks.

Seaboe

The description of the book says "375 exciting tales of heroism and tragedy drawn from the nearly 150,000 search and rescue missions carried out by the National Park Service since 1872."

Y'know, if there's been 150k search & rescue missions in national parks then 1.6k missing person cases sounds entirely plausible and non-controversial to me.

If you DO want to read some obviously fictional but still very creepy stuff, just do a Google search for "stairs in the woods."

You'll find a link to a series of Reddit posts presumably written by a Search and Rescue officer. There's also a YouTube video of someone reading the stories if you prefer "audio book" style.

Also known as an unknown exsanguinating injury...:rolleyes:
like a stabbing or a shooting that no one saw.
:fish:

Or, possibly, also known as dehydration.

Which is a real danger for unskilled people (and sometimes for skilled ones) doing various things outdoors, and which can most certainly kill.

I was actually thinking that if there'd been a valid sighting of bigfoot, it would've been one of the stories they told. Yeah, that many who are still missing is only about 1% of the total searched for--and that quote (150,000) is probably 10 or so years old.

Seaboe

Am I the only one who immediately thought of Dr. Strangelove when they read about the vital fluids? I know that was precious fluids, but it seemed like about the same level of crazy.

The U. S. National Park System encompasses approximately 84,400,000 acres.
This means the system is somewhere between the size of Germany (88,221,810 acres) and Finland (83,281,927 acres).
It includes such places as Yellowstone Park, the Carl Sandburg Home and Grant's Tomb.
How many people do you think get lost in Finland or have disappeared in a crowd visiting Grant's Tomb?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z71pGDq9FbY

The scariest fact is that they don't even know who is buried in Grant's tomb. I read that on the Internet.

No one. No one is buried in Grant's Tomb. No one at all.
Scary, huh?

Or maybe Bigfoot has buried hundreds of people in there. http://message.snopes.com/images/icons/icon27.gif

As I hear it, there are several interns there.

This recent article from Outdoors Magazine talks about it some, how people can just vanish in the great big outdoors even though they should know what they are doing. It also talks about the guy your son saw.

It turns out there are a whole series of the Death in books (the father of them all is Death In Yellowstone, originally 1995, updated 2014). They contain disappearances, too.

My favorite (for some values of favorite) is local. A man was last seen walking across a meadow full of wildflowers on Mt. Rainier, about 20 years ago. Not climbing a glacier, no where near the ice caves, or cliffs. Yet he's gone.

Seaboe