Missing 411 books shine light on a dark and disturbing truth
Police in Canada record thousands of missing persons cases every year.
According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, around 90,000 people are currently missing in the United States. Many credible media outlets in the United Kingdom claim that over 150,000 people go missing in the U.K. every year.
While most of these cases can be explained, there are hundreds of cases still unsolved with no logical explanation.
Finally, there is someone here to help. David Paulides, a former police officer with 20 years of experience, has been investigating strange disappearances around the world for over five years. He is a writer, researcher, and an investigative journalist.
Paulides has published a five-book series called Missing 411. His newest book, released in August 2015, covers 127 cases spread across five countries. The book also includes bizarre cases of college students going missing from 62 different institutions in North America.
“Originally, I was living in California at the time and I started to focus California national parks,” says Paulides. “And, it slowly branched out. It wasn’t just one area in one national park; there were several areas in the parks.”
However, it did not stop there. According to Paulides, the Canadian national parks have an issue with people going missing under strange circumstances as well. Plus, countries like Spain, France, Ecuador, and the United Kingdom have missing person cases with stunning similarities.
Keep in mind, Paulides does not investigate or write about every missing person report. He investigates cases that fit a specific formula.
For example, there are hundreds of cases when someone has vanished while walking directly behind a family member. Sometimes the person is not found for weeks, months, and sometimes they are never found.
By March 22, 2015, David Paulides discovered 52 clusters across North America where people have went missing without a trace. Most of the cases in these clusters have the exact same characteristics.
“The biggest cluster of missing people in the world, to the best we know right now, is Yosemite National Park,” says Paulides. “But, if you follow the sierras all the way through the ‘cascades’, all the way through Oregon and Washington, and there’s clusters of these missing people in national parks and forests all the way up to the Canadian border.”
According to Paulides, if the person is found, it’s often in an area that was searched at least ten times. There are cases when the individual is found miles away from where they were last seen or found in locations impossible, or very difficult, to travel on foot.
“When and if the person is ever found alive; about 99 per cent of the time they don’t have the recollection of how they disappeared or what happened when they were gone,” says Paulides.
Paulides says the majority of people that are found are dead. In lots of cases, an autopsy of the body cannot determine a cause of death. And, in some cases, the coroner determines the length of time the person has been dead, and it does not match with the length of time the person was missing.
For example, there has been cases where someone appears to have been dead for three weeks. But, they have been missing for five weeks. So, where has this person been for two weeks?
The few who were alive have no memory of what happened to this day. But, some tell odd stories when trying to piece it together.
“There some journalists that have written stories ‘Don’t be last in line,’” says Paulides. “Inferring that if you’re last in line on a trail, or you’re first in line and you’re not seen, there’s a good likely hood that you are going to disappear in that realm of missing 411.”
Neither the National Park Service or United States government have been very helpful to Paulides and his research team. Both the Canadian and U.S. governments claim to not have lists of people who go missing in national parks.
Instead of providing as much helpful information as possible; the government charges Paulides hundreds of dollars for full reports. Other times, the government refuses to provide the requested documents.
David Paulides told news anchors on a U.S. news broadcast about some of the price quotes from the U.S. National Park Service.
“We attempted to get information from them through the use of Freedom of Information Act,” says Paulides. “And, we filed dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests for this data. We got information back that they didn’t keep lists of missing people. Locally at Yosemite, or at any national park, and at a national level. When we requested the data, the national park said they were going to charge us $34,000 for a list of missing people from Yosemite. And, they wanted $1.4 million for a list of missing people nationally.”
Could animal attacks explain these disappearances?
David Paulides rules out this possibility due to the Search and Rescue teams never finding physical evidence of an animal attack.
“A vast majority of the time, they bring in professional trackers,” says Paulides. “And, the trackers are looking for predators in the woods. Mountain lions, bears, etcetera. A tracker, and even search and rescue people, would be able to find if a person was attacked by a mammal. There would be blood, there would be a big area in the ground that was disturbed, there would be hair, and there would be drag marks where you were taken away.”
Highly-trained search dogs were used in many of the cases Paulides has researched. According to Paulides, in nearly all cases, the dogs act strangely when arriving on the scene.
“K-9’s, you bring them in and they can’t find a scent of the person,” says Paulides. “And, that’s not right. Sometimes the dog will walk in a circle and lay down, sometimes they don’t want anything to do with tracking. But, 95 per cent of the time the dogs are useless.”
Other factors David Paulides looks for:
-Shoes are often missing
-Often bad weather like rain, fog, or snow suddenly appears around the time of the disappearance
-Disappearances often happen near bodies of water
-Sometimes alcohol, and/or other substances, are found in the person’s system without explanation
The further you dig into these mysterious incidents; it becomes more clear there are shocking similarities. In fact, the similarities across the continent led David Paulides to gathering information on cases all across the world.
You can learn more about the Missing 411 books by typing www.canammissing.com in your internet browser.
