Oh, this is a doozy folks. Uh. We are sharing a classic episode that we really enjoyed about the following crazy thing. There is no federal account of how many people disappear in national parks? Do you remember this one? I remember it well and it comes up quite often actually in other stories that we talked about on stuff that it wants you to know. Hundreds of people in fact go missing in US national parks every year. Um, and there really isn't a place where you can look at an actual number for that. And David Polites is an expert in this. He wrote a book called Missing for One one that was made into a documentary. UM. Really thoughtful, interesting guy, and we had a great chat with him back in And spoiler, this is a little bit of homework fellow conspiracy realists, because I think we might have David back on in the future. Here it is from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noll. They call me Ben and you are you that makes this stuff? They don't want you to know. As always, we're joined with our super producer Alex w and the ones and twos? Are you gonna wave? Is it all? Has he always been there? Is it like the shining? Is it like that scening, that scene the shining? I guess it's like it's happily ever after from now on. It does get to a place where the things that are in your life at the moment get to a point where they feel like they've just always been like that, even if it's only been a week for one thing. That's very normal to people who live in the US. It's just the sheer side of this country, the sheer enormity of it, to those purple mountains, majesty, It's yeah, it's huge. And we have large swaths of land that are largely unpopulated by human beings, and a lot of these lands are allocated by the government as a place where you can go right, and every year millions of people visit public parks, go one day hikes, go on more um more involved treks, you know, long term camping. There is a darker side to some of these explorations, and the fact of the matter is that not all of the people who go into the wild return many in fact go missing. And for years now, folks, you have been writing to Matt Nolan I asking us to take a closer look at this phenomenon of people who just go miss and not just in in um wilderness in the US as we'll find, but in places in other places around the world. And the question is what happens? How do we track this? And in our exploration of this topic, we went directly to the source to the most well known expert on disappearances in national parks, Ladies and gentlemen. Today, in this episode, we are joined by David Politis, the prolific author of numerous works, the mastermind behind the Missing four one one series, and the creator of the new Missing four one one documentary. Welcome to the show, David, Hey, thanks a million, guys. I appreciate being here. So I guess the first things first, if we want to file it under that category for everybody listening out there, could you tell us a little bit more about the Missing four one one phenomenon, which began as a book series. Is that correct? Correct? I'm a former police officers spent twenty years in California and municipal department there, and after I left, I started to do do some research in a national park and some two National park rangers knew me from other books I had written. They were following me around. Uh Later on, I left the park went back to my room independently. They each came back and went to the room, knocked on the door and said that they had something to tell me, and they knew who I was. They knew I had investigative work I've done in the past, and they said, we have a story for you. And what they had said was is that they had worked at other parks, and they had worked other missing persons cases in those national parks. They eventually got together. They talked about compared notes at the park that they were at and they thought there were some peculiarities there that needed to be looked into. Namely, during a search, during that first seven to ten days that someone goes missing, there's a lot of publicity, there's a lot of press, there's a lot of people looking for the missing person. At the end of that, in the ten days, there's nothing. Everything stops, there's no follow up, there's no investigation, there's essentially nothing more that happens. And when they looked into it. They thought that the locations that these people went missing were odd many and went missing in places that weren't deep in the woods, but might have been fairly close to the center of the park, or a populated area, or a location where a lot of people should have seen what happened. And they the more they looked into it, and the more they tried to find out information, they were stymied themselves. They couldn't get some reports, and they thought the whole thing was just strange. So I said I'd look into it. I left the park the next day, called a couple of law enforcement friends. I said, this is what I heard. See if there's any validity to it. You know. Later on they called me back and said, wow, there's something here. There are a lot of disappearances and there's not a lot of follow up, and there's not a lot of information available. So the National Park Service has a contingent of National Park Police officers and they're all trained at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. They get outstanding training. It's the big department. And we knew that if we filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests against the National Park Police, this could be a jump off point for our investigation into these missing people. So the first thing I did was filed against them for a list of missing people, and within six weeks I get a notice back from him. An attorney calls me from the Park Service and says, why do you want the information? And I know from reading the Freedom of Information Act they can't use the rationale behind why you make a request for determining if they're going to give you the information or not. And I told him that and he said, no, no, no, you're gonna get the information. We just want to know why you're using it. And I said, just doing some research. And the person then came back and said, well, we don't have any list of missing people. And I said, wait a mint. You guys have a huge law enforcement group. I could go to any small to medium sized law enforcement agency in the United States, walk into their chief's office, and within an hour he would have a list of all the missing people in his jurisdiction. Now you're telling me, in your large jurisdiction you don't have any lists missing people. He said no, Well, if you go on to the website of the National Park Service and you kind of look around there, they have a lot of lists. One of the more interesting ones is a list of all the movies made on National Park Service property. So they know the importance of keeping lists and the importance of keeping lists of missing people, and they chose not to give it to us. So I was a published author at the time, and I used an exemption, and I said, I want to use my exemption, and I would like to get the information from your agency, and if you and have it like you claim, I want you to put the list together for me. So they get back to me later and they said, well, we did a little search and your books aren't in enough libraries to qualify for the exemption. Well, folks, there is no such qualifier. It says if you are a published author, this qualifies period. And I reminded him of that, and they said, well, this is just an internal policy we have. Okay, So let's just pretend that I want to pay for the information. How much are you going to charge me for a list of missing people from Yosemite National Park and then a list from your entire jurisdiction. He goes, we'll get back to you. They get back to me and they said, well for a list from Yosemite National Park, it's gonna cost you thirty four thousand dollars. And if you want to list from the entire National Park Service, it's going to cost you one point four million dollars. Wow, what what kind of justification did they have for that number? None? They said that they would use an analyst at six an hour, and they figured it would take them that long to put it together. Now, since then, I've learned a lot. I shouldn't just have these lists just available like in a database, Like can they just send you a spreadsheet? Like? What is it? What does it take? Such meticulous mining and paying some specialists. It seems like that's the whole point of keeping these kinds of records right exactly. And I know that there's I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to some things. So I reached out to some investigative journalists I know, and I threw this by him, and I said, do you believe they don't have a list? I could not find one journalist that said, there's there's no possibility in this world that the National Park Service Police doesn't have a list of missing people in their jurisdiction. Everyone says that they do. They just don't want to give it up. But the rationale behind this, and since then, this was six seven years ago now is I've had several people like yourself step up and say, hey, we will buy the National Park Service a laptop and put Excel on it. And every month there's called a month. There's a monthly report that comes in from every National Park Service property from their superintendent of the highlights of what happens in that park. Somebody goes missing, somebody gets killed, whatever. Well, they could have an intern which costs nothing, screen those monthly documents and put every person's name on an Excel spreadsheet on that laptop. It would essentially cost them nothing. They chose not to publicize this. Now, interestingly, just within the last month, they've started to put one or two people on their website from each park that's gone missing. We're trying to understand the rationale why they're putting those people up as missing, but not the vast numbers that are missing in the park. Namely, the people that they're putting missing are people I've already written about or talked about. But they're not putting up all of them. And I don't know why and it's frustrating because it's such a roadblock to future work. The amount of time and energy we have to expand to find a case that's thirty or forty years old where somebody's never been found, That energy is huge. But they're forcing us to do it because they won't help at all. And this, uh, this investigation just just for everyone in the audience. When when we're talking about investigating a specific case, a specific case of a missing person, this doesn't just involve, uh, you know, reading newspapers of the time. This also involves heavy research into the staff of the part at the time, the rangers that would be there, any local law enforcement. This can include family interviews. This is a exhaustive process, not to mention any kind of search and rescue efforts that you know are deployed, as as depicted in your film UM, which I'd like to go into maybe a couple of the cases that are in the film, when in particular the case of a young boy who turned up missing UM and was surrounded mainly by family and I think a family friend and his grandfather, and it's as you described, you know, a very quick disappearance where the child was following his parents to like a fishing creek, and then they turned around and he was gone. And they stayed at the campground for three days with police and you know, local uh citizens um volunteering to do a kind of search party. And nothing came of this ultimately, and it ultimately the case was dropped. But how how does this Why was this case such an interesting one that you chose to kind of feature it as sort of like a bookend in your film? Um, how is this kind of like an interesting case study of these types of situations? So if you, if you by chance read five missing persons cases, you're you're probably going to find five sets of circumstances that are totally different without a lot of commonality. Now you read five thousand missing person's cases, and soon you're going to see that specific points start to jump out at you, and certain commonalities keep replicating themselves time after time. If you look at just one case, like the Coon's case, your your intuition may go to, oh, you know, it was a human interaction. It was some type of crime committed against the child by someone maybe at the campsite or someone nearby, I know who did this, blah blah blah. But if you look at hundreds of missing persons cases, you see that law enforcement caused. Pete calls people at the scene suspects many times when they get frustrated that they can't solve it. In the Coon's case, the child has never been found, and it just so happened that we had a crew up there as this was evolving and occurring. Now, initially you're gonna you're gonna think, well, this isn't so interesting, except there's so many side lights to a missing person's case that people don't understand and how law enforcement goes about investigating those cases. And as for me, I was involved in a case in northern California where a girl disappeared. Well, the FBI was involved, just like they weren't the Coon's case, and they named the father as a suspect. In this case, I was. I was there on and it wasn't for weeks until they finally said, you know what, the father is in a suspect. And then weeks later they end up arresting a suspect charging with murder and he's convicted. So people that are named suspects aren't necessarily the ones who did it, and if they were, they would have filed charges in the coon's case. There's not one piece of hard evidence to point to anyone committing any of this crime. Yet, if you look at that case and you compare it to the profile points that we've established in six years of seven years of research, you'll notice that it's a dead on match. Happens at a remote campsite. The parents state, they turn around, the child's gone. They bring in canines. The canines can't pick up a scent. They bring in cadaver dogs that smell the trucks and the vehicles that were at the scene in case they transported dead body. They can't pick up a scent. All of these things start to lead that Wow, you know what. That's one of the profile points that are established in the Missing four on one books after reading thousands of cases. The handlers bring a dog to the scene. The dog turns around, sits down, doesn't want to can't find a scent. They bring in cadaver dogs. Cadaver dogters look around, they can't find a scent. The parents say, you know, the child was right here, we turned around, it was gone. Well it sounds stupid when you first hear that, but the reality of it is. It's happened hundreds and hundreds of times if you read the books, and law enforcement when they get frustrated, they'll say, well, the only thing we can think of is that the parents or the relatives or somebody in the area must have taken the kid. But there's no evidence. And like I keep saying, if you're going to accuse somebody, why don't you arrest them because there's nobody that's been found. There's nobody that's been arrested. It's a big who done it? And I'm not gonna say that nobody at the theme did do it. I'm just saying right now, I'm I'm somebody who lives in the world of facts, and there's no hard facts to suspect anybody there of doing anything other than law enforcement calling him a suspect. And they do say, well, you know they failed the polygraph. Well I've heard that hundreds of times in other cases where they called other people's suspects and they were later cleared. A mind of reasons for failing in polygraph, and that's that's one of the main reasons why polygraph aren't allowed in criminal court. Yes, it's uh, I'm really glad that you mentioned that part, David, because more and more, Um, I think more and more people are aware that polygraphs are I don't want to say pseudo science, but there's in exact science, perhaps, and in exact science there is very there's way more compelling arguments against polygraph being used because people get nervous, right. Uh. There are also various ways to trigger polygraph in the worst case scenario. This may be an interesting insight, Uh, Ladies and gentlemen, the idea that law enforcement might name innocent bystanders as suspects, perhaps out of frustration, and with some of these commonalities that you're describing here, David, that the cadaver dogs catch no scent, the child disappeared promptly. UM. We've we've found some other commonalities that you have listed in the Missing four one one series, and we'd like to explore those in depth after a word from our sponsor and we've returned. Before the break, we talked a little bit about the additional commonalities that can be found or profile points here and in Missing America four one one, North America and beyond. Uh, David, we have a we have a couple of commonalities here that I wanted to spend some time asking you about. But one thing that really really stuck out, both in our interview today and when we had spoken a little bit earlier, was that when when children, specifically when when children have disappeared in various cases, they they are found in these incredible places or their their bodies are recovered in places that are extremely anomalous. Could you tell us a little bit about this factor this phenomenon. Sure? If one of the first of all, one of the things that I think the audience needs to understand is the vetting factor that we use before we'll even include a case in any of the books or in any of the studies. One of the first things is is that if there's any evidence of human intervention and abduction, any criminal activity, we won't use it. If there for adult or child, if it's a voluntary disappearance, meaning mental health is at stake, we won't use it. If there's any evidence of animal predation, you know, animal attack, killing, dragging away, anything like that, we won't use the case. So what we're left with is a series of who done it's and in percent of the cases or more maybe there's never even a suspect named in the case. The coon's case was one of those weird cases where we happened to be there while it was happening, and we filmed it. Now, there's another case in the film where a two year old child walking along a mountain trail, supposedly being watched by some friends of the family. He gets out of their sight, he disappears. Four years later, the remains are found fifty ft above the trail. Now, myself and a film crew went up there and essentially had to do it on our hands and knees. We probably should have had ropes. It was so steep to get to the location where those remains were found. Now, when I give up speech in front of a conference, I asked people in the audience, I say, so, how many of your parents? And I asked him if your child, at two years old was left in the woods and you walked away, what do you think that child would do? And some of the parents say, well, at two years old, that child would have played in the dirt and probably gone to sleep right there, Or maybe they would have walked downhill fifty yards, found something interesting, sat down, played and gone to sleep. Then I asked him how many would have walked up hill, you know hardy. Anybody ever raises their hand, they think on my child, and there's no way would walk uphill and exert energy. And then I put a table up that's in one of my books that shows many, many cases where small children are found at phenomenal heights from where they were last seen. And when those children are found, there's no evidence of any animal attack, any human attack. They're just found their deceased. Many times at autopsy they can't even determine the cause the cause of death, which is unusual. There's also a table I showed phenomenal distances that small children take. And also in the movie there's a case where a two year old disappears in this rural area and nineteen hours later they're found twelve miles away over two mountain ranges, barely alive, and the person when interviewed as a small age of course, they don't remember anything. Now, the reason these are important is it's easy for us as adults to understand that small children covering phenomenal distances is highly unusual. Small children going up in phenomenal heights is highly unusual and probably not not it probably can't occur. So how do they get there. Well, these incidents occur in areas where there aren't other people. It's not like somebody could have taken the kid and done this, or carry them or forcibly abducted them. These are in areas that are really remote when these things occur and there's no evidence. Remember, there's no dogs that contract this, because that's the most common profile point. Canines can't track the victim or professional trackers that are brought in find no tracks leaving that scene. So how does the victim get from point to point? That's the commonality that nobody can understand, and that's probably one of the most concerning points that I get from readers is how does this happen? And where does this information come from? It comes from search and rescue reports, law enforcement reports, missing person reports, interviews with families, interviews with law enforcement people or search and rescue people, and that's where most of the information gets gleaned from. Dave. In one of the cases that you had just mentioned where the child was carried up to a height that you guys had to travel use ropes to travel to. In in the film, it mentions that at least the law enforcement that was interviewed they seem to mention that they believed it was an animal attack. When you're when you're going through and researching these cases, because you, guys don't you don't look at cases that are definitely animal attacks. So it sounds like law enforcement is trying to make pieces fit to solve a case. Great point, guys, great point. So initially, when we looked at this case, exactly correct, the press reports, the interviews the sheriff gave said, oh, yeah, it was a mountain lion attack. So initially we kind of stepped back and look at that, and then we started to dig deeper. Well, the victims dad wasn't at the scene and always thought that this was unusual. Well, at the press conference on this event, search and rescue people that had gone up there and recovered the remains had told the father that they found the pants of the child turned inside out at the scene. Yet at the press conference, the sheriff told them, hey, put the pants right side, let's show him. And when the dad asked the sheriff why he did, dad, he walked away from the father. So the dad takes all the evidence and all the reports and presents it to multiple mountain lion experts and said, hey, what's your opinion about what happened to my son? And each of them said, well, it wasn't an animal predation case. And I don't know why the sheriff said it. And on all of the clothing that was found, there was no blood on any of the clothing. So the sheriff made a statement to call the community to make it appear as though they had the answers, and in reality there were no answers. And you gotta you gotta lean on the experts and maybe not one. And the father understood this, that's why he went to multiple and independently they all said the same thing. So it you know, that case is is a huge Who done it? What happened to this child? How did they get five fifty ft up the side of this cliff? Essentially? Why wasn't of blood on the clothing? Why were the pants turned inside out? It goes on and on. Was that the case where they also found like a single tooth They found a single tooth on top of a log in at about ninetet in elevation horrendous winters, blazing gals snow up to ten feet in that area. How did the too skin on top of the log and was sitting there. It's also like there's a crime scene photo in the film and it literally is just sitting there. There's no blood, it looks completely clean. Like that's just very unsettled. It was it was four years later, right, or something to that effect, when the body was recovered. Just just to be Devil's advocate, I'm assuming there was there were other animals who came along and took care of the body. Unfortunately. One interesting factor that's explored in in the books as well is the concept of geographical clusters of an unusual number of disappearances happening over time in uh specific regions or areas. Could you could you tell us a little bit about this concept and how you and your team discovered it. Sure. When when I was in law enforcement, I worked a couple of big teams that would work serial rapists, robbers, burglars, and one of the things we used was a map, a pin map, and every time a crime occurred, we'd put a pin on the map, and we usually knew that the first crime that somebody did was usually the closest to their home, and they would start to work outwards. And as I started read through hundreds of reports. A few locations just stuck out in my mind. Hey, I read about this before. So after a couple of years, I started to have piles of reports in my living room of different locations, and as time went on, certain piles got larger, and eventually I got more piles. Now, I don't like to say this as a concept, because I don't deal in concept and theories. Two things you want to find in any of my books is any theories about what's happening or any possible suspects as to what did this. I lay out a series of facts, and facts are the most important thing you're going to read about, and in a lot of books you're gonna hear a lot of wild theories and conjecture. I don't lay that out. I'd let you come to whatever decision you want to come to, even though the facts that you read are highly strange. There are factually fifty nine geographical clusters of missing people in North America to fit the profile points that we laid out, And the biggest cluster of missing people in the world is your Semite National Park. Now, some people may say, well, yeah, but you know that probably probably has the most visitors well, yeah, but if you look at the circumstances that we've laid after these missing people, I don't care if it's downtown Paris or downtown New York. That's strange that a lot of these people have never been found, even though they disappeared in an area where they should have been found. Canines should have been able to track. There should have been an evidence track or professional trackers to be able to follow these people. Um, these warn't voluntary disappearances. There were no mental health issues. Where are these people now? One of the predominant points we haven't talked about yet, but boulders, boulder fields, and granite are somehow involved in this, meaning bodies are found in boulder fields. People disappear in boulder fields or around granite. And that's another one of those points that came out after reading hundreds and hundreds. Well, where's probably the biggest boulder field and granite location in the world other than Yosemite. And I know that's strange, but when you look at the surrounding area and how many people have disappeared in and around Yosemite, coupled with other locations in the world that also have these boulder fields or granted it starts to look at Now, if we go back to the coon's case, two feet from where Door disappeared is a giant boulder field, and we show it in the film, and it's one of those subtle notes that if you follow the books, you're going to say, oh, yeah, that's right. There is that giant boulderfield that no one wants to discuss, right above where he disappeared. Now he hasn't been found, and I don't know the relationship that could be could exist there, but it's there. You mentioned in the film another commonality that we haven't discussed yet that many of these um folks who disappeared had some sort of physical disability. Um, can you go into that a little bit. A lot of times it's not something that's evident, you know, the person isn't limping down the trail. But a lot of times the victim may have autism or dementia. And and again it's not something obvious and you would say, well, yeah, you know, maybe somebody with autoism or dementia that that seems a reasonable way to disappear. They didn't have all their mental capabilities and they vanished. Again, sticking with those profile points, Why can't we track those people down to where they are located? Where did they go? How come they're not found? It doesn't make sense. Now. On the opposite side of that intellectual spectrum, I've also written about people with phenomenal intellectual capabilities that have vanished. One of those sub types is physicists. There's a series of physicists that have disappeared under strange, strange circumstances and never been found. One of them disappeared in the mountains above Los Angeles. Was taking a hike with some people on the trail. He didn't feel too well. He stopped and the person at the back of the line opt as well with him, and he didn't feel good. So these two guys sat there and the guide at the back of the line said, well, I'm gonna wait a couple of seconds, you can go ahead. And this physicist was visiting from Germany, and he took off down the trail and eventually the guy got back to the lodge and the physicist wasn't at the watch huge search of the entire area for weeks. The German physicist was never found. And this is another of the subgroups is Germans, or people with German heritage seemed to disappear at a higher percentage than the norm, But German physicists disappeared in a much higher percentage than anyone else in the US. It's a very very unusual subgroup. I would say unusual for sure. Um oh gosh, I see my mind just reels and I want to start asking you about reasons like why why would a bunch of physicists go missing? I so badly want to get into some of the allegations and can incepts have been floated to us over the years about these kind of things. Well, I'll tell you that. So there's been six missing four one one books aboutes written. And I probably have said this many times in interviews, but if you listen to every interview I've ever done, you're probably gonna glean maybe three to five of what's in the books. And we have a lot of tables, a lot of graphs, a lot of data. We have lists that I encourage people to look at in the back of the books and try to make some sense out of it. And the truth is is that of the people who have read the six books, and there's been hundreds, if not thousands, tens of thousands. Nobody has ever read the six Books and come back to me and said, I have the formula, I understand what happened. Here's what it is. Everyone. I could say, probably I've had five hundred people or a thousand people right to me in the last three years and say, I've watched all your videos. I know exactly what it is. Then you know, off the top of my head, I can answer them quickly and said, yeah, but what about this, this, this, and this, Oh, I didn't know about that, or what about this, this, this, and this, Oh, I didn't even know about that. And the truth is that the people that have read the six books will come back and say, you know, I initially thought that it might have been A but then this, this, and this happened, and so it can't be A. And yet all the profile points are consistent, so we know that they have to be interrelated. The only thing I will say is that I'm sitting in my room right now looking at the cluster map, is that approximately of all of the clusters are within a hundred and fifty miles of a huge body of water. Namely, the clusters run from north to south through the Cascades and down through the Sierras on the west coast, and then from north to south along the east coast through the Appalachian Appalachian Trail, and then there's clusters all the way around the Great Lakes. Now there's one strand of clusters that kind of goes around the top of Idaho, Montana and then down through the Rockies, but it's pretty scattered, and they don't have the bulk of the numbers that's east and the West Coast and the Great Lakes have. The water is an important feature, and I don't minimize that at all, and I think about that all the time. Why are the clusters in close proximity to water, and what's the relationship to that and why is that so? And then once you look at the cluster map, you'll notice that right in the middle of the US North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, that swath north to south through the middle or the furthest points from the ocean have almost no missing people that fit our criteria. It's a very strange sight. So when you start to think about all this, uh, you know, I've had twenty people that have sent me thesis linked documents saying this is what I think it is, but again it's somebody who's ever read the books, and easily after the first couple of pages, I can say, well, yeah, but it's not this because of this, this, this and this, And I don't minimize the people writing in but you have to understand that unless you read the six books, you're never going to glean all of the options and all of the elements that come into play that do match the criteria. So I mean, you you say that it's not your purpose to kind of conjecture of what the what actually is happening here. You're just kind of like laying out some facts and letting the reader make their own assumptions or make their own connections. And in order to do that, you know, you you kind of need to really dig into the totality of these cases. But I mean you must have some ideas. I mean, I think you know, our listeners would be very interested to talk about that and to kind of get a sense of what are some of the options here? What in what realm are we talking about? So if I had a good option, I tell you, And if I heard one out there, I tell you. And every time I hear somebody say, well, tell me what you think. Well, I'm interested you tell me what you think, because just because I'm a good accumulator of data doesn't mean that I know what all those options are and what what all those options mean. And what I mean by that is that I may be really good at collecting data on missing people, siphoning the data, getting it down to a subgroup that all has commonalities. But you guys know that there's probably fifty things in the world that are strange, unusual and are looked at as predatorial. But each one of those groups has an expert. I'm not the expert on all those fifty areas. I'm focusing in on one thing. If people say the information in and all of a sudden, a lightbulb goes off to me and says, this is it, Well, I'm for sure I'm going to say something, but I'm not going to say something stupid and make myself and my team look like a bung of idiots just to appease somebody who wants to know my opinion or unsupported look at something just the way that's going to happen. That's how people in research lose their credibility. And when I'm dealing with families of missing people. I'm not going to let them go online and look at me saying something stupid and unsupported and then lose my credibility in that world that's going to happen. I'm gonna lay I'm going to continue to lay up the facts. If I find a fact that matches what I'm doing, I'm gonna be the first one that's going to step up and scream to the world what's happening. But until that point happens, I'm still doing research, especially considering the way that the National Parks, you know, we're so hesitant to give out this kind of information and almost seems like it unsettles people in law enforcement capacity or in you know, government capacity, like to even consider that there might be some kind of connection in these cases. I just wonder why, you know, if you've got such little help from the National Parks folks, do you get a sense that law enforcement are also holding something back or not giving you all of the information that they have access to. That's a good question. Um. I think if you watch the movie, you're going to see that there's several different law and for some people in it. And part of my job is to keep credibility in that world, because once I lose my credibility, they won't cooperate anymore. Now, just because the National Park Services and cooperating doesn't mean general law enforcement won't. And there is a group of people out there that are willing to look at the dat go and essentially look at facts. And once you delve into it and you realize that Dave politis never said of what is alleged on YouTube and other various sites. He sticks just to the facts and all these other allegations that he said this or he thinks that, but he's never said it. So law enforcement watches these things, and if some of them believe I said some of these wild things that people allege, they won't want to talk to me and they won't give me credibility, and it hurts with the victims families that need help. Now, there is a group out there that knows exactly what I'm about, and they've read the books, and I've given a talk in front of the largest search and rescue organization in the world about this, and at the end of my talk there were there two Alaska State true for sitting at the back of the audience, and what I'm stood up and said, you know, Dave, you're saying exactly what we already know, and we've worked so many of these type of cases and we have no idea what's going on, but you're saying what everyone doesn't want to talk about. And the guy said, thanks, thanks for talking about and he sits down. Now since that, I've had many search and rescue people contact me and said, you know, that's exactly the truth. This, this is what happened to us on this search. And in fact, in the movie we interview some search and rescue people that talked about a super strange case. And it's just an example that once you understand what we're all about, and you understand that, hey, we're about the facts, that there's a lot more of this going on than we all want to talk about, and the local news probably isn't going to talk about it because it's uncomfortable, but it happens. So it sounds as if one thing that maybe occurring is that individual government employees, like individual rangers or state troopers are and are approaching you and your team with their own experiences, but there's a larger system at play which is much less cooperative. Would you would you say that's that's a fair assessment. I think you hit the nail on the head um A few times. I've talked about this, but a friend of mine and I were in a national park and we're at a substation and there's a group of older men sitting around this table talking and you can tell that there are a couple of current park rangers and a couple of apparently retired ones, and this one guy was talking at length, and I told my friends that we're going to wait until this guy leaves the room. I want to talk to him. And after about forty five minutes, he gets up and in the parking lot, I approached him and I said, I'm retired law enforcement and I heard you in there, and I wanted to talk. He goes, yeah, sure. He explained to me that in the Park Service, the detectives for the National Park Police are called special agents, and there's usually about one special agent for every two or three national parks. Yosemite has a couple of special agents assigned just to Yosemite, but normally it's one or two per every national park, and they're like the detectives, and they follow up on cases. And I explained with the National Park System had done to me in abstracting us getting data and information, and and I asked him, I said, can you give me any insight as to why this is going on? And the guy looked at me dead in the eye and he goes, well, Dave, I'm a retired special agent, spent thirty years with the Park Service, and I know exactly what's going on. It's called the lack of integrity, and certain people in the National Park Service, police and in their administration have a complete lack of integrity and they won't do the right thing. And he says, it's been that way for many years, and I'll probably be that way from anymore. And this is not an indictment the National Park rangers that the public sees every day. You know, they're they're great people. They're doing God's work out there. This is a selected group at the higher echelon. They're making these decisions and making these policies. And when I talked to this retired special agent, we've talked for a long time, and it was enlightening because it was his perspective, being that insider, that this is really what's going on. And then he pointed us to a web a couple of websites that were maintained by other park rangers that talked about the discrimination that was going on to them, their inability to get reports when they filed Freedom of Information Act reports, and it was it was sort of a relief, knowing, Wow, this isn't just happening to me. This is how two people inside their organization. And if you go to our website, can am like Canadian American, can i am missing dot com, there's links to all these things and you can see for yourself that this really is happening. And the Park Service has done a phenomenal job kind of portraying themselves as a holier than that organization that Yogi the Bear is the best friend. But when you look at the underlining of it, it's not anything like the publicity says it is. It's totally different. And with this in mind, we're going to going to explore a little bit about various allegations, and we're going to explore the future of missing for one one after a word from our sponsors, and we have returned. So, David, one thing that you said that I think really made our ears perk up collectively is you mentioned that in the online sphere. I guess that there have been people who are spreading what we would call it, uh, misinformation or perhaps misrepresenting what this endeavor is actually about. Um, could you could you tell us a little bit about that misinformation because we want to make sure our audience has has it clear. I think we've I think we've outlined pretty well, UM, some of the process for which cases to explore the commonalities, right, discovered the fact that this is aggregation of facts. Right, So what what are these what are these people saying that is misinformation? Remember, one thing is that I have never and I would never name anything as a suspect or come up with any theory about what's happening unless I could support it, and I never have. And there's a lot of people that say, oh, he he said this or he meant that. If I say something or I meant something, I'd just come out and say it. And I think a lot of people and a lot of organizations out there that represent the the fringe gentleman of cryptozoology or whatever want to align themselves with credible research, and so they want to align themselves with what we're doing in the hopes that it will give them additional credibility. And the truth of the matter is if you read the books, you'll know I've never done any of that. And whether it's a lot of people say well must maybe it's a group of National Parks employees or US for Service employees that want to discredit me so that the mainstream of society won't read what we've put together. You know, Oh, it's just some cook he's saying some things that can't be supported. I've yet to find anybody that has ever read the data in that those books that has attacked us, because they read for themselves and they're all listed where we got the sources, where the information came from, and you can go there and read it for yourself. So I mean, it's thousands and thousands of hours of research and the gleaning of data that has and that has taken us to where we are today. Now why the attacks occur, Well, I mean I've had other investigative journalists tell me, Dave, it just comes with the territory. When you come out with information that makes the Department of the Interior look like fools or makes a Park service look in apt, you're going to get attacks. And it just comes. It comes with the territory. I understand that now at the beginning, but I get it now. One thing that we always like to investigator, that we feel as part of our due diligence on the show is to look at the allegations, like, as you said, the misinformation, because it's something it's stuck out to me. You know, I would see criticism of something on online regarding missing for one one, and then I would go back and check out the books I had read. And you know, honestly, I had looked through the books trying to see if there were conclusions, and I can I can assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that there there aren't. This is a this compilations of you know, case research on the skeptical side for the more skeptical in our audience. One thing that interested me immensely was that I would read these investigations or presentations by you know, people who would consider themselves the word we keep using a skeptical more on the skeptic side. And one thing that I thought was pretty fascinating was that most of these people said in in their presentations, you know, they said, uh, we looked at this and these are all genuine disappearances and the facts are all correct, and sometimes quote unquote Internet skeptics do a very poor job of applying critical thinking. So I was I was impressed with that, And it seems like the only real the only real bone of contention I found from their side was that they were saying they thought there were mundane explanations for these disappearances, but they didn't say what those explanations might be. And so then I started looking at, according to the data we have, what are the most some of the most common disappearance causes for people who are camping and stuff like that. As you said, a lot of these things don't seem to don't seem to fit into those easy explanations. Are are you aware of this stuff? And how would you respond to, uh, the to those folks who maybe in our audience or maybe just somewhere out there in the ether, who would say that there are explicable causes for this, Well, it's hard to respond to something like that on such a general format. If you want to talk about specifics, I'll go toe to toe with anybody on any case in any book. But that's a that's a common trait when someone tries to discredit anything, Well, I think this, okay, how do you respond to that? Well, if we've gone through the vetting process of those points, and Search and Rescue believes that none of those issues are there, then why do you think something different? And I would probably guess that the people saying these things, I've never read one book they've you know, there's there's something called plausible the liability, and a lot of these people are uncomfortable with where the books may take them because it takes you out of that comfort zone and puts an aura on the wild environment that you know, maybe this isn't Disneyland when you walk into a national park, and maybe you're not as safe as you tend to think you want to be. And if it's not a mountain lion and it's not a bear attack, and it's not a human attack, and it's not a voluntary disappearance, what does that leave What what took the person? And how did the person get from this point to this point? And there was an animal predation and there's no injuries to the body, and blah blah blah blah blah, why can't they figure out the cause of death in this case? And you start to think these things, and it starts to become uncomfortable. And I think a lot of people's mentality is is they need to go to the wilderness to clean their mind. And if I take that away from them, that cleansing and that freedom, and that that great feeling they have when they go there, I've taken something valuable from people. And I've heard this before. Now one of the things I tell everybody is that even though I know what I've written, I still go to the wilderness all the time. And I go, but I go cautiously. I never go anywhere alone most of the time. The vast, vast vast majority of time. If I do go somewhere someplace alone, I always carry a personal locator beacon. And the people in my books that I write about would probably still be alive today if they had one. Namely, it costs between a hundred and three hundred dollars. You get lost, you pull the button. It sends a transmission up to a satellite satellite sands as transmission to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and they call the local search and rescue where you're at because they have your GPS corgans now and they send a search party out to find you. In the cases I've written about, I only have one case where somebody activated to transponder and wasn't found alive. Only one that was just outside of Yosemite, and he was found into really weird circumstances. I have never had a case where somebody was carrying a firearm and activated a transponder and was found de ceased. I've never had one of those ever. So I mean, I have a law enforcement background, so I carry a gun all the time anyhow, But I carry a gun, a transponder, a compass, a map. I always tell somebody where I'm going, and I always checked the weather before I leave. I think if people followed those easy to follow instructions, we could eliminate disappearances by probably. I think that's really, really, really smart. Just just learn what you need to do when are going to go into the wilderness, even if you're with another person, just make sure if you get separated, you're gonna be okay. It gets a little dicey, though, when you're dealing with like a two year old, you know, or a five year old. How do you teach your two year old how to use a transponder? You know, keep the kid with you. Oh yeah, I will obviously, but it doesn't always happen. That's that's true. And this this is a really important point. Whether you consider yourself that an OUTDOORI has been a survivalist, you know, or whether you think occasionally, one day in the future you might go camping. Um, these points are are crucial because I think people forget easily. Um how that it's called wilderness for a reason. Wild things can occur. And you always practice the buddy system, always have and as as David said, like always have somebody who is not out in the woods with you, who knows where you're going roughly and what time you're expected to be back. So, speaking of survivalism, survivor man makes an appearance in this movie. So is less Stroud somebody you have worked with before in the past. How did that come about? Less read the books and he got ahold of me, and he said, Dave, those books were phenomenal, and he goes, you're really onto something. He goes, It's something I've thought about for a long time. And he goes, if I can help you with anything to promote this safety strategy and the reality of what you've written about let me know, I'll help you. Well, we got to time to film and we sat around and had a discussion about how we could utilize his services, and we said, well, how about if we utilize you to try to replicate uh a path that a two year old took through the night to get a certain to get to a certain location. He goes, I'm on, I'll do it. So we met him and crew went out with him overnight, and that he proved to me that there's no way this two year old could have done this. And I don't think that there's anyone in the world more credible or more attuned to the environment and less stroud. So I have never heard anybody who's seen the film and watched that segment that said, oh you know that was saked, or you know, everyone says, wow, if less couldn't do it, this two year old, sure as that couldn't have done it. Oh man, that is a great point. So that particular case that he helped out with occurred in the nineteen fifties. One of the other clusterings that we saw are clusterings in time like specific years where there were a lot of missing persons. Can you go over some of some of those clusters and when they occurred. So all the geographical clusters are there now. Inside some of those clusters are are time clusters, and there's certain periods of time in certain areas where a clustering happened, where there were multiple people over a short period of time advantage. There's some in Michigan, there's some on the West coast, and unless we laid it out in a list format, it probably wouldn't be evident. And there's also certain disappearance And somebody found this out and sent it to us, and I can't take credit for it. I think it was a guy in Finland sent it to me and he said, Dave, do you realize that three of the disappearances you've documented occurred when ships and planes disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle, They disappeared on the same day. I said, Oh, that's weird. And I looked and they verified what the guy said, and I said, it's sure, it's true. So you know, again, there could be a lot more to these disappearances than coincidence. And when you look at the numbers and you understand that it's just not the U. S And Canada, but there's nine other countries where this exact same thing is happening, and the top countries besides you US in Canada are Australia and the United Kingdom are the next two. So it's very strange. Definitely strange. Yeah, So, David, I think we're nearing the end here. But is there anything that we haven't talked about that kind of strikes you as something important for listeners to understand about. What what what drove you to do this project and to continue kind of pursuing these cases and what's the future? Yeah, and what's next? Well, I think that once you meet these families and you interact with them, and you realize that they've been robust by almost every government agency in existence, and that after that seven to ten days cycle, everyone wants to forget about the disappearance. These people feel abandoned. And I'm not just talking about the National Parks Service. I'm talking about the Department of the Interior of the US for service. It's just not one agency. Seems as though nobody wants to even address the topic. And if someone is a victim of a homicide or somebody dies from an auto accident, there's finality to it. These people have nothing, they don't know where their loved one died, they don't have the remains they can go and visit. They They're left with this open ended wound that nobody wants to help them close. And you give them a little attention, if you kind of give them a path to get more details, if you let them know that they're not alone. But there's hundreds and hundreds of other families just like there's that also are being victimized the same way. It helps them. And I've seen this happen many times, and being friends with these families is super important to me. And they're all great, great people who are living a life of almost torture. And once you understand that, it hurts, it hurts that our government doesn't do more than help them. Now, what's next is our research is continuing and we're learning more things from victims, victims, families, people who have read the books. I always at the back of each book is my email. I tell people to write. I read every email everything I get, and I encourage people to give me their thoughts after they read the books. One of the things that we're doing is in October of this year in Denver, We're having what's called the Mile High Mystery Conference, and there's gonna be a lot of people. They're speaking, and one of the people that is speaking at the conference is Alan Attadero, who lost his son, and Alan someone who has tremendous insight. He's a high school teacher, He's very, very smart, and he speaks from the victim's perspective, and I think that individuals, once they hear him present, we'll say, wow, there is really really something here. If you don't want to believe it from me, here it from Allen. I'll be presenting there as well some other researchers. But I think it's going to be one of the first times that the public is going to hear directly from a family member the truth and how they've been misdirected, misguided, and essentially lived years without any assistance. David, thank you so much for coming on the show today and giving us a in depth look at a phenomenon that many people, well more and more people are aware of, but many people may not have been aware of until they heard this interview. In the book series is missing for one one and the documentary is out as we record this episode today. You can get it right now on Amazon Video to stream, or you can buy the thing and have it forever. So David, thank you one more time for coming on the show and sharing your research with us. UM, we really appreciate it, guys. I appreciate the opportunity to speak for the families and from our research, and glad to come back anytime. Awesome, Thank you so much, Thank you so much. And here we are broadcasting from the future to reflect on this interview that you have just heard, and you know we've actually all just heard as well listening back to it. UM, I don't know what did you guys think. I thought the Mr Pliz that's some really interesting points about maybe not necessarily answers, but at least these patterns that he sees and organizes, which is no small task. You know. He mentioned that he was sitting in a room while he's talking to us, and it has in that room there's a map that has all the clusters of disappearances throughout North America. And I just imagine David existing in that world for so long. UM, he sees a whole different picture than I can see as an outsider just reading a bit and watching a documentary. Yeah, I thought it was interesting that his response, um, when when I had asked him, you know, what would you say to people who believe that these are not you know, that these are not related, right, And he did say, um, exactly what you're reiterating that he felt those were on Those were remarks on a general level, And so it was interesting that he welcomed anybody listening, including you out there folks, to write to him or contact him about a specific case. But it's something that we see happen often in multiple investigations. It kind of reminded me of you guys, remember the smiley face killer theory, and so one of this is, um, there there's some retired law enforcement professionals who are convinced that there is a serial killer, group of killers drowning young college age men across the United States, and the big debate that they keep having is whether there really is a discernible pattern with commonalities, or whether these things are just being grouped together. You know, it just feels to me like the commonality in these cases largely were the fact that these things happened on national park grounds. And as we've discussed in our previous episode about you know, national parks and disappearances. They're massive and there's a lot of nefarious reasons. People can target these areas for their own own purposes, whether it's you know, organized crime trying to uh kind of mask something they've done, hide to body or what have you, or whether their predators may be seeking out people in remote areas to target for you know, their own And yeah, I think that's one of the issues here. We're grouping together so many different instances that you're right, could have so many different causes. But when you look at them together like that, it's that idea of maybe maybe I can see something different by looking at them together rather than on a case to case basis. That's what it feels like to me. David has been doing over all these years of research, and there's a there are those specific um commonalities as he sees them that they listed right, children, um berries was one right, extraordinary travel you know of the of the like the point of disappearance to the point of discovery of remains, so um. You know, it's a it's a debate that continues on in multiple multiple venues, you know, multiple avenues of expression. And I don't I don't know because he you know, he doesn't talk about what might be causes. He he mentioned a little bit what other people had written to him and said, but you know, he is just aggregating the data. I respect that desire to maintain that kind of credibility that clearly is at the core of what he's doing and all this work that he's put in. But it it there is a part of that attitude that leaves you a little cold, where it's like, you're putting this much work into what you know, you might call an investigation, but there's no result. There's no even speculation, there's no even hint of like what this might be. And I don't know that That left me wanting, well, I'm gonna go out and say it. There's no one, there's no five, there's no ten causes for all of these disappearances. Because you're talking about so many, each of them is going to have a slightly in my opinion, each one is going to have a slightly different explanation for why it happened and how it happens. So that's your take. It just got an idea. It struck me bolt of lightning out of the blue. Right. Uh, we want to know what you think listeners. So what do you think would be a probable cause, What do you think would be a plausible cause. What do you think would be an improbable cause or a or a um not impossible thing? Because you know, I know, I think you brought up a great point when you talk about organized crime. We do know, for instance, um an alternative lifestyles to subcultures. So we know, for instance, UM there are various people living off the grid under the surface of American culture. We know that numerous communities team and thrive, and numerous unseen events occur. Yeah, there's something for everybody. You know, We've been living in this uh, this crazy culture that we have where there are so many different types of personalities and dare I say, perversions, and you know, reasons to lots of reasons to go disappear into the woods. I guess that's what I'm getting at, whether it's for some kind of ritual or some kind of you know, like I said, targeted attack, I just I just kind of felt like, by the very nature of combining all of these cases, Mr Polites was implying without saying so, that there was something unusual or or related, something some connection that he keeps hinting at by the very nature of the fact that these are all, you know, grouped together to see like, look, he's he's presenting them in that way. How can you not? You know? I feel like there is an implied something's going on here, and that's in the film. There's an air of like mystery. It's like we we found a single tooth or like, you know, like all of this stuff, it's presented in a way that to me comes off as like, what the hell is going on here? You know, I don't know, that's just me. I see what you're saying, and that's I think that's why. Um, we're also interested in hearing. I don't want to speak for everybody. I'm personally very interested in hearing what the listeners have to say about. And uh, I just have to men, because we're talking about national parks. I know this doesn't have anything to do with anything, but I've been reading more about it and I'm excited. You know, you guys know how I go through the obsessive phases. So Rainbow gatherings, Yeah, man, yeah, that okay? Are we going? I do you want to? Okay, well, we'll put a go pro on you and Nolan I will be like the We'll be like the guys at the desk, like the hacking will hack for you. I think what we do is we put together some type of artisanal foods and then we just go and we started catching. We'll give you an earpiece and we'll feed you hippie lingo. All right, Yeah, you know Ramsey coworker here is really good at pickling things. I think that's our taken in. Okay, we'll need to build a different identity for you because Matt Frederick is too well known. From the moment we drop you off, like a few miles outside of the gathering. What do you think about being the pickle man? Yeah, that's pretty good, or the man with pickles. I don't know. Either way, I'll go with it. Or we could just give you a new identity where your last name is Pickleman. Oh, yes, Stephen Pickleman, Peter Pickleman's a little too out of those. Yes, I don't know. Not in a rainbow gathering. That's true. That's true if you if you are wondering what this bizarre they were talking about is and you're thinking, um, guys, you keep talking about this thing, but you're not telling us what is actually happening. Yeah, we understand a rainbow gathering is a it's about what it sounds like. Yeah, it's an alternative. Uh, it's an annual I think it's annual alternative gathering in national parks in the United States where a bunch of people live in a intentional community temporarily where they don't have money and they have As you said, I think it is the age word. There's like a hippie vibe, and it seems like what I've been reading about has more to do with sort of the dark side of this, because if you want to if the FBI is looking for you or something, you want to disappear in a place and you don't have money, something like this could work as long as you're not, you know, a violent monster. And then I also started wondering about cults and uh, other you know, intersections with other other cultures off the grid in the US UM and what kind of background checks are involved when you join up. I don't think I don't think there's many. I don't know, dude. I just found this article in The Mirror, The UK Mirror, Mirror dot co dot UK photographer documents life at Rainbow Gatherings festival where people get naked to be one with nature. And not only are these gorgeous photographs like these are wonderfully composed photographs. There's one in particular where it's like this lagoon and everyone's naked and it looks like the Garden of Eden or something like. It's wild. Uh, So check it out if you get a chance. But it's it's n SFW for sure, it'll get It'll give you a sense of what that Rainbow life is like. Yeah. Uh and the okay, so I've seen like two documentaries about it. Um, just in the course of this new obsession, this new phase and uh And honestly, I don't think there are requirements to join. Apparently the way a lot of people are greeted, if we just showed up, they would say welcome home. That's what they say it silo. Yeah, but I got walls, man, I got pace. I'm not. I don't know if I'm if I'm about that life. Just to jump back into four one one really fast before side the point of the show. Yeah, One thing I do want to mention here is that in the course of our research over the years on David Politis and Missing four one one and Canadam Missing and all of the various projects that he's been involved with. We are aware that one of the websites David maintains is the North America Bigfoot Search or n A b S. And if you go on the IMDb page for the new Missing four in one documentary that we watched for this interview, it is listed under there as the production company. It's listed in A B S. And it does seem like David has distanced himself from this and he may not actually be involved in the day to day operations of the site, but it is certainly a thing he has been involved in the past. And with that, please send us your comments, your ideas, everything we talked about earlier. Send them to us on Twitter or on Facebook where we're Conspiracy Stuff, or you can find us on Instagram where we're Conspiracy Stuff Show. And that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three std w y t K. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.