Missing 411: Western United States and Canada by David Paulides

Missing 411: Western United States and Canada Reviews

• 
  Meaghan

  This book was not what I expected. David Paulides recorded many cases I had never heard of, some of them going back a century or more. Some of those people are not listed with law enforcement or on missing persons databases anywhere. Many of his stories were remarkably creepy and made me want to never go anywhere near a national park again. I mean, I’ve gone on hiking trips in national parks in both the U.S. and Canada and nothing terrible happened, but...dang.
  
  What was creepy about the book was not so much the stories about people who disappeared forever — after all, I read and write about missing people every day — but about people, mostly children, who disappeared and then were found in places where they should not, could not, be. Mind you, many of the adult disappearances were creepy too, but it was the children that struck me: small children and toddlers vanishing from campsites, etc., and turning up far outside the search grid, miles away and thousands of feet uphill. In one case, a kid turned up twelve miles away, nineteen hours after he disappeared, with numerous fences and creeks and two mountains between him and the place he’d disappeared from. Many adults could not have walked that far over that kind of terrain in that amount of time. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t. This boy was two. What. The. Fuck.
  
  The children were often naked or semi-naked when found (but none of their missing clothes were ever located) and sometimes they were covered in scratches but sometimes they didn’t have a scratch on them. If they were dead the cause of death was generally given as exposure, dehydration etc. If they were alive they were often in remarkably good shape for the time they’d been missing and either couldn’t remember any of it, or told some very strange stories.
  
  Obviously, it would be difficult if not impossible for a two-year-old or whatever to walk for miles and climb thousands of feet up steep mountainsides in rugged wilderness areas. It also defies logic: lost children tend to travel downhill, that being the path of least resistance, and if they’re old enough they also realize civilization is in that direction. Furthermore, if by some miracle a child was able to travel that far undetected, you’d think they would have considerable scratches, scrapes etc. on them. This was often not the case. Some of the children were barefoot when they disappeared and barefoot when they were located, but their feet were in good condition, not like you’d expect from someone who’d walked all that way in the woods or mountains or desert. The implication is that these children were carried to wherever they were found.
  
  Undoubtedly some of these cases, both deaths and disappearances, must be foul play, abductions. In fact, both
  Thomas Bowman and
  Bruce Kremen, two of the people profiled in the book, are presumed victims of the serial killer Mack Ray Edwards, a fact Paulides fails to mention (an odd omission on his part, IMHO). It’s equally likely that at least a few of the disappearances and deaths are suicides. But certainly those theories cannot explain all of them.
  
  When Paulides wrote about
  Michelle Vanek, an adult woman who vanished without a trace during a mountain climbing trip (and whose disappearance is much creepier than I realized), he carefully discusses and then rules out foul play at the hands of her climbing partner, natural causes, or even the idea that she’s still on the mountain somewhere — he says tracker dogs couldn’t pick up a scent, the mountain had no trees and it was “saturated with searchers” as well as helicopters. No one ever found a trace of her, not even one of her ski poles. Paulides concludes, “Something catastrophic happened to Michelle Vanek, something that none of us could have probably survived.” I’m in agreement there…but what was the “catastrophe” that happened?
  
  The book is sold by the North American Bigfoot Search website and the author has written books about Bigfoot, so I figured he would implicate Bigfoot in some of the disappearances. Although he never actually says “Bigfoot” he does imply it on several occasions. Bigfoot or some other unknown wild creature. (He discusses known wild creatures, bears and stuff, but says their behavior would not lead to these kind of events.) Or something else, something paranormal, evil — something that seems to be hunting people. And, if everything he writes in this book is accurate, I can’t say he’s wrong.
  
  Equally disturbing is the National Park Service’s attitude about people missing on their land. They do not keep adequate records of disappearances and don’t even have any list of all the people that vanished and are still missing from their parks. Paulides claims they blocked most of his efforts to research his book and told him they’d do the research themselves, if he paid them $37,000. He also believes they’re too quick to write off an MP as dead — perhaps, he says, it’s so they can close the case and forget about it. And if a person turns up, even under bizarre circumstances (like the two-year-old marathoner I mentioned above), there is no further investigation. The two-year-old was pretty much dusted off and handed back to his parents.
  
  I understand the NPS is not a law enforcement agency, but their refusal to even keep a list of people who have gone missing seems quite negligent. I understand they don’t want to scare people away from visiting the parks, but they ought to be equally concerned about visitor safety.
• 
  Zach

  This book chronicles unexplained disappearances of North Americans, many of them in national parks, that the author believes can be explained by sasquatch abduction and sasquatch murder. He doesn't ever say outright that sasquatch are responsible for these disappearances, but given that his book is sold by the
  North American Bigfoot Search, it doesn't take an ex lawman like Paulides to put two and two together.
  
  Full disclosure: I'm convinced that sasquatch are a real phenomenon, an extant, unrecognized North American ape that's in all likelihood a relict hominid. I came to this conclusion based on a preponderance of evidence, mostly eye-witness reports from qualified observers who ought to know a bigfoot from a black bear, but also a wealth of physical evidence in the form of footprints, hair, stool, and (soon, soon) DNA analysis. If you're on the fence, read the
  BFRO's FAQ of common objections such as "where are the bodies?" If you've already convinced yourself that sasquatch cannot exist, that the hundreds of sightings and physical evidence recorded every year are all the product of hoaxers and crazies, then there's not a lot I can say in this review to change your mind.
  
  But even if you're in that camp, there are cases in this book that will leave you scratching your head with your hair standing on end. The ones that gave me the willies involved missing children who vanished in the middle of the wilderness while their parents' backs were turned, then were found upwards of 10 miles away and a couple thousand feet uphill about 24 hours later. Most of these children were two or three years old, and in almost all cases they were found with some or all of their clothing removed, but in the cases where the clothing is recovered it's undamaged. Many of the abducted children were either not wearing shoes when they vanished, or reappeared without their footwear, but inexplicably had no cuts or scratches on their feet despite having traveled miles over rough terrain. The obvious implication is that they were carried, then deposited where searchers eventually found them.
  
  There are dozens of stories of this kind of disappearance in the book, and they constitute the most compelling part of Paulide's thesis. Most of the children chronicled were recovered within a week either alive and shaken, or relatively unmarked but dead from exposure to the elements -- but in either case, minus some of their clothing, which was often not recovered by searchers. In the most extreme cases, these toddlers traveled over 10 miles off-trail, over mountains and valleys, and ended up thousands of feet uphill from where they started all within the space of 24 hours. It beggars belief that these children walked these distances, over this terrain, on their own. Furthermore, many of them disappeared in the space of a few minutes in an area very far removed from civilization, where they were camping alone with their family. This makes an abduction by a human predator wildly improbable, and the lack of violent injury rules out wild animals such as bears or wolves. You're forced to conclude that either very stealthy hill people or sasquatch have been stealing children from under the parents' noses for at least the last century. My vote is for sasquatch, and Paulides makes a compelling case for this conclusion without explicitly stating it.
  
  That's the good part, and if you're interested in sasquatch and can find this book used somewhere, it's enough to recommend it. Sadly, there are many not-so-good parts thrown into the mix. As a sasquatch enthusiast, I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did and ended up vaguely disappointed in the entire venture.
  
  First, Paulides states early on that he "doesn't believe in coincidences." OK, fair enough. But I do. They are a demonstrable fact of our reality. So where Paulides notices a geographic cluster of three disappearances of toddlers twenty years apart that happened to all take place in June, he sees a pattern. I see
  pareidolia. If you hang out on the sasquatch-enthusiast portion of the internet, you're familiar with the ability of believers to see a sasquatch in any random pattern of light and shadow in the bushes. This tendency to view the facts in a light favorable to one's predispositions is a universal bias in human thought, and I don't begrudge Paulides for falling prey to it. The problem is that he seems unaware of this pitfall in his thought process, and is always quick to draw weighty conclusions (though always implicitly) from scant evidence.
  
  The majority of the disappearances cataloged in the book go like this: a person went into the wilderness by themselves and didn't come back, and a search by local authorities (often involving dogs, planes or helicopters) failed to locate them. These searchers express bafflement that they couldn't locate their quarry. While I have great respect for search and rescue volunteers and don't doubt their dedication, I also don't doubt their fallibility. An extensive wilderness search for a missing person that yields no results is mysterious -- and nothing more. It doesn't indicate that the missing person wasn't still in that wilderness somewhere, that they didn't have a heart attack, fall and break their neck, or meet with some other misadventure, and somehow, through sheer chance, wind up in a place that made it difficult for tired volunteers to find them. It doesn't indicate that they were removed from the search area against their will by a sasquatch. I won't say that's not what happened in some cases -- just that in most of these cases there is insufficient evidence to finger sasquatch as the perp.
  
  Many of the narratives are filled with speculative statements such as "the person was an experienced hunter / dedicated son / trained boy scout and would never have left his horse tied up / left camp without his gun / wandered off without a water bottle." Sorry, but people act irresponsibly out of character all the time, for reasons we don't understand, and using deviation from habit or character as evidence of extra-special spooky mystery in an already unsolved mystery is, in my opinion, pretty problematic. Fact is, we don't know why these people acted as they did or why they disappeared. If we did, these cases wouldn't be included in the book.
  
  Even worse, Paulides takes a decidedly paranormal bent in some of his writings. He mentions the opinions of psychics consulted in some of the disappearances, as if their thoughts could be of any relevance whatsoever. He also makes much of the fact that many of the disappearances were closely followed by bad storms, implying that somehow the coming foul weather caused the unsolved disappearance, or that people are more likely to vanish when a storm is coming, rather than the obvious explanation that severe weather impairs a search effort and makes it more likely the disappearance will go unsolved.
  
  But all logical fallacies and motivated reasoning aside, the book commits one sin more egregious than all the others put together: it bored me. Some of the cases, especially those where a body was recovered, are shockingly titillating, but the majority are mind-numbingly routine after you've read a few of them. Paulides tries to spice up his case narratives with folksy introductions, along the lines of "camping with your friends is the perfect way to spend a summer vacation from college." For the most part, this effort is groan-worthy and falls flat on its face, and the bare facts of each case, enumerated in a relatively bland and straightforward style, eventually drone on and on. This problem isn't helped by the fact that for many of cases, we know next to nothing about the circumstances of the disappearance. In these instances, even Paulides' two paragraphs of summary feels like too much. Towards the end of the book, I could feel my eyes glazing over. As a rule, I'm not a skimmer, even for non-fiction, but the temptation to get this book over with was very strong.
  
  Overall, I'm glad that I picked this book up to satisfy my burning curiosity, and maybe that satisfaction just barely pays for the time and money I spent. But just barely. I can really only recommend this for the truly die-hard, and only then because it's basically the only book on the topic that exists.
• 
  Lea

  
  
  This is somehow even MORE bizarre than the Eastern U.S. & Canada book I recently reviewed. Although a very few of the disappearances listed in this book seem to have what could be a fairly mundane explanation, the vast majority are so strange that you wouldn't believe them in a work of fiction.
  
  Here are two of the more peculiar listings:
  
  
  On July 4, 1955, 2 year old Ida May Curtis disappeared from a logging camp within the Kootenai National Forest in Libby, Montana. Her 9 year old brother claimed that a bear took Ida from the tent where she was sleeping, carrying the toddler with one leg while running away on the other three. Unbelievable, right? But the children's grandfather stated that he had in fact chased a bear that did appear to be running on three legs while carrying something with the fourth! As if this wasn't strange enough, when they did locate the little girl (alive, thank goodness) -- inside a shelter of cedar slashing -- she told her parents that she was held by a "mother bear" that comforted her throughout the night and kept her warm. Really?! A BEAR?? Having read
  Night of the Grizzlies a while ago, I'm finding that idea extremely hard to believe!
  
  
  
  05/15/1934, Moosehorn, Manitoba -- 4 year old Betty Wolfram vanishes after being put down for a nap. Five days of searching produced no results, then a farmer in the area "took a walk, hoping to find Betty". Which he did.
  
  Now, certainly there would be questions about this farmer -- and the RCMP did interview him extensively, but no details were released. (He was apparently not believed to be responsible for Betty's disappearance.) A newspaper article published about the story had this to say: "Furthermore, when queried by the newspapermen on the scene Monday, he [Rosin] admitted that he had not told all. He did say that when he went on his successful quest for Betty, 'I did not expect to come back alive, or if I did come back I would be all broken up.' "
  
  What?!
  
  But wait, there's more!
  
  "A neighboring farmer..., told authorities that the last three days prior to Betty being found, one of his cows had returned from deep in the bush MILKED on each of those days. He stated that this had never happened before but that it was obvious to him that someone had been milking the cow."
  
  Now, don't get all excited -- the parents confirmed that 4-year-old Betty was not able to, nor did she ever learn to, milk a cow.
  
  After Betty returned, she told her parents that she had met a "mother and daughter while she was gone". Presumably she was with them while she was missing, as she said that "on the morning she was found, a man had pointed for her to walk in the direction that would lead to her farm, which she was doing when she was found." Bear in mind that this was an extremely rural area, where the locals all knew each other. A family living in the woods that was unknown to the community must have been unsettling, I would imagine -- let alone a family where one would be concerned about meeting an unpleasant fate if confronting them . . .
  
  
  
  As truly bizarre as that is, there are other stories like this in both the Western and the Eastern U.S./Canada Missing 411 books. I really don't know what to make out of any of this, but I can say that I doubt I will be going into the woods any time soon. One thing I WILL be doing is reading
  David Paulides next book!
  
  Highly recommend!
  
  
• 
  Jen

  Grab your tinfoil hats and throw critical thinking out the window! This book is a prime example of WHY every person should be required to take a statistics and probability course before graduating high school. Here's an example:
  
  "The fact that berries and berry bushes play a common role in many disappearances is quite intriguing. People disappear and are found in the middle of berry bushes; they go missing while picking berries; and some are found while eating berries. The connection between some disappearances and berries cannot be denied."
  
  That was 2 pages into the preface. Add to that, this guy was featured on coast to coast AM. He starts with a conclusion and cherry picks cases to "support" his theory. A main theme is that people are found without clothes in the winter, or their clothes are found but they aren't. He seems to think this is very strange. Never mind the proven fact that taking ones clothes off is a tried and true symptom of hypothermia! And saying people picking berries in the forest while going missing is statistically significant is akin to saying people who die in car crashes were recently at gas stations is telling. Give me a break. He has a handful of disappearances that span decades and he feels it is worthy of being concerning. Frankly, with the thousands of people who pass through parks annually, I'm surprised that so few have gone missing!
  
  If you are paranoid, emotionally unstable and enjoy conspiracy theories, this books' for you!
• 
  Howard

  5 Stars for Missing 411: Western United States and Canada by David Paulides.
  
  I’ve followed David Paulides’s work for a decade now. I’ve listened to all of his radio interviews, watched his movies and follow his YouTube channel. I really appreciate his dedication to this cause. I’ve spent a lot of time out mountain biking, hiking and even solo backpacking in the Superstition Mountains. What was I thinking? This topic has made me much more aware of how a nice day out in nature can go horribly wrong.
  
  This book is not about the average missing person case. This is about a fraction of one percent of the total cases. He has found cases that go back more than 200 years that fit his criteria. And people are still going missing in these same strange ways.
• 
  Kimberly Robello

  Fascinating read! The author is an ex-cop who became an investigative journalist. In this book he documents people who have disappeared mysteriously in the Western United States and Canada. The National Park Service refused to give him lists of missing people in their parks stating that they didn't keep records of missing people. They say they rely on the memories of their employees. Really? Hard to believe. They are either incompetent or they want to cover up the amount of people missing in their parks for fear they will lose revenue.
  
  The author did extensive research finding these cases, a lot of which are from newspaper articles and personal interviews. In an interview, the author states that the amount of missing people are probably double or triple the amount documented in these books (there is a second book covering the Eastern United States).
  
  Many of the people missing are children. In some areas, mainly women are missing and in other areas mainly men are missing. The author doesn't speculate on who or what abducted these people or how they disappeared. The people who are found alive are either too young to speak, are disabled/unable to speak, or don't remember what happened to them.
  
  The reader is left to make up his or her own mind. Some of these cases could be chalked up to serial killers, but you can rule that out on most of these cases. Could they have been abducted and eaten by Bigfoot? Abducted by Bigfoot, returned, and then eaten by animals? Sometimes partial clothes are missing, partial bones are missing, no blood found, pants found with one pant leg inside out, clothes folded neatly next to 2 pieces of bone, no footprints, footprints that suddenly disappear, toddlers found miles away within a 24-hr period, toddlers found in good condition after being missing for 3 or 4 days with shoes missing in temperatures too cold to survive, etc. Is it the fault of Bigfoot? Aliens? Serial Killers? Satanic cults? They are very interesting mysteries, but sad for the families who lost loved ones. Some of these people are not even listed in the national missing persons database. They are just forgotten and the search for them has ceased.
  
  I was surprised to find that there are a lot of people missing in my own home state. There are probably a lot missing from your own state as well. The Texas and Florida missing are not listed in these books because there are so many missing in each of those states alone that they could fill up a whole book of their own.
• 
  Taddow

  I've been wanting to read this book ever since I heard an interview with the author on the radio show Coast to Coast. Having just finished it, I can say that I got more chills out of this book than I did from H.P. Lovecraft stories. Whether you want to take the suspicious circumstances of the disappearances described as supernatural, accidental or malign, it definitely gives you incentive to be vigilant when out in the back country.
• 
  Adam Rodgers

  Caution: Don't read while camping.
  
  This book was super interesting, but also really spooky. It's a collection of case files of people, mostly children, that suddenly go missing around National Parks and the deep wilderness. Not an easy book to read since the cases are about actual people, but at least some of them end up finding the children alive and well. The mysteries in the cases are tough to wrap your head around, but it is interesting that many of them have similar circumstances.
• 
  Katherine Addison

  [library]
  
  Compilation of missing persons cases, with Paulides' commentary and portentous hints of what he won't say he thinks is going on. I have questions and observations.
  
  1. What does "dying of exposure" entail? I'm sure it depends on the location (hypothermia vs. heat stroke, for example), but what exactly is presumed to be going on? (That's not a question aimed at Paulides; I just realized that I don't actually know. ETA: I got an excellent answer from a reader over on my
  patreon; death from exposure is what happens when the human body becomes unable to maintain its core temperature, either due to cold or heat.)
  
  2. These books badly need a control study: something with which to compare the disappearances Paulides claims are highly unusual.
  
  3. He makes a big deal out of the times missing persons are found, dead or alive, in areas searchers have been over multiple times. But I know from reading about the Green River murders that that does happen, even with searchers who are very careful and very thoroughg. So again, how unusual is this really?
  
  4. Human beings are incredibly bad at estimating time, which Paulides never acknowledges. So when someone says it was only a "few minutes" between the time they last checked on their child and the time they looked up and found the child missing . . . that could mean almost anything. (Which is not a slam against the parents: human beings are just not as good as we think we are at estimating the passage of time.) And that makes a difference in just how long the child was gone before the search started and thus in how surprising/unusual it is that the child was not found.
  
  5. He uses the word "coincidence" when what he means is "alleged coincidence that I think is a correlation," and he has NO sense of when a correlation is significant and when it isn't. Partly this is because he's trying for the "even the most insignificant detail may be of critical importance" routine," but partly it's just that he can't tell. E.g., two women disappeared from the vicinity of Lander, Montana, one in 1997 and one in 2005: "Ann and Amy's disappearances had the common elements that they were both alone, both disappeared on Loop Road, both disappeared in the Shoshone National Forest, both of their names started with A, and their first names only had three letters" (252). Now, there may be no important correlations between the disappearances of Amy Bechtel and Ann Wagner, but Paulides seems completely unaware of his own reductio ad absurdam.
  
  6. Logical fallacies. One example, also from Amy Bechtel's case: "If Amy's watch was in the riverbed, Amy must have been in the riverbed" (251). That's just patently untrue.
  
  7. Dude cannot put a narrative together, and with as much practice as he's giving himself, that says maybe more than just practice is involved in learning to tell stories.
  
  8. "I've always stated that I believe people are more careful traveling alone than traveling in pairs" (157). Saying you believe something to be true is not the same as proving that it is true.
  
  9. He has this conspiracy theory about the National Park Service. I would very much like to hear the NPS' side of Paulides' FOIA requests. Because, "Maybe the answer to this complex equation is that the NPS does not want the public to know how dangerous it is trekking alone in the backcountry of our national parks" (161) , when the NPS goes to a great deal of trouble to try to persuade the public that it is dangerous (Srsly, ppl, BEARS. How hard is this to understand?), is not a terribly plausible theory.
  
  10. "Understand that I didn't set out to locate stories that supported a hypothesis; the hypothesis was developed after I finished investigating the cases. I also didn't search for stories that mimicked each other. There was already an overwhelming amount of data that seemed to be cut from the same mold. Stories were not selected basked on their location; instead, they were chosen because they fit my criteria" (xviii)
  
  A. He says repeatedly that he doesn't have a hypothesis, but I guess we can call that as a lie.
  
  B. "Having a hypothesis" and "having criteria" are the same thing.
  
  C. There's a term for this, and that term is CONFIRMATION BIAS.
  
  11. "They were in clusters, meaning their disappearances could be loosely grouped together by location, time and type of occurrence [. . .] Understand that clusters can also include people who went missing hundreds of miles apart if the facts of the disappearances are similar" (x). Translation: "cluster" means whatever I want it to mean.
  
  12. He's so focused on his hypothesis that he won't admit he has that he routinely fails to consider more mundane explanations.
  
  13. He repeatedly insists that small children could not possibly have traveled the distance at which they were found in the time in which they were gone, but he also includes this detail in the case of Lorraine Smith, who disappeared at the age of 2 in 1950 from Lake Edith in Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada: "After several days searchers did something quite intelligent: they brought Lorraine's twin brother into the forest to see how quickly and efficiently he could move on the ground. The article stated that they were surprised how easily he made his way through the forest" (305). But Paulides doesn't seem to recognize there might be a wider application of this demonstration.
  
  Lorraine Smith, like Amy Bechtel, was never found.
• 
  Amelia

  Maybe my expectations were too high to begin with because I was excited by the subject matter, but this book isn't all that great. It's not the content I have a problem with, it's the writing. This book is about a mans theory (which he leaves unstated for the whole book) therefore it should read a bit like a thesis. It should be well organized and concise. It should be objective. It should at least have been proofread for grammar once, if not twice. It is none of those things. I'm not sure if Paulides has ever written a research paper but if I were to grade this the letter would be low. Here's why:
  The organization of the chapters and their components is all over the place. Sometimes the cases are in order by year, sometimes by age, sometimes they don't appear to be in any particular order at all. They tend to be related by area but even then there will be a chapter about say, Idaho, and there will be a ton of cases from Washington State thrown in, even though there is a chapter for Washington. Paulides does say that this is because some of the cases have similar characteristics but he could have left them in their respective chapters and then summarized at the end. Speaking of summaries, some cases have a summation of his thoughts on them at the end, some don't. This bothered me. Be consistent.
  Dave Paulides isn't very objective. He had a theory and that's totally fine, he's allowed to have his ideas, but if you're going to compile a book of cases that you think point to a specific type of disappearance, come out and say it was Sasquatch or Big Foot. Don't just heavily imply it by using the same phrases like "very weird" "highly unusual" and "strange" over and over and over again. He sounds like a broken record that isn't exactly sure what track is on the vinyl, but it maybe thinks it's a Jackson Five album. He acts like he's too good to be associated with his own thoughts. And, while we are on the subject of objectivity I would like to talk about credibility. Paulides states he doesn't believe in coincidence at all. He'll throw together cases that happen years and years apart that both happened to happen within 120 miles of each other and state they have to be related. He also states aspects of people's personalities like he knew them personally. But he does it in such a way that makes it sound like he's trying way too hard. He used phrases like "my jaw literally dropped" or things along those lines. The book reads like he is casually explaining an experience he had to someone who is interviewing him. It was off putting to read.
  And finally it just wasn't edited at all, yes I believe it was probably self published, but that doesn't mean you don't read through your work to make sure you're typing in full sentences or generally making good use of the English language. You should also have someone else read for grammar before you send it off to print and then charge a crazy 25 dollars for it. It's too expensive for what it is, if you ask me, and I'm sorry I bought two of them at the same time.
  I'm not sure if his other books are written this way, but if they are, they certainly aren't worth struggling through. I have a very strong desire to rewrite the entire thing with better formatting and less weir use of opinion based language. It would be extremely satisfying.
  If you enjoy mystery go ahead and read it, the cases are very interesting to read about. Paulides makes it sound like disappearances are so strange and weird when they happen but the fact is is that they happen all the time, otherwise his books wouldn't exist. I think he has a hard time accepting this fact, but sometimes terrible things just happen. If you go out into remote areas alone your chances of coming back are a lot slimmer than if you were to travel in a group. But numbers won't prevent things from happening. The wilderness is disorienting, and even those who are seasoned explores are prone to getting lost. I'm not saying these cases can be explained by normal happenings, some of them are extremely abnormal sounding, but sometimes people disappear on purpose. Sometimes humans do terrible, violent things to other humans. And sometimes, animals harm humans. I don't believe or disbelieve in the theory of Sasquatch and Big Foot, but I also don't think this book proves their existence.
• 
  Toviel

  EDIT (9/9/21): Fixed grammar and punctuation errors.
  
  ACTUAL RATING: 2.5
  
  MISSING 411 is an examination of “bizarre” missing persons cases. These cases have been overlooked for many reasons, ranging from a lack of Search & Rescue expertise and/or manpower, the National Parks Service covering up possible crimes, or dismissed outright by authorities because they’re so unbelievable. Each book in the series concentrates on a different geological location, further divided into different “clusters” of similar cases. Most of the cases involve unexplained deaths or disappearances, but there are quite a few stories involving survivors, too.
  
  Before writing MISSING 411, David Paulides was most well-known for trying to discover Sasquatch. To his credit, he doesn’t try to push any one explanation (or conspiracy theory) for the disappearances without proof, and he criticizes the NPS and SAR for bungling cases more than anything else. Nonetheless, he’s convinced multi-generational predators are responsible for every death and disappearance in the wild, even if he doesn’t know who or what they are. Is it berry-fixated serial killers or is it Bigfoot? The world will never know!
  
  In the book, Paulides connects primary evidence and firsthand accounts in each missing person “cluster” to undercover any similar patterns between them. Therein lies the main problem in his writing: his conclusions are amateurish and bizarre. Each “cluster” is treated as if there’s one bad guy with a definitive modus operandi, similar to how urban abductions are investigated. He doesn’t understand how extreme exposure, disorientation, delirium, and fear can affect someone, especially in cases involving children. Case in point, Paulides looks at textbook descriptions of hypothermia at least ten times, only to come to the conclusion that the cases are incomprehensible. He then argues schematics in official statements, such as the precise wording of a coroner’s report, usually by asking “but what REALLY happened?” and providing no answers.
  
  If the reader ignores Paulides’ conclusions, there’s little else to keep anyone’s interest. MISSING 411 is not particularly well-written, organized, or edited. Most of the cases are variations of “someone wanders off a trail and isn’t found for a long time,” but a handful are genuinely baffling with interesting trivia sprinkled throughout. Someone interested in real life mysteries might gleam some enjoyment from the book, but I hardly recommend it.
• 
  Edwin

  Why did I have to read this book it totally creeped me out! If David Paulides wanted me stay out of the woods he succeeded!!
• 
  Megan

  A very enjoyable read from David Paulides! I received an autographed copy from my mom for my birthday last year (go Mom!), and I couldn't put the thing down. I was intrigued by the cases Paulides had outlined, which ranged in fear factor from "well, that's unfortunate" to "okay, I think reading that just made me loose my bowels." We are confronted with many cases of varying nature, but most unnerving are the cases (that's right people, MULTIPLE, not just one)of children aged 2-4 years going missing and being found 12-24 hours later, over ten miles away, uphill, over the river and through the woods. Kind of like when your grandparents tell you about how they had to walk six miles to school in three feet of snow uphill both ways. And to add to the strangeness of it all, these children were half naked, with not a mark on them, and no memory of how they had gotten there. Tell me you're not scratching your head, people. I still am! We also read a case involving a bear, cases of missing persons having taken tremendous falls, cases of folks found dead due to exposure, and even some just plain missing and to this day have not yet been recovered. All arguments of presentation and purpose aside, the cases of the missing folks in this one will have a lasting impression, and leave you a little mystified, a little scared, and feeling a little bit more knowledgeable about what mother nature really has to throw at us if we give her the chance. Kudos to you, David Paulides. I will re-read this one until mother nature, bigfoot, or a serial killer come for me too.
• 
  Kent

  Either the National Park Service is genuinely inept and doesn't keep a list of the hundreds of people who go missing in our nation's parks and therefore has no information to cross-reference when human skulls turn up or they know about all of the disappearances and strange deaths and refuse to do anything about them. Neither scenario gives a person a good feeling about what is going on in this country. In any other law enforcement basic and logical protocols are followed as well that basic and logical data is kept on deaths, disappearances, and strange happenings, but the National Park Service says that they don't keep data. Whether it is truth or lie, the implication of such a stance is baffling and terrifying.
  
  This book is one hell of a mystery novel. Paulides has compiled information on odd disappearances nation wide and then split them into two books. This is the Western U.S. and Canada. He has kept a criteria for inclusion and also breaks the book down into clusters of disappearances. When all of the data is packed together nicely and presented this way it makes for a haunting tale.
  
  This book was particularly scary to me considering there are about 30 pages alone that deal with odd disappearances in the Mount Shasta area and I visit the area with my children every summer.
  
  This book can't come more highly recommended to anyone who is interested in a true life mystery. I can effectively say that this book dashed any chances of me ever hiking alone, especially in California.
• 
  Babalon Moon Elf Harlot of Eros Lethe

  amazing haunting and impossible to put down read this in a matter of hours!!
• 
  Natalie

  this was a very interesting book about cases of people who go missing in our national parks. The National Park Service (NPS) is often very hush-hush about wanting the public to know about some of these missing cases, but why? The thing that made this book so interesting were the similarities between many of the cases - very strange similarities to say the least. It definitely makes me look at the woods a little differently now. I'm interested in reading his Eastern US book next.
• 
  John Scott

  Creepy
  Disgusting
  Horrifying
  Cover-Up.
  You'll never NEVER EVER looks at the national parks or the outdoors in the same way.
  Something strange is definitely afoot.
  Call it Sasquatch or call it evil, there is something out there that is having its way with us and killing us.
• 
  C

  You need to hear the author on Coast to Coast to get the back story on the book. It makes for a more interesting read.
  
  I have lived by a few of the clusters locations so that also helped in understanding the book.
• 
  Ted

  Read this book before going into the wild...
• 
  Kenneth

  Really interesting and spooky. Bizarre stories.
• 
  Daniel

  Having heard numerous radio interviews with David Paulides, I finally decided that I had to buy all four of his books on strange disappearances in our national parks. He really only sells his books through his website, so ignore the ludicrous costs you see on this site (from 3rd party sellers) and just go to canammissing dot com to find them. Missing 411: Western United States and Canada is the first of the books, detailing hundreds of unexplained – oftentimes bizarre – disappearances that have taken place in the western United States and Canada over the past century or so – in or in close proximity to national parks. This includes some of the most fascinating cases you may have heard him discuss on the radio – such as Stacey Arras’ disappearance from Yosemite National Park in 1981 and Charles McCullar’s disappearance from Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park in 1976 (and the eerie nature of his remains when eventually discovered). Paulides breaks all of the cases down by region, identifying obvious clusters where disappearances most commonly take place, notes similarities in many of the cases, and discusses time and again how the bureaucracy of the National Park Service seemingly tries to keep the lid on the truth by failing to keeps lists of missing persons (or so they claim), illegally refusing to turn over public information via Freedom of Information Act requests, and failing to add their missing persons to any national missing person database. At times, it’s hard to tell which is scarier – the unknown mysterious truth of what is happening inside our national parks or the government’s attempts to cover the whole thing up.
  
  The information contained in this book is the result of untold hours of investigation by Paulides and his team – scouring newspaper and magazine articles, submitting numerous and sometimes unsuccessful FOIA requests, speaking to nearby law enforcement personnel and individual national park rangers, etc. Simply finding out the names of those who have gone missing over the decades is a terrific chore because the National Park Service itself claims that they don’t even keep lists of the missing. Only rarely does Paulides speak with the family members of the missing, simply out of respect for their loss – but when he does speak to those directly involved in the disappearances and searches, some truly disturbing facts often emerge.
  
  While people of all ages are among the missing, it is the story of the missing young children that are the most disturbing. They often disappear in close proximity to their parents or other children, and those who are eventually found only serve to deepen the mystery. Many small children are located miles away from where they disappeared, at much higher elevations, and in remote and oftentimes fairly inaccessible regions they couldn’t conceivably have reached on their own – or else they are found in an area that Search and Rescue teams have thoroughly searched already. Many have no memory of what happened, or tell strange stories that make no logical sense. When the remains of some children and adults are eventually found, they add even further to the mystery. Children are found with shoes, socks, and sometimes pants missing; adult remains often consist of only a few scattered bones alongside weirdly organized bits of clothing. Pants are sometimes turned inside out, boots are often never found, and jawbones and femurs seem to turn up alongside socks full of tiny bones. None of these findings are consistent with animal attacks.
  
  Paulides does not attempt to explain what is happening to these people or to offer his conjectures. Indeed, how could anyone possibly explain something like the overwhelming preponderance of serious storms occurring to hinder search efforts in the immediate aftermath of so many disappearances? He details the facts of each case and offers his observations about certain clusters, patterns, and similarities between them. The next book, where Paulides discusses disappearances in the eastern United States and Canada, should really be seen as a companion to this one. Indeed, both started out to be one book – but there was too much information to include in just one gigantic book. That being said, Paulides does make reference to a number of eastern cases in this book, so you will want to get both books to get a better picture of the depth of the mystery that Paulides is bringing into focus here.
• 
  Sarah

  This was a fascinating read. I cannot believe how many people have disappeared and were never found. The author believes that there is something suspicious going on with almost all of these cases. He definitely has some good points about some of these cases. However, there are some cases that are unusual but not impossible for where the people were found. The author states many times that some of the people were experienced hikers or hunters and how could they possibly have ended up in a dangerous situation that may have caused their disappearance. However, I kept thinking of the book I read called The Last Season about a back country ranger from Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park that went missing on the job. He had years of experience and appreciation for the national park he worked in. Years after he went missing, his body was found and it was determined that he fell and that is what caused his death. Sometimes no matter how experienced or careful you are an accident can happen.
• 
  Art

  In Missing 411, the author documents hundreds of cases where people have disappeared in or around national parks. Often, despite extensive search and rescue efforts, nothing is ever found. Those who are found are often missing shoes and clothing. These individuals are frequently unable to explain what happened to them. Occasionally, searchers will find puzzling remains. There are many similarities in the disappearances. This book is both fascinating and creepy. The author seems to believe many of these people are being abducted by malevolent entities stalking our national parks. Incredibly, the NPS claims it doesn't keep a record of people who have gone missing.
• 
  Scorpianmuse

  I have no place to begin. Paulides does get a little repetitive in some of his wording (particularly when the missing is a child that is found up a mountain and miles from home). It is a fascinating read and makes you think twice about going it alone in wilderness, let alone places where these "clusters" are.
  
  Some of these tales makes your skin crawl, so I am not going to give anything away. Engaging reading.
• 
  Misti

  There are far too many cases where people vanish into thin air around our country. Some of them have eerie circumstances so similar that you can't help but wonder if there is a connection. Is it one big criminal conpspiracy stretched out over decades? Or is it several different causes to these disappearances that will someday be revealed? You be the judge.
• 
  Gene

  A must read!!!
  I couldn't put this book down.
  I am shocked, stunned,and saddened by the vast and growing amount of people -especially children - that are missing in our National Parks. These series of books will go far to increase the public's awareness of a situation that, until now, has been hidden from view.
• 
  Miss Cat

  More like a three and a half. Very interesting stuff, but he definitely needs a better editor. His storytelling style is a bit clunky at times, and there is a good deal of repetition. Otherwise, I quite liked it.
• 
  Vanessa *the Pixie Princess*

  Just as intriguing as the Eastern United States volume.
• 
  Lisa Copeland

  I really wanted to like this book. However, the author is clearly a hack. Between drawing ridiculous correlations (women with three letter names that start with A? Really?), ridiculous statements that imply preternatural causes without actually stating this, and his clear lack of understanding of known human behavior in the wildness just makes the entire premise preposterous.
  
  I can appreciate bringing attention to the lack of a tracking system for missing people in missing parks. But his attempts at trying to seem scientific when he makes absolutely baseless and stupid statements makes the book unbearable.
  
  Look, we all know this dude thinks Bigfoot is real and is a cross between humans and black bears. If he would just admit that he thinks Bigfoot or aliens are abducting people in national parks the book would be much less annoying. As is, he is clearly implying this but won't actually state it because he wants to come across as credible.
  
  Don't recommend this book if you are a critical reader. His constant statements that defy basic high school level logic and science will leave you absolutely scratching your head and feeling that the author is disengenous.