Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
David, welcome to the show.
Pull on up to the microphone to get that sucker up like a fist from your face. I first heard about you from that guy, Art Bell, the GOAT. The greatest. Yeah. He was, I used to love listening to his show coming home from the comedy store. We'd come home at like one o'clock in the morning, coast to coast with Art Bell from the kingdom of Nye. It was awesome.
And that's when I first got turned on to your work. So tell everybody, you started off in law enforcement, right? That's your background. Correct. How did you get involved in this mystery of people going missing?
So I had already written a couple of books. And I was at Yosemite National Park doing some research on another topic. And two rangers are following me around. And I went back to my room that was at the park. And about an hour and a half later, one of the rangers comes to my room. And he's in plain clothes. And he knocks on my door. And he says, hey, Dave, I'm Ranger so-and-so. I'm here off duty.
I want to talk to you about some missing people. I said, come on. So we start talking. And he says that he knew about me, probably the way he knew about me. And he says, I know you're from law enforcement. Somebody needs to look into this. About an hour and a half later, his partner shows up at the door. And they said that they've worked at different parks over the years.
And while they were working at those parks, there were missing people. And he said, at the beginning, there was a lot of publicity, a lot of people interested, a lot of activity. And then with time, within about 10, 15 days, all of that would end. And he said, we got concerned and we did a Freedom of Information Act against our own agency to get the reports and we couldn't get the reports.
And then we did a Freedom of Information Act request on other cases and we couldn't get the reports. And we got concerned because after that initial 10, 14-day period of searching is all over, there's nothing else that happens. That's it. And he said, somebody ought to look into this because there's a lot of people missing and the Park Service doesn't talk about it.
Now, what was he assuming? Was he assuming something nefarious was going on or was he assuming that it was a lack of commitment to finding the bodies?
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Chapter 2: How did David Paulides become involved in investigating missing persons?
Because you got to assume most people after 14 days lost in the woods are probably going to die.
I think all of the above. He thought that there were too many people going missing. There wasn't enough follow-up being done. And nobody seemed to care.
So if you were being pragmatic and you weren't like diving into mysteries and the stuff that I like, the fun stuff, you would say, well, they don't have any resources. You know, there's not enough people to go looking. When you think about the actual square miles that you would have to cover to find a body.
And then also the reality of predators and all these different animals that are going to eat bodies if a body's there. There's not going to be much left. Obviously, you spent time in the woods. Have you ever seen a dead mountain lion? No. Me neither. I've never seen a dead bear. I've only seen dead bears because I was hunting. I've never seen a dead bear. Well, no, that's not true.
No, we did find one. But I think it's very rare, but that one was recently dead. He was killed by another bear. I think most of the time when you find dead animals, it's very recent. And if an animal's dead and it's left alone in the woods within a certain amount of time, something's going to eat it. Everything's going to eat it, including the bones.
There's almost nothing left by the time they get done with it. 100%.
Yeah. But one thing I learned from being around rangers in all these years now is that there's few things that belong to us that we go into the woods with that are always going to be there. Namely our shoes. Belt buckles. Belt buckles. Leather anything. the rubber waistband of your underwear, these kind of things stay forever. A rifle, a pistol, a bow. And those things you're going to find.
But getting back to the point of these guys, there were too many people going missing in a short period of time that no one seemed to care about. That was really their main focus. And somebody ought to look into it. Somebody ought to start collecting data. Nobody did.
And maybe somebody from the outside, they're the inside, maybe somebody from the outside would have more luck putting this all together rather than them. That's kind of the gist of it.
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Chapter 3: What are the concerns raised by park rangers about missing people?
Okay, so he didn't say anything. And did he have any memories from skiing to, like, did he ever do, like, regressive hypnosis or anything? If he did, it never went public. Hmm. Was that the weirdest one? Oh, no, there's weird ones.
What's the weirdest one you heard of? The strangest disappearance story. There's a lot of people that disappear that don't have a memory. And if you look back and you study missing people, those people historically have been abducted. And there's something about that abduction experience where they can take away part of your mind. You think alien abduction. That's what you're saying.
Alien entity.
Something. Some type of foreign. Just want to be clear. We're not talking about like a bad person abducting a person.
No. We're talking about some kind of entity. Okay. And they take away part of that mind. where they were probably doing something to you that they don't want you to know. And there's a lot of those. There's a whole segment of people that I have chronicled that were truck drivers. who have amnesia, who were found in conditions that were very strange.
There was a truck driver in the Midwest where salt of the earth kind of guy, drove independently, wife and a couple kids. He picks up a load. I want to say it was pigs. And his truck is found like outside of Indiana on a little two-lane highway stopped on the side of the road. He's not anywhere to be found, but his coat is found in a ditch on the other side of the other lane.
So the sheriff comes out, they do a huge search, flyovers, canines, goes on for like four or five days. Nothing. Week and a half later, his body is found in that field, in the spot where they had searched all that time. Impossible to miss. Coroner says he's been dead for two weeks. Well, the sheriff can't make sense of that because he searched that with dogs and people.
That guy should have been there. But, Joe, I have 1,500 of those cases where canines were brought in, multiple canine teams, multiple searches, and people were not found. And the point I try to make about this is that it's not that the searchers are inept. Because I don't believe that. And I don't believe that the canines fail multiple, multiple times because I don't believe that can happen.
I don't believe they were there when they were searching. They were left there later on.
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Chapter 4: What strange cases of disappearances are mentioned?
40 years later. Or 30 years later, I guess. That's fucking weird. The exemption is intended to prevent premature disclosure of the investigatory materials that might be used in law enforcement action. 40 years later? It says the incident is still ongoing. In criminal investigations, the incident is still ongoing. 40 years later? What? Okay. Tinfoil hat firmly placed on your head.
What do you think's going on?
So first of all, missing people investigations are not criminal investigations. Right. There's nothing criminal about disappearing. If it's a criminal investigation and there's criminal aspects to it, it shouldn't be a missing person case. It ought to be suspicious circumstances investigated by a criminal investigator. Right. It has a classification as a missing person.
And what they're not saying there is what about the other 40 cases I've already gotten from them that are since that that are missing person cases? Right.
So that's a little weird, but I could also see incompetent people that don't want to work. They don't want to do their job. They're like, fuck this guy. I don't want to do his work. I don't want to go. Why is he asking me for this information? He's just a kooky author. I could see that. But like, what do you think might be going on with these people?
So when I was in law enforcement, I worked on the SWAT team and we had canines assigned to our team. Joe, I can't ever remember us looking for someone with a dog and the dog didn't find the person. Right. I have 1,200 to 1,500 cases where they bring a canine to find a missing person and the dog can't track, won't track, or turns around, comes down and sits down and is not interested in tracking.
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Chapter 5: What legitimate studies exist on Bigfoot DNA?
Have they done the work? Have they taken the same stuff and done it through the exact same process but not found the same results that she had? Or is there no other studies? It seems like there's no other legitimate studies of the same DNA.
Dr. Ketchum took that DNA to four certified labs. One of them was the University of Texas. And all of those labs got the same result. She extracted it. They did the analysis. She did the comparison at GenBank. And she did this all herself or she had other scientists do it? So she wrote a white paper and six different PhDs wrote it.
The slam job there, I think it's interesting because have you heard of an organization called BFRO? No. Biggest organization in the United States for Bigfoot sightings.
Oh, okay. Bigfoot research organization? Yeah. Yeah. From finding Bigfoot.
Right. Right. So a man named Wally Hersham was their benefactor. He gave them millions of dollars over the years. And they had one job, find DNA. Okay. 10, 15 years, they said they couldn't find it. We found it in less than a year. Wally came over when we had the DNA and looked at the results, met with Dr. Ketchum, said, I am completely done. You guys have proven to me exactly what it is.
I now know what it is. Pulled all of his funding at that point. He was out of the Bigfoot world. And he goes, you guys did what nobody else could do.
How come there's no good camera trap photos? You know, like there's a lot of trail cameras out there that hunters use. How come there's no good trail cam photos? Do you think the idea is that these things know that cameras are there?
So I think they have that ability to look in the infrared range. And they just stay away.
Well, if they are from somewhere else. And we're assuming they're primitive because they're covered in hair.
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Chapter 6: What is the hitchhiker effect in paranormal research?
But what if they have some sort of psychic ability or some sort of intellect beyond what we would attach to an ape and they understand what cameras are?
So do you know what the hitchhiker effect is? No.
No.
So at Skinwalker Ranch, the investigators coming onto that ranch, when they left and they went home, they took those entities home with them. And the entities didn't ever bother the scientists. They bothered the relatives, the wives, They did spooky things. They'd come around, show up in the home, chase the kids around in the yard. What kind of entities? A variety of things.
Sometimes orbs, sometimes silhouettes of people. But things that never happened before happened after these scientists went home. And they talked about it on their show. And it's happened a lot. One of the things that happens to people that study Bigfoot is they have the same hitchhiker effect. It doesn't matter where you go.
For some reason, and you were talking about, you know, maybe they read your mind or something. There's some kind of effect there that they'll follow you wherever you go. As an example, I live kind of in the middle of nowhere. And there's big woods behind my house. And I was walking behind the house one day. One track, middle of a muddy trail. No other tracks anyplace else. 17 inches.
Just one track. I can't tell you how many times other friends of mine and researchers have had the exact same thing happen. In the movie, I interviewed I think seven or eight researchers, all the best ones.
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Chapter 7: How do missing person cases relate to government involvement?
They all say, this has happened to them. It's that hitchhiker effect that they talk about at Skinwalker Ranch, which goes to the point of it being something extra dimensional.
I went to Skinwalker Ranch with my friend Duncan a few years back. I was doing this show for the Sci-Fi Channel called Joe Rogan Questions Everything. And one of the things we did was we went to Skinwalker Ranch and we talked to a bunch of people there. And, you know, some of them were just clearly full of shit. But there was this one guy who was not.
And he didn't have a lot of stories, but he said there was this one experience that he had where these orbs made it into his house. And this orb flew through his wall, was inside of his home, and it seemed like it was interacting with him. And then it was like paused, frozen in front of him, and then took off. This guy seemed like... A completely rational, regular guy.
Like I said, he didn't have a bunch of crazy stories about other things. I forget what his job was, but it was a regular job, regular guy. Seemed totally normal to talk to. But he said he had this one inexplicable experience. He said it was very strange. He said this thing just flew into his home. He said it was like, I think he said it was like the size of a softball, maybe a little larger.
And it seemed like it was interacting with him.
So one of the people I interviewed for the movie was a former Navajo Ranger. You ever hear of those? Yes. So they went to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, full law enforcement credentials, super smart guy. He comes back.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of UFO sightings in national parks?
He works 10, 15 years for the Navajo Rangers. One day the lieutenant calls him in, he and his partner. They say, you got a new assignment. Oh, what's that? You're going to do nothing but investigate Bigfoot and UFOs. I'd be like, fuck yeah. He goes, wait a minute, I didn't sign up for that. He goes, I don't care. That's your new job.
Because you guys are the two most credible people I have, you're going to go do that. Well, because why? They had some sort of a suspicion? Oh, they had tons of calls about Bigfoot being on the property, UFOs showing up over property, all the above. And they wanted some expertise in that team. So he and his friend start investigating Bigfoot.
And all of the things I've just told you happened to him and his partner over those years. They get a call at a lady's house that she just saw Bigfoot on her back porch. All the dogs are afraid. They're hiding under the porch. He goes there and he finds a track, a straight line. One thing about Bigfoot... As you and I would walk down a street, we walk staggeredly.
Bigfoot walks one foot right in front of the other. And that's how you'll know it's real.
It doesn't walk staggered like you and I. It walks like it's doing a DUI checkpoint.
Exactly. Yes. Like it's walking on a balance beam. Huh. And... He talked about the stride was four or five feet. He goes, I couldn't do it. And just like you were saying that the track was so deep in the soil, they couldn't match it. He said it had to have been hundreds and hundreds of pounds. That's just one thing.
But over the years, they started to make this association between Bigfoot and UFOs. They did this all on their own. And then he talked about the Native American belief. Well, Native Americans believe that they came from the stars. Each tribe does. And just like you said, all of the tribes have a different name for these. But nobody, no tribe believes it's an animal. Really?
No tribe believes it's an animal. What do they think it is? It's a human. It's an offshoot animal. They think it came from the stars? They came from the stars. There's a very, very famous set of stories coming out of the Pacific Northwest out of the 1920s and 30s where a tribe of Native Americans hear that there's some people walking down a trail through the woods.
Bigfoot walks in front of them, starts throwing rocks at them, doesn't hit them. throwing rocks at them. The people go home. They tell the sheriff, hey, these huge hairy things are throwing rocks at us. Sheriff says, oh, that's BS. We'll go out there. We'll kill them all. The tribe hears about this. And Joe, it makes no sense. They have a press conference. Swear as I'm talking to you.
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