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DAVID: My name is Dave Paulides
and I'm a former police detective
and current investigative author
focused primarily on mysterious disappearances
in the North American wilderness.
MAN: Melvin!
DAVID: My journey into the disappearances began when I was visiting a national park
and was approached by two park rangers who knew I was an author.
They described strange circumstances over the years involving missing hikers.
I immediately began looking into the phenomenon.
Eight years and eight books later,
I've now researched 1200 cases that fit the profile
we are about to examine.
While these cases involve people of all ages and all walks of life,
I've chosen to present some of the most intriguing cases
involving hunters.
Generally speaking, hunters are very experienced,
aware, and knowledgeable outdoorsmen.
And so, when one vanishes,
you know something unusual has occurred.
One of the most perplexing cases I've examined
involves a hunter named Thomas Messick,
who in 2015, went missing in North-East New York.
DAVID: For people who don't know,
the FBI doesn't investigate missing adults.
There's a sub-category for the FBI, that they can become involved
in the disappearance of extremely young children
under a certain set of criteria.
So, the million dollar question is, why would the FBI arrive
on Tom Messick's case?
WIFE: He loved the outdoors. He loved being in the woods.
Hunting and fishing was his life.
You want a cookie, honey?
BEVERLY: He was a very good husband, very good father.
And I don't think you will find anybody
who ever met him who didn't like him.
DAVID: And how many kids did you guys have?
BEVERLY: We had three sons.
Tommy, Jean, and Rob.
So, tell me about your dad. What kind of guy was he?
He was kinda, "Do what you got to go to get things done."
Never had a contractor in the house. We always did everything.
You name it.
We lifted the house up, put a foundation under it.
When I was digging it out, I looked up at him,
he had a cup of coffee in his hand
and I said, "Why don't we get a backhoe?"
And he said, "I have one, right there."
What did you guys like to do as a family?
We camped. We did a lot of camping.
And the boys loved it and, you know,
I was kind of the outsider because they were boys
and they hunted and fished and did those things.
SID: I knew Tom before we earned enough
'cause he used to work in Norton with me.
I knew him probably about 55 years or somewhere around there.
DAVID: What did you guys like to do together?
Hunt. Hunt and fish.
It's what we did all the time, really.
Yeah, we both had trailers
in which we used to go trailing all the time, come to think of it.
We all got the same vacation in Norton,
so we all took off and went to different places like that.
So, what was your introduction to the outdoors?
It was always there because my father always hunted and fished.
ROB: We got a camp up North, not far from Brant Lake,
for about a week every year.
A bunch of guys get together and go hunting.
BEVERLY: He taught hunter training for a long time.
He probably taught every one of the kids around here.
SID: Tom was a great guy. He was an old airborne Ranger.
He was unbelievable in the woods.
He taught my hunting class for me to get my hunting license.
He taught survival.
BEVERLY: He had gunpowder blow up in his face,
and that's how he lost...
He had a 159 stitches in his hand
and he lost his eye that way.
So, he would say to these kids,
"This is what happens if you're not careful."
I mean, he had a lot of issues over the years,
but it never really seemed to slow him down or anything.
So, obviously, he had one eye.
Yeah.
He was sort of blind, it wasn't really that great,
but he could actually see out of it.
And hearing was an issue?
He wasn't that great with hearing.
Hearing, he needed hearing aids.
Would Tom be the kind of guy who would drink a lot or...
No. He didn't drink that much, no.
So, the day when you guys went hunting, did you guys drink when you hunt?
No.
We might have beer with us in the truck.
Out in the woods, we might have a beer or something like that.
Nothing excessive, you know?
How would you describe your dad's judgment?
It was good.
ROB: In fact, it was probably one of his better days
I had seen in a long time.
He was in good spirits and moving great.
Didn't seem to even have an ache or pain in him that day.
He was moving good.
DAVID: How often do you think about it?
I just think about it, well...
SID: You know, it always pops into your mind.
We were doing just kind of a quick thing.
It was late actually.
Almost lunchtime by the time we ended up going up there.
Kind of just a two-hour thing until evening
and we were going to go back to camp and hunt around the camp until dark.
DAVID: How many guys went up there that day?
Seven.
Someone made the decision to hunt over by Brant Lake.
Who made that decision?
I did.
SID: I messaged that we had state land there.
We kind of agreed to hunt it. The roads of Lily Pond.
I mean, we go up that road, straight to the lake
and we parked right at the lake.
And the old guys literally walked down that road
in hundred yard increments.
We walked in 30, 40 yards at the most and sat down.
Al was the first watcher.
I was the second.
Joe Capacelli, and then Tom.
So, Tom was furthest from the lake?
He was the furthest one.
We followed the trail along the lake,
come up that snowmobile trail,
hopped into the woods, and swung up to him.
A slow hunt-and-drive type thing.
BEVERLY: The young boys said to the old men,
"You four sit here,
and if we see any deer, we'll push them towards you."
And if Tom was a watcher, Tom would not have moved.
I know that for a fact.
He was a watcher, that's where he was.
-DAVID: Did you see any deer? -SID: None at all.
-No. -Did you hear anything?
I heard a strange noise in the woods, but I don't know what it was.
Just a different noise from what I usually hear, you know?
DAVID: Like what?
It'd be hard to explain because...
But it was different.
Something different that I never heard before in the woods.
I just can't say what it was, you know?
How long in duration was it? Was it two or three seconds?
No, it's just...
Whatever it is, you know?
DAVID: How far away was it?
SID: I'd say it was probably 150 yards, something like that.
DAVID: Was it toward Tom, or away from Tom?
SID: This was up towards the hill. The top of the hill. Yeah.
DAVID: Did you tell the cops this?
Yeah, I told them that.
But they just passed it off, you know?
DAVID: The report said that your dad was carrying a walkie-talkie?
-ROB: Yeah. -DAVID: Who else had one?
We all did.
-All on the same channel? -Yup.
-Anybody ever hear anything? -No.
DAVID: Did your dad know how to use it?
ROB: Yep.
MAN: Tom? Tom, you around?
ROB: It's one of those things where, you know, he should have been out by now.
SID: We called and called.
You know, he should have been sitting on the watch.
MAN: Can you hear me? Holler back.
ROB: And then we went and started looking for him.
DAVID: Anybody fire any shots?
ROB: Yep, we fired shots.
ROB: Somebody went down and called the rangers,
and then, we just kept looking.
MAN: Tom!
SID: They stayed overnight at the truck, beeping the horn.
I heard shots, different things.
BEVERLY: Robbie called me that night and said,
"Daddy's missing in the woods, but don't worry,
we'll find him."
And I said, "I'm coming up."
BEVERLY: And he said, "No, don't come up. I'm sure we're going to find him
and I'll call you."
MATTHEW: The community is very close-knit,
everybody has pretty much grown up together
and knows everybody.
It's mountainous, we have lakes,
we've got lots of opportunities to enjoy yourself.
There's not a lot of pressure here.
MATTHEW: I came into work one morning
and I noticed a State Police helicopter
had landed in our ball field, right here behind the town hall.
And then, I could see some rangers
ranging in our parking lot.
Their vehicles and different apparatus and...
I questioned what was going on
and they said there was a hunter that had been missing.
SHAUN: We did note that when we were up there,
it seemed to be devoid of wildlife.
You know, we didn't see squirrels, chipmunks, deer...
or any signs of them.
How unusual is that for your mountains out here?
I thought it was strange.
Like I said, we didn't see signs of anything out there.
DAVID: How many people did Warren County commit?
We had our Emergency Response Team up there,
which is comprised of 13 team members.
DAVID: So, when you heard about it, what did you do?
Go up there and join the search.
I figured it would be...
We'd go up there and we'd find him and it'd be over, you know?
SID: The Air National Guard was going over with infrared.
State Police had helicopters with a guy out.
We walked through the woods, no matter how thick they were.
You had to see the other guy's ankle.
We went through some terrain you just wouldn't believe,
swamps up to your chest,
and we covered every bit of it.
BEVERLY: They were thinking, maybe he got to a road and got hit by a car.
And so, they checked on the sides of the roads
and never found anything.
The first couple of days, I thought for sure we're going to find him.
After about the third or fourth, I said, "Boy, this ain't good."
A mile out, we were still me to you away.
Walking through the woods, you'd trip over somebody,
nevermind not see him.
We would have what they call "bump lines."
Lines that they would run through the forest
and we knew that was like a start and a stop.
ROB: Guy in the end had a roll of string
and would tie it to a tree and just keep walking.
And when we're done with that grid, they'd tie it off
and then everybody would shift to the other side
and walk back.
And so you know between this string line and this string line
and between your bump lines,
that area has been covered.
And few days later, we were back to the same barriers
and did them the other way.
SID: I mean, we covered every inch of ground up there.
The immediate area looked like a spider web,
because not only did they go this way or this way,
and they went that way.
So, there was string everywhere.
They had 300 people in there one day.
ROB: People asked who he was.
If he was a governor's brother, or something.
It was incredible.
DAVID: How many jurisdictions do you think responded to this search?
DOUG: There was probably a dozen or so volunteer fire departments
that had members here.
Probably 50 or 60 altogether in different organizations.
-DAVID: That's huge. -DOUG: Yeah.
New York State Corrections came out and they searched with their dogs.
There were tonnes of volunteer search and rescue teams
that came out with their K-9 units.
I mean, they... For a little while, but not for very long.
Day two that we were involved in the search up there,
it rained heavily all day.
Obviously, an animal didn't get to him, because there'd be a big scatter.
There'd be a huge, you know... His clothes would be ripped up,
his stuff would spread be all over. He'd be easy to find.
BEVERLY: Not even a candy wrapper.
Not that my husband would throw out a candy wrapper,
'cause he wouldn't.
That would be in his pocket.
But, nothing.
Not the walkie-talkie, not his gun.
They never found anything.
You would think that you'd find some trace
of somebody who was there,
especially a weapon,
because a weapon is not going to disappear.
It's not going to blow away.
SHAUN: The FBI, according to their protocol, doesn't search for missing people.
So, do you understand why they were there?
I remember they were there.
I thought they were there to provide some sort of technological support,
but I didn't have any contact with them myself.
Have you ever had them on a search that you've done?
No.
You had a conversation with the FBI, up in Horicon.
What did they tell you?
They said that...
Basically, they were there to tell me that
he now is considered a missing person.
And they felt that something was definitely not right,
but unless and until
they made a recovery, they wouldn't know what it was.
BEVERLY: That was it. That's basically what they said.
DAVID: In the middle of the Adirondacks
where an elderly man disappears,
two agents suddenly show up.
They made their way up to Lily Pond Road
and they started to monitor this incident.
Every time an FBI agent arrives at a scene
and is stating that they're monitoring it,
they're taking notes and they're writing reports
and those reports go to the behavioral analysts in Virginia.
And what their job is, is to look for other cases
that match the profile that they're writing about.
I think they get it. I think they understand.
And maybe they're trying to put the pieces together, just as we are.
ROB: We'd kinda like to know what happened,
but I don't think we ever will.
Even if they found him, we wouldn't know what happened.
Something odd happened, obviously.
We just don't know what.
BEVERLY: I was there until 11 days.
And then, I finally said to my older son,
"I can't sit here anymore. I got to go home."
We came back, I think, for Thanksgiving.
That's when we stopped.
We were down to just me and some rangers
and couple of other guys, that was it, by the time it was over.
BEVERLY: He is such a sweet dog.
He sits at my kitchen window all day long.
He sits here and he waits for Tom to come back.
If you go by my house, you'll see the dog in the window.
Did you dad tell you about a sound he heard in the woods that day?
He said he heard some kind of snapping or crack sound
that was strange.
It wasn't something he normally hears in the woods.
He still talks to me about it.
He almost said it sounded like a big trap closing or something.
I don't know, you know?
Anything that you think that the audience should know about your dad
or about this incident?
I tell you, you really do never know.
I mean, they always say you should go in prepared.
I mean, we treated that hunt
like I was walking out here in the backyard.
It was really nothing.
You just don't expect it.
DAVID: An interesting side note to the disappearance of Tom Messick
is the case of Fred Drumm.
About the tenth day of Tom Messick's search,
the Department of Conservation Rangers for the State of New York
were pulled off of that event
and sent 40 miles South to Schuylerville, New York.
Fred lived on his rural farm with his wife.
Fred was a retired supervisor from his town.
Was an outdoorsman.
On Thanksgiving Day of 2015,
Mrs. Drumm went to attend a banquet,
and when she returned in the afternoon, her husband wasn't there.
His car was there, all of his belongings were in the house,
but he had simply vanished.
There were helicopters, K-9s,
there was a huge SAR.
And the eventual outcome was the same as Tom's.
It's quite a coincidence that two elderly men, both hunters,
disappeared from a rural area,
weren't found,
and both have been just chalked up to disappearing.
The thing that connects all of theMissing 411 cases
are the profile points.
And these have been gleaned after reading thousands of cases
and seeing them come up time after time,
and realizing that they are part of the underlying story
of each of these incidents.
If the victim is with others,
and decides to move away from them and be on their own,
that's the point in time something happens and the victim disappears.
We call this the point of separation.
The most common time for a victim to disappear
is in the mid to late afternoon hours.
Granite boulders and rock fields.
Victims are often found to disappear in the areas of granite or rock fields.
Victims found or disappearing near water...
This is a very common trait
and one that happens anywhere in the world
and isn't isolated to a geographical area.
There appears to be a weather incident
in close proximity to the time that the person disappears
or when the search starts.
The weather issue could be anywhere from a dust storm,
to a full-blown blizzard.
Disability or illness.
Often times, the victim is later found to have
either an obvious,
or a very subliminal disability or illness.
Canines can't find the scent, or lose the scent quickly.
This is an extremely common profile point
that's probably in 95 percent of all the cases
that have been documented.
This is an indictment of Search and Rescue.
But for some unknown reason, the victims are found in an area
that had been searched maybe dozens of times.
Clothes, shoes removed.
A common trait is that the victims are missing clothing or shoes
at the time they're found.
Unknown cause of death.
If the victim is found,
and when they go through a medical examination,
the coroners can't determine a cause of death.
And finally, clusters.
There's a geographical clustering effect
to the victims that fit theMissing 411 profile.
There can be anywhere from three to 70 or 80 people
in each geographical cluster.
This is an area that I've always wanted to come to
for a variety of reasons.
First of all, it's just drop dead gorgeous.
But also, it's a regional cluster
of unexplained missing people going back decades.
This is one of those clusters
of the 59 I've documented
that really has intrigued me over the years.
And within this Santa Fe cluster,
we're going to focus on three very unusual,
very mysterious disappearances.
The first being 75-year-old Audrey Kaplan who disappeared in July 2014.
She was with her husband,
they had a house here in Santa Fe.
And they decided to come up to the ski-resort and look for mushrooms.
It was a popular mushroom picking site up in here.
And what they did,
is they hiked up the trail into the wilderness area
and somewhere or another, they got separated.
Audrey, who was in extremely good shape for an older person,
couldn't be found, and they started to search for her.
Audrey disappeared July 30th,
one of the hottest months in the Santa Fe area.
Now, there were thunderstorms that happened post disappearance.
And that night, they had searchers on scene
and for the following several days,
they scoured that mountain.
And eventually, days later,
one searcher, way off the primary grid area,
came upon a very unusual sight.
He started to see a camping area that seemed to be pretty much destroyed.
And he walked up and he saw a woman in the fetal position,
in about four or five inches of water in a creek,
deceased, naked.
No shoes, no clothing, no nothing.
Her face was in the creek.
Her entire body was lying on its side in the fetal position.
A very strange sight.
And the coroner made a determination
that was even more unusual than the sight in the creek.
And he said that there was no physical evidence
that she died of hypothermia.
But the determination was hypothermia that killed her.
Now, I've read that report 20 times.
It makes no sense.
She had no distinct injuries to her body,
that there was no physical symptoms of hypothermia.
He also stated that in his report, her face wasn't in the water.
And the crime scene photos clearly show
Audrey was completely in that creek.
So, a lot of confusing, strange aspects
to the Audrey Kaplan disappearance.
The second story that involves this exact area
and that's 61-year-old Mel Nadel,
who disappeared up in the wilderness.
Went up to Elk Mountain in the Santa Fe National Forest.
Elk hunting.
What kind of wildlife would somebody find
up in the mountains out here?
We're rich. Elk, mule deer, bear, lions.
DAVID: And the size of the elk and the deer?
BOB: Really good, trophy quality.
Mexico's got really good animals.
We're stingy on our tags, it's a draw system.
So, hunting is a really big sport.
New Mexico is a destination for elk hunters.
The numbers out there are very small compared to our western states,
but our hunting quality is really high.
DAVID: Mel had a slight knee injury.
He had stepped in a gopher hole while target practicing
a day or two prior.
Once Mel met up with his friends at Elk Mountain,
and the three made a plan for the evening's hunt,
Mel would stick close while the other two would go on a pretty good hike.
Mel pointed at a group of trees
about a 100 or 150 yards down the trail,
while the other two would hike in the opposite direction
toward the peak.
Did you expect him to come home that night?
No. The following morning he said he's coming back.
So, he was going to camp up there?
Yes.
-Spend the night. -Yeah.
DAVID: And he's done that before?
Yes.
DAVID: Did Mel ever jog or walk long distances?
EDNA: No.
DAVID: So, if Mel saw an elk, he's not going to walk three miles?
No.
He won't do it?
He doesn't like to walk.
So, knowing that,
then that really puts confinement...
-Yeah. -...on where he would have been.
Yeah.
EDNA: He didn't go hiking with them.
The friends went up the mountain, like, searching for animals.
And then, when they get down,
the jeep was there,
there was no Mel.
DAVID: But he should have been back by then.
He should have been there.
MAN: Melvin!
DAVID: Eventually, another hunter came along with a satellite phone.
They called Search and Rescue, they responded with K-9s, ground teams.
And the K-9s tracked right to the spot
where everyone expected Mel to be, at his blind.
Now, think about this for a minute.
If Mel had wandered, maybe shot an elk,
and traveled to look for it,
his tracks and his scent would be past that point,
but they weren't.
And Mel was carrying a bow.
He was carrying a firearm.
Where are those items?
When he went out hunting, he had a pistol.
-Never found the bow? -No.
-Did they ever find anything? -No.
-Never found anything? -No.
That is the bizarre stuff.
How can you carry it if you get lost?
Isn't it going to get heavy to hold onto all of it?
There's nothing.
Shoes... One of the arrows would have fallen,
or the bow has to drop because those are heavy.
Nothing.
DAVID: Did the Search and Rescue people say that was odd?
Everybody said it was odd.
There's nothing. A shred of clothing, nothing.
If he was attacked by a bear, there's no shred of clothing anywhere.
DAVID: And, Bob, how many years have you been guiding?
-BOB: This is my 25th year. -DAVID: 25th year.
DAVID: And how many years of experience do you have
in the mountains surrounding Santa Fe?
I'm 53 now, almost my entire life.
DAVID: I know you know the story.
BOB: Yeah.
What could have happened to him in your mind?
Here in New Mexico, Roswell, alien abduction.
Yeah.
Really, he had to have gotten a ride out.
He had to have been picked up or gotten a ride out, I assume.
If he was a mobile person and a hiking person,
he could just be so far off target
from where anybody assumed he was going.
But in his sense, what we understand,
he probably didn't do that.
DAVID: Right.
He probably didn't take off on a long march anywhere.
History mystery.
What happens to a big jet airline in the huge ocean?
DAVID: As strange as Mel Nadel's case was,
there was another case
much more recently.
On November 7th, 2017,
another hunter disappeared.
Stanley came up to an area
about 10 miles from where Mel Nadel disappeared.
In an area called Barillas Peak.
And he was in his vehicle with his father and another friend
and they were driving the dirt roads looking for deer.
Deer crossed in front of him,
Stanley jumped out with his rifle, chasing the deer.
And just as he was chasing the deer,
fog and heavy rain simultaneously hit that area
where he disappeared into.
And then he wanders, apparently.
I've started a seven-day search for Stanley.
The canines can't pick up the scent.
Helicopters in the air can't see him.
Professional trackers can't find any tracks.
Fast forward five months later,
and an off-duty New Mexico State police officer
and his son are fishing on the Pecos River.
They find a body.
He wasn't immediately identified,
but the coroner eventually came around
to say that it was and that he had some skull injuries
and he had two broken ribs.
Presumption was that he drowned.
Stanley's body was found nine miles from his point of separation.
It's another weird disappearance with this one just happening.
Especially in these cluster zones,
this is one of those recurring phenomena.
It's going to happen again. It's just a matter of time.
In talking with Edna,
one of the things they found in Mel's jeep was his GPS.
Now, that's an important device
that will help you get back to the point where you started the hike
and it's supposed to be a trail guide for you.
Now, personally, I don't think it's unusual
that Mel didn't take that,
because he knew in himself
that he was only going to walk a 100 or 150 yards down that trail.
If you're going to purchase a GPS device,
consider it your insurance plan.
And this is an example
of why you should always carry that insurance plan with you
whenever you go into the wilderness,
hiking, hunting, or sightseeing.
BOB: We're paid to hunt for a five-day period.
So we make sure people pack the right gear
to be able to stay in the field all five days.
Therefore increase our odds the highest possible.
And so, our basic packing list
that I expect hunters to carry in the field
has a hunting license and has a bottle of water they're drinking.
It has a bottle of water you're not planning on drinking.
It has a garbage bag.
That's the most useful wilderness tool in the world
for a raincoat, to sit on, to pack something in.
LAURAN: As a hunter, you're like, "I'm fine. I'm armed, I'm safe.
I'm the baddest thing out here because I have a firearm with me."
And then, you read more and more
and these are people that are more experienced.
They've been in the woods more than I have, you know?
There's no reason for why these people go missing.
And you're like, "Okay, I'm going to pack things differently."
You change your whole mindset.
Take advantage of the technology that you're given today.
You've got the sat phone, you've got GPS, you've got all that.
But then, if you don't want to have to rely on a cell phone signal,
if your battery dies or something like that,
you know, I've got a whistle, I've got a knife.
My knife's got a fire starter.
It's just all about,
"I'm going to be able to take care of myself."
You know, with the camouflage patterns available today,
you've got this one on right here, it's going to be hard to get spotted.
So, carry something bright with you.
This is a space blanket.
And the reason I grab this 'cause it's fluorescent orange,
which is a universal "here I am" code.
DAVID: Tell somebody where you're going.
Tell somebody that is trusted that is going to look after you
and tell them what time you're going to be out.
And if you're not out by then and you're not calling them,
say it's Lauran that you told,
then Lauran you know is going to call the authorities
to come out there and look for you. Super important.
It is and I've heard you say this many times.
Especially writing about Missing 411.
Check the weather.
If you do get lost, it's common sense to stay put.
Stay close to where you started.
Especially if you told somebody.
And you don't want to lay your pack down,
but one thing I will never compromise on is extra ammo.
There's a three-shot rule that a lot of people might...
I don't even think they still teach it in hunter safety course.
That's not where I learned it. I learned it from him.
And it's not only "I'm lost, three shots, here's where I am."
In addition to that, if I go missing,
and for whatever reason I have that extra ammo,
I've used it up, I've spent my shells,
back at camp, they can fire those three shots
and you can tune into
"Okay, I need to turn around. I need to do this."
If you are lost, the best thing you can possibly do
is get yourself into an opening.
And I always tell people, "Take your coat, take something bright,
and wave it around over the top of your head in a big circle."
Like a set of roller blades
or a rope that you're spinning over your head.
It's really, really easy to see that from the air.
Typically, we find, either the person is alive,
or you know, deceased.
Not very often do we not find them.
JEANIE: The Crazy Mountains are a geological upthrust
that is 300 million years younger than the Rocky Mountain range.
So, they're not part of the Rocky Mountain range.
They're an isolated island of mountains.
CHARLIE: If you're in the Crazies,
I don't care where you're at in the Crazies,
if you follow a stream down
you're going to be somewhere soon.
No matter where you are in these mountains.
Because they're just an island chain of mountains.
There are several versions of why the Crazy Mountains are called crazy.
The one I believe is it's a curse from the Crow Indians.
Because this used to be Crow reservation
and when they were moved off the land,
the Crow Indians supposedly put a curse on the Crazy Mountains
for the wind to blow and drive the white man crazy.
My name is Alan Ronneberg.
I'm the Undersheriff with the Sweetgrass County Sheriff's Office.
I'm also the Search and Rescue coordinator.
I've actually been with Search and Rescue for 24 years.
I grew up in this community.
I've been here... I'm 52 years old now.
I've been here all my life.
My parents, grandparents, great grandparents.
They've been here since the 1880s.
It's always been an agricultural and mining community.
The family ranches have been handed down for over a hundred years
to people that work here,
raise their families here and their kids stay here.
And a fantastic place to grow up.
I'm Rebecca Rein.
I'm Charlie Rein.
And we live in Sweetgrass County in Montana in the Crazies.
DAVID: So, tell us about the kind of wildlife
that we would expect to see in the wilderness.
CHARLIE: Deer, white tail, and mule deer.
Elk, black bear.
I don't see many wolves, but they're here.
DAVID: So, no grizzlies up there?
REBECCA: Not that we know of.
CHARLIE: Now, there have been folks that say they saw grizzlies.
We don't have a resident population of grizzly bears yet.
I think they're coming, but there's nothing now.
DAVID: You know, the Crazies themselves...
are unique.
They are the youngest mountain range in the country.
It's horrendously rugged.
And you don't really understand it until you get into it.
ALAN: What supposedly happened as they started on the trail
going up to Campfire Lake,
they had a horse wreck.
Their mule spooked and started bucking and throwing
all their supplies off the trail.
All of Aaron's camping equipment
was basically on that mule.
I know he lost his sleeping bag.
DAVID: And once they got into Campfire Lake, what happened?
ALAN: They started their hunt.
This was their base camp and they went and hunted from here.
They were planning a week trip.
DAVID: Would you describe that he had good common sense?
CHRIS: Yeah, Aaron had good common sense.
Aaron wasn't a dummy.
I mean, someone that comes up here every other weekend,
always hunts up here, has stashes up here.
He knows the area like the back of his hand.
ALAN: They spent two days here at Campfire Lake.
The one fellow had a cache here, somewhere, below Sunlight Lake.
So, Aaron was going to go up the trail, to Sunlight, into the cache
and get what he needed.
He was supposed to go up here, grab the cache,
and then come down to his friends.
ALAN: Come back into Campfire Lake.
ALAN: Later that day,
Nate had called Aaron on the radio.
He had a walkie-talkie?
Yeah, a walkie-talkie.
Yeah, I think it was a Garmin Rino is what they call it.
And on that Rino, there's an LED screen
and it also gives the GPS position of the person that's talking.
As well as their position. You know, back and forth.
And when they did that,
the GPS position showed him on the very edge of the screen
over in this area here, on the main Sweetgrass trail.
DAVID: Okay, so that's confusing.
When he gets to the fork right here...
-ALAN: This fork? -DAVID: Yeah.
How evident is it that there's a fork in that trail to the lake?
Very.
So, it's real obvious.
It's very obvious.
DAVID: So, at this point, where he's down the trail over here,
he's next to a creek, right?
Correct.
And the creek, everyone knows, runs one direction.
Correct.
So, for him to get disoriented right here,
and not know which direction he was going on the trail
doesn't make any sense.
No.
DAVID: At what point do they realize that he's missing?
ALAN: The next day actually.
DAVID: Okay.
ALAN: And they waited for him for a day
and then looked for him for a day.
And that's when the storm starts.
And the storm is coming in from this way.
DAVID: Gotcha.
How much did it snow?
ALAN: Between 18 to 24 inches within 12 hours.
The temperature was in the 40s and 50s
and then, all of a sudden, it was in the teens.
And the snowstorm kinda forced them out.
We received a call from one of the individuals
that was hunting with him,
saying that he was overdue and hadn't come out.
You know, they hadn't seen him for a couple of days.
When they told me Campfire Lake, I said,
"Well, you need to get hold of Park County."
DAVID: Park County goes out, they start a search.
ALAN: They start a search in their county
and we go ahead in kind of a military blocking maneuver.
You know, there's still 16 inches of snow practically melting.
The temperature is getting better. It's warming up.
We don't find anything.
There's a key point.
So, as you guys were coming up the trail,
you're not seeing any footprints going out?
-Negative. -DAVID: Right.
We're here from Sweetgrass County.
MAN: Alan. Good to see you.
MARK: I believe it was the second day that I was working there.
I had landed with the deputy
after dropping off two separate dog teams.
'Cause that terrain is so steep and so deep,
and very wild country.
Started up high,
and they were going to work the dog teams coming down,
and there was a girl with her German shepherd,
I believe that found a pair of boots.
MAN 2: Roger.
This will be the road that Aaron and his two buddies
drove in on to pick up the horse trailer.
I know they had two horses and a mule.
So, you guys, the horse wreck happened right up ahead of us.
So, the trailer is over here on the right side.
On the right.
Stays on this bench here for a while.
You get glimpses of it whenever we go through a meadow.
We're going to make a right-handed turn, fellas.
And we're going to follow the rest of the trail here.
You can see where the trail is right in front of you.
The zig-zag.
You're going to reveal into Campfire
as soon as you look straight out on the outside of this cliff.
Their base camp. They're basing out of Campfire Lake.
So, when you come up here, you sit up here in you spot
and that's what they were doing. That spot...
We saw elk all the time over here.
So, this is loaded.
So, we'll go down to the bottom.
You can see this kind of tough country
even on the trail when you kind of move through.
-It is. - It's a work out.
Going up and down these trails is one heck of a work out.
-You could see the trail easily. -Yeah.
And the trail is like this
all the way from Campfire over to Sweetgrass.
This is the tee in the trail.
Trail goes through those rocks right there.
There was fresh snow on the ground.
It could have been easy to miss that turn.
He left before it started to snow, though.
-Oh, did he? - Yeah.
-Gotcha. -I think it was bare ground.
When he took off,
it was actually pretty warm out.
Into the 50s at least.
They were right at the county line.
We're coming into Sweetgrass County and leaving Park County.
A lot of boulder fields through here.
It is, yeah.
And these are all loose. These aren't set.
They're all loose.
You take one step forward
and you slide two steps back on each foot.
So, in our search area,
that's what restricted our search area so much.
It was so small,
because you can't get off of the trail very far.
You know, you start going across it's sharp.
If you don't have a pair of hard sole boots,
they're going to eat your feet.
Even into the timber
is loose rock all over the place.
Immediately from the boots, there is a scree pile.
If he was barefoot, he would have torn up his feet immediately.
Not to the falls, no.
Well, we have to turn around to see him better.
Yeah, this is the bench of other falls
where the boots were found.
And this bench is nice and subtle.
It's kinda protected.
A walk that way into the...
And you're limited where you can go.
Right there.
-Yeah, he was right over there. -Those are trees.
Those trees, yeah.
Right in here.
Close to the creek, there are ways down
into the creek that you can do it.
Especially underneath the falls here.
You can get into the... Into this creek.
Now, when we searched, we searched this entire flat.
After we found the boots,
we ticked through this like nobody's business.
I had a bunch of people
and they... three searches
is what we did.
ALAN: So, we had evidence here.
At the falls, we find... See, there's the pair of boots,
I mean, set purposely side by side.
ALAN: Next to that is basically a water bladder,
like a Camelbak water bladder.
Just off the trail, there is a fire pit.
In that fire pit was a partially burnt cigarette container
that we knew was Aaron's brand.
Also in the immediate vicinity,
a fire bundle partially burnt.
Alongside that,
in the fire pit were two waist belts
from a backpack.
DAVID: Straps that come around the back
-and sits on your hips. -Correct.
Is that what we're talking about?
That's what we're talking about. Correct.
DAVID: Why would anybody take those off?
ALAN: Cut 'em off,
there's a little bit of insulation in there because they're padded.
And you can slip your hand in there
for a little bit of protection.
Right.
That's the first thing we thought of.
That's about the only thing that made any sense.
Why a person would take that waist belt off.
DAVID: That must have been a little confusing to the searchers.
ALAN: Absolutely.
Plus...
I throw another little bit of rankle in there,
they were up in the same spot
a day or two days before and never saw it.
Never saw those items.
Never came across those items.
Same spot?
Same people, same spot.
And they said that they never saw those boots.
They never saw any of that.
How is that possible?
I don't know.
These are seasoned guys.
They do good at their jobs.
They're SARTECH II rated by NASAR.
They know what the heck they're doing.
When they see the waist belt cut off,
and then the items laid out.
It's starting to look like hypothermia.
If you look at evidence from hypothermia cases
in the wild,
or in remote areas,
this is kind of the behavior that you see.
So, I narrow my search both sides of the creek,
all the way as far up on the slope as I can get.
Because we didn't think
if he was bad enough that he was leaving stuff,
he wasn't going to get very far.
So, somebody who is that hypothermic isn't going to go very far.
You wouldn't think so. No.
So, the area East of the falls.
You guys covered that pretty thick.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
We turned over everything.
And you're a former K-9 handler.
Correct.
DAVID: So, did the dogs hit on anything?
-ALAN: No. -DAVID: Nothing?
ALAN: Nothing.
CHARLIE: Well, every spring we maintain our fences,
you know, so we can graze our cattle the way we want to.
So, it's just an annual spring thing.
And my father-in-law was here. He just happened to be with me.
And just, you can see the ridge up there,
where a section of fence runs between us and our neighbors
and just annual routine
and I was going over the fence and he was kind of hiking around and...
REBECCA: He looked down and he saw an orange vest.
So, he went down just to go pick it up.
And then, that's when he proceeded to find the backpack and everything else.
So in his mind, he thought,
"Well, what hunter lost his stuff up here?"
CHARLIE: And he comes down off of there just like...
Grinning from ear to ear, just...
"Hey, was there a hunter lost up here?"
I'm like, "Yeah, actually there was."
"Oh, cool! His license is still in here in his pack."
"Okay." So, I look at it and it was Aaron Hedges'.
DAVID: Did you recognize the name?
Oh, yeah. I recognized the name.
I mean, there were helicopters flying way up the valley up there
and a big searching that was in the local press.
DAVID: And inside was there any food?
CHARLIE: There were snack bars.
DAVID: There was nutrition inside?
BOTH: Yes.
Correct me if I'm wrong,
but the backpack, I understand, was actually leaning against a tree.
Correct.
So, somebody just didn't strip it off and drop it.
No.
They put it there with intent.
ALAN: They put it there with intent. They put it there purposely
and it was protected.
DAVID: Okay, and what was in the backpack?
I understand you found a gun.
ALAN: Correct.
A .44 Ruger Redhawk I believe it was.
-DAVID: Find a bow? -ALAN: Yes.
It was alongside the backpack evidently.
In our search, another interesting point, I guess...
When we searched this area,
here, at the head of this ridge,
where it starts to drop off,
was a cup. A Thermos cup.
And beside that cup
was an open energy drink.
Somebody had, you know,
had basically sat down and drank a cup of tea.
That's an odd sight.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, absolutely.
What do you think when you see that?
"What the hell is this guy doing?"
And from this point, you could see the Rein buildings.
DAVID: From where the cup is?
Yes, absolutely. I mean, they're right there.
They're right down there.
DAVID: And could you see a road?
Yes.
Does that make any sense to you?
No, it doesn't, because...
Well, I don't know if it makes sense to me or not,
but it is funny.
DAVID: So, you don't find a body after your search.
No.
No, we couldn't cover a large area
and we didn't have a lot of time to be able to do that.
There wasn't a life or death situation at this point?
No, not at that point. It was evidence recovery.
So, how far does it go on for the next thing to happen?
Another year.
Off of the Sweetgrass ranch,
which is a dude ranch, they have a dude ride.
A string of dudes who were guests at the ranch
were on this ride.
And as they come up the hill,
on a little bench,
one of the guests looks over and goes,
"Hey, there's a skull over there."
And lo and behold, there's a human skull underneath a tree.
I mean, just pretty as a picture, bright as a penny,
underneath a dead tree.
Did you go back out?
Sure did.
And what did you find?
We find the skulls and the remains
and where we find that...
is right here.
We did find the pelvis and one femur
on a cow trail, partially buried.
I did find Aaron's cell phone.
A jacket, like what you're wearing, a thin jacket.
Any pants?
Pants? No.
I don't believe we found any pants.
-I can't remember. -Socks?
No, because we didn't find any feet.
No feet?
Right.
Did any of his bones appear to be broken like his femurs?
No.
Did the coroner come up with any cause of death?
No.
He could have seen the creek?
CHARLIE: Yes, he could have seen the creek.
So, there he had water.
I understand that there was also a lighter in his backpack?
I think so, yeah, probably.
So, he could have made fire.
He had a gun, he could have signaled help.
He had food, e could have eaten.
DAVID: Well, you're a nurse.
Yes.
So, you understand hypothermia and how it affects the body.
That distance...
Somebody said, "Well, he was hypothermic
way back at the falls. That's why he took his boots off."
Okay, great, we're hypothermic then.
How in the heck are you going to make it all that distance?
You know, that's the other thing.
If he was hypothermic, why didn't he drop his bow?
Why was he still packing it?
That's a heavy thing to be packing in your backpack.
This all doesn't add up to me.
Nope.
Does it add up to you in any way?
No.
ALAN: No. You go through
your lost person behavior,
your behavior is, exposure takes a hold of you
and...
it just... None of it makes any sense.
DAVID: There's two things that bothered me most about the Hedges' case.
First I'd like to know
what caused Aaron to change course so drastically?
Even if he had missed the turn to the cache,
he'd eventually known he had gone too far
merely by the fact that he's walking adjacent to the creek
that's flowing downhill,
away from the location he's supposed to be in.
This was an experienced hunter who hunted here often.
And this was a full two days before any bad weather.
The second major issue
is his body being found six miles from the falls,
where he apparently shed his boots under the theory of extreme hypothermia.
Somehow, while hypothermic,
he carries his bow, his backpack,
a jacket, his cell phone and thermos
six miles through a foot and a half to three feet of fresh snow
with no shoes.
Then sits on a rock overlooking safety.
His remains were found 11 miles
from the camp he was supposed to return to.
It's too much.
This is one strange case.
I never take those mountains for granted.
Every time I drive home from the East,
it's like, "There they are. There's our mountains."
It's the best place on Earth.
You know, it's the prettiest place on Earth.
We're prejudiced.
Where we are, here in Sonora,
you see the remnants of the 1800s
in just about every place.
It's an old mining town.
Sonora is kind of at the lower foothills of the mountain.
And as you head Eastbound,
heading up into the forest,
the dense, you know, wild forests
where there is no more cities,
it becomes even clearer to you
that this place is not like other places.
There is sort of a strange sense of mystery
that abounds.
My name is Giuseppe Ricapito.
I am a police and courts reporter
here at The Union Democrat newspaper
in Sonora, Tuolumne County, California.
So, in a county like this, do you have a lot of homicides?
Not necessarily.
There's been a handful,
maybe in the past couple of years
and none of them were unsolved.
Your county goes all the way up into the high mountain area, correct?
GIUSEPPE: Yeah, it spreads all the way over
into the Sierra Nevada mountain range
all the way to Sonora Pass.
DAVID: There's a gorgeous lookout up there. Tell us about that.
GIUSEPPE: If you are traveling up that corridor
which passes through the county, Highway 108,
you basically advance up a steep grade.
You're fascinated by, like, how lush it is, right?
The wildlife, the trees.
And as you wind up further and further up this grade,
you get the feeling like you've lost it, or you're lost,
like you're never going to find it, because it's a single turn off,
a single sign pointing you to the left.
It's called Donnell Vista.
And, it's sort of, I've been thinking about it.
It's, like, etched into the mountain side.
If you're standing there at the lookout point, right,
and you're overlooking that area,
you're seeing these crags of rock jutting out
and I couldn't even tell you how far
the blips of a river far down below.
As you look over, you say to yourself,
"If you fall down here, you're not going to survive."
We just left the vista.
Just a quarter mile East,
Breck Phelps' vehicle was found
at this turnout.
Under the small, old dirt road,
that eventually leads and turns into a trail
down by the Stanislaus river.
DAVID: His pastor found the vehicle here
because he knew Breck had fished here in the past.
And that's where the search started.
They brought in Cobra helicopters, four dog teams.
There was even some bad weather
that hindered the search for a short period of time.
They found nothing after many days of looking for the man.
He was never found.
The strangest thing about Breck Phelps' disappearance
was that it seemed to align or parallel itself
to the previous disappearances
that had happened in that same region.
Patti Sue Tolhurst and Nita Mayo
both commonly like Breck Phelps, left their car,
within a quarter mile of that vista point.
DAVID: The true oddity of this location
is that we have three people
in eleven years that have disappeared
from essentially one spot.
That is very odd.
GIUSEPPE: It's easy to say these people slipped on a rock
and they fell into the river canyon, right?
But then, why haven't we found remains?
DAVID: When you're walking on the paved path,
you've got boulders all around you.
And it's something that I've written about hundreds of times.
You just can't ignore it.
And here, it raises its face again
right amongst a cluster of missing people.
DAVID: Did you ask the Sheriff what their feelings were?
The Sheriff's Office doesn't like to speculate.
The Sheriff's Office is a real cut and dry,
black and white, we found him, or we didn't,
this case is open until it's closed.
The one thing that I wanted to bring up is, in April,
before the disappearance of Breck Phelps.
In April 2016, they did find human remains
over in that area.
They didn't match Patti Sue Tolhurst,
not did they match Nita Mayo.
They tested the dental records.
It was just like, what are these?
And this was before the disappearance of Breck Phelps.
Did they ever ID the remains?
No.
So, we don't know who it was?
No.
People aren't talking about this story anymore.
The news cycle being very, you know, I'm doing two stories a day!
But if it does happen again,
people are going to be reminded of these past stories
and it's going to only increase speculation
and increase the sense of concern.
Now, if you just step out from this area a little further,
there's also a larger cluster
in geographical area
where there's three people missing
so close to Yosemite National Park
and the biggest cluster of missing people in the world.
I don't know why, I don't know where,
I don't know how,
but I don't think it's a coincidence.
Now, within this region,
there's a hunting camp dating back to the 1950s.
Over the years,
the hunters have experienced something highly unusual.
And by proximity alone, this is worth investigating.
And just so people can get some idea,
we're not that far outside Yosemite.
MOREHEAD: We're not far at all.
I tell people we're in between Yosemite and Tahoe.
Yeah, that's where we are.
We're in a 6000 feet elevation,
you're hiking close to 10000 feet
before you start dropping back, you know, up and down.
The whole topography up there changes every year,
you don't know what to expect.
You don't know what... across the trail
that you have to work your way around.
You really need to know which trails to get here.
And if you don't know where it's at, you'll never find it.
It's just one of those places.
DAVID: What year did the Sierra Camp start?
MOREHEAD: The camp's been here since the 50s.
I didn't start coming up till 1971.
DAVID: And do you know what brought 'em to this spot?
MOREHEAD: This is one of those spots that
Warren used to say this is as close to heaven as you think you'll ever get.
It's so remote.
The deer are plentiful. There's a lot of bear up here.
It's pristine, a lot of granite.
Fresh water coming right out of the ground,
especially where the spring starts.
There's a lot of rivers and it's just a gorgeous place to be in.
We're a very sober cap.
A very strict camp.
We don't unload before you came into camp.
No alcohol in here.
It was really a quite disciplined camp.
All the guys were professional people,
so we kept going on up here.
What it was, we don't know,
but had it to ourselves for a long time.
DAVID: And what was the average success rate for you guys coming up here?
MOREHEAD: The deer was 100 percent.
We never didn't get a deer.
It's that kind of a place.
We really didn't realize what we were dealing with.
We still don't know what we're dealing with,
but it's something very unusual.
Strange things happened and most of the stuff happened
in the evening time, just at dusk, nightime, like now.
The first time I ever heard anything was later in '71.
I came back up with the guys
and we were here by the stove.
There was a stove here then.
And as soon as it starts getting dark, we'd go in.
Sometimes we might hear a grunt or a whoop or...
or blowing sounds like that
and that's when you know you want to get inside the shelter
because you still don't know what you're dealing with.
Whatever it is, it's big. Very, very big.
We would all go inside, close the shelter's door
and that's a log we would put in between these trees
and then strap it inside with cable.
And then, they would start making their sounds.
That was in 1971, when I first started hearing them
and we started recording them.
MOREHEAD: We were all talking about, "Maybe I can figure out a way out."
You're just sitting there and all of you are petrified.
You're just waiting for the wall to break open
and something to reach in there and grab you.
Hold you up and...
Waiting for the light to break in through the cracks of the walls
and it never happened.
That's the strange part,
'cause you hear it over there, but you don't see it over there.
As time went on, '72, same thing.
We thought something might be trying to scare us out.
Maybe this is their territory.
We don't know, we can only guess
why they were doing what they were doing.
But they were observing us, that's for sure.
What we do know is that their vocal range
is much greater than human beings.
Their frequencies go way above
and way below the abilities of humans.
SCOTT: I was trained in all of the deceptive practices
in voice and communications.
Besides the fact that you have the creatures
stepping on each other in their conversational turns,
you have humans, like Ron,
stepping on the creatures back and forth,
overlapping their voices on the tapes.
It can't be faked.
Not in 1974.
Plus, it would be extremely dangerous
to come up here at night,
into a camp full of well armed hunters.
They don't go to bed at night without their guns at their sides.
It's ridiculous to think of it.
You wouldn't do it. You wouldn't do it
just to hoax a bunch of hunters up here.
DAVID: So, from a 100 percent factual standpoint,
we really don't know what's making these language sounds.
That's right. We don't know.
One time I heard a sound like a huge tuning fork
above us and couldn't find the source of it.
It was just a big sound like that.
Sometimes you hear a sound out here
and one time we thought our camp was being torn apart by something.
We thought the barrels
that we packed in was being torn up and tossed around.
When we came out when all the commotion and sound had stopped,
nothing changed.
Now, how do you explain that, you know?
One time, when I was in there, I thought I heard a car door slam.
Now, we're eight miles into wilderness.
So, aside from the sounds,
you also saw some things in the sky and the air?
MOREHEAD: Yeah, lights.
You know, orbs.
All the guys have reported orbs when I wasn't here.
Me and my friend Bill saw one night was a big blue ball
coming down from up here.
Slowly moving, definitely controlled.
It had some type of intelligence around it.
You know, if you were just looking up there,
you would think it was the moon.
But it was blue.
It was moving down. We lost it behind the trees and it went over there.
I don't know what to think of it.
You don't know what to think of any of this stuff.
We were in a tent
and it almost wasn't this dark.
But this thing, whatever it was
just comes and starts moving up behind us.
An elongated light, probably about three-foot long,
probably about that big around
and just a rod of light.
I tell people when I talk about it
that it's like a Star Warssaber.
Like, glowing, but not bright glowing. Just glowing.
And it just moved slowly through the trees.
Definitely controlled.
And dissipated over here.
DAVID: Is it embarrassing to talk about?
No, I don't care.
Now nothing bothers me.
DAVID: What makes you keep coming back?
The mystery that's still here.
There's still a mystery that needs to be solved
or understood.
And I'm here now because you're here.
I've been asked multiple times to be brought up here
by different people,
and I've turned them down
basically because I don't want this area,
such pristine areas
to be exposed to a bunch of researchers
just come up here and inundating the area.
And I'm also told that the hunters that still come up
and their offspring could still hunt the area.
You know, they'll all kind of keep it very private
as much as possible.
Our shelter, although, has been dismantled now, years ago.
It's still a place to come to.
Nothing surprises me. Nothing up here.
Why this is such a strange place I have no idea,
but it is a very interesting area.
DAVID: We spent seven days with Ron and Scott at the Sierra camp.
Now, although we didn't experience anything paranormal,
this area holds many secrets.
That we know for sure.
The last case I want to investigate
is even a little deeper down the rabbit hole.
It's not about a missing hunter,
but instead, about a strange experience
one hunter faced in Lima, Ohio.
It's important to know that this isn't a connection to the missing.
It's simply an odd event that's worth looking into.
And it's associated with one of the smartest people I've ever met.
There's a difference, I guess,
between being freaked out by things that you imagine
and being freaked out by things that you actually see.
JAN: This, I have to say, was the most...
terrifying experience, but yeah,
I don't know why I didn't react to it and that bothers me.
JAN: Hunting in Ohio is awesome.
We have some great, big trophy deer in Ohio
and we happen to have
some of the biggest right here on our own property.
It was the most beautiful night to deer hunt.
It was the second day of season.
I wanted to get into the woods to hunt.
I was very excited about it.
There was band, over at the high school.
By the time I got to my deer stand, I could hear 'em.
I was all settled in.
Didn't see nothing coming down the pass.
Trails of birds, crickets, everything was normal wood sounds.
When you're hunting,
you have two of your keenest senses.
It's your hearing and your eyesight.
All of a sudden, the woods went to this dead quiet.
If I had dropped a pin, I know that deer would stand.
They had cut off.
No birds, no crickets, no nothing.
With the sun still up,
we were not calling for bad weather that night.
It was a great night to hunt.
All of a sudden, I thought I had a mote in my eye.
I even took my finger and rubbed my eye, like,
when you get that fogginess over your eye,
like, it's just...
I look and I'm thinking,
"What is this thing in the trees?"
It looked like a large piece of Saran Wrap.
It's the only way I can describe it.
But this thing was very wide.
'Cause I'm up 14 foot and it hung quite a ways down
and I'm thinking...
"What is this thing?"
It didn't really scare me at that time,
until it moved and formed
the arm that reached over to the other tree.
It reached over about 12 to 14 foot.
And then, it all, like a blob, sucked into it.
And it went to a whole other tree.
I had this very important feeling, like,
something ain't right here.
Normally at that time, I would have probably got down
and stopped hunting,
but for some reason, I didn't.
DAVID: So, as you're sitting in your blind,
and you're looking across,
where did the blob come from?
I have no idea. It just appeared in the one tree.
As it was moving through the woods,
it went from tree to tree to tree
and then it just disappeared.
It didn't continue on.
So, where it went I don't know,
but it just... Right before my eyes, just vanished.
And I don't remember taking the picture,
but being married to who I'm married to, Dr. Bruce Maccabee,
he always said, "If you see anything weird, get a picture."
I don't recall actually when either that the sounds had returned.
It's just like I don't remember.
That's not me to this day.
Normally, I would probably crawl down,
come around the house and say,
"You ain't going to believe what's back there in the woods."
DAVID: How much longer do you think you stayed in the stand?
About half hour till sundown. It was time to come out.
The strange part about this is,
Jan goes off to hunt,
we have guests show up, we're having dinner.
She comes back from the hunt
and says nothing about what happened. It was strange.
The guests are about ready to leave.
Later on, Matthew sends me an e-mail.
BRUCE: There was sighting by a number of students
and faculty in the high school band practice,
just before dark.
I'm like, "Holy crap.
Maybe it has something to do with what I saw in the woods."
And Bruce goes, "What?"
And I said,
"I forgot to tell you what happened in those woods to me tonight."
And I'm reading this from Matthew
and then I start getting goosebumps.
He said this light appeared above
like big stadium lights in the football field.
Had Matthew not sent that e-mail,
I'm not sure if I would have remembered even that night to say anything.
DAVID: How many kids were on the field?
MATTHEW: At least 30. Thirty to forty I would say.
DAVID: And was that the high school band?
MATTHEW: Yes.
DAVID: And so, this was just before you guys went back to school?
MATTHEW: Yes, band camp.
-MATTHEW: Late August. -DAVID: Late August?
So, what time at night do you think that was?
Between six and seven.
We were rehearsing normally out here
about six or seven o'clock,
doing our normal routine.
When, all of a sudden, there was this bright light in the sky
that just came out of nowhere.
And we all just kind of stopped and looked at it as one.
DAVID: Where was the light?
So, the light was anywhere...
It was above the treeline for sure,
just kind of hovering in the skyline.
Close enough for it to catch your attention.
Like, it shouldn't have been there, I guess.
If it was some man made thing,
it was too low to be there.
Okay, what was the weather like that night?
Clear and hot.
Typical August Ohio weather.
DAVID: Okay, what color was it?
MATTHEW: Candle orange.
As far as I can tell,
the thing had no definable edges to it.
There were no, like, dimensions.
It was just kind of waxing and waning
till it zapped out.
You know, our band director, he never stops for anything.
He stopped and turned around and looked at this and goes,
"What the hell was that?"
Before I had time to even think of what I was seeing, it was gone.
And then it was just kind of an imprint in your mind,
like I've seen something strange.
DAVID: So, in your gut, are the two issues related?
I often wonder now.
All I can say is it happened within the same time frame
basically as my experience here.
About half a mile over there, as the crow would fly.
BRUCE: This is a Blackberry.
On the back it has the lens.
It's not like the modern ones.
It has a camera on the front and a camera at the back.
Though I'd be taking your picture right now,
but I would not be taking my picture.
Something happened to the camera.
I don't know what.
But there's hard evidence of some weird thing that happened.
She took a couple of pictures of herself before the event,
which provided a fixed point of investigation, you might say.
And she took another picture afterwards.
So you have the camera phone doing its normal thing
before and after,
but right in the middle, with this one photo,
something bizarre happened.
The picture she took, the resolution somehow changed
for that one picture.
You could manually change the cellphone 1600x1200,
1024x760, or something like that.
And 640X480.
But it got changed to 500X400 or something.
Numbers that don't exist.
I don't know how to make it do that resolution.
You have to get it out and re-wire it somehow,
or it changed the software.
But even changing the software
doesn't change the pixels along the edge of the sensor.
I don't know how to explain this film imagery stuff.
I can't imagine what this... what it looks like well focused.
I don't know what that is.
DAVID: I've had people write to me and say
"What that is is that Jan took a picture of her own hair."
My hair was back. Through the back of the ball cap.
Where it... It was tied back.
DAVID: So, there was no part of you that could have been in that?
JAN: No way. No way.
It'll be possible for us to take a picture,
of her hair, if she put her hand back there.
But that wouldn't change the resolution
of the camera or the byte size of the picture.
DAVID: So, Jan, let me ask you,
since that has happened, has it changed your life?
Yeah, I've never been back in that wood.
I actually ended up buying a Redneck deer blind.
I mean, I want something surrounding me.
BRUCE: Imagine if you saw something in the woods
some strange thing like that like the ...
you'd probably be wary of going back there, too.
DAVID: When looking at these cases individually,
Aaron Hedges, Tom Messick,
Mel Nadel,
it's easy to pass them off as isolated strange occurrences.
Anomalies.
But when you look from an informed perspective,
and you see hundreds of victims falling in to same profile points
scattered throughout our national forests and national parks,
you have to stop and question the reality of it.
Is it possible for an 82-year-old man
with heart, eye and hearing issues
to simply vanish while sitting alone in the woods?
Can a man with severe hypothermia hike six miles through
a foot and a half to two feet of snow with no shoes?
In many of the cases,
rifles, pistols and archery equipment are never found.
These items don't blow away and animals don't drag them off.
Sometimes, their remains are found miles and miles off track,
where the victim had no intention of ever going.
Often, they're found in an area that's been searched dozens of times.
It's like they've been placed there after the searchers have left.
To this point,
we've investigated close to 1200 cases
that fit theMissing 411 profile.
They're not all hunters.
Some are children, some are people vacationing in national parks,
some are just out taking a walk in nature.
Each are beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding.