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.

Missing 411: Western United States & 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 each case within or in close proximity to a national park. This includes some of the most fascinating cases you may have heard him discuss on the radio -- such as Stacey Arras's 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 & 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.

[ visit the Missing 411 website ]