Original subtitles

DAVID PAULIDES: How do you put this behind you and move forward?

That's something I ask each missing person family

because I don't understand how you can do that.

-I can't. -Yeah.

I mean, you know, I want some type of closure.

I want him to be found.

DAVID: One of the most confusing and frustrating

investigations by law enforcement

is related to people who disappear

in highly rural locations,

forests, plains, deserts and regions with few residences.

These cases offer no witnesses,

few clues and a strange lack of evidence.

Where are these people?

How did they disappear without leaving a scent trail,

no tracks and a distinct lack of physical evidence.

The investigators left with the distraught family

grieving about a missing loved one, wanting them found,

where many times the search area

is the size of a national forest.

My name is David Paulides.

I'm a former San Jose police officer

who has worked with complex and long term investigations,

while being assigned to Vice & Intelligence,

street crimes, SWAT, and various detective roles.

I'm a bestselling author,

investigating missing people in national parks, forests

and rural locations for over 20 years.

The investigative process has led me to interview

incredible witnesses that tell a fantastic story

that challenges the investigative protocols

every detective follows.

We are staring at unconventional possibilities

supported by witnesses, video

and most recently, our own government.

The human species has been watching the Earth for thousands of years.

Hunting, gathering and observing.

From the moment we left our cave,

we have looked to the skies

in amazement and wonder

about unidentified objects.

MAN 1: Are you recording?

MAN 2: What's that?

DAVID: In just the last 100-plus years,

we have left the ground and flown into the clouds

with a different perspective about our life in this world.

DAVID: We've continued to be amazed and perplexed by flying objects

that have capabilities far beyond

what our government says is ours.

Are these crafts piloted by entities

that have our best interests?

Is our planet merely the ant farm

for complex societies light years from Earth?

Could it be we offer other worlds new DNA

that's needed to refurbish their existence?

Or are they driven by a plan that is so far beyond our capability to comprehend

that the human mind isn't programmed to accept

and live with the consequences?

Join me on a fact finding journey

that has never been disclosed.

Keep an open mind on the possibilities

and a warm and compassionate heart

for the missing.

GEORGE KNAPP: In multiple Missing 411 books,

it looks like people are snatched out of off the ground

and then some of them are dropped back

into these locations.

The little kids that are suddenly,

miles and miles away.

It seems like, I know you don't want to commit

to any particular explanation

because you don't have enough evidence to to point at one in particular.

But some of this stuff

certainly ventures into the area of the paranormal

and, uh, and one of the stories

that I was able to break earlier this year was about Skinwalker Ranch,

that, a program that had been created by the Pentagon

uh, to look at UFOs

also went much further than it studied,

we would call paranormal events, unexplained mysteries

at places like Skinwalker Ranch and elsewhere.

And earlier this year I was invited to go back

by Senator Harry Reid to meet with two people whose names I cannot,

cannot make public.

One of these guys pulls me aside

and then he said,

"You know, we think that that guy David Paulides

"that uh, that his mystery with these missing people

"might be related to the phenomenon at the ranch."

But the idea that the phenomena

that's been seen there,

which is sometimes playful

and sometimes dangerous,

might be related to yours, startled me.

And I don't know how you react to that,

but maybe it makes you uncomfortable

uh, being associated with anything as weird as that,

but your stuff's pretty weird, too.

[RECORDER CLICK OFF]

DAVID: So after reviewing several thousand missing person cases,

several distinct facts started to come up.

And I started to put piles of these reports

in different areas of my room

that indicated certain points of importance.

And after a while I started to call these, "profile points".

As an example, in 97% of the cases that I research,

one of the profile points,

is that canines brought to the scene

can't pick up a scent trail.

They bring trackers to the scene and they can't find tracks

leaving the location that the person was last seen at.

So the number one profile point

in our work is lack of scent trail.

Some of the most common profile points

would be weather related issues,

either just as the person disappears

or just after they're, they're missing,

or when the search starts, there's a weather incident

that inhibits the searchers ability to find the individual.

Another one is the victim's found in an area

that was previously searched.

Oftentimes an area will be searched

five, six, seven times,

and then all of a sudden when they're getting ready to pull out,

the search and rescue says we give up,

they find the person in the middle of the area

that had been searched many, many times.

Oftentimes when somebody goes missing,

they go missing in an area near water,

or boulders or swamps and bogs.

And once these profile points were established,

and this is after reading thousands of reports, I started to document them.

And say, "Okay, if these are gonna be the profile points

"that we use moving forward, then these will be the ones

"that we have to look for in the reports as they come in."

This has become the overshadowing criteria

for a Missing 411 case.

And in this instance

we're in Vancouver, British Columbia,

and we are researching a case of a missing hunter,

someone who had visited the same location,

20 times in 20 years.

It's a location that he and his wife have come to many times.

In this instance, he came out alone.

He brought his dogs, his camper,

and his raft, to do a little fishing,

sightseeing and just relaxing in nature.

And he disappeared on the shores of Harrison Lake.

And we still don't know what really happened to Ray Salmen.

DANIELA SALMEN: Ray was an outdoor camper-hunter-fisherman.

Grew up in the woods, northern Ontario.

Uh, very experienced and a safe outdoorsman.

Thirty-two years, we were married together.

For about a year-and-a-half before that,

he would have rather gone hunting, camping with me

than with anyone else.

He was always telling me that.

But I am a fair weather camper.

I would not have been out in the bush

if it wasn't for Ray, Ray made it wonderful.

JOHN MILES: At the time I met him, he was about 65.

Just recently retired.

He worked for Rogers Sugar in Vancouver

as chief maintenance man.

He was empathetic. He was concerned about

what you felt about something, which is rare today.

And I liked that, I enjoyed his company.

He is the type of guy who is from the old school.

He had this adventurous spirit.

He had a map of British Columbia in a booklet form.

Very seldom would I find a blank page

part of this province that Ray hadn't visited.

DAVID: So he drove up to Harrison Lake

-from your home here. -DANIELA: Right.

DAVID: In a truck with a camper? DANIELA: Right.

And what else did he have with him?

DANIELA: A fridge, a furnace, air conditioner, a few rifles

and maybe a couple of pistols with him.

And he took his Zodiac with him and a motor on the Zodiac.

He had a complete life jacket. Good flotation device.

So fully equipped.

He had the two dogs,

and if anything comes around, they would bark.

DAVID: He'd been to the spot many times before?

DANIELA: Many times because you can get there,

when he was still working, he could go a Friday after work

and get there and set up camp

and I've been with him a couple of times.

We've gone for a week at a time.

DAVID: And again for clarity, he doesn't go

-and just sit at his camper all day? -No.

DAVID: He's out going over the hillsides, walking around.

So he's been all through the mountain sides in this area

-many times in the past. -Correct.

JOHN: He says, "Oh, yeah, I'm gonna camp down

"by the lake in this certain spot."

So he says, "I gotta get going now

"because I've got to set up camp before dark."

That's the last time I've seen him.

We were planning to go out of the lake

and look for old gold mines.

He says, "I'll come down in the Zodiac and pick you up on Monday morning."

On Sunday afternoon, I was doing some repair work

on a trailer up here and we heard three gunshots.

[GUNSHOTS]

Home alone downstairs, watching TV and the doorbell rings.

And it was a Vancouver City police officer,

and she was asking if Ray Salmen is home.

So I went, "What is it? What's wrong? Why are you asking me this?"

And she said she didn't have any information,

and I couldn't contact Ray

even though he had a cell phone.

There isn't any, uh, cell phone coverage at Harrison Lake.

I think I phoned the RCMP at about five in the morning

and they were very brief.

They never gave me any details at the time.

They just said he is missing.

So I didn't know if he was

walking with the dogs somewhere and didn't make it back.

And as he said to me,

"If you're injured, if you're in the woods and you're injured,

"you wait for them to come to you.

"Don't start trying to crawl around wasting energy if you can't.

"They will come and they will look for you."

And I thought, "Okay, I know what's happened now."

ADAM PALMER: A call came in about going out to search

for a possible missing person at this spot.

The team knew, I was actually, I had a lot of experience in this area.

So I was one of the first team members

to arrive at that scene that day.

When we showed up, his truck and camper were right at this very spot.

All his belongings were kind of laid out under the tarp.

His truck and camper looked in great shape.

The RCMP goes up, they find the truck and the camper locked.

Dogs inside, two dogs, and nobody is around.

If Ray went out for a hike,

-would he take the dogs? -Definitely.

-So he wouldn't leave them in? -Never leave the dogs in.

This is what he's got the dogs for.

So in your mind, why would he lock the camper door?

Unless there was a danger to the dogs.

But what kind of danger would be there to the dogs.

ADAM: It was the strangest thing.

I've never showed up to a search where we had full E.R.T members

and there was guys with fully automatic weapons

and I remember it very specifically

because I've never showed up to a search

where we're searching alongside

the Emergency Response Team members.

I was with the RCMP for 31 years,

and back here where I'm from, in the Fraser Valley,

I was here for 22 years.

DAVID: Are you familiar with the Ray Salmen

-disappearance on Harrison Lake? -Yes.

DAVID: So on a disappearance of a, a missing person case,

can you fathom in your own mind why they would send out

an RCMP SWAT team?

For the unanswered questions.

Are we looking at someone who got murdered?

Are we looking at somebody who got kidnapped?

Or they may have a tip that nobody knows about.

I don't know about, top-secret kind of stuff.

I remember an officer telling me,

kids showed up at the Agassiz RCMP detachment,

saying that their vehicle was shot at.

And I remember later talking to the RCMP officer

saying that kids reported their headlights being shot out.

If he shot out somebody's headlights,

and he was that good of a shot to shoot out the headlights,

then he was probably trying

to get attention to where he was?

I don't know if I would shoot

at someone's car to get attention,

because what's going in my mind is,

"Oh, my God, what if I accidentally hit someone?"

Now we know Ray was a responsible hunter,

had a license to have his guns,

had hunted for decades, so, yeah, I am with you.

I believe that, that is very strange behavior.

I remember thinking, "Well that, that wouldn't have been Ray."

Ray wouldn't be shooting, if he did anything,

as he told me, "You shoot three times in the air for SOS."

Now, there is more to the story than just Ray missing.

But not knowing what.

Right directly behind him was the grad party.

So the party was happening up over here.

There was estimated to be above 50,

50 people at that party, and there was

a massive amount of garbage we cleaned up when we got here.

And they didn't consider that possible evidence as well?

Something seemed wrong, um, at that point.

DAVID: When you hear the search and rescue persons

rendition of what just happened,

I don't think in 7,000 cases

that I've ever heard anything so strange

as telling a search and rescue group to go pick up a grad party's

remains of what they left

and then, coupled with the fact that

there were shots fired at the scene

and they bring in a special weapons team to the area.

But that wasn't it.

The more you hear, the stranger this story gets.

ADAM: We would hike for a couple hours in here and start grid searching,

and we would just basically come back to this point then go again.

Then we also got on ATVs, and so we had boats.

We had two watercraft in the lake at that time,

searching the shoreline, air support as well.

DAVID: And I remember when I first talked to you,

you said you were told not to go into the bush?

On the second day,

his belongings were found by air.

They spotted his clothes.

Now, this is a day,

if not two days after the initial search.

It wasn't even probably an hour or two after that,

I remember the corporal, the RCMP members, still in uniform,

coming out of the bush, saying it's unsearchable.

We found his, his clothes.

Um, it's not worth it to go in there.

It's so clear because I was like, "Nothing is unsearchable."

Why would they all of a sudden just call it that quickly?

DAVID: I asked Adam to show me the location where Ray's clothes were found.

Strangely, there was even a worn out

search and rescue tag on a tree.

ADAM: This is where his clothes were probably most likely found.

It's very old. It's, yeah, that would be from that time period.

DAVID: The search uncovered via helicopter

some folded items under a log,

and his rifle 400 yards north of his truck,

right on the beach.

And then over a small hill quite a distance away,

they found his pistol laying in a meadow.

DANIELA: They would, they would give me bits and pieces.

They would call, they would say,

"Oh, we found Ray's backpack under a tree."

And then later on they told me,

somewhere in a field they found his nine -millimeter.

And I thought Ray would never leave a pistol anywhere.

So you're into it a few days, they found these items,

uh, I read that it was the feeling of the RCMP that he must be in the water.

Is that true?

As they were saying, "Oh, we think he must have drowned,"

and I thought, "Well, that doesn't make any sense."

His boat is at the campsite,

so he wouldn't have fallen off the boat.

And if he was on the boat,

he would have had his life jacket on.

The official report says,

he was injured and got into the water

and was trying to swim back, and that's how he drowned.

But it was hard to believe.

DAVID: If anybody said, "Well, he was stripping his clothes

because he had hypothermia"?

It wasn't raining and it was June.

It was, it was warm

and I was even up at 6,000-feet elevation,

and I was in a T-shirt, sweating.

DANIELA: They never found

any traces of any blood, animal or human.

They even said it was unusual

that they had that many tracking dogs

and never found a track.

DAVID: Or a scent? DANIELA: Or a scent.

DAVID: That's an important point.

When you go from the point of the pistol,

from the camper to the beach,

you have an established area to start from, to go to.

It's not like you're going blindly at this point.

So the dogs should have been able

to track Ray point-to-point-to-point pretty easily,

and they didn't.

The RCMP had a search boat, combing the shoreline.

Ray's wife also hired a private response team

to come in and also search the area.

No body was ever recovered.

So Daniela went out with the search boat

and actually spent hours on scene looking for her husband.

I had arranged with the Ralston's

to come down and search for Ray.

DAVID: Daniela told us from the beginning

that she thought that the RCMP was pushing

this probability that Ray was in the water.

And talking to search and rescue people

they didn't necessarily believe Ray was in the water.

And I'm not sure if you guys were aware,

but they found his pistol on top of a mountain,

not even anywhere near the water.

-And Daniela said there is no way... - {end-italic} GENE RALSTON: Yeah.

-...Ray would lose such a pistol. -Yeah.

-Had you heard that? -We hadn't heard that, no.

So it's interesting. Initially, I don't think

they wanted to give me back his, um, guns and rifles.

DAVID: What about the backpack?

No, I didn't get that back.

DAVID: Don't you think that's odd?

They weren't there to explain themselves to me.

DAVID: Ever be a reason to lie to the victim family?

No, not from police, no.

-Ever? -No, never.

DAVID: It became blatantly obvious

that the RCMP was withholding information from Daniela.

Files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act

turned up blacked out paragraphs.

I have encountered similar issues

through the Freedom of Information Act

and the release of details.

Some of the off-the-record interviews that we were doing,

alluded to a connection to some of the local legends

and bizarre sightings within this area.

People that go missing or these things that happen that don't quite make sense.

It happens in an area where

a lot of time, there's gold or there's a history.

There's a legacy. There's legends.

There are stories of past occurrences.

There's a reason why they're called sky ancestors.

DAVID: We heard that the RCMP has a policy about UFOs?

Yes.

Tell us about that.

If you get involved with the UFO investigation,

it is, you hand that information over.

I don't know where it goes.

-So somebody somewhere... -Yeah.

...is collecting and tracking this information?

I would say so. Yes. You have to.

You cannot let that stuff go.

-And they take it seriously? -Yep. Yeah.

That information is collected,

and wherever it goes into some secret something.

So during the interview with the RCMP officer that was retired,

yeah, it reminded me

of a document that I saw several years ago.

In March of 1960,

the RCMP had a document

that would have been classified as restricted,

that had to do with the Athabaskan Indians,

seeing a UFO in the general area of where Ray Salmen disappeared.

And that document in essence, says that they saw something

that we would consider today

to be your standard cylindrical UFO.

DANIELA: We were camping once at a place called Fire Lake,

and we were just sitting around the campfire in the evening

and there is a large lake, and on the other side there's a mountain.

And there wasn't any logging going on at that mountain

and we were sitting there and we could see a light across the lake.

I said, "Oh, there must be logging going on there. It looks like there's a car."

And Ray said, "That's not a car," and he goes,

"I know for a fact there isn't any logging going there."

He knows all the roads, all the back hills.

He's hiked everywhere.

But as we're looking at this light,

it's traveling very quickly

and doing 90 degree turns, very unusual.

So a car in the mountains wouldn't have been traveling that way.

And it wasn't just a flash.

We were sitting there watching this.

And I remember sitting there for a good ten minutes

watching this and almost enjoying this.

I thought, "This is fascinating."

You ever seen anything strange in the skies out here?

Well, I've been here a long time.

When I had the cottage over there, I had some friends

and he came up with his girlfriend.

And they camped on the beach.

I guess it was about 2:30 in the morning.

They were in the tent, on the beach

in the middle of the night, asleep. My friend said,

"I was sleeping like that, and all of a sudden I knew there was a light.

"It woke me up.

"And the inside of the tent it was like daylight."

He unzipped the door and looks outside,

and it was like the 12 o'clock high noon,

on the clearest day of the year,

and he could see the beach and the water

and all that for but he couldn't see past

a certain area so it was lit up.

And that clicked, you know?

Hey, I believe what they told me

because somebody else told me the same thing.

As an investigator who has a very open mind,

and absorbs all the details,

no matter how outlandish and strange,

I really have to put some parameters up sometimes

about how far down the rabbit hole I'll go.

Considering this I'd a good friend in the state of Washington

that is really a UFO expert.

And I wanna take it to him.

My name is Peter Davenport.

I'm, for the last 26 years

I've been the director of the National UFO Reporting Center

and that's what I do. I'm a UFO investigator.

What is the difference between MUFON

and what you do in your organization?

Well, they're two separate organizations.

MUFON is an older organization.

And MUFON is more of an investigative body.

It's a membership organization.

The National UFO Reporting Center

has one member, and that is I.

Do you ever investigate any of the reports you get?

Yeah, once in a while.

I have investigated an elk abduction.

I have investigated crop formations.

Takes a lot of, a lot of resources

to investigate a case.

DAVID: You brought up the elk case

that you investigated in Washington?

I was actually at a conference when the call came in.

He told the story about 14 or 15 people I think it was,

who were out planting trees on a hillside,

on big piece of property owned

by a commercial logging company.

They had seen an object approach from the East,

and they stood there and watched it for a few seconds.

He called the, the object to the attention of the workers,

and they all looked up and saw it as well.

And it flew towards a herd of elk,

that these guys have been watching all morning long

as they worked on a hillside.

All the elk bolted to the northeast to heavy cover,

except for one hapless elk.

And the object

lifted the elk off the ground,

and it started moving slowly in the direction

in which that herd of elk had gone

and it came to a large tree, an evergreen tree

and bumped into it, interestingly.

And backed away from the tree.

And then suddenly shot to the north

and went over the nearest ridge to the north.

I called the individual back

who had made the call to the hotline

and who had left a message.

And arranged to travel to the site.

DAVID: Was the company that the property was on

assisting in this research?

They directed question to Peter Davenport.

Let's put it that way.

So were they interested?

Definitely.

What's general nationality of the workers?

Hispanic.

Would they speak English?

No. Nobody really knew exactly what went on,

until we got some good translation.

That's when I decided we needed to get somebody

that was one, in the UFO community

and two, who could translate well,

and that's when I contacted Ruben down in California,

I had contacted uh, some of the workers

and to arrange for us to meet

and gain their trust too

because these gentlemen were pretty shook up.

I would say they were in their late 20s, early 30s.

They were married, they have families.

Yeah. They were responsible folks.

The three witnesses saw this object

slowly descending and it went toward the elk herd,

which caused the elk to run,

but he was able to see the object

picking up the elk.

It was not a big object at all.

The witnesses emphasized

how surprised they were at how small it was

and still be able to lift an elk out of the forest.

What they did was they looked at the elk,

they looked at the craft and they said,

"Well, okay, if the elk is this big,

"the craft is gonna be somewhere between six and eight feet long.

"About five feet wide with a little indentation in the back.

"About 18 inches thick.

"It had a red and a white stripe that weren't lights,

"but the white stripe was like a bright enamel paint,

"the red stripe was a duller color."

So when the men in the group

-saw this craft take the elk out of sight... -Yeah.

...what was the distance from where they were

to where they finally saw it?

I would say the trees where it ran into is quarter mile.

But basically I think it became a small dot

before it disappeared into the cloud cover.

Down trip was silent,

and as soon as it got over the elk,

the elk was basically paralyzed.

It looked like it was a statue.

It was just stiff.

DAVID: The distance of the elk from the craft

-always stayed consistent? -Yes.

How thick was the cable between the craft and the elk?

There was no cable.

There was nothing discernible

that was holding the elk to the craft.

The movement was like, like a coin.

Uh, it was a slow oscillation.

It took about two-and-half seconds for it to complete a cycle,

and it's as if, if you've ever spun a coin

and when that coin is getting lower and lower,

so it's almost flat and it goes around on its rim,

that's the type of oscillation.

What are the chances, Peter, that, that could have been

some kind of test vehicle that our military has,

and they were just trying out their technology?

About as close to zero as you can get.

-Could the craft have been a helicopter? -No.

In your research as an investigator is that common?

Yes, there are many times

so in reports that we get

uh, from witnesses.

They'll say that they heard no noise at all.

-Did you ever go out and try to find the elk? -We did.

We found what we think may have been the elk.

Uh, it was a dead creature by the time we got to it,

but we did a cursory examination

could find no bullet holes,

no arrows sticking in it,

no wounds. It had good teeth.

It was well fed.

We think it was a female, pregnant female elk.

Describe the setting that you saw the elk in?

It was beside a road,

and it was in the valley, to the north of the valley,

where these men were planting trees.

It leads me to suspect,

but I have no evidence

that the craft flew over the ridge to the north

of where these men were working,

and may have dropped the elk

or lifted off.

DAVID: So how many days was it from the time

that they saw the elk get pulled up by the craft

until someone found that elk on the road?

The elk was found before seven days had transpired.

Does that case rank up there with you

as far as strangeness and credibility?

Yeah, it's a pretty strange case.

Uh, it's not every day that witnesses see a UFO

what we presume was a UFO, an alien spacecraft

lift an animal off the ground and fly off with it.

That's pretty unusual by any measure.

Were any of them concerned that,

"Hey, maybe one of these things could come over and take me"?

Yeah.

-Did they voice that concern? -Yes, they did.

They... Some weren't quite sure if they wanted

to go back to the woods and work again.

Listening to his voice, and I could really see

the actual event that's happening to him

as he's describing it.

And he was shook up about it.

Was he emotional?

From what I recall, he had a hard time sleeping

for several days after he saw that.

His words were whether... he thought,

"Whether it was something prehistoric

"or was something extraterrestrial."

So when you heard that this elk was taken

and you and you heard the witnesses,

at the end of the investigation what was your belief,

credible, incredible, borderline?

It was credible. Everyone was credible.

No one appeared to be wanting to...

mmm, force a story about anything.

It was just the opposite.

They were reluctant, really upset them.

They really didn't even wanna think about it.

Did they give you any indication at all that this was fabrication?

No, David.

I would stake my reputation.

No, they were telling the truth.

DAVID: After the interview, I received a call

from Robert Fairfax regarding the dead elk.

-Hey, Robert. -Hi, Dave.

I'm calling back because when we did the interview of...

there's a couple of things I forgot to add.

I did meet with a representative of the company.

When Peter and I initially went down to find the elk,

it had a chronic wasting disease,

prion disease, that affects the brain

and they had been finding quite a few elks, dead elks in the area.

So in the 1980s, in the UK,

there was something called, "mad cow disease".

It's a prion disease, and it infected cows.

In the UK, they initially said that these animals

couldn't transmit the disease to people.

And they said not to worry.

But it ended up transferring to people

and it killed hundreds.

And the UK ended up slaughtering over four-million cattle

because of this prion disease that we know as mad cow.

In the U.S. there's something that's come about,

where chronic wasting disease

is now infecting deer, moose, elk, cervids,

and this disease has spread across the U.S.

and it centered on Colorado and Wyoming.

This disease is fatal 100% of the time to all cervids.

The state governments of each of the 50 states

have told hunters to get their animals tested

and not to eat the meat of an infected animal.

And they've never stated yet that this can transfer to human.

But it's consistent in that it says, "Don't eat the animal."

Chronic wasting disease, seems to be something that is out of control.

State and federal governments don't have an answer on how to control it.

And right now it seems as though

there's some type of monitoring

going on across the U.S. of these infected animals.

DAVID: In Washington, Peter Davenport

identified one case and attributed it to CWD.

Now he identified a case in the state of Idaho,

involving hunters, that is equally as unusual.

Hi, I'm Chris Bales,

and I have a little incident that I ran into

on September 27th, the year 2000.

Um, something that most people

would never ever see or believe.

We were in the middle of Idaho,

out in a pretty remote area.

DAVID: Who were you with?

Um, I was with my brother Mark,

and a friend of ours,

through construction, Rob and then his dad was with us.

DAVID: Describe the spot where you were camping?

Hard to get down in, and then when you

get down in, it was pretty tight.

Um, steep canyon and tall timber.

And it was kind of a dark, dark hole down in there.

DAVID: And had you been to the spot before?

We had. We've been there for several years.

-So you knew it well? -We knew it well, yeah.

CHRIS: We had some mules

to hopefully, usually pack an animal out that we harvested.

Described the day

and how it started on this specific incident?

We would start early, I mean, like four in the morning.

Drive to a spot and then hike for

maybe an hour or two in the dark.

CHRIS BALE: Work our way around, spotted elk,

trying to follow the elk and look at some high lakes

that we'd never seen before and never got up in there.

We'd try and get back to the vehicles just before dark.

On this day, you guys come back,

you fix some dinner, explain what happened then?

I had finished my supper

and went out to take a whiz

and was starting back to the trailer,

and Chris came out.

I was, I don't know, maybe 15-feet from the trailer.

And when I stepped down, obviously your head goes up.

The light went across, hit on something that's right there,

and instant, instantly

that it was something that I didn't comprehend,

whatsoever.

When I saw that,

that's when I, you know, went down on my knees.

I just kind of turned to my right, went down on my knees.

Chris looks up and just goes Holy--

Shit. Holy shit! Holy shit!

You guys have got to see this.

I look up and I see what he's looking at.

CHRIS: And I mean, I was quivering. I yelled.

I was yelling basically at the top of my voice.

Mark came out of the trailer, and he said that, you know,

he heard my voice and he'd never heard me sound that way before.

He runs out and I just point up, up above.

It was huge. It was like a football field.

Hundred feet, direction, direction, triangular shape.

So how far was the bottom of that craft from you in your estimate?

I would say 80-feet plus or minus somewhere near above us.

Rivets? Canals?

No, that was, that was one of the things that,

I am in construction, I like detail.

Um, I was looking at that and that the detail just...

I couldn't believe, you know, there's, there's no seams, no rivets, no joints.

It's all just one perfect surface in that.

You could just tell it was perfect in every way.

The thing that got me the most was how close it was...

and no noise.

Nothing.

No prop voice. No... breeze.

No exhaust, nothing you could smell.

Zero.

And it was a calm night. No wind.

By that time, it's starting to move up

and Mark and Rob both grabbed their binoculars

and we just watched it just float...

up the draw, just slowly, no noise.

Um, animals didn't make noise.

Those mules never made a sound,

and they never made any motion.

I mean, they, like, nothing was going on.

We weren't making any noise, just kind of in awe

of what's going on and not knowing what it is.

I'm thinking, "Man, that's sure no airplane."

We actually took pieces of paper

and drew up our own pictures

and wrote down information.

So, Chris, I came across this. Did you draw that?

I did draw this.

Is that what it looked like?

That's as similar as what I could come up with.

What were the black dots outside the craft?

Don't know. I just remember seeing them.

Um, didn't seem like there was anything, um...

And was the red dot painted or did it glow like the white?

It glowed like the white disc.

Did the white lights also protrude from the bottom?

Uh, it looked like maybe they were semi-domed.

But it was not really pronounced like the drawing.

You know, you draw that, it was more of white fog,

um, circle, not really unique,

sharp edges or fine detail.

DAVID: Could it have been watching Rob?

Could he have been a target for abduction

and Chris coming out of the trailer,

thwarted that abduction?

Triangular craft like this have been seen around the world,

including, most recently by our own U.S. Military pilots.

That night, did you stay in camp?

Tried to,

but just couldn't bring myself to do it.

Did you get to know anybody else who lived in that general area

and asked them if they'd seen something like this?

There was people that we knew that were in the area.

So Mark kind of hedged on,

"Have you guys ever seen anything kind of different,

"you know, at some point or anything like that out in the valley?"

And so little conversation about it.

I just, we were standing, you know, on the dirt road

and I put the toe of my boot down and said, "Well, did you see something like this?"

And started to draw

a triangle with my boot in the dirt

and I drew a straight line and the guy standing next to me

took his foot and pushed my foot away

and he finished my drawing for me on that.

And that was, there was nothing said or anything

but that he finished my drawing.

DAVID: Is that some sort of validation for you?

Um, well, it made me feel like,

"Yeah, okay. Other people have noticed this."

And so yeah, I guess it's a validation.

So it did affect you?

Oh, it did.

I guess, I'm vacillating maybe.

Since that night in 2000, anywhere that you've been out,

-have you seen other unidentified things in the sky? -No.

How about Mark and Rob?

No, the same thing, you know,

never really seen anything that even...

would have guessed at it.

So, Rob, there's gonna be people that watch this,

and they're gonna say, "I don't believe it,"

you know, "It didn't happen," and all that,

-these guys-- -And I would be one of them.

-You'd be one of them? -[LAUGHS] Yeah.

So if you saw this story, you wouldn't believe these guys?

Well, I'm skeptical.

But I saw it.

And how many times have you gone back to that same site since?

-The exact site? -Yeah.

Never.

When we talk about the triangle UFO sighting by the hunters,

I didn't realize at the time but its location on a map

coincides with the first documentary I did

called Missing 411 that involved the disappearance of DeOrr Kunz.

When I look at the map... directly east,

of the sighting of the triangle by the hunters,

is the exact location that DeOrr disappeared.

Now when you think about the vastness of the wilderness,

what are the chances that these two incidents

happened in such a close proximity to one another?

But also looking at the map and my case files,

it also coincides

with the disappearance of Ray Jones.

Now Ray was a 39-year-old service station owner in Salmon,

who disappeared 53 years ago

on a hunting expedition with friends.

They separated, Ray disappeared,

and for 53 years he wasn't found.

Now a group of hunters

that saw this, the triangular UFO, their dad actually knew Ray.

And so every time they went out, and hunted this area,

they said that they were looking for Ray as well.

He wasn't found and then he's found this year

at the bottom of a boulder field

in an area that had been previously searched

dozens of times.

Suddenly he's found there.

And when you map these three incidents,

you have a very neat triangle.

Which, weirdly, coincides with the shape of the triangle

that was drawn by the hunters.

Are there any new major developments in the case?

Not really.

-Has DeOrr been found? -No.

Are there any named suspects?

Not at this time.

When an investigation starts to push the limits

of standard everyday police protocol,

I start to look for professionals

on the outside that could assist me.

I'm someone who's not

so stubborn as to admit what I don't know.

And at this point,

I looked for professional help

in the name of retired FBI agent John DeSouza.

My name is John DeSouza.

I was an FBI special agent for 25 years.

I've worked all types of cases counterterrorism,

uh, violent crimes, paranormal cases as well.

And I am pretty well known for that sort of thing.

Now, your background to me is interesting

because you've worked a variety of criminal cases.

I worked on the Unabomber case.

I worked on 1994 World Trade Center bombing.

DAVID: The biggest case you ever worked?

JOHN: It would have to be 9/11.

John, how many times have you testified

in front of the in front of a U.S. Court for a U.S. attorney?

Maybe like 100 times.

And how many times has the court decided

that you're an expert in a certain area?

Probably every time I've testified.

I can't think of anybody

who's in a position more to tell the truth,

and with great things to risk than you.

No. No.

I've had agents in the past say,

"Well, Dave, if there is a series of events

"that all kind of line up...

"similar to what you have written about," meaning me,

"then those agents could be forwarding those reports to a profiling unit,

"and they're putting the pieces together to see if there's connections."

Exactly. Yeah, it's true, too.

So who would be directing those agents?

That could be Washington, it could be profiler unit of Behavioral Sciences Unit.

Are there subject matter experts on UFOs, aliens, abductions?

Well, that's what I was while I was during the, in the FBI.

And what was your conclusion in general

about these people that claim abductions

and disappear and come back?

We report on the ones that we talk about,

um, those are real.

And I do believe that they are connected

to extra dimensional beings, beings that come from outside of our reality.

In many, many of my stories...

uh, families in the woods...

children are right next to them...

Everything's fine.

They turn around one second and the kid's gone.

They're not anywhere to be found,

and the statement from the parents

is, "They were right there,

"and then the next second, they're gone."

Now, if that is true,

that really does answer a conundrum about

-how they can disappear and nobody can realize it? -Right.

Time period is so short that their disappearance

is not possible in a purely physical world.

So when you investigated something like this,

were you ever questioned later on

by other departments or other agencies?

No, not by other agencies, no.

Departments?

No. They don't want to know this sort of thing

as much as... as much as they can avoid the knowledge of this. No.

Long time ago,

this is back when I was a policeman,

and there were some FBI guys

that were working a case on something else.

We were talking about,

I don't even think it was anything spooky or paranormal,

but it was something unrelated and the agent said,

"Dave, our government will never acknowledge what they can't control."

And I always remembered that statement.

-Do you believe that? -Yeah, that's absolutely true.

They can't acknowledge it if they can't control it,

or even if they think they can't control it.

Wow. What can I say?

John DeSouza fits your typical model of an FBI agent,

and I've dealt with several

during my years in law enforcement.

Ultra-credible, tons of experience,

a stand-up guy who is speaking the truth.

And during my time sitting in his office,

you probably couldn't tell, but I was in stunned silence

just listening to how he laid out the groundwork

for so many issues related to our work.

And he brought instant credibility

to an arena

where a lot of people don't even wanna address.

John's statement

about parallel dimensions, his overview of missing people

and his statement about our work,

all fell right in line with the 1,500 people

I've documented in the last 12 years.

But that brings up a one of the cases

that has continually sat in the back of my mind.

That's the incident of the disappearance

of Reinhard Kirchner in Arizona.

So this is the spot.

In April 2007,

Reinhard Kirchner made his way from Germany.

He was a physicist.

He drove his rented camper truck here,

parked it and started to hike.

He'd been here before, and he liked it.

Reinhard didn't make his meeting with his girlfriend

at Las Vegas McCarran Airport, she called search and rescue.

Eventually found his truck parked here on Navajo property.

Started to search several days. They found nothing.

They know that he took his camera and took a small backpack

and he walked into oblivion.

Interesting part of the case was

while the Sheriff was at his truck,

there were some local ranchers

that walked up and talked to him,

and these people said that

during the time Reinhard was gone,

they had seen unusual lights in the sky here.

And what is important about that to me as a law enforcement person,

is that they put that in the report as credible.

His girlfriend eventually flew home to Germany.

It's been over a decade, Reinhard and his property has never been found.

What compelled Reinhard to this location?

The case remains open,

and we may never find the answers.

There is one particular case where credibility and evidence merge

in one of the most bizarre cases I've ever investigated.

One where the hunter reappeared with a story

that tested the limits of believability

yet captured my imagination

and strangely physical evidence.

My name is Carl Higdon.

And this is to talk about an incident

that happened in 1974.

I told my wife that,

I'm gonna go south and go hunting.

DAVID: What percentage of the time that he went out hunting

did you go with him?

MARJORIE: Always.

-Except this time? -Yes.

Carl and I are together, mostly 24/7.

So on October 25th, '74...

He went, he went out by himself completely.

DAVID: And was that a rare occasion?

MARJORIE: Yes, very rare.

So that area where this happened,

had you ever been there before?

No.

Describe the best you can where this happened at,

-which forest were you in? -Medicine Bow National Forest.

The area that this happened in,

was back to the north, right at the edge of the forest.

So I got inside the national forest.

I walked down maybe three-quarter of a mile.

I had seen five elk.

They didn't move.

There was another strange thing.

They what? Say that again?

They didn't move.

They just sat there.

Carl entered the woods, lined up on a series of elk.

He even said that the elk weren't moving,

leveled his rifle at the animals,

pulled the trigger.

He says his gun went off.

The bullet came out the end of the barrel

and hit some type of invisible force field

and dropped to the ground.

That bullet was recovered by Carl

and later analyzed, and it did hit something,

what, we don't know.

But the unusual nature of the travel of that ammunition

is so odd that I've never heard of it

in any type of research before.

You're standing there. You shot the rifle.

You're turning and you see the craft.

Give me as much detail as you can on that craft, Carl.

Well, it was like looking at a piece of glass.

Only it had motors around it.

I couldn't figure out what it was to start with.

So when you're looking at the at the cube,

can you see through it and see forest behind it?

Yes.

Was there anything in the cube?

Not that I could see.

So it was just like a glass square on four sides,

seven foot-by-five foot with nothing inside it,

and you can kind of see through it.

CARL: Right.

What did you think when you first saw it?

[LAUGHS] I didn't know.

I just kinda stared at it because it was unusual.

Then this guy showed up and asked me if I was hungry.

Told him, "Yeah."

So this packet of four pills drifted over to me,

just like it was thrown at me.

I took one.

Next thing I know I was in this cubicle, but it looked a lot nearer.

There's five elk behind me.

I said, "You got my elk."

He just looked at me and shrugged.

Told me that his name was Ausso...

and they were down here to get food.

I said, "You guys always come down?"

He said, "Yeah. We come down every so often.

"We get elk, deer from here.

"And go the ocean and get fish and take it back."

MARJORIE: This is the drawing that Carl drew in the hospital.

And the, the being had a, like a hand,

that was a cone and no hand here,

and his hair was like straw.

-And-- -DAVID: So this is a very descriptive drawing.

What are these little things?

MARJORIE: Um, this is kind of an apron,

and it shows where the uh, kind of where the land is,

in his planet.

Did he-- Did Ausso seem to have a personality?

He seemed to.

Like...

When he talked to me, his lips never moved.

I mean, it was back and forth.

But...

He seemed like he knew a lot.

-What color was his suit? -Black.

DAVID: Black.

The entire suit was black?

MARJORIE: Completely black because our sun burns them.

So they have to wear black

and they wear like, uh, like a scuba diver's suit.

Covers them completely.

Did Carl ever say if he only had one hand

-and didn't draw the second? -Mm-hmm. Yes.

He did not have another hand here.

But he had like a cone over here.

Carl ever have an opinion if this was a male or a female?

-Uh, oh, he figures it was a male. -A male.

And then this is uh picture of the, um, the craft.

And this was the controls.

This is where Ausso sat and this is where Carl sat.

And there was still five elk in here also.

And when we lifted off...

and then I could see it looked like a ball... down below.

I figured it was the Earth.

I didn't know.

And he was taken to some place that could

best be described as another planet.

It took him behind a screen

and eventually said, "We don't need you.

"You don't fit what we need."

The implication to Carl being is that he had a vasectomy

and they needed somebody that was 100-percent fertile.

CARL: I said, "What? I got to go home?"

And he said, "Don't worry. Somebody'll come get you,"

and dropped me off and I hit side of this hill and rolled down it.

This is a critical point.

When Carl explained that he was dropped,

I have investigated hundreds of cases

with unusual circumstances

that show that someone was dropped into that location.

This isn't something that's normally talked about in investigations.

A lot of times it's just pushed off

as happenstance and an accident

that the person fell into the place.

There's much more to this and Carl has explained it.

It was after I got off work, I felt the need to go to him.

I felt that he needed me, that I had to go help him.

DAVID: So you get out there, you have the sheriff there

and everyone's looking.

You're sitting on the hill, and you eventually get told

-that they found Carl? -Mm-hmm.

The Deputy Sheriff got out of the pickup,

crouched down with his gun,

ready to shoot Carl if he had to

because we did not know, what, what was going on?

So, so from visually looking at Carl then,

did he even seem like it was your husband?

Uh, he kept looking out through the windshield

and saying, "My elk, my elk, They took my elk.

"They took my elk."

Who did you think, "they" were?

I had no idea what he was even talking about.

-DAVID: So at the hospital, they do a full examination? -Mm-hmm.

They checked him over with a fine-tooth comb.

First, they wanted to know if he was on any drugs.

He was not.

And when I ask him, the Dr. Tongco,

about, about the spots on his lungs,

he said, "What spots? There are no spots."

And in the X-ray, they found that his lungs were completely clear,

which was highly suspicious and unusual

because Carl had tuberculosis scars on his lungs.

So something happened while he was gone that cleared that up.

At the time, did you think that

maybe something happened on that ship

that they made you pure and clean?

No, I think it was, when I was behind the screen up there

because that's what he said,

"You're not what we want. We'll take you back."

And I figured it was because of my vasectomy.

But I'm not sure of that.

DAVID: If it was because of the vasectomy,

was the insinuation that if you didn't have one,

you weren't coming back?

[LAUGHING]

That's what I gathered.

So Carl insinuates that the entities didn't want him

because his reproductive system wasn't intact.

Now, if it was,

we probably wouldn't even be talking about this story.

DAVID: So I read a name

and you can explain this to me, Dr. Leo Sprinkle.

How did he come into the picture and what did he do?

MARJORIE: He was a psychologist,

and he was with the University of Wyoming.

And he studies UFO-people, contactees.

He could not say that he actually believed him.

But he couldn't say that he did not.

Carl took a lie detector test.

In fact, he took, I don't know, three or four of them.

What were the results of those?

MARJORIE: He's telling the truth as he believes.

CHRIS: I don't know what other people think.

But if they don't believe it, they don't have to.

I mean, everybody got their own opinion.

I know what happened to me.

I'm Richard Beckwith.

I am the city attorney for the city of Rock Springs.

I'm also the state director for the Mutual UFO Network

and I have been a practicing attorney

for the last 26 years.

Can you give us a general overview of what MUFON does?

We are a worldwide or global organization

dedicated to the study of UFOs for the benefit of humanity.

And I'd like to think that that is exactly what we do.

An incident that I interviewed, the victim about

was a man named Carl Higdon.

I do remember that taking place.

I think I was 14 years old when it happened.

I'd like to know your thoughts about it.

Well, first of all, I don't,

I don't think that Carl was lying.

I know Dr Sprinkle very well, Dr. Leo Sprinkle.

He investigated that case and did some hypnosis,

some regressive hypnosis with Mr. Higdon,

and his impression of the case was that Mr. Higdon was telling the truth,

or at least what he believed to be the truth.

So some of the things about that case to me reeked of credibility.

He had lung congestion and scarring on his lungs before the incident.

And subsequent to it...

-His lungs were clear. -RICHARD: Yeah.

DAVID: And then the issue about the bullet

coming out of the gun and stopping after hitting something

-and being recovered and even analyzed... -Right. Yeah.

They did examine the bullet

and find that it had struck something

and something really hard.

It has these physiological characteristics

that are just unexplained.

DAVID: So in your experience and in your readings

of people who have been abducted,

how does the Higdon case compare

as far as the physical evidence?

Most abduction cases don't really involve a lot of physical evidence.

We have the Higdon incident,

a hunter,

German surname, hunting elk by himself,

claims he has been abducted.

In that same general area, just last year,

there was a guy named Mark Strittmater, you know about that case?

RICHARD: A couple of different things

that I find interesting about that case is that

you've got an individual that's the same age,

approximately as Mr. Higdon,

also about the same time of year.

Mr. Higdon's incident took place on October 25th 1974,

and Mr. Strittmater went missing on October 19th,

of 2019, almost 35 years exactly to the day

in a relatively similar location.

DAVID: So we're on Forest Road 801...

And we are in the area

where Mark Strittmater was coming

to go elk hunting on October 19th, 2019

in the Medicine Bow National Forest.

In about 200 yards before Forest Road 830,

he pulls to the side of the road for some reason,

and there's some theories behind,

maybe he was pulling over because he saw

one of his hunting targets,

big bull across the road, deer, who knows?

But he pulls to the side of the road

stops, gets out of his vehicle,

and he takes a light coat,

a light day pack leaves his big pack in the car,

leaves his keys in the vehicle,

and he gets out.

Off camera, the search and rescue person told me

that Mark was a 15-year veteran outfitter,

for Big-Game in this area.

So he knew the outdoors super well.

He knew how to track

and he knew elk didn't walk in a straight line.

Elk take off and they wander.

So to think that Mark is more than a mile,

two miles from here, chasing an elk, doesn't make a lot of sense.

My name is Kim Meese.

I was girlfriend of Mark Strittmater

when he went missing.

In your view what--

Wait, what made Mark special?

He was just a giving person.

So how comfortable was he in the woods?

Oh, he grew up in the woods.

He started hunting as soon as he could, 12, 13 years old.

-He knew what he was doing. -Oh, yeah.

In the area that he went missing from,

where I found his truck at,

we never hunted that area.

But that morning that he had went out

on the 19th that he went missing,

I had already made plans to come to Rawlins

to watch my grandkids.

And he knew that there was a snowstorm coming in

and I was worried about him.

And, uh, he tried calling and sent me a text

and said that he had missed an elk and that he was done.

So I assumed he was coming back to Saratoga,

which is a 40-minute drive from where we hunt from.

So I hung out around the house for a little bit

and he never showed up and I left,

and I was trying to get hold of him that night

to make sure he made it back before the snow hit

and trying to call and text and texts weren't delivered.

Phone calls are going directly to voicemail.

I hauled ass up there, looking for the truck.

And then when I got to that intersection, I looked to my left,

and that's where I saw the pickup was sitting.

Explain how it was sitting?

It was on the east side of the road facing north.

-Did it look like he parked it there? -Yeah.

-Did it look out of place to you at all? -Yeah. Yeah.

-It did? -It did.

And when I got to it, like I said it had snowed

and I had to clean off probably 12, 15 inches of snow just to get into it.

And when we would hunt, we always left our key in our gas tank,

so I was able to get in the truck,

and that's when I found his phone and cigarettes, his medication.

The only thing that was missing was him and his pack and gun.

So when he texted you last, what did it say?

The last text it says, I got it at 11 o'clock

says... [READING]

So from that, it kind of sounded like he was done?

Yeah, and that's what I assumed

that maybe he was coming back to town.

You find the truck, you can't find him?

Do you look around at all? Or do you just call Sheriff?

No, I walked around the area,

just to see if I could see any tracks or anything.

And I didn't see anything.

So I came back to Saratoga

and called the sheriff's deputy.

So right off the bat we came in.

The first day we came in

with a whole bunch of ground pounders

and we just went shoulder-to-shoulder

and walked timber.

And then we went around and picked a different spot

near the truck and chose a different direction

and started pounding more timber.

DAVID: That initial search, how many days did it last?

The first time around, I think, was seven days, if I'm not mistaken.

It's like I said, we were gone for the first two days of it,

then we got back, we took off and looked for him,

and I think total I had five days in it.

And was there a subsequent effort to find?

We did go back the spring, um, we spent a full day

with quite a few resources out and three different dog teams.

Did your canines hit on any scent anywhere?

BRYCE: I never had a hit.

How odd is it not to pick up any scent?

Very.

As much ground as we covered

in as many different wind patterns as we hit,

you would think, you know, law of averages,

you'd at least get a head turn out of it.

Just somebody should at least tripped over him.

The amount of people we've had out

and we flew drones in the canyon.

Well, three of the canyons, we flew drones in them.

DAVID: Did you have any other kind of air support?

BRYCE: We did. We had Civil Air.

The last fall we had Civil Air in

and they flew over forest for a couple days.

Was there any evidence anywhere of animal predation?

You know what I saw?

We tracked one bear

to see what he was, where he was gonna go.

But the only other thing I noticed is we never had birds during that search.

DAVID: And birds are an indicator of? BRYCE: A body.

You can kind of hone in on to it.

-BRYCE: Yeah. -By the birds.

BRYCE: Yeah, and I mean, I run dogs.

I'm a firm believer in dogs, but at the same time,

if the birds already have eyes on him,

that makes it a lot easier.

And how odd was this search?

Very. To not...

Most people have kind of a pattern.

I mean, if you're out hunting and you see an elk,

you know, run across the road, you're probably gonna go

find a spot to actually park,

not just pull to the edge of the road and jump out.

How difficult would it be for someone to be lost in there?

If you really wanted out, everything around here,

you just walk downhill until you find a road.

DAVID: And you'll eventually hit a road? BRYCE: Eventually.

You might have to cross private property.

But if you're worried about dying in the middle of it,

who cares?

DAVID: So in talking to the search and rescue people,

I asked them, I said so,

"Was there anything odd about this?"

-"The whole thing was odd." -Yeah.

-So they said that the canines didn't pick up a scent. -No.

They didn't see any tracks.

-They never recovered any of his property. -Mm-mm.

The weather changed the next day,

and if Mark knew the weather was changing,

-he wouldn't stay out there? -No.

At what point did you tell yourself,

"Hey, Mark may not be coming back"?

After they got done searching,

they just said, "You know, it's, it doesn't look good."

DAVID: A lot of people said a lot of strange things about this case,

and in your time with Mark out there,

did you guys ever experience anything weird?

-As far as-- -Anything weird?

He was out hunting deer with a rifle,

and he swore he saw a UFO out there.

He was coming out from hunting,

and he's, just happened to look up, and saw it,

like he said, it was just like hovering, following him,

and it freaked him out.

And he tried to look at it through his binoculars,

but it was getting dark.

And it... So he, it scared him.

What it looked like to him?

He said it was just like a black...

I believe it was just black, it was just hovering.

-And it scared him? -Yeah.

Because it was like it was following him out.

Another odd question.

Did Mark have a vasectomy?

A vasectomy? No.

DAVID: He didn't.

Did he say how long he saw this thing?

He said it was just following him,

but minutes, like, disappeared.

What did you think when you heard that?

Kind of freaked me out because he was freaked out.

-DAVID: And he was a pretty calm guy? -Mm-hmm.

And would he be the kind of person ever make up stories like that?

No.

-So when you heard that from him believability a 100%? -Mm-hmm.

That's crossed my mind, too.

After he told me that story,

maybe there was something out there.

-So how many years were you guys together, 13? -Thirteen.

And when he disappeared,

how would you describe your relationship that previous week?

Um, normal.

-DAVID: Normal? -Yeah.

And how did Mark get along with your kids?

Fine.

How did Marley take this?

Oh, she's... having a rough time.

And when you sit and you talk to Marley about it,

what do you guys talk about?

She's just sad that he's not here anymore.

Yeah, she took it hard,

and finally...

she just kept asking me after he left,

if he was coming back?

It's hard for me to talk to her about it.

So the million dollar question,

what happened to Mark Strittmater?

That same question can be applied

to the thousands of other cases I've investigated,

that follow the same profile points,

we've discussed here.

Families don't have answers.

We move on to the next case,

and it's something that follows me every day.

I have great empathy for the families that are left behind.

I've always been of the opinion

that there aren't such a thing as coincidences.

Just east of where Carl disappeared,

there was another man, named Gustafson,

and he was from Minnesota, another elk hunter,

and he also disappeared and was never found.

Now he was older. He was in his 70s,

also in Medicine Bow.

But those, those three cases were in geographical proximity to one another.

Well, we're in the Medicine Bow National Forest,

about 20 miles due east

of where the Higdon and Strittmater case happened.

Same forest, different location,

right above 8,000, 9,000 feet high up.

And this is the location that Charles Gustafson

a 72-year-old man from Minnesota, came out with his family.

And on October 11th in 2006, split up from his family,

and they decided to hunt different areas.

Gustafson went off for the day.

He didn't come back that night.

His family members got concerned.

He was carrying a Trailside GPS.

He had a compass.

He had food. He had water.

The interesting part about this gentleman

is he had survival training in the military.

And so he knew how to,

how to live out here in the wilderness.

To think that he got out here and he got lost,

kind of difficult to understand.

My name is Jerry Colson.

I'm the retired sheriff of Carbon County, Wyoming.

And in 2006, when Charles Gustafson was here

elk hunting in October of that year, he went missing.

I was a sheriff at that time.

So in the articles, it said that he was camped with,

I think a nephew and some other relatives,

-near Forest Road 111 and 129, is that kind of ring, right? -Correct.

DAVID: I had also heard that he had been

to this area many times in the past?

Yeah, according to family members,

they hunt this area pretty regular.

And what kind of resources would you pull for something like this?

Four-wheel drive and searchers on foot,

requested a helicopter out of Warren Air Force Base

in Cheyenne, military helicopter.

And we would use Civil Air Patrol.

So we go, you know, air search.

And we eventually had searchers on horseback too.

Brought in some canines, um,

both cadaver and search dogs.

As the time went on, we went with cadaver.

Did any dog pick up a scent trail?

No, nothing that led to Mr. Gustafson.

-You searched for what? A week? -About six days.

I had to call it off about the sixth day

because of the weather coming in.

The helicopters were there until

it started snowing and they had to go.

The unusual nature of being lost in the woods

and not found, is that unusual?

It's not unusual for people to become lost in the woods.

It is unusual and not commonplace

for us not to find within a day or two.

People who watch this will say, "Oh, you know, maybe this was a case of animal predation."

What would you say to that?

I mean, we have bears.

I can tell you the whole time I was sheriff

and I worked at sheriff's office for 39 years,

I never remember anybody being attacked by a bear.

How long was it before anybody found anything related to him?

There were some fishermen

down there in Rock Creek canyon,

and they were just walking along,

with everyone else saying, "Look over there,"

and there's this rifle sitting in the fork of a tree,

leaning in the fork of a tree right by the creek.

So they picked it up and brought it out

and turned it over and we got it

and confirmed to the family it was his rifle.

Was anything else found in that immediate area?

Myself and some other searchers,

we went down to the right of that area

where everything was found.

I actually sat down on the side of the hill there by the creek.

I looked over at about ten-foot from me,

here's this fanny pack.

It had a water bottle, I remember that.

So it turned out to be Charlie's fanny pack.

So was any of his clothing or shoes

-or any of that found? -Never. Nothing.

Other than his fanny pack and rifle. That's all that's been found.

So we have Charles' disappearance in northern Medicine Bow.

We have the Strittmater disappearance,

just southwest of where Charles disappeared.

We also have the Higdon disappearance.

On the northwest sector of Cheyenne is Warren Air Force Base.

And this is the location that did the air support

on the disappearances we marked here.

Surprisingly, I found some documents

about UFOs being observed

by on-duty Air Force personnel at Warren.

All three men have German heritage.

All three men, elk hunters.

I had to ask myself, are there other hunters

missing from this region that matched that profile?

Are there any hunters that have gone missing in recent times,

that kind of match the profile of these other guys?

Yeah, a guy named Terry Meador

who was a teacher here in Rock Springs,

I actually knew him, and he was a teacher

when I was in high school.

And he came up missing

when he had gone out to go hunting.

DAVID: And the area that he was in,

can you kind of explain it to us?

Well, it's very typical of southwest Wyoming.

It's sagebrush, prairie.

Uh, it's what we call high desert, isolated.

-DAVID: Not a lot of cover? -No.

So where could he go?

He'd have to crawl into a hole.

-DAVID: And there are not a lot of holes there? -No.

-Not a lot of caves. -I mean, it's open desert.

Anything out there in the middle of the desert that could hurt him?

On occasion we've had a wolf or two.

I can't think of any large predatory animals that would be able to,

you know, take a human being and drag them off somewhere.

What would be your thinking on that?

I suppose we could say that

there's a possibility he was abducted.

Uh, but there's no evidence of that.

All we know is that he was there

and then he's not there anymore.

DAVID: This is in the middle-of-nowhere desert.

And his truck was stuck in a ditch.

And they searched for a week and they never found him.

Do you see any, any convening of the facts,

any assimilation that you could make between all of these guys?

One of the big similarities, of course is

that they're all by themselves

and they're all elk hunting.

With the exception of Mr. Meador,

they're all about the same age.

In your time as monitoring MUFON activity in Wyoming,

have you ever heard of anything similar to this?

We have the cases involving Pat McGuire,

who owned a ranch over in the eastern part of Wyoming,

and he had a series of incidents I guess you could say involving UFOs

and I was fortunate enough to be able to sit in

on one of the regressive hypnosis sessions.

And he had some experiences.

And he was allegedly told

by a race of alien beings that he was to build a well,

to dig a well on this location in or near Wheatland, Wyoming.

He took that very seriously.

He actually went out and bought himself a tank

and he got the motor off it

to pump the water out of this well.

But he had geologists, and all these other folks tell him that he was crazy

for wanting to put the well where he wanted to put it,

because it was just a solid slab of rock.

And there was no way he was ever gonna get any water.

But he insisted that the aliens

had told him that there was water there

and by God, he was gonna dig that well.

-And he did. -Boy.

DAVID: And you just said something that is huge to me.

So in the United States, we have 64 geographical clusters

of missing people that fit our profile points.

As unusual as it sounds,

right down the middle of the United States,

there is an area where there are no disappearances.

Several months ago, I got an email from somebody who worked for the government.

And he said, "Dave, that area of the U.S.

"corresponds to a area,

"which has been described by the U.S. Geological Survey,

"as an underground water area.

"It's called the Ogallala Aquifer."

He says, "You should see if it corresponds with your profile now."

What we did is we overlay that on top of our cluster map.

It's almost a near match, which is interesting.

Because of my background with MUFON and UFOs,

I also know about underwater submerged objects.

And those are essentially just UFOs that have gone to water.

And if there was a way

to keep yourself hidden,

yet make yourself apparent at certain times,

it would be by using the aquifer in going out through Wyoming.

And when you think about the McGuire incident,

and the ability of the UFOs to go through the aquifer

and up out of his well if they watered

and then their proximity in southwest Wyoming

to all the incidents we've talked about,

again it's another one of those coincidence

that you can't ignore.

The Ogallala Aquifer, that covers

almost the exact area where nobody is missing!

And I put it in the back of my mind. I didn't think much about it.

But, damn, you saying that this person digs a well

and it's an offshoot from the Ogallala

and the aliens told him to do it.

-Yeah. -That's weird.

Now what's really weird is they tell him to do it

and all the geologists and all those guys

tell him that there's nothing there.

He's crazy for doing, and he digs the well anyway

and taps in and finds the water.

So the crazy guy was right.

Now, did the aliens tell him to dig the well?

I don't know, Pat said...

He certainly believe that the aliens told him to dig the well.

The reason for the digging of the well

was so that in the event

that there was a a global cataclysm,

that there would be a fresh source of water for the inhabitants

of that location when it took place.

DAVID: Let's put all of this into perspective.

If we plot the locations of the Wyoming cluster

of missing hunters on a map,

this coincides with the spread

of chronic wasting disease throughout southeast Wyoming.

Chronic wasting disease is decimating

the elk and deer populations in this region.

All of the missing and abducted men were elk hunters,

and all of them disappeared in close proximity

to Warren Air Force Base, where numerous UFO sightings

have incredibly documented by government officials.

We know from the Higdon and the elk abduction cases

that these beings, whoever they are,

are interested in North American elk.

We can hypothesize that perhaps these beings

are monitoring our elk population

for what is possibly the worst wildlife disaster in North America.

Just northeast of this cluster is Pat McGuire's ranch,

where the beings told him to dig a well for water,

that miraculously was fed by the Ogallala Aquifer.

There are no clusters of missing around this property.

Nor are there clusters of missing

in the main body of the aquifer.

All the victims in this incident were elk hunting.

Each was alone.

Two of the hunters in Wyoming observed a UFO.

Canines could never pick up a scent.

A UFO in Washington was observed taking an elk.

Carl Higdon observed elk on a UFO.

Only one victim was ever found.

That was Carl Higdon who believed he was returned

because he had a vasectomy.

Let's not forget the first missing person case.

Ray Salmen from Harrison Lake, British Columbia.

Ray and his wife had seen UFOs

in the British Columbia forest in the past.

Ray was a hunter.

He was German.

He was camped adjacent to a lake.

Canines never picked up a scent.

His clothes and rifle were found on a beach.

He disappeared, was never found.

It's another incident that is an exact match to the Wyoming cases.

As incredible as it sounds, you have to start wondering what is happening here.

There's nowhere to turn

and I don't think we left many stones unturned.

DAVID: Frustration and fear turns to anger, anger to loss of hope.

As an investigator, you do your due diligence.

If you can't provide closure in a traditional sense,

and the incredible or paranormal

may be tied to the disappearance,

how do you explain that to a grieving family

that we might be dealing with something

that is just beyond the normal and the extreme

that leads to unknown consequences?

It puts me in a difficult situation.

Puts you in a difficult situation.

When you have families that are missing a loved one,

-I can't go tell them this. -Exactly. Exactly.

-Who's gonna believe me? -Yeah.

Um, yeah, you can't because it's... it's unprovable.

It's a purely in a physical world,

it's just not provable.

DAVID: Yet eyewitnesses' reports

of unexplained events in the skies

are increasing exponentially.

DAVID: How many calls do you think you get a year?

Uh, I would say between 30 and 100 per day, typically.

So saying rough around figures

somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 calls a year.

DAVID: And the conviction and credibility

of those who have witnessed them

is unnerving, to say the least.

Believe it or not, I just know what I saw.

A lot of truths are really experiential.

DAVID: Elk hunters of German heritage are being taken

in specific regions in North America.

Witnesses corroborate bizarre occurrences in the sky,

directly related to these incidents.

What's left are the words of those who have lost so much

and those who returned to share their stories.