Original subtitles

(suspenseful music)

- 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.

(suspenseful music continues)

(gun blasts) - Melvin!

- 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 1,200 cases

that fit the profile we are about to examine.

While these cases involve people of all ages

in 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.

(elk bugling)

And so when one vanishes,

you know something unusual has occurred.

(dogs howling)

(gentle music)

One of the most perplexing cases I've examined

involves a hunter named Thomas Messick,

who, in 2015, went missing in Northeast New York.

(dramatic music)

For people who don't know,

the FBI doesn't investigate missing adults.

There's a subcategory 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?

(mysterious music)

(suspenseful music)

- He loved the outdoors.

He loved being in the woods.

Hunting and fishing was his life.

You want a cookie, honey, huh?

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, Gene, and Rob.

- So tell me about your dad.

What kind of guy was he?

- He's kind of do what you gotta do to get things done.

Never had a contractor in the house.

We always did everything.

You name it.

I mean, we lifted the house up

and put a foundation under it.

When I was digging it out, I looked up at him,

he had a cup of coffee in his sand and I said,

"Why don't we get a backhoe?"

And he said, "I have one right there."

(David laughs)

- And 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.

- I knew Tom before we were into healthcare

'cause he used to work in Norton with me.

I knew him probably about 55 years, somewheres around there.

- [David] What'd you guys like to do together?

- Hunt, hunt and fish is what we done all the time, really.

- [Sid's Wife] They used to travel together

with our kids for years.

- Yeah, we both, we had trailers,

which we used to go to trailing all the time,

who come to think of it.

We all got the same vacation at Norton

so we all took off and went to Sarah

and different places like that.

- So what was your introduction to the outdoors?

- It was always there,

'cause my father always hunted and fished.

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.

(gentle music)

- He taught hunter training for a long, long time.

He probably taught every one of the kids around here.

- Tom was a great guy.

He was a old airborne ranger.

He was unbelievable in the woods.

He taught my hunting class for me

to get my hunting license.

He taught survival.

- He had gunpowder blow up in his face

and that's how he lost,

he had like 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 never really seemed to slow him down any.

- 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.

- [David] And hearing, there was an issue?

- Yeah, he wasn't that great with the hearing.

He needed hearing aids.

- [David] Would Tom be the kind of guy

that would drink a lot, or?

- No, no, he didn't drink that much, no.

- [David] So the day when you guys went hunting,

did you guys drink when you hunt?

- No, no, we might have beer with us in the truck.

When we come out in the woods,

we always might have a beer or something like that.

But other than that, nothing excessive, no.

- How would you describe your dad's judgment?

- It was good.

In fact, he was probably one of his better days

I've seen in a long time.

He's in good spirits and moving great.

Didn't seem to even have an ache or pain in him that day.

He was moving good.

(foreboding music)

- [David] How often do you think about it?

- [Sid] Oh, I think about it quite often, you know.

Always pops into your mind.

(wheels crunching)

- [Rob] We were doing just kind of a quick thing.

It was late, actually late, almost lunchtime

by the time we ended up going up there.

Kind of just a two-hour thing until evening,

and we were gonna go back to camp

and hunt around camp until dark.

(hunters chattering)

- [David] How many guys went up there that day?

- Seven.

- [David] Someone made the decision

to hunt over by Brant Lake.

Who made that decision?

- I did.

I just mentioned that we had state land there.

We kind of agreed to hunt it, the roads to Lily Pond.

(wheels crunching)

(foreboding music)

- [Rob] I mean, you go up that road straight to the lake

and we parked right at the lake.

- Oh, yeah.

- [Rob] And the old guys literally walked down that road

in a hundred yard increments.

(tense music)

We walked in to 30, 40 yards at the most and sat down.

(tense music)

- [Sid] Al was the first watcher.

I was the second, Joe Capeselli, and then Tom.

- [David] So Tom was furthest from the lake.

- [Sid] He was the furthest one.

- [Rob] We followed the trail on the lake,

come up that snowmobile trail, popped into the woods,

and swung up to him, a slow hunting drive type thing.

- The young boys said to the old men,

"You, four, sit here, and if we see any deer,

we'll push 'em 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.

(suspenseful music)

(birds chirping)

- [David] Did you see any deer?

- No, no.

No.

- [David] Did you hear anything?

- I heard a strange noise in the woods,

but I don't know what it was.

It was a different noise

from what I usually hear, you know?

- [David] Like what?

- It's even harder to explain because, but it was different.

Something different than I never heard before,

and it was, I just can't say what it was, you know?

- [David] How long in duration was it?

Was it two or three seconds?

- No, it's just zap, whatever it is, you know?

- Mm. - Mm.

- [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] No, this was up towards the hill.

Top of the hill, yeah.

- [David] Did you tell the cops this?

- Yeah, I told them that,

but they just passed it while I fell.

- [David] The report said that your dad

was carrying a walkie-talkie.

- Yeah. - Who else had one?

- We all did.

- All on the same channel? - Yep.

- Anybody ever hear anything? - No.

- [David] Did your dad know

how to use it? - Yep.

(dramatic music)

(sat radio beeps)

(static garbling) - Tom?

Tom, you around?

It's one of those things where, you know,

he should have been out by now.

- [Sid] Call him and call him, and you know,

he should've been on the, sitting on the watch.

Can you hear me?

Holler back if you can.

- [Rob] And then we went and started looking for him.

- [Sid] Never know, he might have seen somebody.

- [David] Anybody fire any shots?

- Tom! - Yep.

Yeah, we fired shots.

(gun blasting)

Somebody went down

and called the rangers, - Tom!

- [Rob] And then we just kept looking.

- [Sid] Tom!

(somber music)

(horn beeping)

- [Sid] They stayed overnight at the truck beeping the horn,

firing shots, different things.

(horn beeping)

- [Beverly] Robbie called me that night and said,

"Daddy's missing in the woods,

but don't worry we'll find him."

(horn beeping) (gun blasts)

And I said, "I'm coming up."

(gun blasts)

And he said, "No, no, don't come up.

I'm sure we're gonna find him and I'll call you."

(water sloshing)

- The community is very close knit.

Everybody's pretty much grown up together

and knows everybody.

You know, it's mildness.

We have lakes, we've got lots of opportunities

to enjoy yourself.

There's not a lot of pressure here.

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,

arranging 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.

(energetic music)

- 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,

any signs of them.

- How unusual is that for your mountains out here?

- Thought it was strange.

Like I said, we didn't see any signs of anything out there.

- [David] And 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'd you do?

- Drove up there, joined the search.

And I figured it would be, go up there,

and we'll find him and it'd be over, you know?

International guard was going over with infrared,

state police had helicopters with a guy out.

You 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.

(dramatic music)

- 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 days,

I thought for sure we were gonna find him.

After about the third or fourth, I said,

"Boy, this ain't good."

A mile out, we're still, meet you on the way.

Walking through the woods, you'd trip over somebody,

nevermind not see 'em.

- [Shawn] They would have what they called 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 were done with that grid, they'd tie it off

and everybody would shift to the other side, and walk back.

- [Shawn] So you know that between this string line,

this string line, and between your bump lines,

that area has been covered.

- A few days later we went back to the same areas

and did 'em the other way.

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,

they went this way and they went that way.

So there was string everywhere.

- You know, 300 people in there one day.

- [Rob] People asked who he was, like,

"Was he the governor's brother or something?"

It was incredible.

- [David] How many jurisdictions

do you think responded to this search?

- There was probably a dozen

or so volunteer fire departments that had members here,

probably 50 or 60 all together in different organizations.

- That's huge. - Yeah.

New York State Corrections came out,

they searched with their dogs.

There's tons of volunteer search and rescue teams

that came out with their canine units.

I mean, they hit, I guess, for a little while,

but not for very long.

- [Shawn] Day two that we were involved

with 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 be spread all over.

He'd be easy to find.

(tense dramatic music)

- Not even a candy wrapper.

Not that my husband would throw out a candy wrapper,

'cause he wouldn't.

That'd 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

if somebody was there, especially a weapon,

'cause a weapon's not gonna disappear.

It's not gonna blow away.

(engine humming) (tense music)

- 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 didn't have any contact with 'em myself.

- [David] Hmm, have you ever had them

on a search that you've done?

- No.

- You had a conversation with the FBI up in Horicon.

- Mm-hmm.

- 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.

That was it.

That's basically what they said.

(suspenseful music)

- 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 their 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.

(dramatic music)

- I kind of like to know what happened,

but I don't think we ever will.

Even if they found him, we wouldn't know what happened.

I mean, something odd happened, obviously.

We just don't know what.

(somber music)

- I was there until 11 days,

and then I finally said to my oldest son,

"I can't sit here anymore, I gotta go home."

- We came back, I think, for Thanksgiving.

That's why we stopped.

We were down to just me and some rangers,

and a couple other guys, that was it,

by the time it was over.

- Willie's such a sweet dog.

He sits in my kitchen window all day long.

He sits there and he waits for Tom to come back.

If you go by my house, you'll see the dog in the window.

- [David] Did your 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.

I don't know, 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'll 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.

- An interesting side note to the disappearance

of Tom Messick is the case of Fred Drumm.

About the 10th 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, canines.

It was a huge, 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.

(dramatic music)

The thing that connects all of the missing 411 cases

are the profile points.

And these have been gleaned after reading thousands of cases

and seeing 'em 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 are 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 can be anywhere from a dust storm

to a full-blown blizzard.

Disability or illness.

Oftentimes, the victim is later found

to have either an obvious

or a very subliminal disability or illness.

Canines can't find a scent or lose a scent quickly.

This is an extremely common profile point

that's probably in 95% of all the cases

that have been documented.

This isn't 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 the missing 411 profile.

There can be anywhere from three to 70 or 80 people

in each geographical cluster.

(tense music)

(gentle music)

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.

(mysterious music)

(helicopter blades whirring)

This is one of those clusters of the 59 I've documented

that really has had intrigued me over the years.

And within this Santa Fe cluster,

we're gonna focus on three very unusual,

very mysterious disappearances.

The first being 75-year-old Audrey Kaplan

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.

And 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 someway or another,

they got separated.

Well, 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 site.

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 laying on its side

in the fetal position, a very strange sight.

(strained music)

And the coroner made a determination

that was even more unusual than the site in the creek.

(strained music continues)

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.

(light music)

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.

(mysterious music)

(plastic bottle crinkling)

(mysterious music continues)

(hunters chattering)

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?

- Really good, trophy quality.

New Mexico grows really good animals.

We're stingy on our tags, it's a draw system.

(elk bugling)

So hunting's a really big, big sport.

New Mexico's a destination for elk hunters.

The numbers of elk are really small compared

to our western states,

but our hunting quality's really high.

- [David] Mel had a slight knee injury.

He'd 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.

- All right, good luck. - Mel pointed out a group

of trees about a hundred, 150 yards down the trail

while the other two would hike

in the opposite direction toward the peak.

(mysterious music) (birds chirping)

Did you expect him to come home that night?

(people chattering) - No, the following morning,

he said he's coming back.

- [David] So he's just gonna camp up there?

- Yes.

- Spend the night? - Yeah.

- 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 gonna walk three miles?

- No.

- [David] He won't do it.

(people chattering)

- He doesn't like to walk.

- So knowing that, then that really puts confinement.

- Yeah.

- On what, where he would've been?

- Yeah. (birds chirping)

(mysterious music)

- 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 been there.

(hunters chattering)

(dramatic music)

- [Hunter] Melvin!

Melvin!

Melvin!

(gun blasting)

- Eventually, another hunter came along

with a satellite phone.

They called search and rescue.

They responded with canines, ground teams.

And the canines 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.

- Yes, and he was carrying it when he has.

And we never find it.

- Never found the bow? - No.

- Did they ever find anything? - No.

- Never found anything. - No,

that is the bizarre stuff.

How can you kind, if you get lost, isn't it,

it's gonna get heavy to hold onto all of it?

There's nothing.

Shoes, and like one of the arrow will fall

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.

Shred of clothing, nothing.

If he was kind of attacked by a bear,

there's no shred of clothing anywhere.

(helicopter blades whirring)

(light music)

- [David] And Bob, how many years have you been guiding?

- This is my 25th year.

- [David] 25th year, and how many years of experience

do you have in the mountains surrounding Santa Fe?

- I'm 53 now, almost my entire life.

- I know you know the story. - Yep.

- [David] What could have happened to him, in your mind?

- Here in New Mexico, Roswell, alien abduction.

(Bob chuckles)

Yeah.

Really, he had to have gotten a ride out.

He had to have been picked up

or gotten a ride out there, 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. - Right.

- He probably didn't take off on a long march anywhere.

The history mystery, what happens to the big jet airliner

in the huge ocean?

(birds chirping)

- As strange as Mel Nadel's case was,

there was another case much more recently.

November 7th, 2017, another hunter disappeared.

Stanley came up to an area about 10 miles

from where Mel Nadel disappeared,

in an area called Barilla's Peak.

And he was in a vehicle with his father and another friend,

and they were driving the dirt roads looking for deer.

Deer crossed in front of them.

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.

That started a seven-day search for Stanley.

The canines can't pick up a 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 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 gonna 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 your 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 gonna walk a hundred,

150 yards down that trail.

If you're gonna 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 sight-seeing.

- 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 their odds the highest possible.

And so our basic list and a packing list

that I expect hunters to carry in the field,

it has their hunting license in it,

and it 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 rain coat, to sit on, to pack something in.

- 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 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 gonna pack things differently."

You change your whole mindset.

You 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 wanna 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, the knife's got a fire starter.

It's just all about,

I'm gonna be able to take care of myself.

- You know, with the camouflage patterns available today,

if you got this on right here,

it is gonna be hard to get spotted.

So carry something bright with you.

This is a space blanket.

And the reason I grabbed it

is 'cause it's full wrestling orange,

which is a universal here-I-am color.

- Tell somebody where you're going.

Tell somebody that's trusted,

that is gonna look after you

and tell 'em what time you're gonna be out.

And if you're not out by then

and you're not calling them, say it's Lauren that you told,

then Lauren, you know, is gonna call the authorities.

Come out there and look for you, super important.

- It is.

And I've heard you say this a many, many times,

especially writing about the missing 411,

check the weather.

If you do get lost, there's common sense rules there.

Stay put, kind of stay close to where you started,

especially if you told somebody.

- And you know, you don't ever wanna, like,

weigh 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 my age,

I don't even think they still teach it

in hunter safety courses.

It's not where I learned it.

I learned it from him.

And it's not only a I'm lost three shots, here's where I am.

In addition to that, if I go missing

and for whatever reason I don't have that extra ammo,

I've used it, 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 I said, a rotor 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's alive

or, you know, deceased.

Not very often do we not find them.

(tense music)

(elk bugling)

(tense music continues)

- 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.

- 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's 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 the search and rescue for 24 years.

I grew up in this community.

I've been here, you know, I'm 52 years old now.

I've been here all my life.

My parents, grandparents, great grandparents

have been here since the 1880s.

It's always been an agricultural and mining community.

You know, the family ranches have been handed down

for over a hundred years.

The people that work here raise their families here

and their kids stay here, and a fantastic place to grow up.

- [Rebecca] I'm Rebecca Rein.

- I am Charlie Rein, and we live in Sweetgrass County,

Montana, and 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] That we know of.

- [Charlie] Now there's been folks

that say they've saw grizzlies.

We don't have a resident population of grizzly bears yet.

I think they're coming, but there's none here now.

(light music)

(engine humming)

- [Alan] 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.

(light music)

- Put this on that side here. - They're calling him Zenus.

(hunters chattering)

(brooding music)

- What supposedly happened,

as they started on the trail going up to the 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.

(imitates elk bugling)

- [David] Would you describe that he had good common sense?

- [Chris] Yeah, Aaron had good common sense.

He wasn't, 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.

- They spent two days here at Campfire Lake.

The one fella 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 and grab the cache.

- Right. - And then come back

to his stash.

- And then come back into Campfire Lake.

(brooding music)

Later that day, they had called Aaron on the radio.

- At a walkie-talkie?

- This radio, yeah, a walkie-talkie.

I think it was a Garmin Rino is what they call 'em.

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.

- This fork. - Yeah,

how evident is it that there's a fork

in that trail to the lake?

- Very.

- [David] So it's real obvious?

- It's very obvious.

- 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's going on the trail

doesn't make any sense?

- No.

- [David] At what point do they realize that he's missing?

- The next day, actually.

- Okay. - 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?

- In between 18 to 24 inches within 12 hours.

The temperature was, you know, in the 40s and 50s.

And then all of a sudden, it was in the teens,

and the snowstorm kind of forced 'em 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.

He hadn't seen him for a couple of days.

And they told me at Campfire Lake, and said,

"Well, you need to get ahold of Park County."

- [David] Park County goes out, they start a search.

- They start a search in their county

and we go ahead and kind of a military,

it'd be a blocking maneuver.

You know, they're still six to eight inches

of snow rapidly melting.

The temperature's getting better, it's warming up.

We don't find anything.

- This is a key point.

So as you guys are coming up the trail,

- Right. - You're not seeing

any footprints going out?

- Negative, correct.

- [David] Undersheriff of Sweetgrass County, Alan.

- [Alan] How are you?

- [Mark] It's good to see you.

- On, I believe it was the second day

that I was working that, I had landed with a deputy

after dropping off two separate dog teams.

And because that terrain is so steep and so deep,

and very, very wild country, it started up high

and they were gonna work the dog teams coming down.

And there was a gal with her German Shepherd, I believe,

that found a pair of boots.

- [Pilot] Diamond, seven, hotel, romeo, traffic,

seven-mile final runway.

One-two is in Embryo runway, one-two quick takeoff.

(helicopter blades whirring)

- [Mark] Helicopter, five-tango, I'll be making a turn up

towards northeast to get through Ross Pass.

- [Pilot] Roger.

- [Alan] This will be the road that Aaron

and his two buddies drove in on,

you know, pickup and a horse trailer.

I know they had two horses and a mule.

- [Mark] Okay, cruising up drainage now.

So you guys, the horse wreck happened right up ahead of us.

So the trails over here on this right side.

- On the right. - Stays on this bench here

for a while.

You'll get glimpses of it whenever we go through a meadow.

(tense music)

We wanna make a right-handed turn fellas.

And we're gonna follow the rest of the trail here.

You can see where the trail is

right in front of you, that zigzag.

You're gonna reveal into Campfire,

as soon as you look straight down

on the other side of this cliff.

- [David] Their base camp,

they're basing out of Campfire Lake.

(tense music)

- [Mark] So when you come up here,

you sit up here and you spot,

and that's what they were doing.

- Yep. - We were spotting,

we saw elk all the time over here.

So this is loaded.

(tense music)

So we'll go down to the bottom.

- [David] And you can see this kind of tough country,

even on the trail to kind of move through.

- It is. - It's a workout.

- [David] Oh, going up and down these trails

is one heck of a workout.

Oh, yeah, you can see the trail easily.

- [Alan] Yeah, and the trail's like this all the way

over from Campfire into the Sweetgrass.

(tense music)

Yeah, this is the T in the trail.

Trail cuts through those rocks right there.

- [Mark] Yeah, there was fresh snow on the ground.

It could have been easy to miss that turn.

- [David] He left before it started to snow, though.

- [Mark] Oh, did he?

- Yeah. - Gotcha.

- [Alan] I think it was plum bear ground when he took off,

and it was actually pretty, pretty warm out,

in, you know, into the 50s at least.

They we're right at the county line.

We're coming into Sweetgrass County and leaving Park County.

(tense music)

- [David] Lot of boulder fields through here.

- [Alan] It is, yeah.

And these are all loose.

These aren't set.

They're all loose.

You know, you take one step forward,

and you slide two steps back on each foot.

So you're, you know, 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 this, it's sharp.

If you don't have a pair of hard-soled boots,

they're gonna eat your feet.

You know, even into the timber,

is loose rock all over the place.

Immediately from the boots, there's a scree pile.

If he was barefoot,

he would've tore up his feet immediately.

- [Mark] Coming up to the falls.

- [Alan] Coming up to the falls now.

- [Mark] Now we have to turn around

to see him better. - Yeah.

This is the bench above the falls,

where the boots were found.

(tense music)

And this bench is nice and subtle.

It's kind of protected.

- [Mark] I'll walk that way to the creek.

- [Alan] And you're limited where you can go.

(tense music continues)

That was right there.

- [Mark] Yeah, it was right

under that bushy trees, actually.

- [Alan] Little bushy trees, yeah.

Right in here.

Close to the crick, there are ways down

into the crick that you can do it.

And especially underneath the falls here,

you can get into this crick.

And when we searched, we searched this entire flat

after we found the boots.

We picked through this like nobody's business.

I had a bunch of people

and it was like a type three search is what we did.

So we had evidence here.

At the falls, we find, see there's a pair of boots.

I mean, set purposely side by side.

Next to that is a, basically, a water bladder

out of like a a camelback, water bladder.

Just off the trail, there is a fire pit.

And in that fire pit

was a partially burnt cigarette container

that we knew that was Aaron's brand.

Also, in the immediate vicinity,

are fire bundle partially burnt.

Alongside that, in the fire pit,

were the two waist belts from a backpack.

- [David] Straps that come around.

- Right. - And the pack

sits on your hips.

- Correct. - Is that

what we're talking about? - That's what

we're talking about, yep.

- [David] Why would anybody take those off?

- Cut 'em off.

There's a little bit insulation in there

because they're padded. - Yeah, yeah.

- And you can slip your hand in there

or a little bit of protection.

- Right. - That's the first thing

we thought of. - Yeah.

- 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. - Absolutely.

Plus,

I'll throw another little bit of wrinkle in there.

They were up in the same spot

a day or two days before and never saw it.

Saw those items, never come across those items.

- Same spot? - Same people, same spot.

And they said that they never saw those boots,

they never saw any of that.

- [David] How's that possible?

- I don't know.

These are seasoned guys.

They do good at their job.

They're SARTech II rated through NASAR.

They know what the heck they're doing.

When they see the waist belt cutoff

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 onto the slope as I can get,

because we didn't think if he was bad enough

that he was setting stuff, he wasn't gonna get very far.

- So somebody who's that hypothermic isn't gonna go 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 canine handler?

- Correct.

- [David] So did dogs hit on anything?

- [Alan] No.

- Nothing? - Nothing.

(mysterious music)

- Well, every spring, we've maintained 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,

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.

- 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?"

- 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, well, 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 was helicopters flying up

way up the valley up there and a big search.

And it was in the local press.

- [David] And inside, was there any food?

- [Charlie] There was snack bars.

- [David] There was nutrition inside?

- Yes, yes. - Oh, yeah.

- 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?

- Nope, nope.

- They put it there with intent.

- [Alan] They put it there with intent,

they put it there purposely, and it was protected.

- Okay, and what was in the backpack?

I understand you found a gun?

- [Alan] Correct, 44 Ruger Redhawk, I believe it was.

- [David] Did you find the bow?

- 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 a, you know, open energy drink.

Somebody had, you know, had sat,

basically, sat down and drank a cup of tea.

- That's an odd sight.

- Uh-huh, yep, absolutely.

- What do you think when you see that?

- What the hell's this guy doing, you know?

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 he see a road?

- Yes.

- [David] 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,

you guys- - No, you know,

we couldn't cover a large area

and we didn't have a lot of time to be able to do that.

- And it wasn't a life or death situation

at this point? - No, not at that point.

It was evidence recovery.

- [David] 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, a guest at their ranch were on this ride.

And as they come up the hill on a little bench,

one of the guests looks over and went,

"Hey, there's a skull over there."

And lo and behold,

there's a human skull underneath the tree.

I mean, just pretty easy picture.

Bright as a penny underneath a dead tree.

- You go back out.

- Sure do.

- And what do you find?

- We find the skull 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 a like what you're wearing, a thin jacket.

- [David] Any pants?

- Pants, no.

I don't believe we found any pants.

I can't remember. - Socks?

- Were they, no, 'cause we didn't find any feet.

- [David] No feet?

- Right.

- Did any of his bones appear to be broken like the femurs?

- No, uh-uh.

- [David] Did the coroner come up with any cause of death?

- No.

(elk bugling)

- [Charlie] He could have seen the creek.

- He could have? - 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.

- Mm-hmm.

- He had a gun, he could have signaled help.

He had food, he could have eaten.

Well, you're a nurse. - Yes.

- So you understand hypothermia

and how it affects the body.

That distance, somebody said, "Well, you know,

he was hypothermic way back at the falls.

That's why he took his boots off."

Okay, great, if hypothermic then,

how in the heck you gonna make it all that distance?

- And that's, you know, that's the other thing.

If he was hypothermic, why didn't he drop his bow?

Why was he still packing that?

That's a heavy thing to be packing your backpack.

- Mm-hmm.

- This alt doesn't add up to me.

- Nope.

- Does it add up to you in any way?

- Uh-uh.

No, no.

And 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.

- There's two things that bother 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 know he had gone too far,

merely by the fact he's walking adjacent to the creek

that's flowing downhill,

away from the location he's supposed to be.

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 two 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, oh, 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.

(suspenseful music)

(elk bugles)

(gentle music)

- Where we are here in Sonora, you see the remnants

of the 1800s in just about every place.

It's an old mining town.

(engines humming) (gentle music continues)

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 forest,

where there is no more cities,

it becomes even clearer to you

that this place is not like other places,

that there's sort of a strange sense

of mystery that abounds.

(bouncy music)

My name's Giuseppe Ricapito,

I'm a police and courts reporter

here at the Union Democrat newspaper

in Sonora, Toulumne County, California.

- [David] 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 years.

And none of them are unsolved.

- [David] 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.

(engine rumbling)

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, or you're never gonna find it,

because it's a single turnoff,

single sign pointing to you to the left.

(tense music)

It's called Donnell Vista.

And it's sort of, I've been thinking about it.

It's like etched into the mountainside.

(tense music)

If you're standing there at the lookout point, right,

and you're overlooking that area,

you're seeing these like 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."

(light music)

- We just left the vista.

Just a quarter mile east, Breck Phelps' vehicle

was found at this turnout,

onto this small old dirt road that eventually leads

and turns into a trail down by the Stanislaus River.

(suspenseful music)

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.

(suspenseful music continues)

- The strangest thing about Breck Phelps's disappearance

was that it seemed to align or parallel itself

to the previous disappearances

that had happened in that same region.

Patty Sue Tolhurst and Nita Mayo both commonly,

like Breck Phelps, left their car,

like, within a quarter mile of that vista point.

(mysterious music)

- Well the true oddity of this location

is that we have three people in 11 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?

- 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 In amongst a cluster of missing people.

(suspenseful music)

Did you ask the sheriff what their feelings were?

- The sheriff's office doesn't like to speculate.

The sheriff's office is, it's 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.

In April before the disappearance of Breck Phelps,

in April, 2016, they did find human remains

over in that area.

They didn't match Patty Sue Tolhurst,

nor did they match Nita Mayo.

They tested the dental records.

And so it was just like, what are these?

And this is before the disappearance of Breck Phelps.

- [David] 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 gonna 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 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.

(people chattering)

Just so people can get some idea.

We're not that far outside of Yosemite.

- [Ron] We're not far at all, no.

I tell people we're between Yosemite and Tahoe,

and that's where we are.

If you leave 6,000 feet elevation,

you hike into close to 10,000 feet

before you start dropping back, you know, up and down.

The whole topography up here changes every year.

You don't know what to expect.

You don't know what log's gonna cross the trail

that you have to work a way around to get here,

'cause there's really no good 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.

(dramatic music)

- [David] What year did the Sierra Camp start?

- [Ron] The camp's been here since the '50s.

I didn't start coming up until 1971.

- [David] And do you know what brought him to this spot?

- Just one of those spots that Warren's say

this is as close to heaven as he thinks he'll ever get.

(suspenseful music)

It's so remote, the deer are plentiful.

There's a lot of bear up here.

It's pristine.

There's a lot of granite,

fresh water coming right out of the ground.

This is where the springs start

and it goes out to the rivers,

and it's just a gorgeous place to be.

(suspenseful music continues)

We was all very sober at camp, a very strict camp, you know?

Unload before you came into camp.

No alcohol was here.

It was really a quite disciplined camp.

Very, all the guys were professional people.

So we kept what was going on up here.

Whatever it was, we don't know,

but kind of to ourselves for a long time.

- [David] And what was the average success rate

for you guys coming up here?

- [Ron] Oh, the deer, it was 100%.

We never didn't get a deer.

It's that kind of a place.

It's about 43, I think.

A hundred has come out of here.

- [David] That's the success rate, you said maybe 40%.

- When you think things through.

- [Ron] We really didn't realize what we were dealing with.

We still don't know what we were dealing with,

but it was something very unusual.

Strange things happen.

And most of the stuff happened the evening time.

Just the dust, nighttime like now.

The first time I ever heard anything was later in '71.

I came back up with the guys,

and we're just here by the stove.

There was a stove here then.

And as soon as it starts getting dark, we'd go in.

Sometimes, you might hear a grunt, or a whoop,

or (blows), a big blowing sound or something like that.

And that's when you know you wanna get inside the shelter

'cause you still don't know what you're dealing with.

Whatever it is, it's big, very, very big.

We all go inside, close the shelter door,

and that's a log that we put between these trees

and then we'd strap it inside a cable.

And then they would start making their sounds.

And that was in '71 when I first started hearing them

and we started recording them.

(elk bugling)

(hunter imitates elk bugling)

(elk bugling) (hunter imitates elk bugling)

(dog howls) (hunter imitates howling)

(distant chattering)

- [Ron] There's two of them across the creek

at the big rocks.

(unknown creature yelling)

(bird cawing) (imitates bird cawing)

(unknown creature yelling)

(hunter yelling)

(unknown creature yelling)

(dogs barking)

(unknown creature giggling) - That's right.

(bird cawing) (imitates bird cawing)

(dogs barking) (unknown creature yelling)

- [Ron] That's right.

We were all talking about maybe having to shoot our way out.

You're just sitting there, all of you are kind of petrified.

You're just waiting to, for the walls to break open,

something reach in there and grab you and hold you up,

and waiting for the light to break

in the cracks of the walls.

And 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.

You know, whatever it was we thought,

might be trying to scare us out.

Maybe this is their territory, but I, we don't know.

We could only guess that why they were doing

what they were doing,

and that they were observing us, that's for sure.

(fire crackling) (mysterious music)

- Well, we do know that their vocal range

is much greater than human beings.

Their frequencies go way above

and way below the abilities of human.

(mysterious music continues)

I was trained in all of the deceptive practices

in voice communications.

Besides the fact that you have the creatures

stepping on each other in their conversational turns,

you have the the humans, like Ron,

stepping on the creatures back and forth,

overlapping their voices on the tapes.

They 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.

(Scott laughs)

It's ridiculous to think of it.

You wouldn't do it, you wouldn't do it,

just to coax a bunch of hunters up here.

- So from 100% factual standpoint,

we really don't know what's making this language sounds.

- That's right, we don't know.

(dramatic music)

One time I heard a big sound,

like a huge tuning fork above us,

and you couldn't find a source of it.

It just a big sound like that.

Sometimes, you'd hear a sound out here.

And one time, we thought our camp

was being tore apart by something.

We thought the barrels we'd packed in

and was being torn up and tossed around.

And you look out here when all the commotion

and the sound stop, and nothing changed.

Now how do you explain that, you know?

One time we was in there,

I thought I heard a car door slam out here.

Now come on, we're eight miles into wilderness, there's no.

- So aside from the sounds,

you also saw some things in the sky, in the air?

- Yeah, lights.

Yeah, orbs.

Other guys that reported orbs when I wasn't here.

What me and my friend Bill saw one night

was a big blue ball coming down from up here,

slowly moving, definitely controlled,

had some type of intelligence about it.

And 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 went over there.

So I don't know what to think of that.

You don't know what to think

about any of this stuff, you know?

We were in a tent, it just almost, it wasn't this dark,

but this thing, what it was just starts moving

across over here behind us.

Elongated light, about probably three-foot long,

probably about that big around.

And just a rod of light.

I tell people when I talk about it,

it's like a "Star Wars" saber.

White, glowing, but not bright glowing, just glowing.

And it just moved slowly through the trees,

definitely controlled and dissipated over here.

- Is it embarrassing to talk about?

- No, I don't care.

I'm old enough 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 'em down,

basically because I don't want the area.

It's such a pristine area still.

I don't want it exposed to a bunch

of researcher come up here, just inundating the area.

And I've also told the hunters to still come up

and their offsprings, which still hunt the area.

You know, that I'll kind of keep it very private

as much as possible.

The shelter, although it's been dismantled now years ago,

it's still a place to come to.

(nostalgic music)

It was interesting still.

(nostalgic music continues)

Nothing surprises me, nothing.

Up here, why this is such a strange place?

I have no idea, but this is a very interesting area.

(nostalgic music)

- [David] We spent seven days

with Ron and Scott at the Sierra Camp.

And although we didn't experience anything paranormal,

this area holds many secrets.

That we know, for sure.

(low engine humming)

The last case I want to investigate

is even a little deeper down the rabbit holes.

It's not about a missing hunter,

but instead about a strange experience

one hunter faced in Lima, Ohio.

It's important to note

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.

- This, I have to say, was the most terrifying experience,

but yet, I don't know why I didn't react to it.

And that bothers me.

(suspenseful music)

(lively band music)

The 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.

(gentle music)

It was the most beautiful night to deer hunt.

It was the second day of season.

I wanted to be getting my, you know,

run in the woods to hunt.

I was really excited about it.

(lively band music)

There was band over at the high school.

By the time I got to my deer stand, I could hear 'em.

It was all settled in, didn't see nothing

coming down the pass, trails of birds, crickets.

Everything were normal wood sounds.

When you're hunting, you have two

of your most keenest senses,

is your hearing and your eyesight.

All of a sudden, the woods went to this dead quiet.

If I had dropped a pin out of that deer stand,

it cut off.

No birds, no crickets, no nothing.

The sun's 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 like a moat in my eye.

I even took my finger and wiped 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 white, so I'm up 14 foot,

and it hung right 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, like sucked into it.

And it went to the whole other tree.

I had this very euphoric feeling,

like, something ain't right here.

Normally, at that time, I'd 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, like, tree to tree,

and then it just, it disappeared.

It didn't continue on.

So where it went, I don't know.

It's like it just, right before my eyes, it's 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,

because it's, like, I don't remember.

That's not me to this day.

Normally, I would probably crawl down,

come run in the house, and say,

"You ain't gonna believe what's back there in them woods."

- [David] How much longer do you think you stayed

in the stand?

- About a half hour 'til sundown,

like, when it's time to come out.

- The sequence of this is Jan goes out to hunt,

we have guests show up, we're having dinner.

She comes back from the hunt.

She says nothing about what happened, it was strange.

The guests are about ready to leave.

Later on, Matthew sends me an email.

There was a sighting by a number of students

and a faculty at 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

about what happened in those woods to me tonight."

And I'm reading this from Matthew.

And then I started really getting, I get goosebumps.

He said, "This light appeared above the big stadium lights

of the football field."

Had Matthew not sent that email,

I'm not sure if I would've remembered

even that night to say anything.

- [David] How many kids were on the field?

- [Matthew] At least 30.

30 to 40, 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.

Late August.

- [David] Late August, so what time of night

do you think that was?

- Between 6:00 and 7:00.

We were rehearsing normally out here about 6:00,

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 tree line for sure.

Just kind of hovering in the skyline.

Close enough that it could 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, like clear and hot.

Typical August, Ohio weather.

- [David] Okay, what color was it?

- Candle orange.

As far as I could tell,

the thing had no definable edges to it.

There were no, like, dimensions.

It was just kind of waxing and waning 'til it zapped out.

You know, our band director, who never stops for anything,

he stopped and turned around,

and looked at us and he goes, you know,

"What the hell was that?"

Before I had time to even like think

about what I was seeing, it was gone.

And then it was just kind of like 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 timeframe, basically, as my experience here.

Like a half a mile over there as the crow would fly.

- This is a blackberry.

On the back, you have the lens.

It's not like the modern ones

that have a camera on the front

as well as the camera on the back.

So I'd be taking your picture right now,

but I would not be taking my picture.

Something happened to that 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 provide a 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 of this one photo,

that something bizarre happened.

The picture she took,

the resolution somehow changed for that one picture.

You could manually change the cell phone,

1600 by 1200, 1024 by 760, or something like that,

and 640 by 480, but it got changed

to 500 by 400 or something.

Numbers that don't exist.

I don't know how to make it do that resolution.

You'd have to get in there and rewire it somehow,

or change the software.

But even changing the software

doesn't change the number of pixels

along the edge of the sensor.

I don't know how to explain this filamentary stuff

and I can't imagine what this, what it looks like,

it is well-focused.

I don't know what that is.

- I've had people write to me and say,

"Well, what that is is Jan took a picture of her own hair."

- My hair was back through the back of the ball cap,

where it adjusts.

It was tied back.

- [David] So there was no part of you

that could have been in that frame?

- No way, no way.

- It would be possible for her

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.

- So Jan, let me ask you, since that has happened,

has it changed your life?

- Yeah, I've never been back in that woods to hunt

that I actually ended up buying a redneck deer blind.

I mean, I want something surrounding me.

- [Bruce] You can imagine if you saw in the woods

some strange thing like that, like the predator,

you'd probably be leery about going back there again, too.

(gentle mysterious music)

- When looking at these cases individually,

Aaron Hedges, Tom Messick, Mel Nadel,

it's easy to pass 'em off as isolated,

strange occurrences, anomalies.

But when you look from an informed perspective

and you see hundreds of victims

following the same profile points,

scattered throughout our national forest 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 1,200 cases

that fit the "Missing 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.

(mysterious music)

(fire crackling)

(birds chirping)

(suspenseful music)