Original subtitles

- [David] 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.

- [David] Yeah.

- I mean, I want some type of closure.

I want him to be found.

(pensive music)

- [David] One of the most confusing

and frustrating investigations by law enforcement

is related to people who disappear

in highly rural locations,

forests, planes, deserts

and regions with few residences.

These cases offer no witnesses,

few clues and a strange lack of evidence.

Where are these people?

How do they disappear without leaving a scent trail,

no tracks and a distinct lack of physical evidence?

The investigator is left with a 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 complex and long-term investigations

while being assigned to vice intelligence,

street crimes, SWAT

and various detective roles. (siren blaring)

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. (system beeping)

(system whirring) (inquisitive music)

The human species has been walking 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.

- [Onlooker] Are you recording?

- What? - Yeah.

- [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.

(explosion booming)

(system beeping)

- [Neil] Tranquility base here,

the Eagle has land.

- [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 craft piloted by entities

that have our best interests?

Is our planet merely the ant farm

for complex societies light years from Earth?

(transition whooshing)

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] In multiple "Missing 411" books,

it looks like people are snatched 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 wanna commit

to any particular explanation

because you don't have enough evidence

to point at one in particular,

but some of the stuff

certainly ventures into the area of the paranormal.

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

to look at UFOs

also went much further,

that 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 some people

whose names I cannot make public.

One of these guys pulls me aside.

And then he said, "We think that that guy, Dave Paulides,

that his mystery with these missing people

might be related to the phenomena 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

being associated with anything as weird as that,

but your stuff's pretty weird too.

(button clicking) (pensive music)

- 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 missing,

or when the search starts,

there's a weather incident

that inhibits the searcher's ability

to find the individual.

Another one is the victim 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 'em,

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.

(transition whooshing)

And in this instance, we're in Vancouver, British Columbia,

and we're 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.

Did 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.

- Ray was an outdoor camper, hunter, fisherman.

Grew up in the woods, Northern Ontario,

very experienced and a safe outdoorsman.

32 years, we were married together

for about a year and a half before that.

He would've rather gone hunting-camping with me

than with anyone else,

he was always telling me that.

But I'm a fair-weather camper,

I would not have been out in the bush

if it wasn't for Ray.

Ray made it wonderful.

- 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's the type of guy

who's 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.

(inquisitive music)

(transition whooshing)

(text whirring)

(transition whooshing)

- [David] So he drove up to Harrison Lake

from your home here-

- [Daniela] Right.

- [David] in a truck with a camper?

- [Daniela] Right.

- [David] And what else did he have with him?

- A fridge, a furnace, an air conditioner,

a few rifles and maybe a couple 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 this spot many times before?

- [Daniela] Many times, because you can get there,

when he was still working,

he could go Friday after work and get there,

and set up camp.

And 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?

- [Daniela] No.

- [David] He's out going over the hillsides,

walking around.

So he's been all through the mountainsides in this area

many times in the past.

- [Daniela] Correct?

- 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 gotta set up camp before dark."

That's the last time I seen him.

We were planning to go out up 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.

(gun firing)

- 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.

Saying, "Well, 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 cellphone,

there wasn't any cellphone 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's missing."

So I didn't know if he was walking with a dog 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."

(birds singing)

- 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's around.

If Ray went out for a hike,

would he take the dogs?

- Definitely.

- [David] So he wouldn't leave 'em there?

- [Daniela] Never leave the dogs.

This is what he's got the dogs for.

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

- Unless it was a danger to the dogs,,

but what kind of danger would be there to the dogs?

- It was the strangest thing,

I've never showed up to a search

where we had full ERT 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

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?

- [Gail] Yes.

- [David] So on a disappearance of 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 kinda stuff.

- I remember an officer telling me,

kids showed up at the * 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

'cause 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'm with you,

I believe that that is very strange behavior.

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

Ray wouldn't be shooting."

If he did anything, as he told me,

shoot three times in the air for SOS.

Now, there's 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 about 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 at that point.

- When you hear

the Search and Rescue person's 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.

- We would hike for a couple hours in here

and start grid searching,

and we would just basically come back to this point,

and 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.

- 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 clothes.

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.

Yeah, it 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.

- They would give me bits and pieces.

They would call and 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.

I read that it was the feeling in 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've 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 warm.

And I was even up at 6,000 feet elevation

and I was in a t-shirt sweating.

- 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. (dogs panting)

- [David] Or a scent.

- [Daniela] Or a scent.

- 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've been able to track Ray

point to point to point pretty easily.

And they didn't.

The RCMP had a search book

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.

- [Daniela] I had arranged with the Ralstons 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 in 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's no way

Ray would lose his pistol."

Had you heard that?

- We hadn't heard that, no.

- So it was interesting, initially,

I don't think they wanted to give me back

his guns and rifles.

- [David] How about the backpack?

- [Daniela] 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] Would there 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've encountered similar issues

through the Freedom of Information Act

in 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's 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.

- [David] Tell us about that.

- If you get involved with a UFO investigation,

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.

- [David] And they take it seriously?

- Yep, yep.

That information is collected,

and wherever it goes, into some secret something.

(pensive music)

- So during the interview with the RCMP officer

that was retired,

it reminded me of a document

that I saw several years ago.

In March of 1960,

the RCMP had a document

that would've been classified as restricted

that had to do with the Athabascan 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.

(transition clacking) (inquisitive music)

- We were camping once at a place called Fire Lake,

and we were just sitting around the campfire in the evening,

and there's 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're sitting there,

and we could see a light across the lake.

I was saying, "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 wasn't any logging going on 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 10 minutes watching this

and almost enjoying this.

I thought, "This is fascinating."

- You ever seen anything strange in the skies out here?

(suspenseful music)

- 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 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 can 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.

hey, I believe in 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 had a good friend in the state of Washington

that is really a UFO expert,

and I wanna take it to him.

- [Peter] My name is Peter Davenport.

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,

there are 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've investigated an elk abduction

and I've investigated crop formations.

Takes a lot of resource

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 a story about 14 or 15 people, I think it was,

who were out planting trees on a hillside,

on a big piece of property

owned by a commercial logging company.

They had seen an object approach from the east.

(pensive music)

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

He called 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 had 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.

- [David] Was there one general nationality of the workers?

- Hispanic.

- [David] 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, could translate well.

And that's when I contacted Ruben down in California.

- I had contacted some of the workers in

to arrange for us to meet.

And to gain their trust too,

'cause these gentlemen were pretty shook up.

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

They were married, have families.

Yeah, responsible folks.

The three witnesses saw this object slowly descending,

and then 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's 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 strife was a duller color.

- So when the men in the group saw this craft

take the elk out of sight,

what was the distance from where they were

to where they finally saw it?

- I would say the trees

where it ran into was 1/4 mile.

But basically I think it became a small dot

before it disappeared into the cloud cover.

The object 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 a coin.

- It was a slow oscillation.

It took about 2 1/2 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've 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.

- [David] Could the craft have been a helicopter?

- [Peter] No.

- [David] In your research as an investigator,

is that common?

- Yes, many times.

So in reports that we get 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.

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 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 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 left it 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.

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 'em concerned that,

"Hey, maybe one of these things

could come over and take me?"

- Yeah.

(pensive music)

- Did they voice that concern?

- Yes, they did.

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.

- [David] Was he emotional?

- From what I recall,

he had a hard time sleeping

for several days after he saw that.

His words were he thought

whether it was something prehistoric

or it was something extraterrestrial.

- So when you heard that this elk was taken

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 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.

- [David] 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.

- After the interview,

I received a call from Robert Fairfax

regarding the dead elk.

(inquisitive music)

Hey, Robert.

- [Robert] Hi, Dave.

Yeah, so I'm calling back

because when we did the interview,

there was a couple things I forgot then,

but I did meet with a representative of the company.

When Peter and I initially went down to find out,

they had a chronic wasting disease,

which is a prion disease that attacks the brain.

And they had been finding quite a few elk,

dead elk 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.

Well, 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.

Well, in the US, 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 US,

and it's centered on Colorado and Wyoming.

(transition clacking)

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

(transition clacking)

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 US

of these infected animals.

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,

something that most people

would never ever see or believe.

We were in middle of Idaho,

out in a pretty remote area.

- [David] Who were you with?

- I was with my brother, Mark,

and a friend of ours through construction, Rob,

and then his dad was with us.

- Describe the spot where you were camping.

- Hard to get down in,

and then when you get down in there,

it was pretty tight,

steep canyon and tall timber.

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

- And had you been to this spot before?

- We had, we'd been there for several years.

- So you knew it well?

- We knew it well, yeah.

- We had some mules

to hopefully usually pack some of the animal out

that we harvested.

- Describe the day

and how it started on this specific incident.

- [Rob] We were 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.

- Work our way around, spotted elk,

try and follow elk,

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 instantly that it was something

that I didn't comprehend whatsoever.

When I saw that,

that's when I 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 gotta see this."

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

- And I mean, I was quivering.

I yelled, I was yelling basically at the top of my voice.

Mark came out of the trailer.

He said that he heard my voice

and he 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,

100 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 in there, above us.

- Rivets, panels?

- No, that was one of the things that,

I'm in construction, I like detail.

I was looking at that,

and the detail just, I couldn't believe.

There's no seams, no rivets, no joints,

and it's all just one perfect surface,

and 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 propwash, 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.

Animals didn't make noise.

- Those mules never made a sound

and they never made any motion.

I mean, like nothing was going on.

- We weren't making any noise. (laughing)

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?

- [Chris] I did draw this.

- [David] Is that what it looked like?

- [Chris] That's similar as what I could come up with.

- [David] What were the black dots outside the red?

- Don't know, I just remember seeing 'em.

Didn't seem like there was anything.

- And was the red dot painted

or did it glow like the white?

- [Chris] It glowed like the white discs.

- Did the white lights also protrude from the bottom?

- It looked like maybe they were semi-domed,

but it was not really pronounced,

like the drawing,

you'd draw that it was more of white fog, circle,

not really any sharp edges or fine detail.

(pensive music)

- 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

had been seen around the world,

including most recently

by our own US 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 had seen something like this?

- There was people that we knew that were in there,

and so Mark kind of hedged on,

"Well, have you guys ever seen

anything kind of different at some point

or anything like that out in the valley?"

And so a little conversation about it,

and we were standing on a dirt road,

and I put my 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 had drew him 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 there was nothing said or anything,

but he finished my drawing.

- [David] Was that some sort of validation for you?

- Well, it made me feel like,

"Okay, other people have noticed this."

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

- So it did affect you?

- Oh, it did. (laughing)

I guess, I'm vacillating maybe.

- [David] Since that night in 2000,

anywhere that you've been out,

have you seen other unidentified things in the sky?

- No.

- How about Mark or Rob?

- No, same thing,

never really seen anything

that even would've guessed at it.

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

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

It didn't happen.

These guys were." - And I'd be one of 'em.

(Chris laughing) - You'd be one of 'em?

- Yeah.

- [David] So if you saw this story,

you wouldn't believe the guys?

- Well, I'm skeptical,

but I saw it.

- [David] And how many times have you gone back

to that same site since?

- The exact site?

- [David] Yeah.

- Never.

- When we talk about the triangular 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 it involved the disappearance of DeOrr Kunz.

(pages rustling)

And when I look at a 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 Salmen,

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 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.

And 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.

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,

counter-terrorism, violent crimes,

paranormal cases as well.

And I'm 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 the Unabomber case.

I worked 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 a US court for a US attorney?

- Maybe like 100 times.

- [David] 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.

- Yeah, yeah.

- I've had agents in the past say,

"Well, Dave, if there's a series of events

that all kind of align up

similar to what you've 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, that's true too.

- So who would be directing those agents?

- It could be Washington,

it could be the profiler unit,

behavioral sciences unit.

- Are there subject matter experts on UFOs,

aliens, abductions?

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

(pensive music)

- [David] 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,

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,

families in the woods,

children are right next to 'em,

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, the time period is so short

that their disappearance is not possible

in our 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 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,

and 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.

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 could 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 standup guy who's speaking the truth.

And during my time sitting in his office,

he 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.

(inquisitive music)

But that brings up one of the cases

that has continually sat in the back of my mind,

and that's the incident and 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 a 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.

They eventually found his truck parked here

on Navajo property.

(transition clacking)

Started a search, several days, they found nothing.

They know that he took his camera,

he 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 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.

So I told my wife I was gonna go south and go hunting.

- [David] What percentage of the time

that he went out hunting

did you go with him?

- [Marjorie] Always.

- [David] Except this time.

- Yes.

Carl and I are together mostly 24/7.

- So on October 25th, '74.

- He went out by himself completely.

- [David] And was that a rare occasion?

- [Marjorie] Yes, very rare.

- [David] So that area where this happened,

had you ever been there before?

- No.

- [David] 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.

(pensive music)

So I got inside the national forest,

I walked down,

oh, maybe 3/4 mile.

I seen five elk.

They didn't move.

That was another strange thing.

- [David] That what, say that again.

- They didn't move,

they just sat there.

- Carl entered the woods,

lined up on a series of elk.

And he even said that the elk weren't moving.

Leveled his rifle at the animals,

pulled the trigger.

He says his gun went off.

(gun firing)

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.

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

- [Carl] Well, it was like looking at a piece of glass,

only it had borders around it.

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

- [David] So when you're looking at the cube,

can you see through it

and see force behind it?

- Yes.

- [David] Was there anything in the cube?

- Not that I could see.

- [David] So it was just like a glass square on four sides,

seven foot by five foot,

with nothing inside it,

and you could kind of see through it?

- Right. - What'd you think

when you first saw it?

- (laughing) I didn't know.

I just kinda stared at it,

'cause it was unusual.

And this guy showed up

and asked me if I was hungry.

Told him, "Yeah."

So these package 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 bigger.

There's five elk behind me.

I said, "You got my elk."

And just looked at me and shrugged,

told me what his name was, Ozo.

And they were down 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 to the ocean and get fish,

and take it back."

- [Marjorie] This is a drawing

that Carl drew in the hospital,

and 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] This is kind of an apron,

and it shows kind of, where the land is

in his planet.

- [David] Did Ozo seem to have a personality?

- He seemed to,

like when he'd talk to me,

his lips never moved.

I mean, it was back and forth.

But he seemed like he knew a lot.

- [David] What color was his suit?

- Black. - Black?

The entire suit was black.

- Completely black,

because our sun burns them,

so they have to wear black.

And they wear like a scuba diver suit,

covers them completely.

- Did Carl ever say if he only had one hand

and didn't draw the second or?

- [Marjorie] 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 female?

- He figures it was a male.

- A male?

- [Marjorie] And then this is a picture of the craft.

And this was the controls.

This is where Ozo sat.

And this is where Carl sat.

And there were still five elk in here also.

- They were lifted off,

and then I could see,

looked like a ball down below.

I figured it was the Earth.

I didn't know.

- And he was taken to someplace

that could best be described as another planet.

They took him behind the screen,

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

you don't fit what we need."

The implication of Carl being

is that he had a vasectomy

and they needed somebody that was 100% fertile.

- I said, "What?

I gotta go home."

He said, "Don't worry, somebody will come get you."

They dropped me off,

and hit the side of this hill,

and I 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.

- So you get out there,

you have the sheriff there,

and everyone's looking.

(pensive music)

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 was going on.

- [David] So from visually looking at Carl then,

did it even seem like it was your husband?

- 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 asked him, Dr. Tonko,

about the spots on his lungs,

he said, "What spots?

There's 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 shield there

because that's when 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.

So I read a name,

and you can explain this to me,

Dr. Leon Sprinkle.

How did he come into the picture

and what did he do?

- 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 'em.

- [David] What were the results of those?

- He's telling the truth as he believes.

- I don't know what other people think,

but if they don't believe it,

they don't have to.

I mean, everybody to 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 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,

wreaked of credibility.

He had lung congestion

and scarring on his lungs before the incident.

And subsequent to it,

his lungs were clear.

And then the issue about the bullet

coming out of the gun

and stopping and hitting something

and being recovered and even analyzed.

- Right.

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.

- 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's been abducted.

In that same general area,

just last year, there was a guy named Mark Strittmater,

you know about that case?

- A couple of different things

that I find interesting about that case

is that here 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.

- So we're on Forestry 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.

And about 200 yards before Forestry 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 cross 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's Kim Meese,

I was girlfriend of Mark Strittmater

when he went missing.

- In your view, what made Mark special?

- He was just a giving person.

- [David] 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 snow storm coming in,

and I was worried about him.

(pensive music)

And he had tried calling and sent me a text

and said that he'd 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 ahold 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'd 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 thing.

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 11 o'clock,

it says, "I'm done, I suck.

Missed a nice five point or small six,

then a small five pointer ran

in a perfect broadside shot even closer,

but I thought I had one down,

but walked down to shit."

- [David] 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 the sheriff?

- No, I walked around the area

just to see if I could see any track 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.

So like I said, we were gone for the first two days of it,

and then when we got back,

we took off and looked for him.

And I think total I had five days in it.

- [David] And was there a subsequent effort to find him?

- We did go back this spring.

We spent a full day with quite a few resources out,

and three different dog teams.

- [David] Did your canines hit on any scent anywhere?

- [Bryce] I never had a hit.

- [David] How odd is it not to pick up any scent?

- Very. (laughing)

As much ground as we covered

and as many different wind patterns as we hit,

you would think, law of averages,

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

Just somebody should've 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 'em.

- [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 for us for a couple days.

- [David] Was there any evidence anywhere

of animal predation?

- You know what?

We tracked one bear to see 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.

- [David] You can kinda hone in on to it

by the birds. - Yeah, 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.

- [David] And how odd was this search?

- Very, most people have kind of a pattern.

I mean, if you're out hunting

and you see an elk 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 somebody 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?

- So in talking to the Search and Rescue people,

I asked 'em, I said, "So was there anything odd about this?"

The whole thing was odd.

- Yeah.

- [David] 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 have stayed 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, "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?

(inquisitive music)

- As far as?

- [David] Anything weird?

- He was out hunting deer,

during rifle,

and he swore he saw UFO out there.

He was coming out from hunting,

and he just happened to look up,

and saw, 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 so it scared him.

- What'd it look like to him?

- He said it was just like a black,

it was just black, it was just hovering.

- And it scared him?

- Yeah, 'cause it was like, it was following him out.

- Another odd question,

did Mark have a vasectomy?

- A vasectomy?

- Yeah. - No.

- He didn't?

And did he say how long he saw this thing?

- He said it was just following him,

and then it just like disappeared.

- [David] What'd you think when you heard that?

- Kind of freaked me out

'cause he was freaked out. (laughing)

- [David] And he was a pretty calm guy.

- Mm.

- [David] And would he be the kind of person

to ever make up stories like that?

- No.

- So when you heard that from him,

believability 100%?

- Mm.

That's crossed my mind too,

after he told me that story,

maybe there was something out there.

- [David] So how many years were you guys together, 13?

- 13.

(camera shutter clicking)

- [David] And when he disappeared,

how would you describe your relationship that previous week?

- [Kim] Normal.

- Normal? - Yeah.

- [David] And how'd Mark get along with your kids?

- Fine.

- [David] How did Marley take this?

- Well, she's (crying) 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?

But 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.

And I have great empathy

for the families that are left behind.

(car engine rumbling) (pensive music)

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 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,

we're about 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, 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 live out here in the wilderness.

To think that he got out here and he got lost

kind of difficult to understand.

(wind blowing)

- [Jerry] My name's Jerry Colson.

I am the retired sheriff of Carbon County, Wyoming.

And in 2006, when Charles Gustafson fund was here

elk hunting in October of that year,

he went missing,

I was a sheriff at that time.

- [David] 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.

Does that kind of ring right?

- Correct. - 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

outta Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne,

military helicopter.

We would use Civil Air patrol.

So we'd go air search.

And eventually we had searchers on horseback too.

Brought in some canines,

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.

- [David] You searched for, what, a week?

- About six days.

I had to call it off on about the sixth day

because the weather coming in.

The helicopters were there

'til it started snowing and they had to go.

- [David] The unusual nature

of being lost in the woods and not found,

is that unusual?

- It's not unusual for people to come lost in the woods,

it is unusual and not commonplace

for us not to find 'em within a day or two.

- [David] People who watch this will say,

"Oh, 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 the 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 was some fishermen down there

in Rock Creek Canyon,

and they were just walking along, whatever,

and all of a sudden, you look over there,

and here'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 through the family it was his rifle.

- Was anything else found in that immediate area?

- Myself and some other searchers,

we went down to right that area

where everything was found.

And I actually sat down on the side of the hill

there by the creek,

and I looked over, and about 10 foot from me,

here's this fanny pack.

It had a water bottle in, I remember that.

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

- [David] 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,

you have the Strittmater disappearance

just southwest of where Charles disappeared.

You 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.

(transition clacking)

All three men of German heritage,

all three men, elk hunters.

I had to ask myself,

are there other hunters

missing from this region

that match that profile?

Are there any hunters that have gone missing in recent times

that kind of matched the profile of these other guys?

- Yeah, a guy named Terry Metter,

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'd gone out to go hunting.

- [David] And the area that he was in,

can you kinda explain it to us?

- [Richard] Well, it's very typical of Southwest Wyoming,

it's a sagebrush prairie.

It's what we call high desert, isolated.

- Not a lot of cover there? - No.

- [David] So where could he go?

- You'd have to crawl into a hole.

- [David] And there are not a lot of holes there?

- [Richard] 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 take a human being

and drag 'em off somewhere.

- What would be your thinking on that?

- I suppose we could say that there's a possibility

he was abducted,

but there's no evidence of that.

All we know is that he was there,

and then he's not there anymore.

- 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 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. Metter,

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?

- Well, the case 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.

And you just said something that is huge to me.

(pensive music) (map rustling)

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's 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 US

corresponds to a area

which has been described by the US Geological Survey

as an underground water area.

It's called the Ogallala Aquifer."

And he says, "You should see

if it corresponds with your profile map."

Well, what we did

is we overlayed 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

and 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 as well if they wanted,

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,

and 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,

that's weird. - And 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 then 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 and certainly believed

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 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 settings

have incredibly documented by government officials.

(inquisitive music) (transition clacking)

We know from the Higdon and the elk abduction cases,

that these beings, wherever 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,

and 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 and 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.

- 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 'em this.

- Exactly.

Exactly. - Who's gonna believe me?

- Yeah, yeah, you can't because it's unprovable.

In a purely physical world,

it's just not provable.

- [David] Yet eyewitnesses' reports of unexplained events

in the skies are increasing exponentially.

How many calls do you think you get a year?

- I would say between 30 and 100 per day typically.

So say in 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 return to share their stories.

So here's an important question, Carl.

There could be millions of people that watch this.

If there's one thing you want people

to take away from this interview

and think about and remember,

what is it?

- Don't be afraid if you see 'em.

They're not here to hurt nobody.

They're here looking for food.

They're here to explore.

And maybe one day,

they'll come up and pat you on the shoulder.

We don't know that yet,

nobody does.

(light music)