Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. Today, we are diving into a
really fascinating and frankly pretty unsettling topic that a lot
of you have sent sources on.
Speaker 2: We are we're looking at those persistent, baffling mysteries of
people who just seem to vanish in North America's huge
national parks and forests.
Speaker 1: And specifically we're zoning in on a really strange correlation,
one that was identified by an investigator named David paul Edes.
Speaker 2: He calls it the Barry connection.
Speaker 1: The Barry connection. I mean, it sounds almost mundane, but
the idea is that this simple peaceful act of you know,
foraging for wild berries shows up again and again in
the profiles of people who just.
Speaker 2: Disappear, yeah, without a trace.
Speaker 1: It seems almost designed to make you afraid of the woods.
Paul Eides lays out this premise that these aren't just
random disappearances. They happen with these bizarre, recurring themes.
Speaker 2: Right like people vanishing instantly, search dogs completely failing to
find a.
Speaker 1: Scent, and then bodies being found miles away, often without
any clothing on.
Speaker 2: It's deeply it is, and our sources today really force
us to look at this from two completely different angles.
On one side, you have these mysterious, non conventional correlations
that Polyides is highlighting, and on the.
Speaker 1: Other you have the cold, hard, evidence based explanations from
forensic scientists, from search and rescue experts exactly.
Speaker 2: So our mission today is to really unpack what makes
these cases so baffling to someone like Polyides, and at
the same time why critics say the patterns he's finding
aren't some unknown anomaly.
Speaker 1: They're saying it's an artifact.
Speaker 2: An artifact of his own selection process, a classic case
of what's called cherry picking.
Speaker 1: So we have to hold both possibilities here, the truly
unknown side by side with the rigor of established science.
That's the only way we can really understand this specific
wilderness mystery. And you'll give you that definitive shortcut to
being well informed on it all.
Speaker 2: Okay, So to really get this, we have to start
with the person who kind of built this entire theory
from the ground up, David Polides.
Speaker 1: Right, He's a form i'mer police officer, spent years in
law enforcement, and then he transitioned into investigative journalism, and
that's when he started this huge project. He claims it
involved over seven thousand hours of research.
Speaker 2: Which is an enormous amount of time, and all of
that were culminated in his book series Missing four one
one and the documentaries that followed.
Speaker 1: The scope of what he looked at is pretty impressive,
even if his methods are heavily criticized.
Speaker 2: For sure, he wasn't just looking at any disappearance. He
was looking for very specific patterns across documented cases, children, adults,
the elderly who vanished often when they were right there,
practically inside of friends or family.
Speaker 1: And he mapped them all out meticulously.
Speaker 2: He identified what he claims are twenty eight distinct clusters
of missing people all across the continent.
Speaker 1: And some of these cases go way back, all.
Speaker 2: The way back to the eighteen hundreds in some instances.
Speaker 1: That historical depth is really key to his theory.
Speaker 2: Isn't it It is because to him it suggests that
whatever force or phenomenons at work here, it's not new,
it's something persistent, something tied to these specific geographical locations.
Speaker 1: So what exactly makes a case unusual in his framework?
What are the criteria for it to get into? The
Missing four one one.
Speaker 2: Files he filters for cases where basically conventional police work
just hits a brick wall. All the leads are exhausted,
there's no evidence, nothing makes sense. Impossible cases the impossible cases,
and in his view, these are the ones that defy
any normal explanation, which is what prompts relatives to start
thinking it must have been a kidnapping or some kind
of you know, external abduction.
Speaker 1: And from there he starts zooming in on these tiny,
seemingly insignificant details that keep repeating across these cases exactly.
Speaker 2: And for him, the consistency of those small, odd facts,
that's the real evidence of a larger mystery at play.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's break down those commonalities. What are the
specific recurring traits that he points to as proof of
something strange going on.
Speaker 2: The first one is probably the most dramatic, and that's
the recovery location. When a victim is found, they are
often miles outside the official search grid, like way outside,
oh yeah, three, five, sometimes even ten miles away. And
what's even stronger is that sometimes they're found thousands of
feet uphill from where they went missing.
Speaker 1: Which just defies logic for a lost person, right, yeah,
especially a little kid.
Speaker 2: It totally defies the typical profile. A lost person should
follow the path of least resistance, which is almost always downhill,
maybe towards a creek or a road.
Speaker 1: So for polydes this is evidence that the person either
traveled at some impossible speed.
Speaker 2: Or well was moved or relocated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then there's the clothing issue, which I think
is probably the most disturbing part of all of this.
It just screams foul play or yeah, something really wrong.
Speaker 2: It's extremely disturbing and it's a huge focus in his work.
Children in particular, when they're found, whether they're alive but
confused or deceased, are often naked or just partially.
Speaker 1: Clothed, with the clothes just gone.
Speaker 2: Clothes are just gone. They're never recovered, And for polities
that immediately raises red flags about some kind of external intervention.
Why would a lost cold child take off their only
source of warmth and protection.
Speaker 1: And the fact that the clothes themselves are missing, it
makes it feel like evidence was taken. It's an incomplete puzzle.
Speaker 2: It suggests the scene was altered.
Speaker 1: Yeah, then we have the recurring problems with the search itself.
I mean, canines are supposed to be the gold standard.
Speaker 2: For this they are, but Pollides points out case after
case where the bloodhounds or other search dogs act bizarrely. Also,
they might not be able to pick up a cent
trail at all, even just moments after the person vanished.
Or they'll follow a cent for a little way and
then just stop. They'll act confused, spin in circles, or
refuse to go any further, like the trail just ended exactly,
like the person was just lifted out of the area
or passed through some kind of barrier that just erased
their scent signature. It's a common pattern he highlights across.
Speaker 1: All the clusters, and finally he collects some correlations that
I mean, they really seem to stretch the bounds of coincidence.
They feel almost targeted.
Speaker 2: And this is where his methodology gets the most criticism.
He notes these factors that seem totally random, but he
suggests they're part of this mystery profile, like what the
source material brings up an example of two missing women
in one area whose names both started with A and
were three letters long, Amy and Ann. Or in other clusters,
it might be a shared nationality or specific birth dates
among the victims.
Speaker 1: Critics would jump all over that.
Speaker 2: And they do. They argue that this is a classic
example of a human cognitive bias called aperphenia, you know,
seeing patterns in random noise, rather than evidence of some
actual external force at work.
Speaker 1: Okay, So central to Paul Ady's whole narrative isn't just
the weird data, it's the environment he's collecting it in.
He talks a lot about institutional resistance.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is huge for him. It fuels that hole
them versus Us narrative. He claims the National Park Service,
the NPS, has actively blocked his access to the data
he needs.
Speaker 1: He filed a Freedom of Information Act request right at
a FIA.
Speaker 2: Request he did. He wanted a single consolidated list of
all the people missing within National Park jurisdictions, and he
alleges they came back and quoted him an insane fee
of one point four million dollars to get that list.
Speaker 1: One point four million dollars. I mean, that's just that's staggering.
It's designed to stop you in your tracks.
Speaker 2: Whether it was a literal cost estimate or just a
bureaucratic way of saying go away, the effect is the same.
It creates a total lack of transparency.
Speaker 1: Right, And the core issue for him is that the
NPS doesn't seem to keep a centralized, public facing, searchable
list of these disappearances exactly.
Speaker 2: The NPS has always said that, you know, individual parks
track their own incidents, but there's no single nationwide database
that researchers or the public can easily access. And this
institutional silence is seen by a Polytis and his followers
as more than just negligence.
Speaker 1: They see it as an active cover up, an active
and when you have an absence of official, consolidated data
like that, you create a perfect vacuum, and non scientific
theories are always going to rush in to fill that void.
Speaker 2: It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. When the public sees
institutions as secretive or obstructive, their confidence just plummets and
they become way more open to non conventional explanations.
Speaker 1: And police is very skilled at using that lack of
transparency to his advantage.
Speaker 2: He is he uses it to justify looking at phenomena
beyond the conventional, basically saying, look, if they won't give
us the official story, we have to look everywhere else.
Speaker 1: Even critics would agree that if the data were just
open and accessible. It would take a lot of the
fuel out of these speculative fires.
Speaker 2: Absolutely objective, accessible data would remove that institutional ambiguity that
the whole narrative feeds on.
Speaker 1: Okay, so on one side you have these genuinely baffling
case details, these weird patterns, and this wall of institutional resistance.
But the main critique of Polity's entire body of work
hangs on one pretty devastating scientific flaw cherry picking. Cherry picking.
Speaker 2: And we really have to define this concept rigorously because
it's the thing that undermines the entire statistical foundation of
missing four one one.
Speaker 1: So what is it? Fundamentally?
Speaker 2: At its core, cherry picking is the deliberate practice of
selecting and presenting only the results or the data points
or the anecdotes that support.
Speaker 1: Your hypothesis and ignoring everything that doesn't.
Speaker 2: Fit, consciously ignoring or just omitting anything that contradicts it
or is irrelevant or you know, shows no effect at all.
Speaker 1: It sounds like academic fraud, Like a chef who makes
ten cakes, nine of them are burnt disasters, but he
only shows you the one perfect one and claims that's
how they all turn out.
Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy. The name itself comes from
harvesting fruit, right. A cherry picker only grabs the ripest,
most perfect cherries.
Speaker 1: And if that's all you see in the basket.
Speaker 2: You would wrongly assume the entire orchard is pristine and
of uniformly excellent quality. Gives you a completely false picture
of all the information that's actually available.
Speaker 1: So why do people do this, I mean, especially researchers,
given the professional risks.
Speaker 2: Well, the sources suggests that even though it's you know,
hugely discouraged in theory, it's still pretty common in practice because.
Speaker 1: Of pressure, pressure to publish, pressure.
Speaker 2: To publish, pressure to get results. There's this strong kind
of unspoken idea in a lot of scientific and investigative
fields that unsuccessful studies aren't useful, or that you know,
messy equivocal findings just don't have that publishable punch.
Speaker 1: So people feel pushed to present a clean, definitive story,
even if it means filtering out the messy reality of.
Speaker 2: The data exactly. But the damage from that selective filtering
is profound. It completely tanks your credibility.
Speaker 1: Absolutely when you only present the stuff that supports your claim,
your findings can't be replicated, and the whole work just
loses credibility.
Speaker 2: And it leads straight to generalization, where you take this tiny,
selected sliver of data and you stretch it to apply
to a whole population.
Speaker 1: Which is what Paulite is accused of doing. He's taking
the strange characteristics of a few dozen really difficult cases
the selected fruit, and using them to characterize all wilderness disappearances.
Speaker 2: The selection process itself introduces this massive, insurmountable bias right
from the start.
Speaker 1: Okay, to make this less abstract, let's look at some
real world examples that are sources cited. They really illustrate
the danger here. Let's start with the cancer research lie.
That sounds terrifying.
Speaker 2: It's a really profound ethical warning. So an unnamed researcher
published this big paper showing they had successfully inhibited tumor
growth in animals.
Speaker 1: A potential breakthrough, a huge deal.
Speaker 2: But then later another researcher, Glenn Begley, he tried to
replicate the study, and he failed over and over again.
Speaker 1: So he couldn't get the same results.
Speaker 2: Not at all. And when Begley finally met with the
original researcher, the truth came out. It turns out they
had run twelve full trials. Only one of those twelve
trials had actually produced the successful.
Speaker 1: Result, and that was the only one they published.
Speaker 2: The single positive result was the only one that ever
saw the light of day.
Speaker 1: Wow, a one in twelve success rate presented as a
definitive finding. The implications of that are just enormous.
Speaker 2: They are The failure to publish the eleven null results
meant that an entire branch of subsequent research, wasting millions
of dollars and who knows how much time, was completely misled,
all based on a statistical outlier that could have just
been random chance.
Speaker 1: It shows how cherry picking goes way beyond just being dishonest.
It affects real life altering decisions.
Speaker 2: It does. And there's another more public example, the daycare scare.
Speaker 1: Ah I think I remember this.
Speaker 2: An author named Eric Sigmund published a paper about the
effects of early childhood daycare, and the sources say that
Sigmund only used information that supported his negative claims about
the developmental impacts.
Speaker 1: He only picked the scary studies.
Speaker 2: He only picked the scary studies, which led to this
super provocative and frankly miss leading headline in the Daily Mail.
Of course, the headline was sending babies and toddlers to
daycare could do untold damage to the development of their
brains and their future health.
Speaker 1: So the media sensationalized the negative conclusion. But the conclusion
itself was already based on selectively chosen evidence. It wasn't
the full picture of.
Speaker 2: The research exactly. So the cherry picking process led directly
to public fear, all based on incomplete data, which.
Speaker 1: Brings us right back to missing four one one. If
we accept that this is the method selecting only the
evidence that supports your claim, how does this apply to
Politi's findings, especially this Bury connection.
Speaker 2: The sources are very firm on this. Critics, you know,
data scientists who have tried to analyze his published patterns.
They all conclude that Paulite's correlations, the canine failure, the
impossible distance, the missing clothes are fundamentally artifacts of the
selection process.
Speaker 1: They're not genuine statistical anomalies.
Speaker 2: No, they argue, he intentionally filters his data right from
the start. He's looking for cases that involve two specific things. First,
maximum search and rescue.
Speaker 1: Difficulty, hardest cases.
Speaker 2: Hardest cases, and second, maximum atypical recovery circumstances.
Speaker 1: So he takes the metrics of search and rescue failure,
which you'd expect to see when a search goes really wrong,
and then he reinterprets them.
Speaker 2: He reinterprets them as signs of something mystical or non conventional.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's break that down with an example. So say
a hunter gets lost in a dense forest, but search
and rescue finds them alive and fully closed within four hours.
Speaker 2: That case is solved, its successful, so it's excluded from
the four to one one profile.
Speaker 1: But if that same hundred disappears and a huge storm
rolls in, wiping out the scent trail, and he's found
months later, partially clothed, miles from where he started.
Speaker 2: That case gets included. That's the statistical bias in action.
The commonalities Polytes finds, the dog failure, the weird travel,
they aren't the mysterious causes of the disappearance.
Speaker 1: They're just indications of how hard the case was to
solve in the.
Speaker 2: First place, or how catastrophic the environmental conditions were. He's
essentially studying only the failure points of search and rescue
and then claiming those failure points are proof of something supernatural, and.
Speaker 1: This leads us to the biggest statistical flaw that critics.
Speaker 2: Point out, the failure to establish a control group.
Speaker 1: Right, which is non negotiable in any kind of real
scientific analysis.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, to prove that barry pickers are a statistical anomaly,
that they disappear in a way that's truly unusual, polids
would have to normalize their disappearance rate. He'd need to
compare it against a baseline, a baseline of other comparable
off trail activities. We need to ask how many people
go missing while they're hunting in the same area, or fishing,
or doing remote photography in the same parks during the
same seasons.
Speaker 1: Without that comparison group, the pattern he's seeing is meaningless.
Speaker 2: It's inherently biased. It's derived only from the most difficult,
most tragic cases that already fit his initial criteria for
being unusual.
Speaker 1: So the analysis has to shift. Instead of asking what
strange force is causing all this, the forensic analysis asks
a different question, right.
Speaker 2: It asks how does the specific environment of berry picking
inherently create these specific common markers of SAR failure?
Speaker 1: And that question is the bridge to the next part
of this, we stop looking for an unknown anomaly and.
Speaker 2: We start looking at the known lethality of the environment
and the predictable physiological responses of a lost human being.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if the big methodological flaw is cherry picking,
then the forensic explanation has to be able to scientifically
account for those data points he selected.
Speaker 2: It does. It has to explain the weirdness.
Speaker 1: So why does forensic analysis say that the barry connection
people vanishing while picking berries is actually a statistically predictable
outcome and not some strange anomaly.
Speaker 2: Well, the explanation really comes down to the intersection of
two very powerful factors, what they call environmental optimization and
pathological progression.
Speaker 1: Okay, what does that mean.
Speaker 2: Basically, the habitat where you find high yield wild berries
is by its very nature a higher risk zone, and
then the human psychological and physiological response to getting lost
in that specific habitat dictates the strange recovery outcomes that
Paulades is citing.
Speaker 1: So let's unpack environmental optimization first. Why is a huckleberry
patch so much more dangerous than say, an open meadow
or a managed trail.
Speaker 2: Because it forces you into what's called deep wilderness penetration.
To get the good berries, the high yield ones like
huckleberries or certain wild riseberries, the plants need very specific
conditions what dense cover, filtered light, undisturbed soil, and research
from places like Glacier National Park confirms this. One study
showed that ninety four percent of the black huckleberry shrubs
they looked at were located more than one hundred meters
from any human recreation trail.
Speaker 1: Wow, one hundred meters. So the very act of going
for the prize the berries requires you to step off
the safe established network.
Speaker 2: And immediately enter what's called a high friction environment, an
environment that is optimized for getting lost.
Speaker 1: This habitat structure leads right to what you mentioned, instantaneous concealment.
Speaker 2: Or visibility failure. Yeah. When a person, especially a small
child or an older person with limited mobility, steps just
behind a dense thicket of these shrubs, they are instantly
gone from sight.
Speaker 1: In sound too, I'd imagine.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, the thick foliage acts as an acoustic dampener, so
yelling for them, trying to communicate verbally becomes extremely difficult.
Speaker 1: So this rapid isolation, that's the point of separation they
talk about in so many of these missing For one
win cases.
Speaker 2: It is the search starts from a position of almost
zero visibility and high uncertainty, which forces a delay, and
in the wilderness, any delay can be lethal.
Speaker 1: We also have to talk about the timing. Poll Aids
often notes that these disappearances happen right before a big
storm or during a period of bad weather.
Speaker 2: And the forensic analysis turns that from a weird coincidence
into a crucial causal factor. The season for foraging, late
summer early autumn is also peak season for environmental instability.
Sudden storms sudden severe storms that can pop up out
of nowhere, and they rapidly accelerate your exposure, which maximizes
the risk of acute hypothermia.
Speaker 1: And crucially it affects the search massively.
Speaker 2: Heavy rain and high winds will completely destroy any viable
ground scent, sometimes in minutes. This perfectly explains the extremely
high rate of canine search failure that polytes find so mysterious.
Speaker 1: So the weather is a dual accelerant. It makes things
more lethal for the victim, and at the same time
it makes the job of search and rescue exponentially harder.
Speaker 2: Exactly and beyond the weather in the foliage, the environment
itself is optimized for conflict, meaning wildlife we have to
consider resource conflict. Huckleberries specifically are a critical late season
food for apex.
Speaker 1: Omnivores like grizzly bears.
Speaker 2: Particularly grizzly bears in the western US. So by going
into these dense off trail areas during peak foraging season,
human pickers are walking directly into prime wildlife feeding.
Speaker 1: And while a direct predator attack is probably.
Speaker 2: Rare, it is rare, but just increasing that interaction substantially
elevates the probability of a sudden adverse encounter. And any
sudden encounter, even if it's not lethal, could cause a paniced,
disoriented person to just flee in a completely irrational direction.
Speaker 1: Okay, that covers the environment. Let's shift to the pathological
progression side of it. This is what's supposed to explain
the really inexplicable behavior Pallide's highlights, like the rapid impossible travel.
Speaker 2: This is where lost person behavior or LPV profiles come in.
It's a core field of study in search and rescue analysis.
Speaker 1: So what happens to a person when they realize they're lost.
Speaker 2: Their brain is flooded with acute overwhelming stress, and it
basically reverts to a primitive state. It's called cognitive narrowing
or cognitive load saturation.
Speaker 1: The thinking part of your brain shuts down pretty much.
Speaker 2: The rational planning functions of your prefrontal cortex get completely
hijacked by the fear response in your amignala. You start
making irrational disc visions, you miss obvious trail signs, and
you can engage in what's called runaway behavior, which is
rapid illogical movement away from the point where you got separated,
just pure panic.
Speaker 1: So the impossible travel distance isn't impossible at all, It's
just an indicator of pure uncontrolled panic energy.
Speaker 2: Precisely, a frantic, irrational adult or child can cover way
more ground, way faster than a calm, rational person would
ever think is possible. This is what accounts for children
being found so far away. Their small size lets them
crawl through stuff an adult can't, and their panic response
is even more accelerated.
Speaker 1: The sources also say that these LPB profiles show that
lost people instinctively follow the path of least resistance, usually downhill,
and often head for water.
Speaker 2: Right which directly counters Polliday's big point about subjects traveling
uphill against logic. While some specific profiles, maybe lost hunters
or people with certain disorders, might move laterally or uphill,
the vast majority of panicking children and adults move downhill.
Speaker 1: They hear running water and think I'll lead to civilization.
Speaker 2: Mistakenly yes, which explains why SAR analyses show that something
like seventeen point six percent of victims are ultimately found
near water. The small percentage that do travel uphill are
statistical outliers.
Speaker 1: That Pollides would then select to support his narrative of
strangeness exactly. Okay, now we have to tackle the most
sensational part of the recovery. Victims found naked, sometimes in
areas that have already been searched. The sources are definitive
on this. They say it's not an abduction, it's not
a ritual.
Speaker 2: It's a well documented medical phenomenon called paradoxical undressing.
Speaker 1: And this is the critical point. This is the thing
that directly explains the most bizarre physical evidence in these cases.
It's a physiological collapse, not a choice.
Speaker 2: It's not a choice, not an external intervention. It's a
terminal symptom of severe acute hypothermia, which is an extremely
common cause of death in these wilderess disappearances.
Speaker 1: Can you walk us through the actual mechanism? How does
a person who is freezing to death suddenly feel hot
enough to start taking off their clothes?
Speaker 2: So as the body's core temperature is plummeting the regulatory
center in the brain, the hypothalamus, it just fails. It
gives up.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Normally, your body tries to keep warm blood near your
core organs by constricting the blood vessels in your skin.
It's called vasoconstriction. But in the final stage of hypothermia,
the muscles controlling those vessels suddenly fail and relax.
Speaker 1: It's called vasodilation, right.
Speaker 2: And that causes a sudden massive rush of warm blood
from your core right back out to the surface of
your skin.
Speaker 1: And that rush of blood creates the feeling of being hot.
Speaker 2: An intense, delusional feeling of being suddenly unbearably hot. It
leads to a frantic primal reaction. They start stripping off
their clothes, sometimes in a frenzy, right before they die.
Speaker 1: That perfectly explains why someone might be found naked in
the snow and why their clothes are scattered or just
gone because they might be running and strip at the
same time.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and this is often linked to another behavior called
terminal burrowing.
Speaker 1: Right tell us about.
Speaker 2: That paradoxical undressing often happens at the same time as
terminal burrowing, where the person in this state of profound
confusion seeks out a small, confined space to hide under
a log in a dense thicket, even in a crawl space.
Speaker 1: A primal instinct to hide from the coal Right.
Speaker 2: And that behavior, combined with the dense berry thickets providing
immediate concealment, completely resolves the mystery of how bodies can
be found in areas that were previously cleared by search teams.
Speaker 1: So all the factors that Paul leads flags as evidence
of a mystery, the canine failure, the impossible distance, the
missing closed. To a forensic analyst, they're just the predictable
sequential outcomes of a person getting lost in a high
friction environment.
Speaker 2: Its environmental optimization followed by acute panic and then physiological collapse.
The sources even give us the data to back this up.
Speaker 1: What are the numbers?
Speaker 2: Eighty one percent of these difficult cases involve canine failure.
That's not supernatural, that's just scent being destroyed by weather
or human contamination. And sixteen point four percent of victims
are found in previously searched areas. That's not them being
moved that search or fatigue and natural concealment.
Speaker 1: And critically, most of those found and searched areas were kids.
Speaker 2: Fifty nine out of sixty one of the alive subjects
found in previously searched areas were miners. They're the exact
demographic most likely to engage in that burrowing behavior and
be completely hidden by dense foliage.
Speaker 1: So the forensic conclusion is pretty rigorous. The very connection
is a high risk trigger that pushes people into an
environment optimized for a failed recovery, where predictable human panic
and physiology takeover, leading to outcomes that only seem inexplicable
if you ignore the science.
Speaker 2: Right, if you ignore the well documented science of lost
person behavior and hypothermia. Okay, So, while that forensic view
offers these really powerful, compelling explanations for the physical commonalities
pollite sites, his work doesn't stop there.
Speaker 1: No, it doesn't. He uses that lack of institutional data
and the genuinely strange nature of some of these reports
to pivot.
Speaker 2: He pivots hard into non conventional theories, and you see
this most clearly in his documentary Missing four one one.
The UFO connection.
Speaker 1: This is where we really leave the world of forensic
science and enter the realm of pure anecdote and speculation.
And he justifies this by saying these cases fit a
profile that law enforcement just refuses to acknowledge.
Speaker 2: It broughtens this criteria here a lot. He moves from
these circumstantial commonalities to alleged physical encounters, and they often
involve hunters in these really remote, deep wilderness spots.
Speaker 1: So let's start with one of the most remarkable stories
from the sources, the elk abduction case in Washington State.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this one really stands out because of the number
of witnesses and how credible they were.
Speaker 1: Fifteen witnesses, all of them were tree planters working for
a big lumber company, all watching this happen on a hillside.
That's a huge consistency factor.
Speaker 2: It is. So these fifteen workers all together watched a
UFO fly up a valley, hover directly over an elk,
and then it picked the elk up and just carried
it away.
Speaker 1: But the key detail, the one that they all agreed
on in their separate interviews, was that.
Speaker 2: There was no visible cable, no grappling hook, no net,
no snandered mechanical way for the craft to physically grab
and lift an animal that big. It just lifted off
with it.
Speaker 1: And the reaction from these guys, I mean they were
seasoned wilderness workers, not tourists. Their reaction says a lot.
Speaker 2: The fear was profound. The sources say they were deemed
ultra credible because their stories were so consistent and they
had no motive to make this up, and they refused
to go back to that area.
Speaker 1: They were scared they'd be next.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what they said. And Pallides connects this right
back to the missing four one one profile. He says, look,
if a huge animal like an elk is just picked
up and carried away, its tracks would just bluntly stop
in the middle of.
Speaker 1: A trail, mirroring the way a missing person's trail just
suddenly vanishes. The thing that confuses the search dogs exact.
Speaker 2: It provides an alternative, non physiological explanation for those sudden
cutoffs that the canines can't flow.
Speaker 1: And this narrative thread leads us to another really extraordinary case.
This is the story of Carl an Elk Hunter in Wyoming.
Speaker 2: Carl's case is I mean, it's wild, it's unique because
of the alleged medical and ballistic evidence left behind.
Speaker 1: So he was allegedly abducted and then sent back.
Speaker 2: Right, he was reportedly taken aboard some kind of craft
and here's the first fuckl anomaly. Years before this, Carl
had had chronic tuberculosis, which left very distinct scars.
Speaker 1: On his lungs visible on an X ray.
Speaker 2: Clearly visible. After this bizarre experience, he was taken to
a local hospital and his doctor allegedly came in and said, Carl,
this is a miracle. Udberculosis scars are gone.
Speaker 1: A complete inexplicable physical healing. And Carl had a theory
about how it happened.
Speaker 2: He did. He linked it to something that happened on
the craft. He said he was told to walk behind
the strange glowing X ray panel. Believed whatever energy or
tech they used to scan him also maybe inadvertently healed
his lung tissue.
Speaker 1: He also said they rejected him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he claimed they told him you are nobody that
we need which he thought was maybe because he'd had
a vasectomy, and then they told him we're gonna send
you back.
Speaker 1: Now, this alleged abduction also involved a physical confrontation, and
this is where Paulie claims there's actual scientific, examinable evidence.
Speaker 2: Carl said he fired his weapon at the craft during
the encounter, and a flattened bullet was recovered. According to
Polyt's sources, that bullet was examined by the Wyoming Ballistics Department,
and what did they find? They reportedly confirmed that the
bullet had hit something very unusual. It hadn't mushroomed like
it would if it hit steel or concrete. It was
flattened in a way that suggested it hit some unknown,
incredibly resilient material.
Speaker 1: But the bullet is now missing.
Speaker 2: Right yeah. Poullet Iss notes that tragically, the location of
this unique piece of physical evidence is now unknown, so
it can't be verified by anyone else, but he uses
that initial report as powerful circumstantial evidence.
Speaker 1: And Carl's recovery when search and rescue found him was
just as baffling.
Speaker 2: They found him exhibiting profoundly bizarre behavior. He was apparently
looking frantically up at the sky, asking over and over
where's my elk.
Speaker 1: Which paul Aides attributes to the trauma of being abducted
and relocated.
Speaker 2: Right, but the most inexplicable detail was his truck. Sur
teams later found Carl's truck sitting in the middle of
a muddy swamp with zero tire tracks leading into it,
none at all. None. They had to spend a whole
day winching it out, which means he couldn't have driven
it in there and gotten stuck. The only other conclusion
is that it was placed there, and.
Speaker 1: Paul Edes uses this detail to suggest an explanation for
a common finding and missing person's cases he does.
Speaker 2: He interprets Carl being dropped by the entities, which allegedly
caused a severe shoulder injury, as a potential reason why
so many missing people are just written off by investigators
as having fallen off a cliff or a mountain.
Speaker 1: When there's no body or no logical place for them
to have fallen from.
Speaker 2: Right, The physical trauma is real, but the cause, he suggests,
might be external and non conventional.
Speaker 1: So these cases start to push the whole narrative into
the interdimensional. It's a concept he explicitly explores moving beyond
just physical craft to the idea of localized spatial anomalies.
Speaker 2: Yeah. In the DVD extras for one of his documentaries,
Paul Eydes introduces a retired FBI agent, and this agent
claimed his own case files were the basis for the
first season of The X Files.
Speaker 1: Which adds a lot of weight and credibility to the
story he's telling.
Speaker 2: For sure, and this agent confirmed his belief that multidimensions
and portals are one hundred percent real phenomena that he
actually investigated during his career.
Speaker 1: And the idea of portals serves a very specific function
in the missing form one model, doesn't.
Speaker 2: It It does. It provides a non scientific mechanism to
explain those absolutely instantaneous vanishings.
Speaker 1: The ones where a child is holding a parent's hand
one second and it's just gone the next exactly.
Speaker 2: The agent pointed out that in real life, no kid
could disappear that fast unless they were literally stepping into
an adjacent dimension or through some kind of invisible doorway.
It explains the lack of struggle, the lack of scent,
the instantaneous nature of it.
Speaker 1: And finally, Paullage collects one more seemingly random coincidence in
the same area where Carl vanished. He calls it the
German hunter cluster.
Speaker 2: In that same cluster of disappearances, Polly's identified a series
of missing hunters who were all of German descent.
Speaker 1: But there's no big German community.
Speaker 2: In that area, none at all. A lot of these
hunters had traveled hundreds, even thousands of miles from other
states to hunt in that specific spot. So Paully's catalogs
this strange coincidence of national heritage as part of the mystery.
Speaker 1: Profile, suggesting maybe some kind of selective targeting mechanism.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it's an observation that defies any known demographic or
sociological pattern, so for him it has to be part
of the mystery.
Speaker 1: So after all of that, what does this all mean?
We've looked at the same set of facts through two
profoundly different lenses.
Speaker 2: We have we started with this idea of a specific,
inexplicable link between picking berries and vanishing, as identified by Pollate, and.
Speaker 1: Then we broke down the methodological flaws the cherry picking,
the lack of a control group, and we offered these
rigorous scientific explanations for the baffling outcomes.
Speaker 2: Things like paradoxical undressing and runaway behavior.
Speaker 1: Right, So the forensic conclusion really synthesizes this whole conflict perfectly.
Speaker 2: It does. The Bury connection is a compelling correlation. Paul
Eggs was right that he found commonalities in a subset
of cases, but it's derived from high risk behavior in
an environment that's just optimized for a failed recovery.
Speaker 1: So the commonalities he found aren't signs of a mystery
that the predictable consequences of environmental friction meeting human physiology.
Speaker 2: In this view, the ultimate cause of these tragedies is
that intersection of predictable human behavior panic cognitive narrowing, heading downhill,
and environmental factors like dense foliage and sent destroying storms.
Speaker 1: And that all leads very quickly to physiological collapse.
Speaker 2: The swift, unobservable journey from just being disoriented to death
in dense cover mediated by these established biological processes explains everything.
It explains why a victim can be found miles away
and a place that was already searched, often without lows
and leaving no evidence of a struggle, and we.
Speaker 1: Have to see it again. The fuel for this whole
mystery is twofold. It's Politi's methodology of only picking the
hardest cases.
Speaker 2: And crucially, it's the lack of data transparency from institutions
like the National Park Service. That institutional resistance, he noted,
is a genuine bureaucratic failure and it allows all this
ambiguity to just thrive.
Speaker 1: So if we accept the forensic model, if we say
the Bury connection is a statistically predictable high risk trigger,
then the need for policy changes becomes really clear.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. What are the concrete things we can do to
improve wilderness safety and reduce the number of failures in
these foraging environments.
Speaker 1: The sources outline three main retommendations. The first is targeted
public education campaigns.
Speaker 2: Yeah, national parks should be issuing highly visible warnings about
the specific dangers of these dense barry habitats. They should
explicitly talk about the risk of getting disoriented instantly because
of visibility failure and the fast onset of hypothermia in
those conditions.
Speaker 1: And this also means encouraging people to wear high visibility
closing hunter orange vests things like that to counteract how
well the thickets hide.
Speaker 2: You for sure. The second recommendation is to improve the
intelligence that search and rescue has to work with from the.
Speaker 1: Start through mandatory foraging check in protocols.
Speaker 2: Exactly, SAR efforts are so handicapped when they don't have
accurate initial information where did you go in, what was
your route? When were you expecting to be back?
Speaker 1: A detailed mandatory check in for any off trail activity
in these high risk zones, kind of like a mountaineering permit,
would let them start a search way faster and with
much better information.
Speaker 2: And speed is the single biggest factor in a successful rescue.
Environmental friction maximizes delay, so anything to counteract that helps.
Speaker 1: And third, address the core issue that PAUL is exploited
in the first.
Speaker 2: Place, improve data transparency.
Speaker 1: The MPs has to prioritize creating a centralized, accessible, searchable
database of all missing persons cases, resolved and unresolved with
standardized reporting.
Speaker 2: If you remove the need for investigators to rely on
fragmented or cherry picked data by just providing a consolidated
objective record, you shift the focus. It moves away from
speculative conspiracies and towards practical ways to mitigate known wilderness hazards.
Speaker 1: And it would allow real researchers to do that control
group analysis we talked about exactly, So at the end
of the day, this deep dive shows that while the
story's polite's collects are undeniably tragic and really compelling, the
underlying mechanism isn't necessarily supernatural.
Speaker 2: It's the powerful lethal efficiency of nature itself, amplified by
predictable human panic.
Speaker 1: We started with the idea of this specific, inexplicable link
between berries and people just vanishing, and we end with
the knowledge that the commonalities polyides identified are real. They
are strong, but the scientific explanations for.
Speaker 2: Them environmental friction, panic, hypothermia.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: They are devastatingly efficient at mimicking abduction or supernatural forces.
Speaker 1: They perfectly explain why search dogs fail and why bodies
are found miles away in these strange states.
Speaker 2: The mystery persists because panic looks like impossible travel, hypothermia
looks like a bizarre ritual, and bureaucracy looks like a coverup.
Speaker 1: So here is the final provocative thought for you to
think about poly These correctly identified correlations that lead to
maximum search and rescue difficulty. The scientific model resolves these
strange outcomes through environmental friction, lost person behavior, and physiological collapse.
Speaker 2: So, considering the detailed forensic analysis we've explored, which explanation
do you find more difficult to accept and why? Is
it the precise, evidence based scientific model or is it
the possibility of an unknown, non conventional force that can
instantly remove all trace of a human's presence.
Speaker 1: Let us know what you think.