The Basement Interview: w/ Dave Paulides (Transcript)

Okay. Their entire system. And 6 months later they come back and they say, well, we don’t have any lists of missing people. 6 months. 6 months. We don’t have any lists of missing people. And we’ve already looked and spoke to the management. And if you wanted us to go out and gather that information, we will not acknowledge your exemption. But if you wanted to pay for it, if you want a list from all of the park system, it would be $1.4 million. And if you wanted it just from Yosemite National Park, that would be $34,000.

AJ GENTILE: And that’s to justify what the work involved in compiling that list that they have.

DAVE PAULIDES: Correct. So I was on Coast to Coast. I think I was on Norrie’s show and I talked about this and within a couple days, I get a special agent from the Park Service that calls. And he said, Dave, they are trying to screw you. Let me explain how this works. Each one of our regional offices has so many special agents, right? Every special agent has a handful of missing person case files in their desk. Here’s what it would take, Dave. Each one of those special agents, maybe it takes them 10 minutes to type on a computer each one of the 4 or 5 files, name, date, location, case number.

AJ GENTILE: And this is out of the 6 districts. 6 districts.

DAVE PAULIDES: Each special agent does that. And then in each office, they send that list to their special agent in charge in that office.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

DAVE PAULIDES: They cut and paste that on an Excel spreadsheet.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

DAVE PAULIDES: Dave, maybe we’re talking an hour and a half, 2 hours max. Each one of those special agents in the 6 jurisdictions sends that to the front office. And how long is it going to take them to cut and paste? Dave, they’re absolutely screwing you. That’s how I found out about this.

Compiling the List Independently

AJ GENTILE: And they have the list anyway. This is all just words. They have it anyway because we know for a fact they keep track of who dies in the parks. 100%. They’ve been doing that since 1897. They know every number, but they don’t track who disappears? No, I don’t buy it.

DAVE PAULIDES: Well, they have lists of how much toilet paper is in Yosemite National Park on an inventory list. They have a list on their website of every movie that was made in a national park. And George Knapp said one day, “Dave, they are absolutely lying. They have the list. They don’t want you to have it.”

AJ GENTILE: So you compiled your own list of Yosemite.

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh yeah, that really got me mad. So for the next year and a half, I just did nothing but focus on Yosemite. Wrote a couple of different books that included Yosemite cases. And guess what happened? They released a list of missing people from Yosemite. Son of a gun. And what that told me though —

AJ GENTILE: And how close to that list, to your list, was theirs?

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh, it was — they missed a couple of really old cases that they probably don’t want to even acknowledge, but —

AJ GENTILE: But you had everything. Oh yeah. Yeah.

DAVE PAULIDES: But it also told me that I’m missing a lot of cases from the other parks, obviously.

AJ GENTILE: Of course.

DAVE PAULIDES: But yeah.

Yosemite: The Park That Swallows the Most People

AJ GENTILE: Because you can’t do 2 years per. Is Yosemite the — I don’t want to say dangerous, that’s not the right word — but what park swallows the most number of people? Is it Yosemite?

DAVE PAULIDES: Yosemite.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: Because in looking at Olympic — I think it’s Olympic National Park, right?

DAVE PAULIDES: Olympic.

AJ GENTILE: Olympic. I think they’re up to something like 500 deaths. So if Yosemite’s bigger, a lot of people have died in that park.

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh, yeah.

AJ GENTILE: How long was your list of missing people from Yosemite?

DAVE PAULIDES: It was longer than theirs. I think it was approaching 70, 80.

AJ GENTILE: You never really speculate on what you think is happening with these people.

A Suspicious Death in Yosemite

DAVE PAULIDES: So there was a case I wrote. This is how confusing it gets. There was a woman that disappeared in Yosemite, and a National Park Service ranger took the report. And it was obvious that she was up on a hillside or on a cliff. And her body was found in a position at the bottom that the wording used by the Park Service was, she was launched. Meaning she didn’t fall, she was launched. Now, what they thought, how she was launched, was never made clear, but that was in their report. And it wasn’t a missing person case, that’s just a death case.

AJ GENTILE: Right.

DAVE PAULIDES: So you can get that. And when I looked at that, it was never made clear how she ended up so far from the base of the cliff. Nobody ever said anything about it. It was just suspicious.

AJ GENTILE: And they’re not going to speculate in the case file. No, they probably wish they never wrote launched. Yes. Is that a file that the public can get to or no?

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah.

Missing 411 Washington

AJ GENTILE: Maybe we’ll link to it. Well, since your latest — your latest film is amazing. I watched it a few nights ago. Washington for it was 411 Washington. That’s what we’re calling it.

DAVE PAULIDES: Missing 411 Washington State National Park.

The Ken Arnold Sighting and the Origins of Flying Saucers

AJ GENTILE: It’s so good. It’s Hollywood slick. I hope you’re proud of it. You should be. I want to talk about a couple of cases in the movie. Some of them are really interesting. Jacob Gray is one. It’s very touching. But a few cases are great. But that area, everything in your film is focused around Mount Rainier, which has a very interesting history. So maybe you, or together we can go back to December 10th, 1946, Marine Corps transport planes. Can you walk us through that story?

DAVE PAULIDES: So they had a series of transporters leaving El Toro Marine Base in Southern California, kind of following each other up, and they were going to land at an Air Force base outside of Seattle. And as they get near to the location, the weather started to get bad. A couple of the planes landed, a couple of them detoured, went to other locations. One of the planes never made it and was lost. They didn’t know where it was. They didn’t have a clue.

And from the date that it went missing until the date that they could even start searching was weeks because the weather stayed so bad. There were rumors that maybe it landed in the ocean. There were rumors that maybe it went into Idaho. They were really lost.

And sometime after that, a couple months, a businessman’s leaving Idaho and he’s flying in to do business in Washington. Ken Arnold.

AJ GENTILE: Mm-hmm.

DAVE PAULIDES: And as there was a reward for finding the transport, Arnold is flying up and he says, hey, I’m just going to fly by Rainier because there were some rumors that maybe it crashed there. So as he’s approaching Rainier from Baker, he sees these 3, 4, 5 odd-looking things fly by him.

Well, Arnold is a super smart man, and he times when he sees these things going by two points. He goes by and does the math, and it’s going at speeds that we have nothing in the world that goes that fast. And he described them. And they don’t really look like a common disc UFO. They look unusual, almost like some planes that we have now.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, they kind of look like a delta wing. People have seen these pictures. Yeah.

DAVE PAULIDES: And eventually, Arnold tells the story. And that was really the start of the modern-day UFO era. Right there.

AJ GENTILE: Because Ken described it as moving like it was a saucer skipping across water.

DAVE PAULIDES: Correct.

AJ GENTILE: So it was flying saucers, and that’s how it was coined.

DAVE PAULIDES: Exactly.

The Lost Marine Transport and the Debris Field

AJ GENTILE: And it all starts with Rainier. He didn’t find anything, but people eventually did, right? We know where that transport is now and the bodies. But you can’t get to them.

DAVE PAULIDES: You’re hitting a soft spot with me. Okay, they walked there. Some National Parks people walked in on it. And they confirmed that it had crashed there. And then we brought in some other researchers. And something odd happened there.

Why that plane crashed on that mountain is the million-dollar question. It’s located very high up on a glacier. And the glacier moves. So why hasn’t that plane moved over the decades further down? That’s one of the questions.

The other question is, one of the researchers we brought in, Dave, far from the plane, he found a propeller using Google Earth. And talking to experts, that propeller can’t get there if the plane hit the glacier straight on at that location. It’s almost like there had to be a mid-air event with something for that propeller to land up so far away.

AJ GENTILE: Because you’ve got a debris field. I think there’s almost 3 debris fields because didn’t Dave also find a fuselage at some point?

DAVE PAULIDES: Yes.

AJ GENTILE: Because you make a good point about the glacier. That’s one of the fastest moving glaciers in the country. So every 50, 100 years, things are moving around. Those bodies of those servicemen are in there. They’ll surface, they’ll go back under. And we can’t get up there to do anything about that.

DAVE PAULIDES: Well, when we were doing the film, the crew and I, we’d talk about what happened to No Man Left Behind.

AJ GENTILE: Right. It’s 32 men up there.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah. And if they were able to hike in, why couldn’t they hike the people out? Or put them on sleds and bring them out? A lot of questions.

AJ GENTILE: Does it feel like a mid-air collision to you?

DAVE PAULIDES: I’m not the expert on that, but from the people I heard, it sure seems like something hit it in the air.

Mount Rainier: A Hub of Strange Activity

AJ GENTILE: You make a compelling case in the film. There’s a lot of stuff in there I hadn’t heard before. I hadn’t seen any of that footage before. I thought that plane was just gone. I didn’t know that you found it. But then I started to get angry, like, well, if we could see it on Google Earth, we’ve got to go in there, or at least make an effort for those families. Because I agree, no man left behind.

So Mount Rainier becomes the center of a lot of weird stuff. Flying saucers start there. You said you heard a little bit about the Maury Island incident. That happened up there as well. This is a UFO flies over, drops slag on a fisherman. And this is the first time we get the Men in Black appearing in Seattle. And we’ve got a connection to CIA, JFK, the whole thing. But it all starts right here at Rainier. So what is it about that place? It’s got all this weird stuff. Is Bigfoot up there too? Are there orbs?

DAVE PAULIDES: So in our movie American Sasquatch: Man, Myth, or Monster, we filmed— there’s footage in there at the base of Rainier of a woman that lives there that captured a Bigfoot. It appears it’s coming in and out of a portal, and she’s had tracks up there. This is right at the base of the park, probably within 2 miles, and there’s been a series of Bigfoot sightings up there over the years, a lot of it related to orbs and other things.

AJ GENTILE: Her footage was good. I’m on the fence about Bigfoot. I’m very skeptical of all of it because of all the hoaxing, but her footage was good.

And you did a great job in the film— and I said this to you before we went on the air, but I’ll say it now— there’s a famous piece of footage. It was filmed in IMAX from this Canadian company or whatever that shows what looks like a Bigfoot behind a bunch of caribou. You guys can find this online. But Dave went and got the original print. So when it shows up on the film, I know it’s a hoax, and I go, “Oh no, Dave, don’t fall for this.” But he got the original print, and you can clearly see that it’s a guy on a bike?

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah, yeah. When you look at it under IMAX with the big frames, it’s so much easier to see.

AJ GENTILE: You could see everything. It was really stunning.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah, we were kind of wondering how the people were going to respond to that. People are going to get mad. I think it’s been all positive. I haven’t heard anyone really come back and attack us about it.

AJ GENTILE: No, I mean, people are still out there saying it’s real.

DAVE PAULIDES: Really? Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, they email me.

DAVE PAULIDES: I don’t know how you could after watching that. It looks like a guy on a bike to me.

AJ GENTILE: Definitely. He’s got a hat, he’s got a backpack. It’s totally clear. Is Mount Rainier one of the clusters that you’re seeing?

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh yeah, it is for sure. Rainier has so many. I mean, we ran out of time on that film. It’s one of the longer films I’ve ever made, and we covered a lot of cases there, but they’re near the end. We just kind of piled on and listed them, but they all kind of follow the same track. There’s no scent trail by the dogs, there’s no tracks found. There’s no body. There’s no backpack. There’s no anything. And it replicates itself time after time after time. And it’s all around the mountain.

AJ GENTILE: What I found stunning was how far apart, like the last known sighting, and then we find half a tent and all this. It’s so spread far apart.

The Case of Jacob Gray

AJ GENTILE: Can you tell the story of Jacob Gray?

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh, that was a tough story for me to tell.

AJ GENTILE: It was.

DAVE PAULIDES: He was a young man from Santa Cruz, California. I lived in Santa Cruz for a long time. It’s a really nice city. And he was a big surfer, swimmer, athlete. And he went up to see his grandmother, who lived in Port Angeles, just outside the park. And he was going to leave from there and eventually ride across country on a bike. And then he wanted to tour the park at his kind of leisure.

Well, one morning he gets up real early, doesn’t tell anybody, just goes to take off and goes into the park. He rides in, nobody knows exactly why, but he’s pretty far into the park and he leaves his bike and disappears. Park Service is notified. His dad is a lot like me, because if I had heard this and it was my son, I would have been there within a day. And his dad is there.

AJ GENTILE: Quickly. He’s a warrior. Oh yeah, he swam that river.

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh yeah. And the Park Service tells his dad, “Your son’s— the bike’s right next to a river. Your son’s in the river.” And he goes, “What do you mean?” And they go, “Oh, we kind of hiked the river and we saw some marks on the side of a rock.”

And so Jacob’s dad’s thinking, hey, my son swims in 48 to 54 degree weather, every day just about, in Santa Cruz. He lives through huge waves. He swims in ocean water. If he’s in that river, he’s just going to swim down a little bit and he’s going to come out.

AJ GENTILE: Yes.

DAVE PAULIDES: And he’s thinking, “Oh, these guys are lying to me.” He says, “Okay, I’ll go in the river and I’ll follow it 10 miles down and I’ll search every nook and cranny, but I don’t believe he’s in that river.” They go, “No, he’s dead. He’s in the river.”

So the dad says okay, gets a wetsuit, he goes in the river, and for a couple days he just swims it. Told me he found some dead animals. And says, “No, my son’s not in the river. He never was in that river. I don’t know why they’re lying to me, but Dave, I knew he wasn’t in the river.”

Was his the case where they refused the helicopter? They refused helicopters, drones, canines.

AJ GENTILE: Why?

DAVE PAULIDES: Canines.

The Case of Jacob and Gilbert Gilman

AJ GENTILE: Because sometimes, I mean frequently, they allow all that stuff. Why did Jacob not get the same treatment?

DAVE PAULIDES: So just later on in the film, I highlighted a case where a young lady disappeared about 8 air miles from Jacob on a different river. They had multiple helicopters, multiple drones, same park, same management, but for Jacob, no. For her, yes. Why?

So Jacob’s dad was at the premiere, and he never knew about this girl, and he never knew how badly he was screwed over by the Park Service. And at the end, he came, gave me a big hug, and goes, “Dave, that was stellar.” He goes, “Why is the Park Service lying like that? Why are they treating one case of a missing person one way and another 180 degrees different? And applying different rules to different cases. I don’t get it.”

Make a long story short, eventually Jacob is found. No, not in a river. Way, way up a mountain.

AJ GENTILE: Up a mountain?

DAVE PAULIDES: Up a mountain.

AJ GENTILE: And this is what, 15, 16, 18 miles away?

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh, yeah. And a trail of clothes going to the top. And what I explained to his dad is that, number one, why did his bike stay here? Why didn’t he just keep riding the bike another 4 or 5 miles to the trailhead? Why did he leave it here? And then at the top of the mountain, they said that there was a trail of clothes. So if he was getting hypothermic, all he had to do was hike down the mountain because it’d get a lot warmer quick. But no, he kept going up way above treeline.

AJ GENTILE: Now, hypothermic people will sometimes take off their clothes. That’s a natural reaction. But they normally don’t hike up a mountain 12 miles while they do that.

DAVE PAULIDES: No. And obviously your body will tell you when you start getting cold. A lot of really hypothermic cases, there’s no choice. You’re confined, you’re injured, you’re in a valley, there’s no way out. And you die that way. He had every option in the world different. So really what happened there, that’s the real million-dollar question. And if they would have brought in a helicopter and searched, or if they would have brought in a canine to hit that trailhead, they probably would have found him.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

DAVE PAULIDES: So I don’t understand it. At all.

The Kindness Award

AJ GENTILE: It was a touching part of the film. Didn’t you give that bike shop owner a kindness award?

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah. So when Jacob was staying at his grandma’s house, he took a ride one day and he was trying to fix up the bike for the trip across the U.S. and he rode into this man’s cycle shop, small shop. He was explaining to this man what he was trying to do. And this is an older Asian man, very kind person. And he goes, “Dave, I was listening to what he needed and things, and I could tell he didn’t have a job and he was kind of working off of savings. And I said, hey, I want to take the journey with you. So here, you take these gloves. They fit you good. You use those.” And then he put a new back tire on. He goes, “No, you’re going to roll on my tire.” He goes, “Well, what do I owe you? What do I owe you?” “No, no, no, no, this is on me.”

So every one of my videos I talk about kindness. And I said, sometimes when you’re at the store and a clerk’s ringing you up, maybe she’s having a really bad day, or you go to the post office and you tend to take advantage of these people and don’t think what they’re doing for us every day. Maybe smile. “Hey, how’s your day going? What have you been up to?” I talk about that in every one of my videos. Something about kindness.

AJ GENTILE: It does. Not that hard.

DAVE PAULIDES: Not that hard. And what this man did for him was unbelievable. When you really think about it, he would’ve never known in a million years that he was going to be standing up in front of 1,000 people with me giving him this award. He was crying.

AJ GENTILE: Of course. What a nice moment.

DAVE PAULIDES: And I don’t know. It was a very sad, sad encounter, the way it all ended. But yeah, he deserved that.

Living With the Weight of These Cases

AJ GENTILE: Does it get hard on you sometimes just living in this world every day? You deal with nothing but pain.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it does. Every once in a while I run across a case like that one that struck my heart. It reminded me of my own son. And yeah, I try not to let it get to me. I try to keep it as impersonal as possible, but every once in a while these cases just hit at my core.

AJ GENTILE: I don’t think you should be that impersonal though. Sometimes you really help these families just by talking to them because it’s like someone’s finally listening.

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh, I get a lot of hate mail. “Why are you doing this? You’re making this publicity to just push your own podcast.” And I think, out of all the people I’ve ever talked to, I’ve ever written about, I’ve never had one person get mad at me.

AJ GENTILE: Don’t read the comments. Don’t read it. Just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s working fine.

The Gilbert Gilman Case

AJ GENTILE: There’s one case that’s really fascinated me. I don’t know if it’s the same park. Gilbert Gilman.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: And I don’t know how we tell the story to get all the information in, but maybe I’ll let you get started and I’ll just add some color. But this is a very interesting case. Gilbert Gilman. So we’ll go 2005, Thunderbird convertible pulls into the park, has an exchange with a ranger. Walks out to the park with his camera and that’s it. So what about Gilbert?

DAVE PAULIDES: So Gilbert was in Army intelligence, spoke 6 languages, has a Bronze Star, got into promoting people for political positions, and he was pushing a woman that didn’t win for Congress in Washington. She was appointed by the governor to be the head of the Public Retirement System in Washington. He was picked by her to be the assistant director.

Super smart guy, single, lived in Washington, had just purchased this Thunderbird, was real proud of it. Pulls into the park, playing his music loud. Ranger comes up, says, “Hey, you mind turning the music down?” He goes, “Well, do you at least like it? That’s what she said.” And she goes, “No, I like it, but could you turn it down?” “Yeah.”

He’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, and flip-flops, a camera around his neck, gets out, walks into Olympic National Park. Pretty busy area where he disappeared. Walked up the trail. That was it. He’s supposed to be at a meeting for the retirement system the following day. The director reports him missing. Big search. Huge search.

AJ GENTILE: Well, talk about that search because that’s a big clue to me. Because Jacob gets nothing, Gilbert gets 5,000 hours of federal search, all kinds of air, everything, ground pounders. That’s a big response for just an assistant pension fund manager.

DAVE PAULIDES: Huge. But I think everybody knew why he was getting that — it’s because of the political tie-ins that everyone had to this case.

AJ GENTILE: I think it’s something else. Because, all right, I know a little bit about the intelligence community, as my audience knows. We’ve got 82nd Airborne, 2 Bronze Stars, expert trooper. Okay, that’s a feeder into a certain system. Speaks all these languages. His posts are at embassies. So that to me sounds like he’s undercover with State. 3 of those languages he speaks are Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. One of his posts is Mongolia. Why Mongolia? Because it’s our only listening post that borders on land with Russia and China. He’s in Yemen. He’s an interrogator as a contractor in Iraq. He’s doing all this stuff. So that response to me sounds like that’s a guy who knows things that we’ve got to find out what happened. Where’d he go? Was he picked up by agents? Was something nefarious? Did he fake his death?

DAVE PAULIDES: So in hindsight, the ranger believed that he purposely had the music loud so that he would be seen by a ranger and acknowledge that he was there.

AJ GENTILE: That wasn’t in the film. That’s a nice note.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah. And she thought — Lustig was her name — she thought it was odd the way he was dressed. That wouldn’t be the way that you and I would go hiking, right? He didn’t wear hiking shoes, nothing. It just seemed odd, especially for a trained Ranger.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

DAVE PAULIDES: So his girlfriend, who lives on the East Coast, flies out. His mom lives on the East Coast, flies out. Mom’s in her 90s, sharp as a tack. So they’re out there, they’re monitoring the search. Search goes on for a week and a half, 2 weeks. They’re not finding anything. They put divers in the water, they had helicopters in the air, they had everything you can imagine. They searched his house hoping to find some clue. Nothing.

AJ GENTILE: Who searched his house?

DAVE PAULIDES: The special agent from the Park Service with the parents went to the house.

The FBI, the Apartment, and the Yellow Tablet

So, as the mom — the mom’s wealthy, really wealthy. She had a penthouse apartment in Chicago that he stayed at occasionally and had a room there. And they lived on Park Avenue in New York. That’s where she lived. As they’re there at the park and this is going on, she gets a call from the management team in Chicago. Says, “Hey, Mrs. Gilman, just to let you know, a couple FBI agents were here today and they needed to get into your apartment to get some things, and we let them in and they left with some things.”

She’s telling me the story. I says, “Mrs. Gilman, they can’t do that.” She goes, “No?” I said, “No, they ought to have a search warrant.” And number one, your management team has no right to let them in. Oh, really? Just a nice innocent lady. I said, no, no. And she goes, well, I said, did you figure out what they took? Yeah. Gilbert, the last time he was there, wrote on a yellow tablet in Arabic. Because I don’t know what he wrote, but I kept it there. They took that. And then there were two books that he asked me to get for him that were on his nightstand. And she goes, “Dave, I always thought that that was a clue to all this.”

I said, “Clue?” She goes, “Yeah, clue.”

So before I interviewed Mrs. Gilman, I interviewed the girlfriend who had seen Gilbert about a month before he disappeared. And we start talking, and I said, “Did he have any ties to the CIA?” She kind of goes, “I don’t think I could talk about that.” I said, “What do you mean you can’t talk about that? You’re not under a nondisclosure, you’re not under a secrecy oath, you can talk about anything.”

She said that about a week before he disappeared, he had called her. And she said, “I was in the middle of something and I just couldn’t talk and I had to break away.” And he goes, “But—” And she said, “You know, I always thought that he was trying to tell me something, but I had to go and I feel really bad about that.” And she was upset.

So then I go on and I talk to Mrs. Gilman. And in the end, it’s the feeling that this was probably a planned event, and that he went away for some type of governmental issue, and it was all orchestrated by the government.

So when I talked to others about this, I said, I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Why was I able to figure this out and the Park Service didn’t? Why is he listed as a missing person on the Park Service if there’s something else going on, which we just exposed? Why are they lying to the public? I don’t get it.

Now, if this happened once, okay, so be it. But then I ask you, AJ, how many times has the park been used as a point to extricate someone from society and put him into service someplace else, and we don’t know about it?

AJ GENTILE: No, but we know it happens. Does your gut say that he’s out there somewhere? He’s deep, deep undercover.

DAVE PAULIDES: The question I really have is, let’s say the CIA needed him for some reason. What’s the need to extricate him from society and make him appear as a missing person versus just take him in and use him? What’s that? I don’t get it. And I don’t understand. I’ve talked to other military people and they said, “This makes sense to us, Dave.”

AJ GENTILE: No, it’s a weird way to do that. What do you think? Why do you think he was trying to call attention to himself? To make sure that he was seen?

The Gilbert Case: Family, Loyalty, and Unanswered Questions

DAVE PAULIDES: To use the missing in a national park as cover.

AJ GENTILE: His mother was more open about his intelligence work. Apparently they had a bit of a kind of a code. Yeah. But his girlfriend, man, she wouldn’t say anything. She knows something. Oh yeah. I was waiting for you to ask and you finally did. “I don’t think I can talk about that.” It’s like, well, I know what that means.

DAVE PAULIDES: The other point that I’ll make here, and I don’t care if Gilbert watched this, but at the end of the interview with his mom, I said, you know, there’s a decent chance that Gilbert may see this someday. What do you want to tell him? “Please come home. I miss you.” Come on. How could you do that to your mom? How could anybody do that to their family?

AJ GENTILE: I couldn’t. No, that’s why I kind of lean away from that theory a little bit, because I don’t feel like he would do that. When someone’s pulled out like that for a mission, it usually is someone with a little bit of cleaner background, like no one left behind to ask questions. A wealthy mom could be a pain. Maybe, you know, that could be a pain. You think he’s out there? I do. I hope you’re right.

DAVE PAULIDES: And I say that just because the mom feels that he is, and so does the girlfriend. I think the girlfriend does.

A Personal Loss: AJ’s Story About Pat

AJ GENTILE: I never talk about this, but probably my best friend in my whole life was, I’ll say pre-agency, and in great shape. And he was working in Colombia, Bogotá embassy, and he died of a brain aneurysm on a run when he was 25. But we, meaning we and the family, couldn’t get an autopsy, couldn’t see anything. The body came home in a welded stainless steel casket. No further. I have his flag in my office. It’s all very strange. State Department would not cooperate with the family at all.

So I continue to tell myself that Pat’s out there, that all of that was just staged so he can do that work. But then again, you left a lot of us hurting.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: But if something happens— Pat had called me 2 days earlier and he said, “If something happens to me, you gotta come get me.” I wish I still had that tape. What else was happening in Washington that I didn’t realize that D.B. Cooper landed out there as well. What is it about granite?

Granite, Water, and the Disappearances

DAVE PAULIDES: So when you really get in and get into the minutia about granite, it’s an interesting mineral and it has a lot of properties that don’t exist in other rocks and minerals. And just to get to the core of it, where’s the most granite in our world? Yosemite. And when I say that granite’s involved in a lot of the disappearances and water is, well, what goes through the middle of that big, huge granite field in Yosemite? The Merced River.

AJ GENTILE: What are some of the properties of granite that are interesting? Its conductivity. It creates electricity. Piezoelectricity. Especially with the river. Magnetic field, a lot of weird stuff. A lot.

DAVE PAULIDES: And I didn’t know that when I first started. I had people a lot smarter than me write to me and say, “Hey, Dave, you’re on to something here, pay attention to this.” And not just Yosemite, but when you get up higher in altitude above treeline, in a lot of these places where people disappear, there’s a lot of granite boulders.

So when you hear— I’ve heard about this more than once— that orbs are seen in Yosemite a lot. And where do orbs tend to go? Right into the rock. So that’s a hard thing to wrap your head around. If there’s something inside that orb going into that rock, how does that happen?

AJ GENTILE: They see it at Rainier, they see it at Shasta, it goes right into the side of the rock. 100%. Like the rock doesn’t open. No, it just goes.

DAVE PAULIDES: How does that happen?

FLIR Research and the Unseen Activity at Rainier

AJ GENTILE: I think you have captured orbs in your film during one of the shots. Unless you pulled that footage. But there was stuff in the sky during one of those shots. Maybe it was during the FLIR test. Maybe. I don’t know if you remember that from the film, but your FLIR expert’s amazing. And as you’re shooting, there’s stuff moving in the sky, moving all around. I don’t know if you remember that.

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh, yeah. So that individual is used right now at Skinwalker Ranch on their series doing that research. And he called me. He lives in Seattle. He called me and said, “Dave, I want to help you if you can have— if I could ever use you.” And he has a FLIR device that he developed himself that shows about 10 times more than a normal FLIR would show. And we set up on Rainier and in 6 hours, I can’t count how many things we saw flying in and out of there. And it’s hard to wrap your mind around how busy it can be— and we’re not even seeing it, we can’t see it with the naked eye.

AJ GENTILE: That’s one of those claims that kind of connects to Bigfoot for me. When skeptics say, “How does it disappear?” Well, if something can somehow shift into ultraviolet or infrared, you wouldn’t see it. But it’s still there. You just can’t see it.

Bigfoot, Orbs, and UFOs: The Pennsylvania Connection

DAVE PAULIDES: There was research done in Pennsylvania where Bigfoot has been seen there so many times, and one of the times a Bigfoot was seen holding an orb in its hand.

AJ GENTILE: What?

DAVE PAULIDES: Yes, and this was in the proximity of where a UFO was seen hovering above other Bigfoot. So that association between orbs, Bigfoot, and UFOs is almost like a weekly occurrence out there in parts of Pennsylvania.

AJ GENTILE: Sounds like that story from earlier where the orb comes down and the creatures come out. Exactly. If you go back to the native legends, because with the Hoopa, are the orbs part of those stories too?

DAVE PAULIDES: Yes. Because if you really think about that story on the California-Oregon border, that glowing moon could be an orb. Just by the definition. We just don’t know.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, the tribe around Shasta, they are forbidden to go above the tree line because that’s the home of the sky people.

The Carl Landers Case: Vanished on Mount Shasta

DAVE PAULIDES: You ever seen Vanished? Yes. So that’s owned by the History Channel. You can watch it right now on Amazon for a couple bucks. But they hired me to do an hour and a half special about missing people. We went up onto Shasta about some missing people. And it’s absolutely— where that person went, there’s no crevices, there’s no place to go.

AJ GENTILE: Now you’re getting me excited. Do you remember any of those cases from Shasta? Because I have questions.

DAVE PAULIDES: So the man that disappeared on Shasta, he was up there with a pilot from American Airlines and another man that owned an import-export business from San Francisco, and they had camped. His name was Carl, and they’d camped on the side of Shasta. He didn’t feel good that night, and they were putting the camp together, and they said, “Hey, Carl, you take off ahead of us and we’ll follow you up.”

AJ GENTILE: This is the Carl Landers case.

DAVE PAULIDES: Carl Landers. Yes. And he’s going up, and they said, “Yeah, we saw him climbing up.” And then you hit a position where a ranger checks you in before you go up. Well, the ranger wasn’t there that day, and they don’t know. There was some thinking that somebody saw him making that final jump to the summit. Others said they hadn’t seen him.

So long story short, the head of search and rescue for the state of California took over that search up in that area. And they put a Cobra helicopter at the summit over 14,000 feet and dropped searchers and had them come down like a spider web on the mountain. They did that 3 times. And that search official said, “Dave, he’s not on it. He may be in it, but he’s not on it. Or he’s either up there or he’s in there, but he’s not on it. I guarantee he’s not on it.”

AJ GENTILE: “There’s no place to go.” I mean, Landers disappeared basically in plain sight with good visibility in front of two companions. 100%. And he was a trained hiker. Good shape. 69 years old. Yeah, still nothing on him. Very few options on that.

DAVE PAULIDES: Very few options about what could have happened. And the searcher said, “Dave, I’m baffled. I have no idea.”

AJ GENTILE: Did you ever pull his report, his case? Well, there’s— FOIA?

DAVE PAULIDES: So I got unlimited access to the head searcher, and he was as transparent as you could be. So he would have been the one writing them. And so that would have been a state issue, not federal. State isn’t covered by FOIA, only feds. So I never even tried, but anytime I wanted to contact him, I could have.

More Shasta Disappearances: The Lesnar Cardenas Case

AJ GENTILE: So that was a long time ago, but just last year, I don’t know if you looked into the Lesnar Cardenas case. Lesnar Cardenas, he’s driving, he flips his car, calls for help. Police respond, he’s not there. Apparently he hitches a ride home, grabs his hiking gear, goes to a trailhead in Shasta, and just says, “That’s it.” And that’s the last we’ve heard of Cardenas.

DAVE PAULIDES: I hadn’t heard that. There is another case on Shasta within the last year involving a younger man, like in his 20s, disappeared on the mountain too. I did a video about it.

AJ GENTILE: And just nothing. Nothing. When a case comes across your desk, what makes it a 411 case and what makes it not?

The 411 Profile Points

DAVE PAULIDES: Fit in those profile points. Tracking dogs can’t find the scent. Professional trackers can’t find tracks. Point of separation— you and I are hiking together, hey, you go that way, I’ll go this way, and something happens to one of us. Happens all the time. A weather event, either when the person disappears or when search and rescue starts. Granite. If the person is found, 9 times out of 10 they have memory loss and they don’t remember how they got lost or disappeared.

AJ GENTILE: Those cases are wild. They are. What was that one case where the guy heard the bagpipes? Do you remember that one?

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh yeah, that was an Olympic case. Olympic National Park.

AJ GENTILE: You want to tell that one real fast? Because he disappeared twice, didn’t he?

The Bagpipes Case: Olympic National Park

DAVE PAULIDES: So he gets dropped off by a girlfriend and he’s going to hike Olympic. He spends a few days, he gets lost. And he’s just camping out, wakes up one day and he’s looking for something to drink or something to eat. And he hears bagpipes. And he kept walking towards those bagpipes. So there’s a search and rescue team on the mountain looking for somebody else. Those bagpipes drew that man and led him right into the middle of that search party’s camp.

AJ GENTILE: Didn’t they say he was like dirty and crazy and thirsty?

DAVE PAULIDES: Correct. How crazy is that?

AJ GENTILE: And then what happens to him? He just wanders off again?

DAVE PAULIDES: So I forgot who it was, but while he was missing, it was like a father-in-law or stepfather— it wasn’t his direct father, but one of those people died. And there was some theory by some that maybe those bagpipes had something to do with a father or father-in-law that died, that led him to safety.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah. That’s a nice touch.

DAVE PAULIDES: Gotta admit, it’s pretty odd.

AJ GENTILE: Yes. But I mean, if you’re dying of thirst, all kinds of crazy things you’re going to see and hear.

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh, and no doubt, but to lead you to the middle of the search camp, that’s pretty remarkable.

Grandma Cappy: The Underground Encounter on Shasta

AJ GENTILE: That’s a great case. All right, we’ll take a quick break, come back, we’ll talk some more 411 and we’ll get into some Bigfoot. Right back.

So I’ve been asked to ask you about one Shasta case, and if you don’t remember, you don’t, that’s fine. Do you remember the Grandma Cappy case?

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh, yes.

AJ GENTILE: You do? Okay, thank goodness. Such a weird story.

DAVE PAULIDES: Very weird story. Little boy gets lost. Then he tells a story that he gets taken down underground. And there’s this woman. She may have been a robotic type woman because she emitted some kind of sparks and things. And the thing that was very odd about it is that he was taken underground. And for a little kid to come up with this story is just bizarre. And the way he described this woman was bizarre. I would have ignored it and not given it two cents, except that for a little boy to come up with that story, I don’t know if it’s possible.

The Strange Case of the Missing Boy

AJ GENTILE: The way he was found was weird. Yeah. For you guys that don’t know, this little boy is hanging out with his grandmother, Grandma Cappy, and says, “I like you better than the other Grandma Cappy.” And mom says, “What?” And he tells this story about being underground with someone who looks like his grandmother, makes him defecate on paper or something like that. It’s too weird to make up. Then search and rescue can’t find him. They search the whole area, and then he just appears out of the brush. And he’s fine.

DAVE PAULIDES: And he’s found in a location that was previously searched. Yes. Which is one of our profile points. And I wish I could have interviewed the child one-on-one, but we didn’t get that option. So we have to just kind of listen to what his grandmother said. It’s one of a kind. I’ve never heard of anything similar to that. No, it’s a really weird one.

AJ GENTILE: And I think his grandmother was camping there once and woke up with puncture wounds. I don’t know if you remember that part of the story, which was corroborated by a friend of hers. And they thought it was spider bites or something. Yeah. But I think it sounds like DNA extraction for the androids that are under there. That’s a great story. It is a wild one.

Alright, we’re good. Let’s talk some Bigfoot. So you know, I don’t like Bigfoot. I don’t like that. I don’t like it.

DAVE PAULIDES: Well, then why are we talking about it?

AJ GENTILE: Because if I don’t, I’ll get in trouble. When I say I don’t like it, that’s not what I mean. I want all these stories to be real. I approach them as a hopeful skeptic, like Bigfoot, I want it to be real. But there’s so much noise. I don’t know what to believe. So in my mini-doc, I debunked pretty much everything except Patterson-Gimlin film. I couldn’t debunk it. And the Freeman video, I couldn’t debunk that. Is there any other video?

Bigfoot: Language, DNA, and the Evidence

DAVE PAULIDES: So when I go to a conference, I’m going to give you a list of things to think about. And this is what — this is how I started. And I start off talking about a man named Ron Moorhead, who had the Sierra Camp. And it was a camp with hunters that went to it for decades. And they had these encounters at the camp with what probably was a Bigfoot. And he actually brought a recorder up and recorded the sounds that this thing made in camp.

He then turned the recordings over to a University of Wyoming professor, Rodney Kurland, University of Wyoming, and he said that these were not digitalized, they were not pre-recorded, they were a lower frequency than what humans could produce.

AJ GENTILE: They’re very unsettling. They’re creepy. They are creepy.

DAVE PAULIDES: Then they were turned over to a man named Scott Nelson, 25 years Navy cryptolinguist specialist, 3-time Navy postgraduate school. He identified it as perfect language. We just don’t know what they were saying, but he said, “That is language.”

Now, there’s a show called Expedition Bigfoot, Season 4, Episode 5. They hung microphones out there and they recorded some things. They turned that over to a professor of linguistics, Dr. Ron Kasper. He stated those sounded like hominid, meaning they were articulated in the mouth. Asked by a producer if he thought Bigfoot produced language, Dr. Kasper said yes. And he said Kasper stated that there are reports of yetis using language.

Season 3, Episode 9 interviewed with Hank Bernard, a native elder. He stated that they are a tribe of people, they can bend light around them. Mariah Mayer, a good friend of mine, by the way, she and I did a cruise together. She said, “Something ran right by me, but I couldn’t see it.” We didn’t walk through any of this. It’s like she walked through a portal, didn’t recognize anything. Something runs right by her. She says she doesn’t see it.

Dr. Rob Alley wrote a book called Raincoast Sasquatch, one of the best books out there about Bigfoot. And he had multiple, multiple reports of Bigfoot swimming amongst the inner islands. Swimming? Swimming amongst the inner islands in Alaska. This was a common occurrence in Alaska. Now, apes and gorillas don’t like to swim. Bigfoot likes to swim.

AJ GENTILE: And apes and gorillas can’t make language. They don’t — obviously not, right? They don’t have the anatomy. No.

DAVE PAULIDES: So I’m going to get to that. Okay, don’t jump ahead.

AJ GENTILE: Sorry, I didn’t want to step on the punchline.

DAVE PAULIDES: So in our movie American Sasquatch, Colm Kelleher, the chief investigator at Skinwalker Ranch, where they saw this biped come out of what looked like a portal. 6-foot tall, 400 pounds. NASA website 2015 said portals are real. Jonathan Dover —

AJ GENTILE: What did NASA say in 2015? Portals are real.

DAVE PAULIDES: Portals are real. It’s on their website. Okay. Jonathan Dover. You ever heard of him? Another guy you would really like. He’s a former Navajo Ranger. He’s 30 years in law enforcement, graduated from the Federal Law Enforcement School. Super smart man. He’s Navajo. As a Ranger, they were like the fishing and game for the Navajo tribe.

He gets called into his chief’s office one day after 20 years. And he and his partner get called in and said, “Hey, you’re my new Bigfoot and UFO expert. We’ve had too many of these. You’re going to go investigate and you’re going to be the expert.” He goes, “Hey, I don’t have any interest in this.” He goes, “I don’t care. You’re going to go do it.”

Jonathan went out and for 10 years did nothing but investigate Bigfoot and UFOs. He said, “Dave, I can’t tell you the number of times I walked and followed a path of tracks that ended in the middle of nowhere. Just suddenly stopped.”

DNA studies. When I was working for the technology people, one of the things they wanted was DNA. So I went on Coast to Coast. Who wanted DNA? The people that paid me to go out and do the research.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, they wanted you to collect DNA? Yeah, not yours.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah. No, they didn’t, they’re not getting mine.

AJ GENTILE: Mine either. 23andMe, no thank you.

Collecting and Analyzing Bigfoot DNA

DAVE PAULIDES: So we went on Coast to Coast and we got 14 states, different specimens, 2 Canadian provinces. When the people sent in hair, we need the follicle for the DNA. So when they sent in the hair, at first we sent it to a hair and fiber expert. Now, a lot of people don’t understand this, but there are people in the FBI and people on the outside that look at hair and fiber every day and use it for criminal prosecutions. Everybody’s hair looks different. I mean, human to ape to gorilla to deer to elk, everyone is different. Bigfoot hair doesn’t look like anything else on the planet.

AJ GENTILE: How do you know it’s Bigfoot hair?

DAVE PAULIDES: If I’m a witness, and I see the Bigfoot walk over to — and this is exactly how it happened. They walk over to a shed on the property. This is in Hoopa. And they lean over this shed, and they’re going through the big plastic bags in the shed. They pick out 2 bags, they pull back over the shed. At the point where they’re pulling back over, right at the corner, it pulled out hair.

One of our guys went out there, accumulated the hair. The hair was sent to a hair and fiber expert. It’s nothing that’s ever been identified on the planet. This is replicated time after time. But when you look at it under a microscope, it looks like it has scales on the hair. It’s very unique looking. I could teach you, AJ, in 10 minutes how to be a hair and fiber expert and identify Bigfoot hair. Looks like nothing else.

These 100-plus samples that we had of just hair — they all look just like that, but they’re like nothing else on the planet. They can’t be mistaken. So you have the follicle, you can get the DNA, but you can only get mitochondrial DNA, meaning from the maternal side, from her. But we also, in our specimen analysis and collection, we got blood, saliva, tissue.

AJ GENTILE: Let me help them understand. So it’s hard to collect fraternal DNA because that only occurs in the nucleus and it degrades very, very quickly. Mitochondrial DNA is all over the cells. There are 2,000 in every cell, and it’s very hardy. So easy to collect the maternal side, fraternal almost impossible.

DAVE PAULIDES: So we did get saliva, blood, fingernail, and tissue.

AJ GENTILE: I didn’t know you had all of that. Yep. Because I’m very aware of the Sykes DNA study in Oxford. I follow all of that stuff, and I lean towards Sykes’s. I didn’t know you had blood and saliva and tissue.

DAVE PAULIDES: So Sykes is from these 115 samples from all over North America. Okay. So on Sykes, do you know that Dr. Meldrum sent Sykes Bigfoot hair?

AJ GENTILE: I didn’t know he did. He did. I think he just passed, didn’t he? He did. That’s a shame.

DAVE PAULIDES: So Dr. Meldrum and I did two different cruises together, and were the speakers on the cruise. I asked him that. I said, “Did you send Sykes hair?” He goes, “Yeah.” I go, “What did Sykes do with it?” He told me, “Dave, that it was bear.”

AJ GENTILE: That’s what’s in the study, is American black bear.

DAVE PAULIDES: So I’m going to tell you flat out, it’s a lie. That’s what Meldrum said.

AJ GENTILE: Dr. Meldrum, smart guy, and he’s a tenured professor.

DAVE PAULIDES: I could teach you in 10 minutes to identify Bigfoot hair. You mean to tell me that you’re trying to tell me that Meldrum sent and mistook black bear hair for Bigfoot? Impossible. You can’t do that. I don’t believe it. Sykes took all of the DNA samples and never vetted them through a hair and fiber expert, just went straight to DNA.

AJ GENTILE: So he’s a geneticist, that’s what he does.

DAVE PAULIDES: But wait a minute, that’s idiotic. Do you know how much that one sample probably cost him to do at that point? Tens of thousands of dollars. Why would you do that? That makes no sense. That’s why I don’t believe anything he did.

AJ GENTILE: Fair enough. I wanted your reaction.

Non-Human Hair, Human DNA, and the Russian Connection

DAVE PAULIDES: Okay, so let’s go on. So we have non-human hair yielding human mitochondrial DNA. Non-human hair yielding mitochondrial human DNA. Now that on the maternal side comes back to 12,000 years into the Middle East. Now we got nuclear DNA, but when we passed it through GenBank, the world receptacle for DNA — 352 billion base pairs when we did it — it had never been categorized in GenBank. It didn’t exist.

Now, when the movie came out and we interviewed other experts in other arenas, there were experts doing DNA studies on the elongated skulls. Do you know that they couldn’t get nuclear DNA on those skulls either?

AJ GENTILE: But they can get mitochondrial DNA. Yes. But if you take a contaminated sample and run it through a test like PowerPlex, you’re going to get mitochondrial DNA perfectly, and you’re going to get fraternal DNA that doesn’t match anything because it’s called an amplification error. So that’s what you would actually expect.

DAVE PAULIDES: So that’s exactly what the press tried to push on the public. But we used — there’s only like 10 of these in the world at the time — the Louisiana Crime Lab, completely automated system, extracts, analyzes, computes, does everything. And that came back and gave us what was called a Q30 score. That’s like a score about how accurate their measurements are. It was in the stratosphere for accuracy.

Then the press came back and said, “Well, the reason it says human” — they’re still thinking it’s ape and gorilla, right — “the reason it’s human is because it’s contaminated.” So they never said this in front of me, but I’ll say it in front of you. If my DNA contaminated those things, it’s going to show I’m Greek and Russian. It’s not going to show Middle East. And on the male side, it’s going to show Greek. It’s not going to show nothing nuclear. So that’s impossible for one of us humans to contaminate it. And the problem was, is that there was nobody educated to counter these ludicrous things that were being said.

Now, let’s keep going here. This is important. There’s only one country in the world, AJ, that committed their funds to studying the topic. Do you know who it is?

AJ GENTILE: Russians.

DAVE PAULIDES: The Russians spent millions. They got their best scientists in the world to study it. You know what the conclusion they came to? Human. One of their researchers came here to a conference in Colorado, and I was invited to it. I walked into the back room at the conference, and they’re holding my two books. And he said, “Dave, you’re the only one that’s told the truth. Everyone else is lying. We know what the truth is because we’ve done it in Russia. Now you’re finally telling the truth here.”

AJ GENTILE: Did the Russians get the nuclear DNA?

The Silatik Tribe and the Human Connection

DAVE PAULIDES: No, they got exactly what I had found. But you see, they believed that it actually bred with a human, and they were trying to, at that time, extract the DNA from bones that were buried like 50, 70 years ago, and they were having a difficult time with it. But they said, “We know you’re right, Dave.” That’s coming from the country that did it. So that’s pretty powerful.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, Russia invests in all that stuff. They do.

DAVE PAULIDES: So in 1924, I was doing a review on articles about missing people. In 1924, I found an article in the Oregonian newspaper. I almost fell out of my chair thinking, I’ve gone to 100 conferences on Bigfoot. I’ve never seen anyone present this. The title of the article on the front page of the Oregonian was “Big Hairy Indians, Back of the Ape Tail.” I said, what? They called it the Silatik tribe. They said that they’re covered with hair.

AJ GENTILE: I know the tribe.

DAVE PAULIDES: Bear and bird language they have. They imitate anything in the woods. They have supernatural powers. They can kill game with hypnotism. Other tribes, the Quileute, Lummi, and the Quinault, have traded with them.

AJ GENTILE: I’ve heard this, that they traded with them. They would— they had a relationship with the—

DAVE PAULIDES: Correct.

AJ GENTILE: I’ve heard it. Yeah. And I want to be there, man.

DAVE PAULIDES: They said that they’re another tribe of us. By the way, the article’s in there. Articles in that book.

AJ GENTILE: I see a very famous giant skeletons article right on the back of the book. I watched one of your videos, might have been just a few days ago, where you were covering some of the sort of connect— the first time I saw anyone connect the giants legend to possibly being Bigfoot. And you were very cautious because you didn’t attack the Smithsonian like I do.

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh, I have. Good.

AJ GENTILE: But I thought it was an interesting theory because we’ve got all these stories, articles in the press, bones being found, being shipped to Smithsonian, giant, all these native legends. Here are the bones. We’ve got the woman from the Lovelock tribe wearing the orange hair. I mean, the hair is there. Well, I wonder if we can test that.

Giant Bones and the Smithsonian

DAVE PAULIDES: So the truth is, every time that those giant bones have been found, it goes to an institution, mainly the Smithsonian, and bingo, it’s gone. Why is it gone? Now, I’m not saying that all of those giant bones were Bigfoot, but I find it suspicious that all those specimens are gone. How could that be?

AJ GENTILE: Now, they will argue that it’s sensationalism and all of that, and that’s fine. I’ll give you 95% of it. But we have records from the Smithsonian acknowledging receipt of large bones inside a large coffin as well. So like a giant ossuary, we have their receipt. So what do you mean you don’t have it?

DAVE PAULIDES: Well, what doesn’t make sense to me is when they said, well, we’re trying to hype this or something. No, no, the articles were written at the time the bones were found. Hype? It was in just a normal newspaper trying to show the trail of where it went. And there’s so many articles.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, absolutely. No, absolutely.

DAVE PAULIDES: Okay, so that 1924 article— subsequent to that, I found several others that also talked about similar occurrences with that tribe, the Silithiks. Then we bring in Harvey Pratt, brings witnesses, draws much more human-looking face than anything related to an ape or gorilla.

Now here’s the part you won’t hear at other conferences. Apes and gorillas, namely Gigantopithecus. Let’s talk about that. They don’t have large breasts all year, all the time. Only humans have that. No wild ape or gorilla hair has ever been found in the wilds of North America. So all these specimens that have been found, we know what Gigantopithecus DNA looks like, Paranthropus DNA. We know what their hair would look like.

AJ GENTILE: We also know they didn’t walk upright. They were knuckle walkers.

DAVE PAULIDES: Absolutely, that’s right.

Debunking the Gigantopithecus Theory

DAVE PAULIDES: So that DNA has never been found here? Nope. Apes and gorillas do not like water to swim in. There’s not one shred of evidence Gigantopithecus or Paranthropus has ever been in North America. No hair, no bones, no sightings, no evidence. Just like you said, that they walked upright. Gigantopithecus went extinct 2 million years ago. They say it was here just because of a piece of a jawbone and a few teeth, and that’s it.

So when people say, well, Bigfoot is Gigantopithecus, Paranthropus, ape, gorilla, there’s not one shred of evidence to prove that. Think about that. And I’m not saying that with no facts or evidence. That’s 100% fact. Yet we do have hair that doesn’t match anything else in the world, that was seen by people, a Bigfoot going from A to B. We recover, we do the DNA, the evidence is there.

AJ GENTILE: You still have samples sitting around? Samples of hair, tissue that could be tested? With more supervision? I know you don’t like the Sykes test. That’s fair. He was very specific.

DAVE PAULIDES: So when I first got the samples and was looking for the DNA, you know where I went first? UC Davis. I lived in California. I mean, one of the best scientific centers in the world. You know what they told me? They said, “Hey, we don’t want anything to do with Bigfoot.”

AJ GENTILE: Why not?

DAVE PAULIDES: I don’t know. I got that from universities time after time after time. It was something that they didn’t want to touch.

DNA Research and the BFRO

AJ GENTILE: So I’ve—

DAVE PAULIDES: Do you know what BFRO is? I do. Okay, so the biggest organization— yeah, biggest Bigfoot research organization in the world. Great database. So there was a man named Wally Hersham. Wally was the main benefactor to BFRO and gave them hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars over the years, with one edict: get DNA. If you ask them, they never got any DNA.

Again, AJ, I’m going to say I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I was able to get DNA. Scott Carpenter and I got DNA from Great Smoky Mountain National Park. And then we got DNA when we went on coast to coast. Why didn’t they do that?

So, Wally, when he heard we’ve got it, he joined our study. He actually helped finance some of the DNA work. Once that DNA was done, he said, “You guys did an excellent job. I know what you did is 100% accurate. You’ve answered all my questions in the Bigfoot world. I’m done.” And he dropped out. He died not too long ago. He was a really good guy, and he was trying to just get to the fact of what it was. He says, “I know now.” He knows.

AJ GENTILE: I wonder what happens to Meldrum’s work and all of his— everything he has.

DAVE PAULIDES: It went to Cliff Brackman.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, it did? Is it safe there? Oh yeah, Cliff’s a good guy. I think the field is going to miss Jeffrey Meldrum. I mean, they tried to have him untenured and it didn’t take.

DAVE PAULIDES: He was one of the nicest people you would ever meet. I mean, we didn’t agree on anything in the Bigfoot world, but we could sit around and talk.

AJ GENTILE: He seemed very sincere. What did you disagree with him on?

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh, he thought it was an ape-gorilla-based Paranthropus Gigantopithecus.

AJ GENTILE: I didn’t know that he felt that way. Oh yeah. He was very valuable to the field because he’s so credible.

DAVE PAULIDES: He broke down so many doors and he had people listen that wouldn’t normally listen.

AJ GENTILE: I would think there’d be more public support for the research.

DAVE PAULIDES: There’s a lot of people out there that do it as a hobby. I personally believe that there have been organizations within the last 3 years that have done DNA studies that believe it was an ape or gorilla that did the study. Found out what it was, and they never talked about it again.

Moving Toward the Interdimensional

AJ GENTILE: Over your research going back 15 years, I feel like you’ve moved closer toward the interdimensional quantum orbs side of this story. Have you?

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh, definitely.

AJ GENTILE: So what do you think is going on there? Because I think all UFO people in the community, researchers— I’ll say we— we’re moving toward it’s spirit, some type of spiritual manifestation. Orbs are more frequent now.

DAVE PAULIDES: So I’ve been a MUFON investigator for 17 years.

AJ GENTILE: I didn’t know that.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah, I don’t actively do any work. I’m too busy doing my own things. But I do have access to all their literature and research. And did you know that many abductees have seen a Bigfoot creature on a craft?

AJ GENTILE: I’ve heard that.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yep. So what do you make of that?

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, all the missing time, all that. Now, what is the quantum argument? Because I like quantum physics, as you know, like you like hockey. How does Bigfoot connect to quantum mechanics?

DAVE PAULIDES: So how something can be in two places at the same time, entangled, right? So one of the things that has happened to the researchers at Skinwalker Ranch— they don’t talk about it a lot, but they have gone public with it. The Hitchhiker Effect. Have you heard about this?

AJ GENTILE: The phenomenon follows you.

DAVE PAULIDES: It follows you. And it can go home with you. And 9 times out of 10, it never bothers the researcher, but it will go after the family, friends. And it’s almost as though it wants to scare them or surprise them at some level.

AJ GENTILE: A lot of poltergeist reports like this.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, we’re talking about world-class physicists that have had this happen to them. So it’s real. But that happens at the ranch when they’re dealing with UFO issues. It’s happened fairly regularly to Bigfoot researchers.

AJ GENTILE: Hitchhiker effect. Oh yes. No kidding. Oh yes.

The Hitchhiker Effect: Personal Encounters

DAVE PAULIDES: When you get down to the bare basics with these guys, everyone in the movie would admit it, that was in my movie. It’s all happened to them. It’s happened to me twice.

AJ GENTILE: What happened to you?

DAVE PAULIDES: So I was doing the research in California, moved to Colorado, and I was living in the foothills outside of Morrison, Colorado, kind of in a rural area. Came out to my car one day, and there in kind of the muddy soil right at my car was about a 16-inch track. Perfect. Just one. And it was at a place I couldn’t miss it. It was right— I stopped everything. I searched for like 300 yards in every direction. Not another track, just one.

AJ GENTILE: Did you take a picture?

DAVE PAULIDES: No, I probably should have, but I didn’t.

AJ GENTILE: Nobody ever takes a picture.

DAVE PAULIDES: So I moved to Montana, and at the time I was living with another lady, and I have a forest all around me. And she went for a hike, and she texts me, she says, “You need to come out here right now.” I grab my gun, go running back there. She goes, “Look, Dave.” And there on the side of the trail is a 15, 16-inch track. Perfect. Just like my house in Colorado. Perfect.

She goes, “What do you make of that?” I says, “Well, let’s look.” So we spent an hour looking, couldn’t find any other track. So then we turn around, start walking back home, and I have to go over to this little knoll on the trail. And I swear to you on anyone’s life, as we go up over the trail, laying right in the middle of the trail is a deer leg. Perfect, right in the middle of the trail.

AJ GENTILE: But no deer, just the leg.

DAVE PAULIDES: Just the leg. It was placed there so we wouldn’t miss it.

AJ GENTILE: And she goes, “Oh, they’re here, Dave.” I go, “Oh, yeah, they’re here.” That’s your bowling ball in the creek moment.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah, there you go.

The Simulation Theory and Missing Physicists

DAVE PAULIDES: Let’s go home. Yeah. So, things like that have happened to us before. We were in Colorado when I was living there. And there was a trail we always liked to hike up in northern Colorado. And it snowed like 6 inches that morning, we were going to take the hike anyhow. And we were out about a mile and a half and in fresh, perfect snow, starting on the hillside to our left, crossing the trail in front of us, and stopping like 5 feet on this side. Perfect, perfect set of tracks. Ch-ch-ch-ch. Stops. Starts right there where you can see and stops right there where you can see.

But that happens all the time. Now, the reason I’m leading you on this is that these aren’t these creatures there leaving one track. There’s something else going on. And I think it has to do with being in multi-places at the same time and being able to leverage that to send us messages. Messages, I don’t know what it means other than, “Hey, we’re here, we’re keeping tracks of you.” I don’t know.

AJ GENTILE: This is like part of the trickster legend where they leave you just enough to let you know that we’re here, but not enough to prove it.

DAVE PAULIDES: See, I don’t believe that because I think that they cooperated with Scott and I and purposely left their DNA for us, left their hair, left their tracks.

AJ GENTILE: How intelligent do you get the sense they are?

DAVE PAULIDES: Way smarter than us. Really? Way smarter.

AJ GENTILE: Then why dig through garbage for food? Why don’t they open a Denny’s? A Bigfoot Denny’s would be a good idea. Those are the parts I can’t square. If they’re hyper-intelligent, why pluck a chicken?

DAVE PAULIDES: What’s not intelligent about that?

AJ GENTILE: I guess that’s how we’re going to eat it. That’s how we do it.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah, we’re going to eat it.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, so there’s just parts of the story I can’t square, but there are parts that I can’t disprove.

DAVE PAULIDES: So one of the things I’ve talked about on my channel before is I was at a conference and somebody asked me to go to lunch and they were super smart. So I said, okay, I’ll go. And they said, “Dave, I got a theory for you.” You know, this one really made me think. “Dave, you’ve heard of that theory that we’re in a simulation. Now put your guard down for a second and think we really are in a simulation. I think we are. And whoever’s playing this game with us, they earn a certain amount of points, and once they get enough points, they can put a Bigfoot down and see how you, you humans down there will react to it.”

AJ GENTILE: I love this theory. ‘Cause that’s what you do if you’re playing SimCity or whatever. If you earn the Bigfoot bonus, let’s drop a track. He would. Wouldn’t you? Yeah. Send Godzilla, whatever. Yeah.

DAVE PAULIDES: And then he said, “And then on that other side, we have this ant farm next to us. And Earth is the ant farm. And every once in a while, the homebody 20 planets away needs some fresh DNA and they pluck some out.” I’ve heard that before. Yeah. I— what can you say?

AJ GENTILE: It’s unfalsifiable. It’s a great theory. Yeah. I lean toward simulation theory. Speaking of science and physics, you brought in a couple of— are these missing scientists, right? Yeah. Which is in— they’re in the news. And we’ve got 4 men here. They’re all German scientists, right? Yes, sir.

The Missing German Physicists

DAVE PAULIDES: What happened to these guys? So here’s the intriguing part behind this. First of all, I came up with this on my own about 4 or 5 years ago. 3 out of the 4 are from Germany. The young man on the far left, he got a special scholarship because of his brilliance. Fulbright Scholar to come to the States and study graduate-level physics. He disappeared in Olympic National Park January 20th, 1992. He was a genius.

Aleijav Krost, the second man, was here for a physics conference in Los Angeles at Lake— and he came, went to Lake Arrowhead for the conference. He was a university professor of physics in Germany, 62 years old. He went on a hike with some people sponsored by the conference. As they go on the hike, there’s like 20 people. He starts to feel ill. This is something I talk about in missing persons cases. If you and I are out together, sometimes one of us will get sick and say, “Hey, you go on. I’m going to wait here.” That point of separation. He sits down. There’s a guide at the front of the pack, a guide at the back. The guide at the back also doesn’t feel good. So he and Cross both sit down. Cross says, “I feel better,” and he takes off. And the other guide says, “Well, I’ll meet up.” Cross took off and never was found again. Bingo. Gone.

Richard Reinhard Kirchner, he worked for a company called GSI Corporation. He’s a physicist who was studying heavy ion research. They had an accelerator where they bring in physicists from all over the world. He was here on vacation. He landed in Vancouver, rented a cabover camper, drove down to the little Colorado River Gorge, and went for a hike. He had been there the year before. He was by himself, disappeared, never found again.

Carl Dish, missing May 8th, ’65 at the Byrd Ice Station in Antarctica. He was an ionospheric physicist originally from Wisconsin working for Boulder Labs, the National Bureau of Standards. He was walking between buildings there in Antarctica during a storm. And they have ropes that you hold on to. He’d been there for a long time. He knew the gig. Somehow or another, he got off the rope and he disappeared.

Now, the interesting part about that is that there were rumors, and you could look this up, that there were lights in the skies seen. And supposedly he called into the ice station years later and says, “Hey, I’m alive. I’m someplace else,” or something weird. Really?

Now, that’s not the only one. Kirchner, when he disappeared, disappeared really in the middle of nowhere in the desert out there in the little Colorado River Gorge. There were some sheepherders that when he disappeared, they saw lights in the sky above his cab-over camper. And when the Arizona State Police took over that case, in the report— because I have it— it says they saw lights in the skies and thought he was abducted by aliens. I’ve never seen anything like that in a police report ever in my life. It’s in the report.

So for what it is, now that we talk about linkage, this is the only time I’ve ever seen confirmed linkage. All of them were physicists. All of them were German.

AJ GENTILE: What makes it not a coincidence? Because they’re so spread apart. How about this?

DAVE PAULIDES: I can’t find another physicist in the world that’s missing other than those four.

AJ GENTILE: That’s a good answer. And what do you make of the scientist controversy now? Is it over? Is it overhyped?

DAVE PAULIDES: Well, first of all, not all of them are scientists. Several of them— one of them was a program manager, McCaslin. And a couple others were just peripheral support people. I think the press is trying to find linkage when there is none. Really? Really, I think so. I think a couple of them are real, a couple of them are suicides.

AJ GENTILE: I’m with you on most of that. I tend to think the press is a tool of the state, but I think it’s overhyped a little bit. I don’t talk much about it because I think a couple of those scientists would like to be left alone at the moment, so I’m doing that.

DAVE PAULIDES: It’s very honorable of you.

AJ GENTILE: Well, because I’ve covered so many of these cases of people working on advanced research that just— they get suicidal, they get home invasions, mugged in front of their house, in broad daylight, over and over and over again.

Can-Am Missing Project and German Disappearances

DAVE PAULIDES: So getting back to the German scientists here, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but on my YouTube channel, Can-Am Missing, like Canadian-American, Can-Am Missing Project is mine. Yeah, plug it. Half a million followers. Oh, it’s going up. Oh yeah, growing up. So we talked about Germans disappeared, and they disappear at more of a frequency than normal people. Now why is that? I get a lot of people that talk about that. And some people say, “Oh, there’s something about the German blood. There’s something about Germans going back centuries that it’s different.” I have no idea if any of that’s true, but I’ll throw it out there.

AJ GENTILE: Well, they’re the most common ethnic group in America, or German descendants. Could just be that, 30% or so. Yeah.

DAVE PAULIDES: But how do you account for only German physicists? I can’t.

AJ GENTILE: I can’t. And with Carl Dish, when you handed me this earlier, I saw the date and I was like, “Oh, this is a Nazi scientist.” And you said, no, he’s the only American on there.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah, that’s right. But German heritage.

AJ GENTILE: Mm-hmm. So no trace of Steve— so Bissert, he was out of Washington.

DAVE PAULIDES: He was in the movie.

AJ GENTILE: That case is in the movie. That’s right, I remember him. So no trace. No trace.

DAVE PAULIDES: And you got it, I mean, that’s 34, 35 years ago and still nothing’s been found of his, which is odd. So let’s just think about that. What’s the consistency? They were by themselves. They were in a very, very remote area when they disappeared. How odd is that, that those guys would be in that space at that time and disappear, considering who they are? I mean, none of them made a living being in that remote space. The two guys in the middle, one a professor in Germany, one a physicist at a big corporation in Germany. And they’re here and it happens here.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah, it’s weird. With a lot of your cases, they’re experienced hikers, but there’s so many cases where it’s like these men have never gone out for a hike and suddenly you do. So Kirchner was—

DAVE PAULIDES: It had been said that he was a hiker and that he had gone to this little Colorado River Gorge before. Now, when he disappeared, there were some US Fish and Wildlife people actually down in the water in the gorge doing some studies, said they never saw anybody come down there. So if he didn’t go down in the gorge, where did he go?

AJ GENTILE: Have you tried to get these cases yet?

DAVE PAULIDES: I do have Kirchner’s case. You do? I do. Dish’s case, I don’t even know if there is a case because it was at Antarctica. Yeah. Cross, he would be the LA County Sheriff’s, and Bissert’s case is National Park Service.

Agencies, Cooperation, and the Stacy Arras Case

AJ GENTILE: Are there any agencies that cooperate with you? Are there any good guys out there?

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh yeah, I tell people that in most jurisdictions, the sheriffs are really, really good guys. And the reason for that? We elect them. Right. Police chiefs? Political appointees. Sheriffs? No. We got them into office. They usually respond. They’re usually good. Not everybody, but usually good people.

AJ GENTILE: The Bureau of the Interior is infamous for being litigious about its image. And yet has not sued you. No. I don’t think they have issued a public statement about you. Have they? I mean, they know who you are.

DAVE PAULIDES: Not that I know of.

AJ GENTILE: It’s very hard for the skeptics. It’s like, if he’s lying, they could just— DOI sues people. You were working with Tim Burchett to try to get to the Secretary of the Interior?

DAVE PAULIDES: Congressman Burchett from Tennessee. Absolutely salt of the earth guy. He’s actually in our movie. And he tells a Bigfoot story. He’s a big believer. He was— he had a fighter pilot tell him a story at the park right near where he lives. At Great Smoky National Park. Fighter pilot driving through the park. And he says, “Bigfoot rock right in front of our car, in front of my wife and I.” And Tim goes, “Dave, this guy wouldn’t even lie. Never lie.”

Anyhow, he’s tried to help me before and trying to get through into the Department of the Interior to get to Bergum, who’s the head of it. He knocks down some doors. Got me to them. And they wouldn’t call me. So you got to Bergum? No, no, no, no, I got to the Department of the Interior. And then they stopped returning my calls.

AJ GENTILE: So it doesn’t matter what kind of administration’s in power. It’s always Stonewall, no matter who’s in charge. It feels like the UFO disclosure story— doesn’t matter who’s in charge. You get read into the program and suddenly, “I can’t release the files.” Is there a case that you still kind of think about? Maybe is solvable, maybe bothers you? Arras. Stacy Arras does?

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: What is it about her case?

DAVE PAULIDES: I’ve never seen them put up such a fight over any case like that.

Wilderness Safety and Final Advice

AJ GENTILE: Did you ever identify Agent Yu?

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh, I know who he is. Yeah.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, you do? Oh yeah. That’s his real name?

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah. I mean, it sounds Asian, but he’s white.

AJ GENTILE: Oh, that’s helpful actually. Yeah. And you haven’t been in touch with him since? Nope. Did you file an appeal against that FOIA denial? No. Why not?

DAVE PAULIDES: I think there’s a time to fight and there’s a time to just go backwards a little bit. That’s not your hill to die on. No. And I’m still having success getting other case files from other areas. So rather than make a huge stink about that, that maybe shuts down the whole system, let that dog lie for a little bit. Something will come on that case in the future.

AJ GENTILE: That’s smart. You want to pick your favors. Yeah. Well, before we get out of here, maybe it’s a weird way to close this, but I think it’s important. Advice for people going out in the wilderness? Great question.

DAVE PAULIDES: In fact, I’m going to do one in the next 2 weeks. Every spring I do a video on what to carry in your backpack and how to get it arranged so that if the worst happened, you’d walk out of there eventually.

The number one thing is carry a personal locator beacon. They’re about the size of your phone. And believe it or not, most phones these days actually have that in it. But besides carrying your phone, make sure you carry a charger with it. An extra battery, solar battery, something to make sure that that thing will work in an emergency.

There’s a new device that just came out within the last year that is just extraordinary. It’s about the size of a quart-sized milk carton. What it is, is there’s a canister inside. You activate the canister, you point it in the air, and a balloon goes straight up 150 feet. And there’s a light in the balloon. And that is your SOS. So if the personal locator beacon didn’t work, that balloon is going to get seen everywhere.

I always tell people, I usually introduce a couple of different bars that I know of to carry in your backpack, water, etc. But it’s a good question. Personal locator beacon should be carried by anybody, especially if you go off trail. If you go off trail and you break your leg, you’re not coming out of there.

Carrying a Weapon in National Parks

AJ GENTILE: I’ve noticed that a lot of the parks, national parks, don’t want you to carry your gun there, even if you’re licensed to carry. Have you found that?

DAVE PAULIDES: It doesn’t really matter what they think. I mean, I’m bringing mine anyway.

AJ GENTILE: Yeah.

DAVE PAULIDES: The way the law is, is whatever state the park is in, if you could legally carry your gun concealed in that state, then you can carry the gun concealed in the park.

AJ GENTILE: I didn’t know that.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yes, it’s a law. So as an example, if you’re a Montana resident like me and you travel to California, and because we have CCW laws in Montana that are very loose — that doesn’t mean I can carry my gun concealed in California. No. In the parks. But could I do it in Idaho? Yes. Could I do it in Wyoming?

AJ GENTILE: Yes. Reciprocity.

DAVE PAULIDES: Yeah. Washington, Oregon, California, no. But I would encourage anybody who has the wherewithal — go down to your local rifle or pistol range, get an NRA instructor, get comfortable with a weapon, and carry a weapon when you’re hiking if you can. And always, always, always carry bear spray if there’s bears in that area.

Where to Find Dave Paulides

AJ GENTILE: Good advice. Anything else you want the folks to know? Where to find you?

DAVE PAULIDES: Missing411.com is my website for Bigfoot and missing people — not that they’re related. But I was talking to you about Jeff Meldrum and I doing the cruise. Yes. I actually have a Missing 411 cruise and a Bigfoot cruise all in one, leaving in September for Alaska.

AJ GENTILE: Do you promise the cruise comes back?

DAVE PAULIDES: I promise. The cruise will come back. It’s probably — I’ve done this 3 times — it’s the most beautiful place to go by boat in the world. Go through my website, missing411.com, you can find the cruise and all the information about it.

AJ GENTILE: So it’s you and some experts on the cruise?

DAVE PAULIDES: Oh yeah. And hey, we walk around, we get stopped by people all the time. I’m telling you, if you want access to the smartest, best researchers in the world, that’s the place to go. You’re going to join us? I’m into it. I love it.

And lastly, my website for YouTube — our YouTube channel, half a million subscribers. I load a new video on a missing person every other day. CAN-AM, like Canadian American, CAN-AM Missing Project.

AJ GENTILE: The videos are great. You’re a great storyteller as well. And also very compassionate. A lot of the stories are touching. You’re doing important work.

DAVE PAULIDES: Dave Paulides, thank you for coming in. Thank you very much.

Closing Thoughts from AJ Gentile

AJ GENTILE: Bye, everybody. That was David Paulides. We covered Missing 411, the Bigfoot DNA, Skinwalker Ranch, and the cases without a clean ending. So let me break it down.

Here’s what we know. David was a cop for almost 20 years in the San Jose PD. That’s true. The Stacy Arras case is real. In July of 1981, the 14-year-old walked toward a lake in Yosemite in plain view of her father and never came back. One of the biggest searches in park history turned up a single camera lens cap. Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 flying saucer sighting happened while he was searching for a crashed Marine plane near Mount Rainier. That’s also on the record.

Now the bigger claim. David funded a Bigfoot DNA study run by a geneticist named Melba Ketchum. She said the maternal line went back 15,000 years and the father’s DNA matched nothing on record. Well, there are some problems with that study. Her 2013 paper ran in a journal called De Novo that had never published anything before or since. It looks like it was built to print this one study. In fact, the paper was purchased or launched, I think, 9 days earlier. Other geneticists also found problems with the study. One lab traced the sample back to a black bear, and no outside lab has been able to reproduce any of these results.

Now, David knows the study isn’t widely accepted and has rebuttals, but based on my research, we can’t rely on that DNA. And there are other problems with the study that you can find online if you want to look into it.

But there are no simple answers to the paperwork problem. Stacy Arras vanished 45 years ago. David filed a records request for her file and got denied under an exemption meant to protect active criminal investigations. A missing 14-year-old girl from 1981 is somehow still an open criminal case. He asked for a list of everyone missing across the park system. They told him it would cost $1.4 million, or that no list exists. A cop asking for those files shouldn’t have to fight this hard. And look, the list exists. I think the government is lying. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

David Paulides isn’t telling you aliens are abducting people. He never claims anything is paranormal. He lays out the cases and lets you decide. What he wants is the data the government won’t release. And that’s a cop’s instinct, not a believer’s. Whether it’s something strange in the woods or a system that won’t count its own missing, the real story is the same: we can’t get a straight answer from the government.

His books and films are at missing411.com. The newest are on Amazon. 3 are free on Tubi. If a vanishing in the wild story interests you, watch our episode on Kenny Veach. He walked into the Mojave looking for a cave and never came out. It’s a great story. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

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