Missing 411: Is There Really a Pattern to National-Park Disappearances?

Simon Whistler (0:00)

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Decoding The Unknown. As always, I'm your host Simon. Welcome back to the show. Today, what we're going to do is we're going to talk about missing 411 Is there really a pattern to National Park Disappearances? Uh, is there some serial killer out there doing this? I don't know. This episode has been written by Katie. I'm going to read it. As always, we're going to go through the first part and see what this is all about. And then in the second part of the show, we're going to debunk it. So, let's get into it, shall we?

The National Parks of North America are some of the most visited areas on the continent with millions of local and foreign visitors heading to the great outdoors every year. Most people have probably heard of Yellowstone, Yosemite.

Yosemite! It's a Trump joke. It's Yosemite.

SPEAKER_2 (0:50)

When they gaze upon Yosemites, Yosemites, towering Sequoias.

Simon Whistler (0:57)

And the Grand Canyon National Parks, but Great Smoky Mountains National Park seems to be the most popular, logging over 11.5 million visitors in 2025 Holy shit. Must be a good ass park. People go to camp, hike, fish, canoe, have close encounters with bears, and generally try to get back to nature, especially in our increasingly always on society.

What? Don't know what you're talking about, Katie. What are you talking about?

I'm checking my phone for those just listening to this.

It's a joke. Also, I was in, where the hell was I? I was doing some overlanding in Romania, and I saw a goddamn bear just like driving along the road. It's like, dude, that a bear? And it's just like this, I think it was black. It was like about yay high, just kind of standing there. And the car in front of us had just stopped. And I'm like, bro, what's going on? Why you stopped? You're in the middle of the road. And then it's because they had seen the bear. And then I'm looking around, I'm like, oh, there's a goddamn bear.

Anyway, moving on. You know from the title, though, that this episode isn't about how great national parks are. It's actually about how mysterious and potentially deadly they are. Even though hundreds of people go missing in national parks every single year, it seems that there is no centralized database for tracking these cases, and information about them is deliberately withheld by the National Park Service.

There should be a list of people who go missing in your parks.

That would be like, oh yeah, no, and by state building, I mean people go up, they don't always come down, but we don't keep track.

So.

So what don't they want us to know? Is there something sinister going on that they're trying to cover up? Are there some disappearances that just can't be explained? Well, one man has been on a decades long mission to find out the truth behind these disappearances, because once he started looking into it, he found that there aren't just a handful of unexplained cases, there are over a thousand. I mean, I don't want to get into the debunking bit already, but it's like, well, yeah, people go missing. They're big parks. They probably died.

Do we necessarily need to assume that it's a national parks conspiracy? But we'll get to that in part two. Let's get on with it. Now, if you're old and grew up in the United States, Katie, I am young and I grew up in the great country of Great Britain. It's right there in the title, isn't it? Great.

Look at the expression. Yo, fellow kids, what's the 411?

Yeah, if it was the 90s. The translation of this might be, hi, lots of people who are younger than me. What's the latest gossip you can impart to my ancient ears? Well, dialing 411 in the US or Canada would connect you to a phone directory service so it became a slang term for finding out information. Surely, that doesn't work anymore. What was it in the UK that was like, um, god, there was a campaign when I was a kid about this, and it was these two dudes with like big curly hair, and they were like, 118, 118, that's it. Dial 118118 for something. I think it was information, but obviously we have the internet now, so we don't need that shit anymore. In the UK, oh, here we go, you could dial 192, but I don't think this spawned its own term. Oh, I thought it was 118118 Never mind. Anyway, that was just some background into the phenomenon that has been termed missing 411 If you had never come across it before, you might have thought there were 411 missing people. But no, that's not what it means. Ex-cop David Paulides has been researching a bizarre subset of disappearances and has been trying to draw more attention to them by publishing several missing 411 books. He has also produced a couple of documentaries focusing on a few of the stories. Basically, his books read like an information directory of these missing people, hence the name. Oh, I see. I was wondering where the name came from, but now I understand. Oh, so it's like a phone book. I thought it was more like, you know, you ring it up and you find out if the cinema is open or something. But before we dive in, let's find out a little about Paulides and how he stumbled upon these cases. David Paulides is not some random kook who decided to dig into the National Park Service's dirty little secrets for the heck of it. He was a California law enforcement veteran who took on stints in the street crime unit, detective division, and even the SWAT team over the course of a 20-year career. He then moved into the tech sector doing background checks on businesses. He knew how to investigate things and understood how the process was supposed to work. He also knew what to look out for if things were falling outside of the norm. In 2009, Paulides was visiting a national park when he received a knock on the cabin door from a couple of park rangers who wanted to ask for his help. According to a piece that he wrote online for abovetopssecret.com, feels like a very early 2000s domain choice, quote, they explained that they believed there was an inordinate amount of missing people and the park service was not conducting follow-up investigations, wasn't tracking missing people, and didn't appear to understand the issues behind the disappearances, end quote. And this was the genesis of Missing411. As Paulides started researching disappearances and deaths in national parks in North America, he began to uncover a tranche of cases that fell into their own category. Strange coincidences connected them, leading him to believe that there was something going on that either National Park Service was covering up, or that nobody could quite explain. Over the years, Paulides researched more and more cases in different areas of North America and also overseas, producing a series of 12 books with the first two covering the Western United States, Canada, and the Eastern United States. Subsequent books cover individual states such as Montana, Idaho, and Washington, and there are various other complications covering specific subsets of this subset, such as hunters. In total, Paulides highlights over 1,440 cases that can fit into the criteria that he has discovered. That is a lot of missing people just in and of itself, but it's sobering to realize that it is a subset, not the number of disappearances total. So, let's look into what makes a case a missing 411 case.