UBC: Paulides, Missing 411: The Devil's in the Details

[truepenny]

Missing 411: The Devil's in the Details by David Paulides

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

[library]

So. Of course I'm fascinated by David Paulides' Missing 411 series (which I found through the documentary that came out this year). Fascinated and yet brutally skeptical.

Missing persons is a horrifying and baffling phenomenon, and while I appreciate the sheer quantity of data Paulides has collected in this and the 5 other Missing 411 books, I do not appreciate his sensationalist, faux-scientific, and disingenuously "neutral" approach to the material. Paulides is a former Bigfoot researcher, and while I do believe that he is sincerely appalled by the number of people who go missing in our national parks, I also believe that he recognized the inconclusive and bizarre anecdotal evidence as perfect to supply as fodder to every conspiracy theorist under the sun. (He admits in the introduction to this book that it works, too.)

I want to find a copy of Robert Koester's
Lost Person Behavior
, which Paulides quotes in order to triumphantly prove that the cases he documents are all outside the bell-curve of "normal" disappearances (whatever a "normal" disappearance might be--Paulides doesn't say, and I frankly don't think the beast exists), because from the interview with Koester I found online, it looks to me suspiciously like most of the things Paulides cites as "unusual" (by which he means paranormal, even as he strenuously insists that he is putting no interpretation on the facts whatsoever) are, while mysterious, actually common and even explicable. Some of them aren't even mysterious. More people go missing from wilderness areas. More people go missing when they're alone or when (if they're with a group) they've lagged behind or run ahead. In many cases where a person is not found, bad weather has moved in immediately after they disappear. (I also want to find someone who actually works with bloodhounds, because Paulides sets up as "normal" the idea that bloodhounds can track anyone, anywhere, anytime, and never lose a scent. Thus it is "unusual" when the bloodhound can't find a scent, or loses it after a short distance. But I would like to know what actual normal looks like in tracking with bloodhounds, because I know bloodhounds, while amazing, are not infallible4.) Common sense and logic can provide, with less than ten seconds' thought, why these factors might correlate across a large number of cases. But Paulides simply, willfully refuses, in every case, to accept a logical explanation. He frequently asserts that his cases defy logical explanation. And, of course, because he's made it programmatic that he draws no conclusions and offers no theories, he's permanently off the hook himself. Which is shoddy and, as I said, disingenuous: heads I win, tails you lose.



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