UBC: Paulides, Missing 411: Eastern United States

[truepenny]

Missing 411: Eastern United States by David Paulides

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is the 2nd book in the series (and it's the 2nd book by virtue of being the 2nd half of the 1st book) and it answers some questions that have been bugging me after reading Missing 411: The Devil's in the Detail.

1. The 411 is the 411 people whose cases are presented in the 1st 2 books.

2. Paulides' hidden agenda, being not so hidden at the start, is Bigfoot. He started out in the fringe world of cryptozoology & ufology & their ilk as a Bigfoot researcher, so this isn't a SURPRISE, but it's nice to have it confirmed. He's pretending, even at the beginning, not to have a theory, but the inclusion of Roy Bilgrien, who was NEVER missing, but who WAS almost abducted by something his mother described alternately as a bear and a wolf, shows Paulides' hand very clearly.

So this review is mostly about the problems I have with Paulides, because otherwise it's just "here are a bunch of unexplained disappearances about which I have a theory I will not tell you but in true Socratic fashion will hit you over the head with ("Think about the reasons why this may be occurring" (122)) until you tell it to me." My chief problem is actually not Bigfoot; it's the shoddy sloppiness of Paulides' research. I will give one example, although there are plenty of others. In discussing the SAR (Search and Rescue) efforts after the disappearance of Dennis Martin in Great Smoky Mountains National Park (from a place I've definitely been near, if not actually to), Paulides says: "In one of the more surprising twists to the SAR, it was discovered that the park service closed Cades Cove Loop Road for three days, without explanation. . . . There is nothing in the documentation I received [after filing a FOIA] explaining why the cove was closed" (M411 150).

So, pursuing a different aspect of Dennis Martin's disappearance that Paulides deals with badly (more about that in a minute), I Googled the FBI agent assigned to observe, Jim Rike. That Google search brought up a document called the Dennis Martin Search Chronological Narrative, which is the National Park Service's report on the SAR effort. This document was requested & received by the Knoxville News-Sentinel in 1969, no FOIA needed, and on p. 11 it says: "The Cades Cove road was closed to keep the many curiosity seekers away from the Cades Cove heliport" (DMSCN 11). Now, if you are a conspiracy-minded person, you may choose not to believe this explanation, but it is patently untrue that no explanation was given.

This is unforgivably sloppy research. It's part and parcel of Paulides' fundamental problem, which is that he's not a researcher. He has no formal training and it's clear that he's not doing a good job of training himself. He makes errors like this one. He misses obvious cross-references, like "in the early 1930s there is another major increase of men and women missing, with the escalation staying elevated until today" (307), where GOSH I WONDER IF MAYBE THERE WAS SOME MAJOR SOCIAL DISASTER THAT BEFELL AMERICA IN 1929 THAT MIGHT EXPLAIN THIS INCREASE. He doesn't contextualize his cases at all, except in terms of each other. He tells us, with a kind of ghoulish satisfaction, that Jim Rike (the FBI agent I mentioned above) committed suicide, but offers no proof that his suicide was because of his work on cases involving missing children. There are other reasons a guy might be suicidal. (An article about Dennis Martin on Tales of the Weird says that Rike's reasons are unknown, and I feel like a ghoul myself so I'm not digging further.)

And it becomes important to remember that Paulides is skewing his data. He's only interested in MP cases that fit his (weird-ass) criteria. As an experiment, I checked West Virginia's MP in NamUs. Paulides has 5; NamUs lists 72. The kicker? Only one of Paulides' cases is in NamUs (Victor Shoemaker). One of the others is on Porchlight. The other three were found (2 alive, 1 dead)--but their disappearances fit Paulides' schema, so in they go. This is a pretty wild distortion in describing national trends of disappearances and means that you need to keep the salt shaker handy.

So why do I keep reading him? He does have an impressive collection of raw data and bizarre stories, and something in my back-brain just chews on this stuff like homemade caramels.



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