Review, Paulides, Missing 411: Hunters

[truepenny]

Missing 411: Hunters by David Paulides

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

[library]

This is a collection of missing persons cases, this time of hunters, almost exclusively male and almost exclusively white--and I don't know whether this is because white men are the predominant hunters in America, whether they're the hunters most likely to go missing, or whether it's unconscious selection bias on Pauldies' part, either in choosing to focus on hunters or in choosing the hunters he focuses on. But anyway. Paulides is getting worse at hiding his Bigfoot theory behind his claims of objectivity. He wants it to be Bigfoot or at least some sort of other cryptid (or maybe aliens. Aliens might be okay). He says in his discussion of the disappearance of Larry Wycoff (116-119):

"I am one of the most open people you will ever meet when it comes to understanding missing persons cases. I have seen too many instances where someone called a psychic, remote viewer, and so forth steps into a case and assists in finding the person. I would never push assistance away from someone who is a proven success in finding people" (118)

Problem #1: "too many instances": none cited

Problem #2: "assists in finding": not the same as "finds"

Problem #3: (more specific to the Wycoff disappearance) "I would never push assistance away" (emphasis added): but the deputy in this case "got five psychics to help him" (118). OR "gave interviews saying he wasn't really involved in Larry's case but was ordered by supervisors to meet with the psychics who had volunteered and keep them out of the hair of the investigators on the case" (119). Paulides is all more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger about the closed-mindedness of the brass but doesn't notice he's contradicting himself.

Problem #4 (Wycoff): 1 psychic drew a sketch (not reproduced): "the picture appears as though you're looking down on a body and high grass, near a beaver pond and creek" (119), a description which is markedly generic for the area of the disappearance, Michigan's UP. The deputy goes and shows the drawing to the locals, and a retired carpenter says he recognizes it, knows right where it is. They search there once, find nothing. Search there a second time, find the body. Deputy says the sketch looks just like the location. There are so many dubious leaps of logic and/or faith in this story that it's impossible to believe any of it wholly.

Paulides' desire to believe in the occult (like Mulder's I WANT TO BELIEVE poster, as amended by the kid in "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'" to read I BELIEVE) colors his narrative of disappearance in several ways.

The worst is probably that he goes straight for the occult answer. (I'm using "occult" as a catchall for aliens, cryptids, Lemurians, ghosts, and whatever other agent you can think of, including Men In Black.) He almost never addresses the possibility of foul play (except in one case where it looks to me like the parents killed their child and beat the polygraph, but Paulides insists because they beat the polygraph their child must have been abducted by an unseen and unknown monster). He never addresses the notorious and thoroughly proven unreliability of eyewitness testimony, nor the possibility that witnesses might be lying (either because they are actually murderers, because they were doing something illegal, for personal reasons of their own, etc.). He harps endlessly on rivers and ponds and swamps, but he never says whether someone could fall into a river and be swept downstream out of the search area, or whether there's quicksand. He never discusses the possibility of sinkholes or old mineshafts. (One missing persons case I am haunted by, Jesse Capen, who disappeared in the Superstition Mountains searching for a lost gold mine, was made infinitely harder for SAR efforts because the abandoned mineshafts are everywhere and completely uncharted. (Jesse was found in 2012, three years after he disappeared. He fell down a cliff and his body was wedged in a crevasse; he was found basically by accident.) And Arizona is not the only state in the Union with this problem.)

And this problem creates another problem, which is that the points where his research might actually uncover something interesting and valuable get ignored. One is the frequency with which he quotes Koester's Lost Person Behavior only to triumphantly note that this MP bucks the trend like a bucking thing--and yet he never asks whether there's something, other than Bigfoot, that might explain why Koester is wrong. Similarly, could there be a reason other than Bigfoot, that people with training, experience, and "common sense" seem frequently to be the ones who vanish? My husband suggested the parallel with the fire-fighting disasters chronicled by Norman MacLean (Young Men & Fire) and John N. MacLean (Fire on the Mountain, The Thirtymile Fire, The Esperanza Fire), where men and women with extensive training and experience still get disastrously caught out by the unexpected behavior of a terrible fire. "Wilderness" is a volatile and freighted concept in American culture, but at the core, it's still a place where the indifferent power of the natural world can crush you or eat you . . . or make you disappear.

I think this question--of why people with training and experience go missing--is one that should be considered much more carefully. Partly, it's that they go missing because they're out there, in the wilderness alone, like Randy Morgenson (who fits many of Paulides' criteria & may actually be in Paulides' 1st book, which the library hasn't given me yet), but why doesn't their experience/training cancel out that vulnerability? What's going wrong?

There's also a certain degree to which you have to expect that the same conditions (person alone, bad weather, etc.) will produce the same results, which Paulides does not account for. He leaves his cases absolutely contextless, except for his "cluster" theory.

Pauides also, as I've mentioned in other reviews, completely fails to establish a control group of disappearances that aren't occult. So at the root of the whole enterprise is a fatally flawed methodology. As he himself says with unintentional truth, " "After reading my books, you will quickly find that logic doesn't come into play in these stories" (155).

Paulides chooses his cases based on a set of criteria which he calls "profile points":

1. "Canines cannot find a scent": he harps on the failure of bloodhounds to find his missing persons. I need to find out more about what one actually can and cannot expect a scent hound to be able to do, but I'm also concerned by the fact that I can't tell whether Paulides understands that SAR dogs & cadaver dogs are two separate categories; any given dog may be able to do both, or may only be able to do one. And Paulides' claimed experience with tracking dogs keeps shifting. In this book, it's "extensive" (103). So I am mistrustful.

2. Bad weather: Paulides' missing persons almost always go missing right around the time a monumental blizzard or pounding rain or some other dramatic weather event occurs. I think, as I've said before, that he's indulging in post hoc ergo propter hoc. Because the weather comes after the disappearance, he claims the disappearance somehow causes the weather. (? Or something? It's not actually clear to me what Pauldies thinks is going on; I can only tell he thinks there's something.) But I would say that the catastrophic weather goes a long way toward explaining why the person was not found. Again, there's no control group set up of other people who went missing in the same area without bad weather, and whether they were found or not found.

3. Geographical clustering: Paulides claims there are "clusters" of missing people who meet his critera (and, hey, one of those criteria is that the person be in a "cluster": self-selecting & self-fulfilling condition). He further claims that because they're separated widely in time, no one has noticed this alarming rash of missing persons.

(For a reality check, 750,000 MP cases are reported per year, on average. Paulides is well past his original four hundred eleven, but his MP (drawn from at least a hundred years of MP cases) are maybe just barely 1/1,000th of the missing persons cases reported in America every year.)

His "clusters" of course generally map onto national parks and other wilderness areas, where you would actually logically expect people to go missing because they're deliberately isolating themselves in a dangerous location.

4. Victims found somewhere previously searched: he's big on this one, and insists it happens over and over again. I don't know enough about SAR to tell whether he's genuinely found something weird or not, but I know just how much eyewitness testimony cannot be relied on, and that's a factor he never addresses.

5. Clothing or shoes removed: He goes right up to the edge of explicitly denying paradoxical undressing and harps endlessly on clothing found neatly folded or hung in a tree. I agree that some of his cases are weird as all fuck, like the man whose clothes were found neatly folded in a spot that was under six feet of snow when he disappeared. But again, without a control group, I can't judge how weird this actually is.

6. Missing often found near water: I don't even know what he thinks is so important about this.

7. Time of disappearance: he says his people mostly disappear in the late afternoon. (Which is what one would expect, really; if you go missing just as night is falling, you aren't as likely to be found.) He doesn't say whether this is common for the wider Venn diagram of MP or not.

8. Disability or illness: People with disabilities (ranging in Paulides' terminology from diabetes to severe musculoskeletal damage from car accidents to developmental disabilities) and people who aren't feeling well--he says--are part of his Missing 411 categorization. Again, I can think of reasons that someone not feeling well or someone with a disability might be more likely to go missing, reasons that have no occult tinge at all.

Hand in hand with his magnetic yearning for the occult goes his blind spots. Paulides is completely unwilling to admit that lost people behave irrationally. He keeps saying things like, "But X would never do Y! It defies common sense!" But instead of drawing the conclusion that maybe common sense was not in operation, he insists that because common-sensically X would not do Y, X did not do Y, Bigfoot did.

The arguments from physical impossibility are at least less unconvincing.

I've also started catching him in sweeping statements contradicted by statements from actual experts:

1. Paulides claims the FBI have a "very large group in their profiling unit" (182) which is exactly the opposite of what an FBI profiler tells Zeman and Mills in The Killing Season 1.1 (Zeman's the guy who did both Cropsey and Killer Legends (also with Mills). I'm not very far into The Killing Season, but it is thus far excellent.)

2. Paulides says, "SAR teams know that missing people rarely go higher in elevation when they are missing or when weather is turning sour" (Paulides 193). But in "How 1,600 People Went Missing from Our Public Lands Without a Trace," Jon Billman quotes Robert Koester (the Lost Person Behavior guy) as saying, "Heading for higher ground is a known strategy for a lost person."

I think it's interesting--and probably telling--that while Koester talks about lost people, Paulides only talks about missing people. Word choice matters.

What I find most frustrating is the valuable data swamped by the flawed exposition. Every once in a while, he inadvertently says something true or useful: "I am telling you these two specific stories to bring it into your head that it doesn't matter how experienced, smart, and educated you are: this can happen to anyone" (89). This is a great sentence & an important sentence, until you get to the point where you try to define "this." I would define it as "getting lost & dying in the wilderness." Paulides would define it as "Bigfoot or other occult occurrence." He looks so right, but he's still so wrong.

And he's so unaware of what he's doing. He outright says: "It's very odd that when you start to profile the cases, picking specific cases that match what you are looking for, that the similarities start to show themselves" (242). This is textbook observer bias, recorded by the observer without any apparent awareness of what his observation means.

What I want most, really, is for Paulides to stop pretending he isn't biased. That's all.



View all my reviews