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truepenny
Missing 411: North America and Beyond by David PaulidesMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
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So here Paulides doesn't so much show his hand as throw it wildly all over the table. He quotes a story from Jacques Vallee's Passport to Magonia about a woman who experiences what she thinks is an alien abduction on May 20, 1950, "near the Loire." There are no identifying details given, nor any way to corroborate the story, and yet Paulides says, in apparent sincerity, "We have no reason to disbelieve the story from France" (369). Now, I suppose that if you aren't instantly put on your guard by the fact of Dr. Vallee's being a prominent ufologist, that may be true. But even so, I am inclined to be suspicious of a story received second-hand about "a woman" whose strange experience "near the Loire" actually provides no proof of anything. (I think it's more likely that, if the woman was real, she was struck by lightning than that she was abducted by some kind of alien robot.) And even if it does, it is completely unverifiable and therefore only hearsay, which isn't evidence at all.
This is a persistent problem with Paulides, in that he doesn't seem to have any feel for what constitutes proof, so he makes up his mind on a case-by-case basis depending on whether or not the facts line up with the theory he still insists he doesn't have. Most of the time he's a champion of listening to the victim and believing the victim's story--unless the victim's story suggests a mundane explanation, like an abduction by a human being, in which case he switches tacks and accuses law-enforcement of posing leading questions (see, for example, the case of Beverly Kay). I can't decide whether he's genuinely un-self-aware and naive (which seems so very unlikely for a former police officer) or carefully disingenuous in the service of his franchise.
He continues to be a bad writer in desperate need of a copy-editor--at least someone who can make sure that he has the victim's name right consistently through the case-narrative. And I have some more specific comments:
1. It's not actually surprising or remarkable that there are "clusters" of missing persons in national parks & wilderness areas. Those are places where people are most likely to get lost and also most likely not to be found. He wants so badly for the explanation to be Sasquatches or aliens or the Little People (or all three), that he looks straight past mundane explanations and in fact seems to have suppressed from his own narratives the fact that people get lost without any occult help. (I'm using the word "occult" in its less common senses of "beyond the realm of human comprehension" and "hidden from view" and in its verb form, "to conceal or cause to disappear from view.") He quotes the Bangor Register from October 26, 1826, "It is said to be a common thing for people to be lost in the wilds of Nova Scotia" (qtd 356) and says, "I read this line multiple times. It appears that the disappearance of people in Nova Scotia while in the wild wasn't uncommon. [Like many undergraduate student writers, Paulides frequently mistakes repetition/paraphrase for meaningful analysis.] A pretty sobering statement that begs the question: why were these people disappearing?" (356). Note (1) the substitution of "disappearing" for "to be lost", (2) whether deliberately or not, he is forcing an occult interpretation on a simple statement of fact. Nova Scotia in 1826 being, as it was, mostly a trackless wilderness, was a place where people were going to get lost. Just as people continue to get lost in Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings and the Superstitions and, and, and ... One of the things that frustrates me greatly about Paulides is that some of his cases are genuinely weird and inexplicable--like kids who are within sight of a destination when they leave their parent and yet somehow fail to reach it, only to be found (most often dead) miles away in a different direction. But because he can't or won't filter (aside from his "criteria" which are a heap of non-causative correlations), the signal to noise ratio is frankly lousy.
And that wouldn't bother me if he were simply doing what he claims he's simply doing: presenting a compilation of missing persons cases from national parks & wilderness areas. I'd even be okay with his conspiracy theory about the National Park Service. ("Okay" not being a synonym for "in agreement with.") But that's not what he's doing and we know that's not what he's doing because he constantly, obsessively alerts readers that "something unusual happened" (10), even though we have no actual idea of what happened at all. Paulides does have an agenda, no matter how many times he says he doesn't. (Another trait he shares with undergraduate student writers is the mistaken belief that saying a thing is true proves that it is true or that saying you have proved something is actually the same as having done so. Which: nope.) And his agenda does nothing but foul up the evidence about missing persons cases he could be presenting.
2. Cross-referencing a different area of interest, Paulides claims Ted Bundy has been "eliminated" from suspicion in the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr, but he doens't say eliminted how or by whom, and in fact the most recent article I found on Ann Marie's disappearance does not dismiss Bundy as a suspect.
(My personal feeling is that Bundy denied so vehemently that he killed Ann Marie that--like Gertrude--he's probably guilty. Being as he was a psychopath (or sociopath or person with antisocial personality disorder), Bundy might be offended by a false accusation, but he wasn't going to be horrified. He was horrified by accusations that were true, but were things he was too ashamed of to confess. See, passim, Keppel's The Riverman.)
3. "I try to steer clear of words that exaggerate a situation" (53). Yeah, right. Ditto his claim to have a "common sense test" (283).
4. "This area of the Oregon Cascades is not as steep, as high, or as rugged as mountains in Colorado, Idaho, or Montana, yet there appears [sic] to be more missing people that are never found here than makes logical sense" (46). Actually, it makes perfect sense. Because they aren't as difficult, people can get farther. And the farther you get from roads & civilization, the more likely you are to be lost and never found.
5. QUESTION, SAR & forensics: can a cadaver dog find someone who's sunk in quicksand? Given how many of Paulides' cases involve swamps, it seems like a good thing to know. (I assume the answer is yes, that the scent of the decaying body will be detectable, but I don't actually know.)
6. QUESTION, psycho-behavioral: Paulides asks in the case of Mary Jane Barker: "why would Mary Jane ever leave the safe confines of her yard, enter a vacant home, and climb into a dark closet?" (250). Well, why would a child climb inside a refrigerator and close the door? Neither makes sense to an adult, but the second is certainly a well-established phenomenon. (There are things about Mary Jane Barker's death that are genuinely puzzling, but that's not one of them.) In general, there are a lot of things Paulides presents as mysterious and/or suspicious and/or occult that I think might be readily explained by someone with a better knowledge of the psychology of children under five than I happen to possess.
7. Also re: Mary Jane Barker: "The coroner made a statement that Mary Jane had not been molested, and news articles specifically stated that Mary Jane was fully clothed. I believe the mere statement that she was fully clothed was odd, and something I rarely if ever see in any article about any disappearance" (250). This is a perfect example of "naive or disingenuous?", because the explanation for the mention of her being fully clothed is right there in the previous sentence. Right. There.
8. And his repeated puffed-up this-is-so-suspicious stance about coroners/pathologists ruling out homicide, when he was a detective (although I admit I don't see any statements that he worked homicide). He must know the flow chart of homicide Y/N => suicide Y/N => accident Y/N => natural causes. Ruling out homicide is an automatic step in determination of cause of death. If I know that, he has to know it.
9. He tries so hard for the investigative journalist's technique of asking the telling questions that no one has asked, but when there actually is a question like that, he boots it. For instance, in the disappearance of Colin Gillis--where Paulides is all over the "real" questions: "why did Colin walk away from a social gathering in the wee hours of the morning, and why was he walking in a direction away from his parents' residence? [...] how did Colin's driver's license end up on the highway?" (271), the question unanswered by Paulides' precis of the case that I find most disturbing/important is: what did the passing motorist, the last person to see Gillis, see that disturbed him so much--"'It wasn't like someone walking with a purpose straight down the road with a coat on. As I passed by I recognized it was something out of the ordinary, something that I didn't think it was safe to stop'" (270)--that he didn't stop, but did call the police?
10. I submit the possibility that people often go missing when they're picking berries, grapes, pine nuts, mushrooms, etc., because that's the most common reason for non-hikers to go to wild areas, rather than that by picking berries they are somehow marking themselves as targets. Paulides often mixes up cause and effect like this. Another example is the correlation between missing persons and bad weather, where he's trying to claim the disappearance triggers the bad weather, while I'm guessing that, as bad weather is actually not an uncommon occurrence , it's the bad weather that causes a lost person to be less likely to be found.
11. THE BLESSED WORD "COINCIDENCE"
12. There are way more than ten in his top ten most unusual disappearances. He says a case is in his top ten (or is the "most unusual, "most bizarre," "most puzzling," etc. he's ever researched) so often that it loses all meaning.
13. For a third time like undergraduate student writers, Paulides doesn't actually understand how close reading works. In the case of the disappearance of James Carroll in 1916, he quotes the New Castle News: "Several theories are advanced as to the cause of the disappearance of the child. One theory, which is believed by some people, is that the boy was abducted. In support of this contention it is reported that the footprints of a grown person were found near the home of the Carrolls" (qtd 281). And then tries to whip up some sound and fury: "This is an interesting statement--it specifically stated 'footprints' and not 'tracks,' 'boot marks,' etc." (281). Now what Paulides is trying to imply is that the use of the word "footprints" means bare footprints, and that therefore the child was abducted: by a Sasquatch. However, I would suggest strongly that the unmarked state of "footprints" in this case is almost certainly "shoe prints," and that if they were the prints of bare feet, the article would say that. Sound and fury . . . signifying nothing.
14. Instead of asking the same questions over and over again about how far a two-year-old is (a) likely to travel, (b) capable of traveling in a given time, doing some actual research might be the smart choice here.
15. Statistically, his sample is so horribly skewed that trying to make it look important that two people in his sample disappeared within a week of each other, or within ten miles of each other, just emphasizes Paulides' lack of knowledge of either statistics or probability theory.
In 2016, 800,000 children were reported missing. Only a fraction of those are unresolved disappearances, but since Paulides jumbles together "found alive," "found dead," and "not found," that's not actually important. What matters here is that that's about 2200 children reported missing every day. (That's out of 73.6 million children in the US in 2016, so actually about 1%, and "reported missing" includes children who are found within hours and with nothing having happened--I myself was a "missing child" for a couple of hours one evening when I was in my early teens, due to poor communication and my not having a watch. But I digress.) With the sample size thus adjusted, you can see that there's nothing remarkable about any coincidence of time and place in the cases that meet Paulides' "criteria."
And this comes full circle back to my original complaint: there is no rigor in Paulides' study. I don't fault him for being an amateur, but I do fault him for not being an auto-didact. He's not learning as he goes, not improving, just making the same mistakes on repeat. And that's disappointing.
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Date: 2017-12-14 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-14 03:23 am (UTC)If the person is within the depth at which cadaver dogs can work, I see no reason why not. They are used successfully after disasters like mudslides/landslides.
the question unanswered by Paulides' precis of the case that I find most disturbing/important is: what did the passing motorist, the last person to see Gillis, see that disturbed him so much--"'It wasn't like someone walking with a purpose straight down the road with a coat on. As I passed by I recognized it was something out of the ordinary, something that I didn't think it was safe to stop'" (270)--that he didn't stop, but did call the police?
That is almost unbearably frustrating, because you feel that anyone with the slightest sense of narrative—with a journalist's instincts or without them—would want to know the answer to that question, because it's exactly the sort of haunting lacuna that makes for a weird tale all by itself. The thing that is wrong, but no one says how. You'd think a person attuned to conspiracy theories and occult explanations would have been all over it.
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Date: 2017-12-14 03:44 am (UTC)