samedi 21 novembre 2015

David Paulides' "Missing 411" books

There is a series of books called "Missing 411", written by David Paulides. I haven't read any of them but I've recently read of them and was curious if any forumites might have read them and have anything critical to say, before I go to the effort of finding them for myself.

David Paulides used to be a bigfoot "researcher". A very well-known one too; a search for "Paulides" in this forum turns up roughly a million threads about "bigfoot". However, just to get that out of the way, from what I've been able to discern, these books were written after he ended his "bigfoot phase", and have nothing to do with bigfootery as best I can tell.

This is what I've been able to determine so far. The Missing 411 books were initially about disappearances that have occurred at US National Parks; apparently over time they have begun covering disappearances in other wilderness areas, and then other less-wildernessy areas in the US and abroad. The book series doesn't involve itself in every single instance where a person has gone missing; but rather select cases where the person is never found, or where the person (or remains) are found, but where there are peculiar circumstances that don't seem to lend themselves to easy explanation. Some evident examples would be children found unlikely distances from the place where they went missing, in a relatively short amount of time from their disappearance; bodies being found in places that had previously been thoroughly searched; remains found a substantial amount of time after the person's disappearance but showing a much more recent time of death and little evidence of a difficult time barely surviving in the wilderness for an extended period. Paulides claims to have identified certain specific and important similarities between the various cases, although not having read the books I'm not sure what these are. From the reviews I've read, Paulides has at no time insinuated that a certain thing is responsible, whether that's UFOs, or ghosts, or yetties, or government Satanists, or any other such things that like to be postulated by aficionados of "mysterious disappearances"; however, he does heavily insinuate that there is something to be insinuated about all of these cases, and that he believes it is something that is outside the "comfort zone" of mundane explanation.

From what little I've been able to gather, the disappearances covered in his books are actual, documented disappearances (no fictional men from the mysterious land of Taured or vanishing David Langs); although not having read the books and double-checked each case I can't vouch for how well he relates the details of each one, including the details that he depicts as "unusual".

So, there's my question. Anybody here read these books, or otherwise know of the cases covered by them? Are there instances where he gets things vastly wrong, or seems to invent conveniently mysterious details? Other reasons to dismiss these books (besides his previous forays into the bigfoot BS)?


via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1XgaDJK

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