David Paulides

Joe Rogan opens by saying he first heard of David Paulides on Art Bell's late-night show Coast to Coast. Rogan notes that Paulides comes from law enforcement and asks how he got into the mystery of people going missing. Paulides says he had already written a couple of books and was at Yosemite National Park researching another topic. Two rangers had been following him around. About an hour and a half after he returned to his room, one of them knocked on his door in plain clothes. The ranger said he was there off duty, knew about Paulides and knew he came from law enforcement. About an hour and a half later, the ranger's partner arrived as well.

Somebody needs to look, needs to look into this.

According to Paulides, the two rangers had worked at different parks over the years and had seen people go missing at them. At first a disappearance drew publicity, interest and activity. Within about 10 to 15 days, they said, the Park Service no longer talked about it. Rogan asks whether the rangers suspected something nefarious or simply a lack of commitment, and he points out that most people lost in the woods for 14 days are probably going to die. Paulides answers "I think all the above." In his account, the rangers thought too many people were going missing, too little follow-up was being done, and "nobody seemed to care."

Rogan sets out the skeptical explanation directly. Search agencies may not have the resources or the people to cover the square miles a body search would require. Predators and other animals also eat remains, so if a body is out there, not much will be left. He adds that when you find dead animals in the woods, the death is usually very recent. Within a certain time something eats a carcass, "including the bones." Paulides agrees: "100%." The transcript also contains a fragmentary remark that an animal "was killed by another bear," without clear context.

Paulides then adds a qualification he says he learned from years around rangers. Some things people carry into the woods don't disappear with the body. He lists shoes, belt buckles, anything leather, the rubber waistband of underwear, and a rifle, pistol or bow. In his view, those items should be found. He then returns to the rangers' main concern: too many people going missing in a short period of time, with no one seeming to care.

These kind of things stay forever.

Rogan raises a case Paulides has covered: a man he believes was from Canada went skiing in New York, went missing, and turned up 2,500 miles away in California still wearing his ski clothes, with no idea what had happened. Paulides describes him as a fireman from, "I think, Toronto," on a weekend ski trip with friends. At the end of the day the friends couldn't find him. The man says he found himself in the front seat of a truck traveling from roughly Reno to Sacramento. He was already talking to the driver, as if his mind had suddenly come back on mid-conversation. The driver dropped him at Sacramento Airport. He remembered nothing except his home phone number. When he called his wife in Toronto, she told him everyone was still searching for him at the ski resort.

The account has clear gaps, and Paulides acknowledges several of them. He does not remember how many days passed. The man himself could not explain how he got into the truck. The driver left, and nobody knows who he was. Paulides sums it up: "That was kind of the whole story. It wasn't a lot." Asked why the man didn't question the driver, Paulides says he thinks the man was embarrassed. Asked whether the man ever tried regression hypnosis, Paulides says, "If he did, it never went public."

Asked for the strangest disappearance he has heard of, Paulides moves to a broader claim. Many people who disappear have no memory afterward, and he says that historically such people "have been abducted." Rogan asks whether he means alien abduction. Paulides answers "Alien entity. Something. Some type of foreign." Rogan confirms they are not talking about a bad person abducting someone. Paulides speculates that whatever it is can "take away part of that mind" where something was probably done to the person that they aren't meant to know about. This is an interpretation he offers. The excerpt presents no evidence for it beyond the pattern of amnesia cases.

Paulides says he has chronicled a whole segment of truck drivers who had amnesia and were found in very strange conditions. In one Midwest case, an independent driver with a wife and a couple of kids picked up a load ("I want to say it was pigs"). His truck was found stopped on a two-lane highway, "like outside of Indiana." He was gone, but his coat was found in a ditch across the other lane. The sheriff ran a large search with flyovers and canines for about four or five days and found nothing. A week and a half later, his body was found in that same field, in an area that had been searched. Paulides calls it "Impossible to miss." He says the coroner put the time of death at two weeks earlier, which the sheriff couldn't square with the dog and foot searches.

The trucker case leads into Paulides' main inference. He says he has 1,500 cases where multiple canine teams and multiple searches failed to find people. He stresses that he doesn't believe the searchers are inept, and he doesn't believe dogs can fail repeatedly. He concludes that the missing people were not there during the searches and were placed there later.

I don't believe they were there when they were searching. They were left there later on.

Later he backs this with his own experience. On his SWAT team, which had canines assigned, he can't remember a search where the dog failed to find the person. In contrast, he cites "1,200 to 1,500 cases" where a dog brought in to find a missing person can't track, won't track, or turns around and sits down. Earlier in the conversation he gave the figure as 1,500. The case counts are his own and are not documented in this excerpt.

That's totally outside the behavior of a dog.

Paulides names the case that first made him think something was off: a girl at Yosemite whom the National Park Service identifies as Stacey Anne Arras; the transcript renders her name as “Stacey Eris” and “Stacey Evers.” He says she grew up in Saratoga, next to his Cupertino, and went with her father and five others on a guided horseback trip into the High Sierra Camp. In his retelling, she took her camera to a nearby point where a 72-year-old group member was sitting, then walked into trees near a small lake and never returned. These are Paulides’s details: the NPS summary instead describes a group of ten riding mules to Sunrise High Sierra Camp and a 77-year-old intended hiking companion. The official record confirms the identity but does not match every detail of his account.

Paulides calls the search one of the biggest in Yosemite history. Searchers found her camera's lens cap on the path in the tree line, but never found her. He describes her as a 14-year-old girl who disappeared and was never found. He puts the timing at 46 years ago, and later says 47 years and "40 years" in the same discussion. He explains that the Park Service has uniformed police officers trained at the National Law Enforcement Academy, with special agents above them who do follow-up investigations.

His Freedom of Information Act request for the report was denied, and so was his appeal. He then recounts a call from a Park Service special agent who asked why he wanted the case. Paulides said that question was irrelevant under FOIA. In his telling, the agent admitted nobody had looked at the case, said Paulides would never get it, and told him it was "none of your business." When the agent claimed Paulides had never seen any other missing-person case, Paulides said he had received over 30 missing-person cases from the agency through FOIA. The agent called him a liar, and the call ended. Paulides says he still hasn't seen the file.

Rogan reads a FOIA appeal response he found online, sent to someone in 2011. It cites exemption 7A, which allows law-enforcement records to be withheld only to the extent their release "could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings." The document says the matter is still ongoing. Rogan reacts with disbelief that this would apply 30 or 40 years later. Paulides argues that missing-person investigations are not criminal investigations. If there are criminal aspects, it should be investigated as suspicious circumstances, not classified as a missing-person case. He adds that the agency has already released about 40 other missing-person cases to him, a higher count than the "over 30" he gave earlier.

There's nothing criminal about disappearing.

Paulides says he asked Tim Burchett, who had recently been on the show, to help him get a meeting with the head of the Department of the Interior, Doug Burgum, whose name the transcript renders as “Doug Bergam”. He wanted to lay out what he calls obstructions in the agency. His reasoning is that if nobody has looked at the file in 40-plus years, releasing it can't hurt anyone. Rogan adds that the people who worked the case then aren't working anymore, and Paulides says half of them are dead. Burchett's office contacted him and said the Department of the Interior had promised to follow up. Paulides says he has called three times and gotten no reply.

He estimates there are probably over 50 people missing in Yosemite right now. Twelve years ago he asked the Department of the Interior for a list of missing people in Yosemite and across its whole system. He was told no list existed. He asked them to compile one and linked his status as a published author to the eligibility he believed he met. The transcript does not clearly identify whether that dispute concerns fees, compilation terms or another criterion; it does not show that only published authors may request records. He says the agency told him he did not qualify and quoted $1.4 million for a system-wide list and $34,000 for Yosemite alone. He then spent two years building the list himself. In the third year, he says, Yosemite released its own list, which let him confirm he had all the Yosemite cases he wrote about. He says no system-wide list has been released.

Rogan keeps playing the skeptic throughout. He suggests the stonewalling could come from people who are lazy, don't want to do the work, and dismiss Paulides as "just a kooky author," while recognizing that Paulides believes something stranger is going on. Paulides does not directly answer whether his pressure prompted Yosemite's list. Rogan's question "what do you think might be going on with these people?" leads Paulides back to the canine argument, not to a single stated theory.

In this part of the conversation the evidence is mostly secondhand anecdote and Paulides' own tallies. Details are often uncertain in his own words ("I think, Toronto," "I want to say it was pigs," "I don't remember"). Key witnesses, like the truck driver in the skier case, are unidentified. Figures shift between retellings: 1,500 versus 1,200 to 1,500 canine cases, over 30 versus about 40 FOIA'd cases, and 40, 46 or 47 years since the girl vanished. Rogan's resource-and-scavenger explanation is countered mainly by Paulides' point about items that persist. The entity-abduction interpretation is offered as his view, not demonstrated.

After a sponsor segment, Rogan asks about a woman who recently went missing and was part of a group of scientists in propulsion research. The name "Reza?" comes up, followed by "Yeah. Same sort of situation." The case is then discussed as a woman disappearing while hiking with a friend, with searches reportedly finding no trace; Paulides relates it to his separation and tracking criteria while explicitly saying he does not know the cause.

The conversation continues with the case introduced just beforehand as “Reza,” a case that, in the speakers' words, fits the profile David Paulides has built through his Missing 411 work. A woman was hiking with a friend. The two had just been talking, and the friend was walking ahead. When the friend turned around to ask her a question, she was gone. Searchers brought in dogs and found nothing. Paulides says the case matches 'that 411 criteria that I laid down,' and that this is why he made a video about it. Both speakers agree the disappearance 'doesn't make sense.' The case is described only in outline: the preceding passage supplies only the name “Reza,” and this exchange gives no full identity, location, date or independently checked source.

Asked straight out whether he suspects something supernatural, extraterrestrial or interdimensional, Paulides starts by declining to commit. He says his books lay out facts and leave the conclusion to the audience. That disclaimer is the lens for the rest of the segment, which moves from patterns in the cases to firsthand-style accounts that go much further.

First of all, I don't know. Right. In my books, I've laid out facts and I let the viewer decide.

Paulides draws on the many missing-hunter cases he has written about to name two features he says keep coming up. He illustrates the first with a hypothetical. Two hunters split up on a friend's farm and agree to meet again in an hour. He calls the moment they part the 'point of separation.' He says that in every missing-hunter case, whatever happens takes place at that point.