Mysterious Disappearances

Hosted byGeorge Knapp

Mysterious Disappearances

About the show

Researcher and author David Paulides joined George Knapp for the full program to share even more bizarre stories of missing persons in national parks and forests throughout the United States. He expressed concern that, since his research began, reports of mysterious disappearances have seemingly increased. "The numbers have incrementally gone up in the last three years," Paulides revealed, noting that he has now amassed a stunning 1,400 cases. He dismissed the idea that this increase is merely because of additional attention focused on the phenomenon, since archival searches for such events over the last ten years has borne out the troubling trend. "It doesn't seem to make sense, what's happening," he mused about the puzzling rise in disappearances.

Over the course of the evening, Paulides shared a number of baffling disappearance cases that he has amassed via his research. One such story centered around a British man named Jonathan Myles Robinson who was vacationing in a small, isolated community in Switzerland which is only accessible by a railway system that shuts down at midnight. Paulides recounted how Robinson seemingly vanished at around 3 AM while walking to his hotel one night. Despite an exhaustive search of the area, the man's dead body was not discovered until five days later when searchers spied it at the bottom of a cliff in a nearby town. Eerily, cell phone records indicate that Robinson likely fell to his death shortly after 3 AM on the night he disappeared and, Paulides stressed, "there was no way" he could have traveled the distance to where his body was found.

"This is a really, really unusual case," he said about the 2014 disappearance of a woman named Karen Sykes. An avid hiker on Mt. Rainier, Sykes had been dubbed the "guru of the trails" by local newspapers and even wrote a book on hiking safety. On a seemingly routine hike with a friend, she opted to advance a bit further up the trail after her companion became tired and decided to take a rest. Sykes never returned and her body was discovered three days later in a location described by the Parks service as "difficult to access and not commonly traveled" which would have required her to climb 6,200 feet and then halfway down into an adjacent valley. Her death mystified Sykes' friends, who insisted that she was "the last person in the world that would have ever gotten lost on Rainier."

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