Missing 411 Book – Western & Eastern United States & Canada by David Paulides
Missing 411 is a Book Written by David Paulides, Missing 411 is a fascinating book that will challenge your current thinking about people who go missing, challenge your perception of law enforcement and search.
What is the Story of Missing 411?
Following his work on Bigfoot, Paulides’ next project was Missing 411, a series of self-published books and two documentary films, documenting unsolved cases of people who have gone missing in national parks and elsewhere.
According to Paulides, his work on this subject began when he was doing research in a national park and an off-duty park ranger found him and expressed concern about the questionable nature of some of the missing person cases which occurred in the parks.
The ranger knew Paulides’ background and asked him to research the issue. Paulides obliged, and asserts that he uncovered multiple lines of evidence suggesting negligence on the part of the park service is failing to locate the missing people.
He broadened his investigation to include missing people from across the world, and this led to his belief that he has uncovered a mysterious series of worldwide disappearances, which he said defied logical and conventional explanations.
As of August 2021, Paulides has written at least ten books on this topic. According to A Sobering Coincidence, he does not yet have a theory on what is causing the disappearances, although he indicates that the “field of suspects is narrowing.” Paulides advised his readers to go outside of their normal comfort zone to determine who (or what) is the culprit.
Paulides’s books publicized the fact that the US National Park Service does not keep an independent list of people that go missing in their parks. While there is a database for the incident and criminal reports, it is not widely or consistently used and it doesn’t interface with other criminal databases. In response, a petition was created to make the department accountable.
The interest in the book series prompted the creation of a documentary film based on the Missing 411 books; this film was released in 2017. Images of maps made by Paulides regarding his theory have been frequently shared on social media. The theory has also gone viral on TikTok. Missing 411 Eastern United States & Canada Book by David Paulides is a very famous book in united sates of america and Canada.
Kyle Polich, a data scientist and host of the Data Skeptic podcast, documented his analysis of Paulides’ claims in the article “Missing411” and presented his analysis to a SkeptiCamp held in 2017 by the Monterey County Skeptics.
He concluded that the allegedly unusual disappearances represent nothing unusual at all, and are instead best explained by non-mysterious causes such as falling or sudden health crises leading to a lone person becoming immobilized off-trail, drowning, bear (or other animals) attack, environmental exposure, or even deliberate disappearance.
After analyzing the missing person data, Polich concluded that these cases are not “outside the frequency that one would expect, or that there is anything unexplainable that I was able to identify.”This presentation was discussed in a February 2017 article in Skeptical Inquirer, a publication of the CSI. In the article, Susan Gerbic reported “Paulides… gave no reason for these disappearances but finds odd correlations for them.
For example, two women missing in different years both had names starting with an ‘A’ with three-letters, Amy and Ann.” Polich concluded in his analysis: “I’ve exhausted my exploration for anything genuinely unusual. After careful review, to me, not a single case stands out nor do the frequencies involved seem outside of expectations.”
In August 2021, science communicator Brian Dunning released a Skeptoid episode that examined the Missing 411 claims, summarizing the analysis done on the subject by both Kyle Polich, and Madilyn Oster of Seattle University’s Department of Criminal Justice.
In the report, Dunning states that “researchers have pointed out that many aspects of the cases have explanations that are well known, just apparently not to Paulides.” He points out that Oster’s paper disproves Paulides’ own conclusions, using the information presented in his own research:
Who is David Paulides?
David Paulides is a former police officer who is now an investigator and writer known primarily for his self-published books, one dedicated to proving the reality of Bigfoot, and his Missing 411 series of books, in which he documents the disappearance of people in national parks and elsewhere.
Paulides attributes mysterious, unspecified causes to these disappearances, while data analysis suggests that these disappearances are not statistically mysterious or unexpected.