Finished Vol. 1 of Missing 411, subtitled Western U.S. by David Paulides. Began Vol. 2. The Eastern U.S. & Canada. Also reading The Phantom Killer by James Presley. Also Finders Keepers by Stephen King. A YA novel, two anthologies, and Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. Many other things have my attention, too. I read a lot of things.
Been immersing myself in the Paulides investigations. There are many radio and video discussions and interviews with him online. You Tube has dozens. He reinforces his points and clarifies his patterns in calm, clear factual reports. He does not offer guesses, speculations, or conclusions. Just the facts, ma’am; befits an ex cop.
Most impressive is how organized his work remains. It’s consistent throughout. It stems from his approach, which is both methodical and detailed.
He spots clusters invisible to anyone who is not seeing the big picture from a span of years, even decades. Age, sex, location, circumstance, and soon, all are factored. Given statistics of known events and crimes, these clusters come into focus only once you compare them to what is usual. They stand out in contrast.
It’s as if they’re hidden this way, by spreading them out over time. Steeply oblique views show how they pop up only over a comparison to long term observations of the same areas.
My current obsession with mysterious disappearances may bore you but then again it may intrigue you, so either way I’ll likely keep researching. And talking about it. It’s not like we don’t rehash unsolved mysteries of other kinds endlessly: Black Dahlia, Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, Elisa Lam and so forth.
Interestingly, Paulides addresses Elisa Lam’s case. He draws no conclusions as yet. None of us do, or can. Insufficient data. It seems certain she was put into the water tank. They had to cut the tank open to get her body out. As you know, situations surrounding her ending up there remain unexplained, including locked access to doors leading to the roof. A janitor or employee of the creepy Hotel Cecil, which as since changed its name, must be considered. Was she playing games with someone we did not see on the elevator tape, someone who then playfully raped and killed her?
Water removes DNA traces.
As DARK WATER, 2005, or its Japanese precursor from 2002 make clear, some choose to factor into the story a hungry ghost or malicious spirit. Could be. If any hotel is haunted it would be the Cecil, where Richard Ramierez, the Night Stalker, lived in l984 and where in 1991 Jack Unterweger, an Austrian serial killer, also lived. Other deaths, including murders, suicides, and skid row overdoses, happened there over the years from 1924, when it was built, through the 1950s, when it hit hard times, to 2007, when part of it was refurbished. Hauntings are reported consistently though its history but, even if we don’t buy into ghosts, Lam may have, and that could suffice to explain some of her odd behavior.
Google Elisa Lam and watch the video. I defy anyone to explain that, although of course many do, reaching for comforting prosaic explanations when in fact there is not enough to make such leaps.
Yes, some suggest ghosts in the National Park disappearances, and UFOs, Bigfoot, Unmarked Black Helicopters, Pterosaurs, Thunderbirds, etc.
As mentioned, Paulides began his retirement from police and business by looking to apply police investigative methods and business organization to sorting out Bigfoot. This means physical evidence, including DNA.
He gathered a lot, convinced separate groups to cooperate for the first time, and found a prominent scientist and her lab to analyze the DNA. Further, he got many to chip in to pay lab costs. All this amounts to his certainty that yes, Bigfoot is real and is likely a species not of ape but of human, surviving from the Ice Age. Is it the Denisovans, recently identified and considered extinct?
One fascinating effort was using a police sketch artist to elicit good descriptions from witnesses. These came out looking more human than animal. Better, when facial hair was removed from the face shown in a still frame of the Gimlin-Patterson film, it matched First Nation faces and looked native American. It’s not a gorilla or a person but something between, more on the human side.
My bet is Denisovans. Makes sense. Enclaves survive on high ridges, above the trees, at altitude. The Denisovan genes found in Tibetans, especially in the Sherpa, allow the Sherpa to work in altitudes that kill others by keeping denser red blood corpuscles from clumping. Blood with those genes stays thinner. No embolism, thrombosis, or stroke occurs.
Paulides, wisely, won’t come out and say any of this until the lab has its work nailed down. Dr. Melba Ketchum is the geneticist doing the DNA analysis. Her lab work moved her from skeptical to certain and she says her lab co-workers range to include a stone-cold skeptic who keeps them honest in adhering to protocol. She’s aware how solid her work must be if she is to announce confirmation of a large unknown primate.
My analysis of Paulides’s books is that he suspects Bigfoot is snatching people for various reasons. They’re taken from wilderness areas near large bodies of water. If they are, as First Nation tribes state, another tribe — they never call Bigfoot or Sasquatch an animal — they may also need fresh breeding stock. They could also go rogue, in individual cases, as with any species. We may for those rogues be tasty cousins.
Paulides refuses to state conclusions and sticks to facts but preponderance of evidence points to the disappeared having been taken by an overwhelming force capable of whisking them long disances, almost always steeply upslope to gasping altitudes, at speeds even expert outdoor types have no chance of emulating.
Another tribe among us, on our fringes, of a distinct line of development, huge and hairy, evolved to survive in high mountains and deep wilderness, makes sense to explain Bigfoot, and provide a good candidate to explain people disappearing mysteriously. They’d be a culture. They’d avoid us, sometimes use us. Prey on us.
We get the inter dimensional folks raving, too, trying to explain Sasquatch’s amazing elusiveness. They’d say Elisa Lam fell into the tank though a vortex or portal, clinging to a conceptual explanation too fanciful to count as persuasive and fitting none of the few facts.
Then we move into the urban areas. That’s unsettling. No handy Bigfoot to fall back on, unless it’s a variant of the Wolfen concept from Whitley Strieber’s book or the movie with Albert Finney.
Again, that’s far-fetched. Factually, in urban areas people very often vanish from the midst of friends, from crowded bars, and from family gatherings, only to turn up several days later in water. Rivers, canals, tanks. None had drowned, none were in the water even half as long as they’d been missing. They seem to have been kept somewhere, then discarded. Cause of death unknown.
Over the last nine years there have been sixty-one deaths in Manchester, England, UK, all the dead found near or in canals rarely deeper than two to four feet. If you fall in, stand up and you’re fine. Oh, and they didn’t drown. They’re called the Canal Murders in Blighty. Stateside we have the Smiley Face Killer, linked to the Clown Killer, both names stemming from a smiley face found at the scene or glimpses of someone, or some thing, dressed as a clown in the area. All are young men, college aged and responsible in life. No one sees them vanish, and friends frequently report, “He was right there, then he wasn’t.”
Surveillance cameras in bars and on streets fail to show the missing person leaving or passing by, yet the body ends up near or in water.
As I said earlier, water removes traces.
Then there are shoes with feet in them, almost always left shoes and left feet, coming ashore along the northwest coast and on the shores of the Great Lakes and other large bodies of water. DNA matches no known missing person. There are hundreds of them so far.
Could these have anything to do with missing people? What could explain this, a harsh form of captivity, piracy, or slavery?
No proven cause of death, no reason they vanished, and no explanation how they got to where they’re found.
About sixty percent of those who go missing in National Parks are found alive but are either too young to speak or cannot recall what happened or where they were. They sometimes offer surreal explanations such as a toddler saying, “A big dog ate my shoe and carried me in its paws, then slept with me to keep me warm,” and so on.
Ten to fifteen percent of those who go mysteriously missing are utterly gone. No trace, or sometimes tantalizing clues such as one inside-out glove liner, clothes folded neatly, or weapons discarded. Despite such hints, they are never found. Dogs can’t or won’t track them. Skeletal remains never show up. They’re just gone.
The rest are found dead. Sometimes only tiny fragments are found, such as a tooth, part of a skull cap, or flakes of crushed bone. Some bodies are found without enough blood to identify even the type. Utterly drained. That is rare and even weirder, in such cases there is not a mark on them.
Most mysterious disappearances are male, white, and, strangely, a high percentage are of German descent. No explanation is evident or offered.
Most are superior physically, which makes sense given that they’re in wilderness areas, and mentally, which seems a fluke. Many are doctors or scientists. Almost none are troubled or poor.
Of those who vanish in cities, ninety-nine percent tend to be found dead.
Dogs being unable to find scent is one of the standard oddities. Another is bad weather striking soon after someone goes missing. Is this timed to cover tracks? Should we be extra cautious prior to heavy weather striking a wilderness area?
The Kathy Ann Shea case, from Thursday 18 March 1965, in Tyrone PA, where the six-year-old was last seen by her mother and the crossing guard as she walked the remaining couple blocks to school after having come home, as usual, for lunch. At that time Tyrone, a small town now, was a village with no near-by highway and only winding roads through mountain forests as a way to reach it. Or flee from it. Outsiders were noticed. Nothing unusual was noticed that day. Massive searches revealed no sign of her. No remains of any kind were ever found. She simply vanished.
Most feel she was abducted, which makes sense. Are her bones moldering in someone’s basement dungeon? did a passer-by snag her into a car and simply drive off? Did she chase a puppy into the woods, only to get lost, die of exposure, and have her bones scattered by animals and time? Did a teacher keep her in the trunk all school day and drive her to a secret place? Or was it even more mysterious?
All those theories and more have been considered. Her family continues to hope she is still alive, somewhere. Somehow.
I know of a case in Omaha, that of a school girl who managed to vanish in half a block after getting off a school bus and walking toward her house in the middle of the block, and another in Peru, a small college town, where a college student went missing and has never been found despite river dredgings, divers, and searches of farmland and woods. Nebraska is not part of the usual patterns or clusters, but people vanish from here, too.
There are even incidences of people disappearing while on the phone. They’ll say, “Oh, no,” or “Help me,” or “Oh my god,” and some sound as if they’re moving rapidly away from the phone. In a terrifying case, screams and growls are heard.
Most of these are never found, which is chilling.
One wonders if there may be witnesses who see things they won’t discuss, perhaps because they don’t understand them. No one ever seems to see a thing. Very rarely do people hear things. SAR people have sometimes heard cries for help, whimpers, or other distress sounds. Those almost never pan out, but a few have led to the discovery of an unharmed child who should have died from freezing over a few days of being naked in the wilderness.
This indicates these people are being taken at opportune times when they are momentarily alone, whether in wilderness or urban settings. This hints strongly at stalking, stealth, and confident ambush. No attempts to grab have been known to fail. There are no slip-ups, attempted abductions that fail and leave angry, upset people and witnesses. Something is well within its comfort zone, operating at a level of efficiency we don’t usually see. The disappearances are eerily seamless.
There are about one per week that we’re aware of, disappearances featuring weird and mysterious details or aspects. They come in clusters, rather than regularly, and often there are lapses of years or even decades between clumps in certain cluster centers. It is as if some plan to hide these statistics with a broken pattern is in play.
Paulides created a profile for the disappearances he considered mysterious, so he could cull kernel from chaff. After all, many vanish in wilderness, taken by bear, falling off cliffs, or drowning. Being lost, starving, freezing to death, and many other mundane causes are not necessarily mysterious at all, and those people are found, or their bodies are found.
It is baffling, chilling, and ignored by the authorities. They’ll find a few bone chips and declare it a “death from exposure”. They’ll stop searching in a short time and declare the missing person “obviously dead by now” and forget it. Once declared “presumed dead” they have no obligation, legal or moral, to do more. It’s an easy out.
This dismissal of case lets them move on, perhaps, but also leaves families and loved ones hanging, and blocks further search and investigation. They seem not to want to understand what’s going on.
There is some indication that the Dyatlov incident could have featured human mutilation, something not openly discussed among the National Park rangers. The Dyatlov incident happened in Russia, of course, but there is a Bigfoot overlap in those mountains where it happened. Pictures show jaws stripped, eyes, taken, even a tongue removed. That one was a woman, and her stomach had a lot of blood, meaning it happened to her while she was still alive and swallowing. Note how the mutilations parallel those of so-called cattle mutilations, which actually began with a horse and involved mostly cattle but many other animals as well over the years.
A map of American cattle mutilation sites matches an overlaid map of nuclear test drift zones, incidentally, prompting some to speculate the mutilations are soft-tissue samples being taken to check for radiation from a random population.
Both the Dyatlov and American cattle mutilation events hint strongly at attack from above. This, along with lights seen in the sky, make people mention UFOs without specifying what they mean. Unmarked black helicopters are sometimes cited.
All these unsettling details are supposedly why Russia kept the Dyatlov incident under wraps for so many years. It freaked them out at official levels because it could not be categorized or explained.
Incidentally, a recent TV show purported to be a documentary of the Dyatlov incident showing “new” photographs depicting a Bigfoot-type shape in a blurry picture turns out to be fiction, and should be discounted as a source for anything factual. It is made by the same types who did the fake mermaid documentary and the fake mega shark documentary. Ignore those sensationalist hoaxes.
Not surprisingly, myth fills in where facts are scarce. Alma, the bigfoot of the area where the Dyatlov expedition met its grisly, mysterious end, were mentioned as culprits to explain why dead students seemed crushed. So many bones were shattered that their injuries were compared to having been in high-speed car crashes. Bigfoot attack? Or were they, as so many cattle mutilation cases indicate, dropped from 200 feet or more?
Really, UFO abduction and mutilation explains things better than a yeti attack. It’s eve better than the soviet special forces squad explanation, that cites a roving band of Spetznaz deciding to obliterate the athletes for seeing something classified. Why then the scattered carnage? They’d simply have been shot once in the back of the head and buried in shallow graves.
It was not locals. Those tribes are not violent. They even helped search when the Dyatlov expedition failed to show up on time. Nor would there be motive, considering nothing was taken or missing from the camp equipment. Impoverished attackers steal of necessity.
Galling that the apparent ETH provides the most elegant, persuasive explanation, given how targeted any Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis is for ridicule by so-called establishment scientists.
Attack from above could explain why some of the Dyatlov expedition members ran for the trees, from which, presumably, an attack was not coming. The three found single file headed up the hill could have been dropped that way, not in their tracks but from a height.
In fact, these bodies were found only by using probes in the snow. They were four feet down. All lay face down.
Seems we have no further details from the reports even though there should be more. Russian paranoid protocols and secretive practices have thwarted investigations for decades.
As for National Park disappearances, they are often found dead miles away and many hundreds of feet higher. Many are gone for a week or two or three before being found, yet the times of death are only a couple days prior to the body being found, in conditions such that they seem to have been held indoors or protected somehow from weather. Their bare feet or socks are clean, unmarked. Their boots and other clothes are often never found. No explanation of why they’d remove clothes or especially boots is indicated. Often they’re found in places that have been searched repeatedly, as if placed there as a taunt.
What, Paulides asks, are their stomach contents? They had to have been eating something to be found in such healthy a state of death. With no supplies, how were they eating at all?
One little girl stated the “dog” that carried her in its paws made a nest of leaves for them and curled around her to keep her warm, and also stated that it had gone off and brought back berries in its paw. Talented dog.
Many are found in or near berry bushes but berries alone won’t sustain anyone for long, at altitude, in inclement climate, often harsh storms. Bushes offer no shelter from severe weather. Mountain weather is wet, cold, and unpredictable and its effects should show.
As Paulides emphasizes, anyone who reads all five (so far) of his books realizes there is, and likely cannot be, a single answer. Conventional answers don’t apply, especially across so many cases over such a wide area over so much time. These mysterious disappearances date back into the 1800s, and that is only as far as his research in newspaper accounts can find. Earlier accounts surely explain folk tales and local legends. One thinks of the Pied Piper of Hamelin Germany or the Green Children in England.
Paulides chooses cases for his books using a set of clear, well-defined parameters. There are many more cases that fit, and new cases continue to arise, so he cuts the clutter. Clusters and patterns revealed seem designed to baffle and frustrate. There is also an eerie sense of will in them. This is intelligence at work. These things are being done on purpose and with awareness.
Kathy Shea is not in the Pennsylvania section of the second Paulides book. Her case should be; perhaps he elided it, or does not know of it. He states that PA is a cluster in and of itself, so many children have gone missing in mysterious and inexplicable circumstances.
It is mostly children in PA. There is an odd cluster of older men around Timmins, Ontario, Canada. Other clusters show other slants.
My guess is the local patterns involve different needs. Unless they’re simply falling into random space-time holes they’re being taken for reasons we can’t yet spot.
Cases of bone fragments being found, sometimes tiny flakes and little else, or a single tooth, or a skull cap, beg the question of where does the flesh, blood, and skeleton go? Why?
Blood is rarely found on any clothes or the ground around them. These seem to be taunts, or dump sites, not murder scenes. If murder it was. It is next to impossible to confirm cause of death from mere fragments of bone.
Then arose awareness via a TV limited-run documentary series of the six Chillicothe, Ohio women who went mysteriously missing. Four have been found dead. Two remain missing entirely. This is likely an active serial killer.
Some think he was killed in a motel room by a potential victim who managed to grab his gun, which he’d set aside in order to strangle her more efficiently with both hands. She fired blindly over her shoulder, instantly killing him with a bullet to his head. This killer apparently roamed from Ohio to the West Coast, and ended up dead in Reno, Nevada. Whether he’s linked forensically to the missing Ohio women is being investigated.
The Chillicothe disappearances happened between May 2014 and May 2016. Interviewed cops, including the chief, do not speak clear English, which makes me think it unlikely they’d think logically or with much awareness of other aspects that may apply to a given crime. This in turn makes the serial killer’s continued evasion more understandable.
Small town hunting grounds work best, it seems. They are the urban echo of wilderness, with few witnesses and no overview.
The Chillicothe Gazette’s editor, Mike Throne, is literate and articulate but only a newspaper editor. He won’t be investigating personally and won’t be privy to inside details of police investigations, if any such details arise.
As a commercial venture, the ID Channel’s show THE VANISHING WOMEN has a companion guide on sale at news stands and grocery stores, as well as a discussion thread on the Investigation Discovery website. I’m wondering if this will be a trend as a new multi-media approach, as TV continues to change, struggling with the urge to mesh all media into one thing. To stay productive and competitive, TV must offer changes that stick with the internet and other audiences.
It’s a six-part series while the murders and investigations continue, so I guess it’s focused more on process and situation than solution. This has become a norm in nonfiction TV.
One wonders if they’ll milk it. Probably not, unless there is a big break in the case, when a follow-up single episode would suffice as excuse to show the whole thing over again. It’s summer filler, so who knows? Maybe an annual update?
Piracy of books is so bad now that publishers and sellers are ridding their lists and shelves of tea-cosy mystery stories, even though this sub-category is hugely popular, especially among women, who read more than men overall, apparently. It’s very popularity undermines it, allowing pirate sites to profit even if offering free books as enticements. These proliferate. It’s theft but it’s what killed music’s profitability.
Worse, a generation now feels entitled to free music and books. They defend the theft by saying writers or musicians wanting money are greedy for asking for pay for something they’d do free. These entitled thieves don’t see creating as a real job not everyone can do and have no appreciation of how hard creative work is. Some imagine all creators of entertainment are rich. Writers are all Richard Castle or J. K. Rowling or Stephen King. Musicians are all the Beatles or the Stones or business moguls like Sean Combs. It’s bizarre and infuriating, because it’s willful blindness.
How much more marginalized must writers and artists be before something fundamental breaks and works in our favor for once?
This is the backdrop not only TV faces, but even investigators such as David Paulides, who understands books reach only a small portion of his potential audience. Wisely, he avoids putting out electronic versions. That way lies automatic piracy. If it costs them only a few key strokes to pirate a work, they’ll do it on spec. If they have to spend big to make hard copies on the off-chance a book will sell, they’ll skip it, or focus only on the sure-fire best-sellers. So Paulides sells his books through his Missing 411 CanAm Project website. Amazon does have them, but at grossly inflated prices by gougers. Avoid that and buy direct, where they are fairly- and regular book-priced volumes.
As stated, he knows this is only a small part of the people who’d be interested, so to widen the audience for this ignored, uncovered, and some say covered-up story of mysterious disappearances in National Parks, he has crowd-funded a movie, which is in final editing to be released later in 2016. Movies reach more people, so this could mark a turning point in breaking down National Park Service stonewalling.
As you will hear Paulides mention often, the NPS told him flat out they don’t keep tabs of any kind, not even a list, of people who go missing in National Parks. Further, they demanded huge fees to process Freedom of Information requests; any billionaire interested in funding these, please get with Mr. Paulides. FOIA applies because the NPS is Federal. State Parks are exempt.
Worse than all this, one person he contacted at NPS told him he’d never get those files. When he asked why, he was not answered. Paulides concludes the NPS does indeed have extensive records and does not want the public to know what’s in them. He believes if the extent and nature of these mysterious disappearances got out, visits to parks would plummet, and National Parks are a many-billion dollar a year proposition and enterprise.
Capitalism, ironically, has destroyed the artistic community’s ability to make a living, demolished small business, and wiped off competition by favoring corporate big money homogenized extruded product. Making even a paltry living is nearly impossible for most creative folks, unless they allow their work to be co-opted by corporate in some way and thus rendered non-creative.
Sickening but typical, these corrosive, even cancerous effects spread also to investigative journalism. Without funding or officially-sanctioned access, without government approval, and without resources to back you, you’re left flailing in a choppy sea of indifference, and no one is looking for you.
The Jennifer Kesse disappearance from Orlando, Florida — scene of both a mass-shooting hate crime at a popular nightclub called Pulse and a gator killing a toddler at a Disneyworld resort — in 2006, as detailed in the DISAPPEARED episode #705 titled “Girl Interrupted”, on ID Channel, fits Paulides’s parameters. She became mysteriously and utterly gone amidst her ordinary life. Her father believes she was trafficked, a possible solution certainly. Others think she was grabbed, raped, and killed, there being so many places to dump bodies in Florida. The boss who lusted for her instantly said, “Gators ate her,” when a co-worker told him about her being missing. That’s creepy and suspicious, of course, but no evidence has linked him or anyone to her disappearance.
She vanished, apparently, in the twenty foot walk from her car to her condo’s door. Argues for a car abduction, you’d think, but parking lot cams show nothing of another car. The lot abuts a wild, swampy area, however. Could someone or something have dragged her into that?
Her car was found parked elsewhere in the complex and her keys were never located. Her apartment remained undisturbed except for the oddity of her MACE, found on a table instead of in her purse, where she was known always to carry it. Another urban mysterious disappearance, no trace of the missing found.
I’m convinced the Kathy Shea case fits well into David Paulides’s books and study.
Here is a contrast: Locally, here in Omaha, there is the case of 12-year-old Amber Harris. She is the girl who vanished on a half-block walk from the corner to her house, having gotten off a school bus. This was on 29 November 2005. On 14 February 2006 her book bag was found on top of a cement mixer used as a garbage container, at a location near her home, leading eventually tot the arrest and conviction of Roy Ellis. In 2008 he was sentenced to death. Amber’s remains were later found in Hummel Park, a particularly wild area of Omaha.
Here we see the expected, usual situation. An abduction, rape, murder, and body dump. We see evidence sifted, the crime solved, and the body found. What was mysterious at the start was revealed as a heinous crime and the victim was not gone forever. Certainly some of the National Park disappearances are the work of serial killers, if statistics can be believed. However, so many over so long a time, in so many places, in clusters separated by long stretches of time during which nothing happens, with the patterns always the same? That would require an army of serial killers all disciplined, all following the exact methods, and never making a mistake. Ludicrous.
This example shows how facile answers and superficial resemblances do not necessarily serve to dismiss the unresolved cases Mr. Paulides discusses in his books.
In one such case a woman who’d left her toddler outside in a fenced front yard to play while she cleaned the house came outside in time to see what she at first described as a bear carrying the child off. With the child slung under its arm. Running on two legs. She screamed. A neighbor passing by joined her in chasing after this abductor.
At a high fence, the child was dropped and found to be without a scratch. When the woman’s story of a bear doing this elicited incredulity among reporters, who knew bear did not behave this way, she offered, “Maybe it was a wolf?”
Rationalizing what she could not understand would explain why her tale was unbelievable. She could not believe it herself and had no terms to describe what she’d seen.
Yes, this hints strongly at a Bigfoot situation, although would that not have prompted her to call it a big hairy man without clothes, or perhaps a large ape of some kind? She seemed genuinely baffled and unable to say exactly what she saw taking her baby.
In THE VANISHING WOMEN, a suspected serial killer case is presented in well-filmed artful documentary style. Testimonials are from participants and the cases remain cold as ice. It’s still happening. One is curious whether any of the money the series and its concordance booklet generates will go toward either the cops or to a private effort to fund further investigation.
If the serial killer angle doesn’t pan out, it could mean a criminal got away with it, or the cops were inadequate to the cases, or it might mean that something more mysterious is happening.
Sifting the genuinely mysterious disappearances from the creepy ones, from the mundanely-criminal ones, from the disappearances that only seem mysterious until the solution is presented, is difficult. It requires patience and time, focus and concentration. It requires organization and an ability to stay alert to small indicators across a wide range of material.
David Paulides possesses all these traits and more. He’s doing important, interesting investigations, and where they leads may require us to loosen our grip on what we imagine is quotidian reality. He’s also spreading the word, so more of us can start to realize that something mysterious, dark, and appalling is going on, and being officially ignored or covered up. We expect and must demand more of our society’s officials.
There is another tribe among us, it seems. It prowls at the fringes of our awareness, in wilderness and in urban areas. It takes some of us, returning only a percentage, entirely keeping others. This tribe can be sensed the way astrophysics notices celestial bodies it cannot see, by observing their influence and deducing their aspects and qualities.
Look askance and ask yourself if that shadow moving in the corner of our society’s vision is going to grab you next. It has already snatched thousands.
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5500 words
18 June 2521 Athenian Era
