As I read the excellent ninth Missing 411 book, Canada, I’m considering as always the impossibility — so far — of offering a convincing solution to the core mysteries of these cases. It struck me, as a writer, to think in terms of narrative. What if I were an impetuous fiction writer who set myself up with these Missing 411 details as parameters for my story? How could I solve the story to the satisfaction of any potential reader?
If we look at the Missing 411 mysterious disappearances as narratives, we must ask what we’d insert as suspects, or culprits, to keep our readers’ suspension of disbelief going. When it comes time to start solving the mystery you’ve cobbled up, you need a viable villain, right?
So … What is taking the people so seamlessly and in some bizarre instances plopping them down again in strange places and circumstances, all with no mistake ever?
Normal predators, such as bears and mountain lions, the usual suspects, don’t work. They leave predation sites, blood, torn clothes, chunks of flesh, bones, drag marks, and scat, among other things. So it’s not them. They’re not mysterious, they’re terrifyingly blatant. Watch GRIZZLY MAN sometime.
How about covert paramilitary groups? Well, no. Again, they’d leave signs when moving or if they’d bivouac, helicopters and walkie-talkies would be heard, they’d be glimpsed sooner or later, and they’d make mistakes. Over the course of uncounted thousands of instances, surely they’d have goofed and given us a solid lead. Yet no such clues exist.
A gang of serial killers? That’s an absurd concept off-the-bat, and gets worse the more you examine the notion. Ever herded cats? Go back to paramilitary units, it’s a bit more conventionally convincing, until you examine it.
So what culprit can save your story about disappearances while keeping within the Missing 411 parameters? What takes people, often within arm’s length of others, and no one sees a thing? What takes people leaving no trace and huge searches reveal nothing? What moves people in impossibly short times across the ruggedest, most impassable terrain, and drops them, often naked or bare-footed, without a mark on them, on high ridges or summits? What takes people from boulder fields where there is nowhere to go, so that no search finds them? What takes people from clear snow fields above the tree line, tracks just end, no sign of them for hundreds of meters in any direction?
A ghost? Wendigo? Werewolf? Time Travelers?
To make any story with such elements believable even as fiction, we’d need to be writing science fiction, the hard kind rooted in physics, not ghost or horror stories. We’d need to find a cultural trope that provides enough elbow room to give us a plausible, if not entirely convincing, bad guy. Is there any suggested solution to our narrative that might slide by squinting skeptics?
It would be Sasquatch or ETI, perhaps. Only those two possibilities might slip the reader through the story without a balk, at least until they’ve finished reading the story and start trying to tell others about it. Then they’d blush.
Remember too that Bigfoot and ETI are not experiential referents, they are cultural. We can go to a zoo and see a bear or cougar. They’re confirmed as real. We can’t go see a Bigfoot, Grey, or Reptilian. They remain speculative at best. We might know what’s being referred to, we might get an image in our head when we hear the terms, but we can’t experience them in mundane situations. No documentaries or zoos contain actual specimens.
So we might make our narrative gratifying for the time it takes to read it, but soon after reading eyes roll and scoffing begins. Our tale would reduce from enthralling to entertaining to distracting to ridiculous. Remember, we are asking only how to make fiction with these parameters somehow sensible, rational, even logical. How much harder if it were factual?
Mark Twain said fiction is harder than fact because fiction has to be believable. He wasn’t kidding. We need to remember the Missing 911 cases are real. These disappearances, with such baffling details and impossible possibilities, are not mere fiction conjured to mystify, they really happened. Real people vanished, and real families suffer their loss daily. The details that confuse us arose from the cases, they were not sprinkled in to make a fictional detective’s job harder so a story would be more fun for a reader.
If our suggested fictional solutions to the inherent mysteries cannot be anything short of convincing, then our factual suspicions must develop solid evidence and follow it with strict care and constancy.
So far, no one can suggest anything. Not even for fiction based on such mind-boggling details. Mystery writers like locked-room mysteries, where the crime seems impossible until we learn that one sneaky trick that makes it work. It’s like stage magic, the illusions of which are often underwhelming once you see how simple the trick can be. Smoke, mirrors, angles, and distractions don’t begin to solve these cases of people going missing in such inexplicable situations.
Read all nine Missing 411 books by David Paulides. Buy them at CanAmMissing.com, where they are sensibly priced. Read them carefully. Think hard about them. Re-read cases, even whole books. Take notes and discuss with friends. Compare, contrast, and think some more. Consult the helpful maps, on which clusters are obvious, if inexplicable. Keep worrying at it.
Among us lies, they say, the wisdom of the crowd. Data analysis might give us new insights, new avenues of approach. All it might take is one child’s simple question. That’s why a group effort, distributed thinking, a crowd-funded mind bank, a Boolean avalanche of decision branched mini-max theories is probably our best bet to figure out what’s going on, how it works, why it’s happening, and who, or what, is behind it.
Maybe we’re a simulation and the programmer got sloppy, or is perverse and sadistic, or a lunatic. Who needs a programmer if the simulation developed spontaneously from binary information bits.
Yikes.
By the way, a definition from your friendly online dictionary: Boolean search is a type of search allowing users to combine keywords with operators (or modifiers) such as AND, NOT and OR to further produce more relevant results. For example, a Boolean search could be “hotel” AND “New York”. This would limit the search results to only those documents containing the two keywords.
Boo!
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