My God! What if it should seep into the water table! 
That stuff’s an acid!!!
I worked for the Dept of Defense for 37 years, part of that time in jobs that required security clearances, and even in those situations where you knew you could go to jail for revealing stuff, people still talked. So how can anyone imagine that the Dept of the Interior is able to keep secrets from the rest of the nation?
Some people speak of “The Government” as if it were a homogeneous entity of a single mind and purpose, existing to keep secrets from the governed. They seem to forget that the government is made up of lots of people from lots of backgrounds doing lots of different jobs, and while some are secretive and have been known to do sketchy and even illegal stuff, there’s no way such a vast conspiracy could exist - it’s impossible.
To quote Ben Franklin: Three may keep a secret if two are dead. The man knew.
It has a higher pH than any acids used in legitimate industry…
Yep, both are good ideas.
Not really, but it’s so dangerous that just exposing it to air forms acid.
Yes, an acid so strong it can eat through solid steel.
Exactly! This is the death-blow to most large-scale conspiracy fantasies, like the Apollo hoax or the Alien Autopsy guff. It would require hundreds, maybe thousands, of people to keep a secret with absolute loyalty. Even after they’re retired.
It means that no one ever wrote anything down to be published after their death.
The nice Sicilian chap had an apt word for this: “Inconceivable!”
(I was at Sunset Crater, and the nice Ranger at the visitors’ center told me a couple of secrets that she wasn’t supposed to. Specifically, what “SP Mountain” meant. But she took me outside the room and only spoke in whispers.)
And you can get lost in 60 seconds in a wooded area. It happened to me at about 9. I stepped off a trail to take a shortcut and bam! I was lost. I did what I learned in the scouts, headed downhill and didn’t panic. Found everyone waiting for me.
It was fast. If you’re not used to being in the woods (I was used to it, and being alone in the wood) and you panic, yeah, I can see someone getting deeper in the woods and not be found.
As residents of San Diego County, we read all the time about someone going hiking in the mountains or deserts and - well disappearing. The authorities go to great lengths to tell everyone who heads off to those areas to carry water, a cell phone and let others know where they will be hiking and when they’ll return. Some people seem to think they are feral humans who can beat mother nature in a heads-up match, but most can’t.
Same thing happened to me.
or you can step off the trail 10 fucking feet, trip, and roll into a ravine with a broken leg.
I had to go back and check. We’ve got two things going. The OP is talking about a book that someone else read that possibly referred to disappearances from national parks, assuming his friend has good reading comprehension skills. Then Flyer posted about the author being on a radio show, talking about other disappearances, ones not related to national parks. So I don’t have to wonder how the Swiss Alps came to be part of a national park. Good.
I think that “Most of those who vanish are under the age of 12, and about 50% are found alive, but semi-conscious with little memory of what happened” is not at all surprising. It probably amounts to: kids wander off, then get terrified and confused, then get dehydrated and possibly badly chilled. When they’re found, it’s by a bunch of strange adults who all had to work hard to find them because they got lost and it was all their fault. After that they don’t want to talk about it. Go figure.
If he’s collecting cold cases going back to 1952, from all over the world, he’s going to find a lot of cases with very incomplete information that can be spun into a mystery. One problem with people who disappear from national parks is that they’re transients, tourists. Incomplete information is to be expected. But I guess everybody needs a hobby.
The biggest thing of value is to make your kids aware that national parks are not Disneyland. There have been many posts with good advice about that.
Wilderness terrain is weird, even to country kids. It’s brutally easy to get to walking in circles, while being absolutely certain you aren’t. Your eyes can play tricks on you: distances are especially hard to judge, but, counter-intuitively, angles are very hard to judge. You’d think, “How can you mess up an angle?” The sad answer: easily.
I do a bit of hiking, and the difference between my mental map of a route, and the actual GPS map, is extreme. I can easily be going due west while still thinking I’m going north.
Doubly dangerously, a lot of the niftiest wilderness areas are out of cell-phone reach, so you can’t yell for help.
I do not know about GPS systems: does your typical Android phone receive signals from the satellites, or from cell towers on the ground?
I agree my OP was second-hand and incomplete. I haven’t read the books in question – I frankly never intend to – and so I was hoping for someone more knowledgeable to help debunk them. (I’m not going to read the books on the “Apollo Moon-Landing Hoax” either.)
My poor friend is completely convinced by (his reading of) the books, and insists that the books prove that something is going on that cannot be explained. Not even an organized gang of kidnappers. He says “It has to be supernatural.”
That isn’t the sort of conclusion that flies well on the SDMB (with or without a treadmill…) But, again, I was hoping that someone here was more familiar with the premise, and could help us know precisely why it’s a load of hoss-hooey.
I hope I didn’t sound annoyed. I was just de-confusing myself.
According to wikipedia, the authoris a retired cop. He wrote two books on searching for Bigfoot before branching out to disappearances. I don’t know who’s editing that page, but the entry is an admiring one.
As to the “something is going on that can’t be explained”, the author is looking for old cases where there’s incomplete information and he’s spinning them. He talks about national parks, but the cases are from national parks “and wilderness areas.” So he really is looking for cases world-wide. He’s got YouTube videos, both on Bigfoot and Disappearances, if anyone wants to go through them.
There’s not an easy google to a debunking. One blogby Charley Ross reviewed the books. He states, " . . . many cases I had never heard of, some of them going back a century or more. Some of those people are not listed with law enforcement or on missing persons databases anywhere." Charley can be presumed to have done at least a bit of research because he says, " . . . Thomas Bowman and Bruce Kremen, two of the people profiled in the book, are presumed victims of the serial killer Mack Ray Edwards, a fact Paulides fails to mention." A couple of the missing are presumed suicides.
Charley says that the book implies a Bigfoot connection, but in a newspaper article, Mr. Paulides takes a reporter to task for printing Bigfoot instead of “wild men”. The author is organized and gives an impression of professionalism that everyone online seems to eat up. People also seem to be impressed by the number of cases and by the fact that the author has not yet come to a conclusion. He will not state a theory of what is happening, he just keeps implying that something is.
Sigh. There’s a website collecting disappearances. It may not be run by his team, but it comes up on a google search with his name. It’s sad. The listings all describe someone who went walking alone and disappeared and how could that have happened. You can tell that their friends and families are upset and don’t want to hear that there’s a reason for the buddy system.
The book is sold by the North American Bigfoot Search. Damn. His out of print 411 books are listed at $80 plus on Amazon consignment. Not that it guarantees anyone is buying them. But you might want to alert your friend that he might be able to sell his books.
Your friend may be inserting the supernatural to meet his own needs, but the author is obviously pushing all the right buttons. He casts a big Authority and has a lot of fans that think his efforts are too comprehensive to be doubted.
I guess it’s good to have a hobby to turn to in your retirement.
Yllaria: Thank you! That’s pretty solid stuff, and is pretty much what I was hoping for. (DrDeth also gave a pretty solid response, earlier in the thread.)
I haven’t been able to figure how my friend is jumping from Bigfoot to “the supernatural,” but I think it may be a “God of the Gaps” problem, because it takes some kind of really extreme explanation to tell us why we’ve never found a Bigfoot corpse, never found scat or hair (for DNA samples,) only have the tiniest handful of photos and videos, and only have the tiniest handful of footprint-casts. (And why the latter two forms of evidence are all highly suspect, alas.
(The famous Patterson footage has been admitted to as a hoax. Oh, well…)
Of course, in some of the cases in Paulides’ books, bodies of missing hikers/campers have been recovered, and none of them had been eaten on by carnivores with primate dentition. Coyotes, maybe, but not Bigfoot.
My friend isn’t a follower of any other conspiracy UL that I know, which is odd, because don’t people usually cluster on these? (I’ll open a new thread!)
No worries on tone-of-post; you had a valid point. My OP was sketchy, and all I can say is it’s all I got. I often post “Here’s what I’ve heard; can someone tell me the real truth?” posts. I have been suckered by ULs, and don’t like it!
(I was at a science fiction convention, and innocently related the “Isaac Asimov’s Last Words” UL, just the way it had been reported in Locus Magazine. Oops! Turned out not to be correct, and someone scolded me very heavily for it. I thought that was unfair; falling for an intrinsically credible UL is not an intellectual failing!)
The following isn’t from the books, but from online comments about the books.
One of the things people seemed to latch onto is the author’s contention that it’s very odd for a lost person, especally a lost child, to walk uphill instead of downhill. Once someone says that, it’s hard to say it’s not reasonable, but I have no idea if it’s true. Does anyone else know?
I do know that on a slope a toddler can go up more easily than they can go down or perpendicular to the slope. They’re unsteady going down a slope.
Another repeated contention is ‘they couldn’t have walked that far, at least not in that length of time.’ There are many ways to mis-estimate the reasonableness of distances and times. One is to mis-guess when you last saw the person or child. Another way is to assume that no one carried them. A third is to be sedentary and unfamiliar with regular walking.
I’m not speaking to the author’s claims so much as I’m shaking my head over all of the online agreement.
re uphill/downhill, quite often the downhill direction looks scary. Slopes often steepen, and drop off into chasms, etc.
Also, going downhill is kinda slippy. (The worst tumbles I’ve ever had were walking downhill on cobblestones/gravel, where my feet shot right out from under me. No problems going up those same trails! My local walking group has nicknamed one trail “Ball Bearing Ridge” for the small, round bits of gravel that like to roll right out from under our feet.)
Also, the higher you are, the farther you can see. It’s quite logical to think, “I’ll go to the top of that little point, and from there I should be able to see the Visitors’ Center.” This reasoning might even be correct!
So…yeah! Even experienced hikers might do the unexpected or the unadvised, for reasons that seem good to them at the time.
Now add in confusion, dehydration, fatigue, exposure, and emotional distress…
(Some days, it’s a wonder I can find my way from the kitchen to the bathroom!) 
Here’s a Reddit thread where an experienced search-and-rescue volunteer explains why, and I quote, ‘David Paulides is full of shit’. Scroll down a bit.
Fun! Thank’ee!
Good information there, credibly told. Thanks.