EVERY SPOKEN WORD
115 min read · 23,443 words- JRJoe Rogan
[upbeat music] Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music] David, welcome to the show.
- DPDavid Paulides
Thank you, sir.
- JRJoe Rogan
Pull on up to the microphone. Get it, get that sucker up like a fist from your face. Uh, I first heard about you from that guy, Art Bell, the GOAT.
- DPDavid Paulides
The greatest.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. He was, uh [laughs] I used to love listening to his show, uh, coming home from the Comedy Store. We'd come home at, like, 1:00 in the morning and, "Coast to Coast with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nye." It was awesome. And, uh, that's when I, I first, uh, got turned on to your work. So tell everybody, you, uh, you started off in law enforcement, right? That's your background.
- DPDavid Paulides
Correct.
- JRJoe Rogan
How did you get involved in this mystery of people going missing?
- DPDavid Paulides
So I'd already written a couple of books, and I was at Yosemite National Park doing some research on another topic. And two rangers are following me around. And I went back to my room that was at the park, and about an hour and a half later, one of the rangers comes to my room, and he's in plainclothes. And he knocks on my door and he says, "Hey, Dave. I'm Ranger so-and-so. I'm here off duty. I wanna talk to you about some missing people." I said, "Come on in." So we start talking and he says that he knew about me probably [laughs] the way you knew about me. And he says, "I know you're from law enforcement. Somebody look, needs to look into this." About an hour and a half later, his partner shows up at the door, and they said that they've worked at different parks over the years. And while they were working at those parks, there were missing people. And he said, "At the beginning, there was a lot of publicity, a lot of people interested, a lot of activity. And then with time, with, within about 10, 15 days, all of that would end." And he said, "We got concerned, and we did a Freedom of Information Act against our own agency to get the reports, and we couldn't get the reports. And then we did a Freedom of Information Act request on other cases, and we couldn't get the reports. And we got concerned because after that initial 10, 14-day period of searching is all over, there's nothing else that happens. That's it." And he said, "Somebody ought to look into this, because there's a lot of people missing, and the Parks Service doesn't talk about it."
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, what was he assuming? Was he assuming something nefarious was going on, or was he s- assuming that it was, uh, all a lack of commitment to finding the bodies? 'Cause you gotta assume most people after 14 days lost in the woods are probably gonna die.
- DPDavid Paulides
I think all the above. He thought that there were too many people b- going missing, there wasn't enough follow-up being done, and nobody k- seemed to care.
- JRJoe Rogan
So f- if you were being pragmatic, and you weren't, like, diving into mysteries and the stuff that I like, the fun stuff, you would say, "Well, they don't have any resources. You know, there's not enough people to go looking. When you think about the actual square miles that you would have to cover to find a body, and then also the reality of predators and all these different animals that are gonna eat bodies. If a body's there, there's not gonna be much left." You've spent, obviously you've spent time in the woods. Have you ever seen a dead mountain lion?
- DPDavid Paulides
No. I've never seen-
- JRJoe Rogan
Me neither
- DPDavid Paulides
... I've never seen a dead bear.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, I've only seen dead bears because I was hunting. I've never seen a dead bear. Well, no, that's not true. No, I did, we did find one. But I think, um, it's very rare, uh, but that one was recently dead. He was killed by another bear. I think most of the time, when you find, uh, dead animals, it's very recent. And if an animal's dead and it's left alone in the woods, within a certain amount of time, something's gonna eat it. Everything's gonna eat it, including the bones. There's almost nothing left by the time they get done with it.
- DPDavid Paulides
100%.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DPDavid Paulides
But one thing I learned from being around rangers in all these years now is that there's few things that belong to us when, that we go into the woods with that are always gonna be there. Namely our shoes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Belt buckles.
- DPDavid Paulides
Belt buckles, leather anything, um, the rubber waistband of your underwear. These kind of things stay, stay forever. A rifle, a pistol.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Paulides
A bow. And those things you're gonna find. But getting back to the point of these guys, there were too many people going missing in a short period of time that no one seemed to care about. That was really their main focus.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Paulides
And somebody ought to look into it. Somebody ought to start collecting data. Nobody did. And maybe somebody from the outside, they're the inside, maybe somebody from the outside would have more luck putting this all together th- rather than them. That was kind of the gist of it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, there's some cases that are just flat-out weird. Like, some cases, like, people go missing, they die, animals eat them, that's a wrap. That makes sense to me. But there's a few cases, and one of 'em you covered was a guy, I believe he was from Canada, that went skiing in New York. And he went missing, and then he showed up 2,500 miles later in California with his ski clothes on, and he didn't know what happened.
- DPDavid Paulides
Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was, uh, he was a fireman from, I think, Toronto, that went with a bunch of friends to New York on, like, a weekend ski trip. And the guys were all getting together at the end of the day to leave, and they couldn't find him. He says he wakes up on a truck traveling from, like, Reno to Sacramento.Woke up in the back of a truck? No, sitting in the front seat. And he said that he was, as he wakes up, he, he's talking. It's not like he was asleep and woke up. It's like his mind suddenly flashed open, "Hey, you're alive now. You can keep talking." And he goes, "But I was talking to the driver, and we're traveling." The driver drops him off at Sacramento Airport. He doesn't remember anything, but he remembers his home phone number. He calls his wife in Toronto, and she goes, "Hey, everyone's searching for you, thinking you're still at the ski resort." And he go- he has all the ski clothes on.
- JRJoe Rogan
How many days later?
- DPDavid Paulides
I don't remember. But even he doesn't make sense of it. He doesn't know how he got in the truck. The truck driver left. Nobody knows who the truck driver was. That was kind of the, the whole story. There wasn't a lot.
- JRJoe Rogan
So he didn't ask the truck driver, "Hey, where'd you pick me up?"
- DPDavid Paulides
I think he was embarrassed.
Episode duration: 2:20:25
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Transcript of episode _UduwgMDR-0
