His bike wasn’t damaged, the tires weren’t flat, and there was no evidence he’d been in an accident or purposely hit. Nothing about Jacob’s disappearance suggested foul play.
“We still have it in the evidence freezer.” Keller remains an unsolved disappearance. The search was called off after 13 days - “We even collected bear crap,” said local Sheriff Howard Galvez. Almost immediately, dozens of searchers with canines covered 73,000 acres and found nothing, only to have Moore wander home a week later on her own.Ī similar search made no difference for Joe Keller, a 19-year-old who went for a run in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado in 2015 and never returned. In 2017, a middle-aged woman named Kara Moore disappeared in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan’s Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. A virus is as invisible as a missing person.”Ī search-and-rescue effort doesn’t always make a difference. “There’s pride at stake, egos, not to mention budgets. “It would be like the US asking Mexico for COVID-19 ventilators,” Billman says. When somebody goes missing in their territory, they’re not inclined to seek help from outside government agencies. National parks like Yosemite operate almost as sovereign states. Loading up an Arctic Fox slide-in camper with food and gear, Randy invited the author to join him as he set out for Washington. He sold his house and shuttered his successful contracting business. A 63-year-old house-builder from Santa Cruz, Calif., he went on to “liquidate his world in order to find his son,” writes Billman. Bigfoot hunter David Paulides Twitterīut Randy Gray, Jacob’s father, wasn’t about to give up so easily. Despite a several-month coordinated effort by hundreds of park rangers, local police and volunteers, they found no trace of him. The odds of locating Jacob Gray were “beyond finding a needle in a haystack,” Chief Ranger Jay Shields told Billman. “But the National Park Service certainly doesn’t advertise that there are dozens of still-missing visitors in Grand Canyon or Yosemite, and a county sheriff isn’t gonna put a missing person on his reelection poster.” “I don’t think there’s a grand conspiracy to keep the numbers hidden,” he says. He speculates that the Park Service conceals the true data on how and where people disappear and how many have actually been found because it “would shock the public so badly that visitor numbers would fall off a cliff,” Billman writes. The biggest obstacle to getting any information about missing people in the wild, according to Paulides, is National Park Service red tape. (During the last stages of hypothermia, people often feel hot and remove their clothing.) Children are sometimes found at improbably far distances from where they went missing. Bodies are often found in previously searched areas, and often without clothing or footwear, even when hypothermia has been ruled out. Most people, according to his data, disappear in the late afternoon and during or just before severe weather. Jon Billman (foreground) and Randy Gray search for Jacob Gray in Olympic National Park. In 2011, David Paulides, founder of the North America Bigfoot Search, launched a database of wildland disappearances that occurred under “mysterious circumstances.” From his research, there are at least 1,600 people, give or take, currently missing in the wild somewhere in the United States. Strangely, the most reliable info on missing people in the wild comes from Bigfoot hunters. Neither the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, or the Department of Agriculture’s US Forest Service keeps track. But how many of those disappear in the wild is unclear. Anywhere between 89 percent to 92 percent of those missing people are recovered every year, either alive or deceased.
the proverbial vanish-without-a-trace incidents, which happen a lot more (and a lot closer to your backyard) than almost anyone thinks.”Īccording to NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System), more than 600,000 persons go missing in the United States every year. but Billman has long been fascinated by cases that “defy conventional logic. As he writes in “The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America’s Wildlands” (Grand Central Publishing), out Tuesday, most disappearances are easy to explain - hypothermia, falls, avalanches, eaten by a mountain lion, etc. The mystery caught the attention of journalist Jon Billman, who has been investigating “missing persons in wild places” since the late ’90s. Several months of search-and-rescue missions uncovered nothing. The 22-year-old’s bike and camping gear were discovered near the Sol Duc River, but otherwise there was no trace of him. In April 2017, Jacob Gray rode his bicycle during a rainstorm into Washington state’s Olympic National Park and vanished.
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