Missing 411 is an online conspiracy theory that suggests that there are eerie connections between hundreds of missing persons cases in wilderness areas and national parks around the United States and beyond. Many are huge fans of this conspiracy and a cottage industry has sprung up around it. But is there anything to it? Or are people just getting lost in the woods?
TRANSCRIPT:
On June 14th, 1969, the Martin family was on a camping trip in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, along with another family they were friends with.
There were four of them, William Martin, his father Clyde Martin, and his two sons Douglas and six year old Dennis.
At one point on the trip, the other family was returning from a hike and when they could hear them coming, little Dennis decided he wanted to play a little prank, so he ran down the trail a little bit and hid in the woods so he could jump out and surprise them.
Five minutes or so passed and the other family came walking into the camp, but Dennis wasn’t with them. When asked, they said they never saw him.
William and Douglas immediately went looking for Dennis, but he was nowhere to be found. They searched down the trail for up to 2 miles, poking into the woods and calling his name the whole way. But he was just… gone.
After hours of searching, they sought help from the park rangers but by the end of the day there was still no trace of Dennis. In the following days and weeks, everyone from the National Guard to the Green Berets to the Boy Scouts joined in the search. Over 1400 volunteers helped scour a 50 square mile area of the park in one of the largest missing persons hunts in history up to that point. But despite all of that, Dennis Martin was never seen again.
The Dennis Martin story is one of hundreds of stories of people disappearing in National Parks across the United States, so much so that the phenomenon has a name – Missing 411.
So today we’re going to examine a few stories from the Missing 411 archive and see what exactly is going on here. We’ll look at some of the theories around it and I’ll chime in on what I think is happening.
Some of you may not like it.
What is Missing 411?
Many of you I’m sure are familiar with Missing 411, it gets requested a lot on this channel, it’s fairly popular on Reddit and YouTube, and there are some interesting theories around it, which we’ll get into.
The term itself was coined by author and former law-enforcement professional David Paulides (Paul-itis) who wrote a series of books on what he believes is a pattern of mysterious disappearances in wilderness areas.
Now there are a lot of missing persons cases, they’re not uncommon, in fact they’re kinda disturbingly common, around 600,000 people are reported missing in the United States every year. which is insane.
But Missing 411 cases are cases that specifically happen in wilderness areas and national parks and often defy conventional explanations.
Places where people people go to hike, camp, and fish — water is often a feature of sites where they happen.
And they do seem to cluster around specific places, like Yosemite and the Grand Canyon
Sometimes these people disappear and no trace of them is ever found, sometimes remains are found years later, but nowhere near where they vanished. And sometimes they suddenly appear in places that had been thoroughly searched beforehand.
And every once in a while, someone will be found alive, but they’re in a a peculiar physical or mental state. Often, with no memory of what happened to them.
But the cases do seem to have what I can only describe as a unifying strangeness to them, which has led to all kinds of theories and speculation. Some of them reasonable and some are… pretty out there. I’ll get to that in a minute.
There’s far too many to cover in one video and there’s no shortage of content on YouTube about this, I could point you to The Lore Lodge and Coast to Coast AM if you want to go down the rabbit hole but today I’m just going to focus on a few of them… and let you decide.
Dennis Martin
Let’s start with the case I’ve already mentioned, that of Dennis Martin, or Denny to his family.
55 years later, the case still has plenty of unanswered questions, like..
How does a healthy six-year old vanish so close to a busy campsite?
And so quickly?
And so quietly?
How could more than 1400 searchers, including Boy Scouts and Green Berets, fail to find any trace?
Well it turns out there was at least one possible trace, a set of footprints that may have belonged to Denny.
The footprints were the right size, and they resembled the tread of the shoes that Denny was wearing, but the tracks contained one shoe print and one bare foot. Which definitely suggests the person who made those tracks was in potential trouble.
Hiking with only one shoe on is not exactly a common thing.
But officials thought the tracks belonged to a young searcher, so they didn’t give it much attention at the time. Probably a mistake, but all these years later, it’s kind-of impossible to know.
Another possible bit of evidence came out way later when an illegal ginseng hunter claimed to have found a child-size skeleton in the area, but when officials went looking for it, they were gone.
But I mean this guy didn’t come forward until 1985, apparently he was afraid of being prosecuted…
For illegal ginseng hunting? Is that that big a deal?
As for other evidence, there may have been more but there was a rainstorm the night after he disappeared that might have washed it away.
A big part of the problem with Denny’s disappearance is the massive scale of the search effort. I mean 1400 people is a LOT of people.
And many of them were untrained volunteers who didn’t know what to look for or how to maintain the integrity of the search area.
Like like any footprints that might have survived the rainstorm were probably stomped all over by the 1400 people looking for them.
The Park Service actually changed their search protocols after the Denny Martin disappearance for this very reason.
That did not, unfortunately, put an end to people going missing in national parks.
DeOrr Kunz Jr.
In July of 2015, another child went missing from a campsite in Idaho.
This one’s name was DeOrr Kunz Jr., and it was actually featured in a documentary about Missing 411 by David Paulides and his son, Ben.
There have been several of these documentaries by now, this was in the first one that came out in 2016.
The story goes that DeOrr Kunz Jr, age 2, vanished from a campsite in Timber Creek campground, near Leadore, Idaho, in July of 2015
DeOrr’s parents, Vernal Kunz and Jessica Mitchell, took him on an impromptu camping trip along with Jessica’s grandpa Robert Walton and a friend of Robert’s, a guy named Issac Reinwand.
According to their story, after setting up camp, Vernal and Jessica went to a nearby store for supplies. Upon returning, they all decided to walk down to a creek to check out a spot for fishing.
All of them except Grandpa Bob. He was 76 years old and on oxygen so his heath wasn’t great so he chose to stay behind.
Initially, DeOrr started down the path with his parents but then decided he wanted to stay with grandpa, so Jessica sent him running back up the short path to Robert and shouted to let him know that DeOrr was coming his way.
After scouting the trip for a short amount of time, in some retellings they said five minutes, in others they said 15 to 20, Jessica says she saw a fish that she thought DeOrr would like, so she walked back up the path to Grandpa Bob.
But when she got there, not only was she surprised to not see DeOrr, but Grandpa Bob claimed that he never came back.
Somehow in the handful seconds he was out of eye sight on that path back to Grandpa, DeOrr Kunz disappeared. And he was never seen again.
An extensive, modern search was conducted but no trace of DeOrr was ever found. No body, no clothing… and no boots.
I bring up the boots because Isaac told investigators that DeOrr’s boots were way too big for him and ill-fitting, meaning a couple of things, one, he wouldn’t have been able to move quickly or get very far in those things, and two, if somebody or some thing had picked him up, those boots would have fallen off.
Not to mention nobody heard any screaming or distress if he had been picked up by a person or an animal.
For all intents and purposes, it’s like DeOrr Kunz just vanished off the face of the Earth. And to this day, nobody’s figured out why.
Kenny Veach
One last story I’ll cover here thankfully doesn’t involve a child, but it’s pretty famous on the internet and YouTube and that’s the story of Kenny Veach.
Not only was Kenny not a child, but he was an experienced hiker who regularly traveled in the Nevada desert, occasionally documenting it on his YouTube channel under the name snakebitmcgee.
To be clear, he wasn’t like a full-time YouTuber or anything, he mostly made videos about inventions he wanted to get on Shark Tank.
But ten years ago he shared a story in the comments of someone else’s video that sparked a lot of debate. His claim was that he had recently found a cave in the deserts outside Las Vegas that seemed to emanate some kind of strange energy that he couldn’t explain.
As tends to happen in the comments section, people called his bluff, asked him for its location, asked him for proof, but he couldn’t provide any. It seems he couldn’t remember the exact location, which led many of them to call him a liar. What he did remember vividly was that the opening of the cave was shaped like the letter M.
The infamous M-shaped cave.
The argument in the comment section is sadly no longer available in its original form, but Kenny was determined to go back to the cave with a video camera to prove them wrong. And on October 18th of 2014, he did exactly that.
Throughout the rest of the video, which has now racked up 3.6 million views, Kenny walks the Mojave desert looking for the cave. And while he finds other caves… and previous mines and manmade structures… and mountain goats and tortoises and edible desert nuts… he never crosses paths with the M cave.
Obviously this didn’t help his case with the skeptics but he remained undeterred and vowed in a comment that he was going out there again, this time for a whole weekend. He was gonna find this cave.
That comment… was the last thing the internet heard from Kenny Veach.
At the time of this video, Kenny Veach has been missing for just over 10 years
Here’s what we know:
On November 10, Kenny told his family he was going out for a “short, overnight trip” and then he never came back.
Authorities were contacted and a search began. On November 22, his cell phone was found, sitting on the platform of the very mine shaft where he recorded the infamous video.
Searchers looked inside the mine, thinking he may have fallen in there, but he wasn’t there. Not him, none of his clothes or equipment… In fact no other trace of him was ever found.
Interestingly, his video camera was found back at his home, which is strange considering the whole reason he was going out there was to find proof of the cave.
But the strangeness of his original comment along with the strangeness of his disappearance, not to mention the proximity to Area 51, has led to a lot of speculation.
In fact, his original comment about the cave was left in reference to someone’s story about Area 51.
So while his disappearance is mysterious, there’s no real mystery as to why this story has become one of the most popular internet mysteries of all time.
Popular Theories
So those are just a handful of stories, like I said, there are hundreds of them out there, if you have a favorite one, feel free to share it in the comments – and hell, point to a video of it. I don’t mind.
But it’s lead a lot of people to search for explanations, and look for a common cause.
Some people see an organized group behind it involved in kidnapping and possibly human trafficking.
Some blame it on mysterious, unknown predators and cryptids.
Some, of course, see alien abductions.
Others find more exotic explanations like mysterious energy vortexes or time slips.
One thing proponents tend to agree on the most is that whatever it is, the government is covering it up. A lot of them lay the blame on the National Park Service.
Which, you know I’m not a conspiracy bro but I could definitely understand why the Parks Service would want to downplay any risks that would keep paying visitors away.
And I think it’s that sense that something is being kept from us that helps fuel the wilder theories around Missing 411. That, and the people who push the idea, people like David Paulides.
David Paulides
David Paulides is a former police officer turned author and filmmaker who began researching missing persons cases in National Parks after an off-duty park ranger suggested to him that something foul was afoot.
So he dove into the subject and began to see what he thought were connections between the cases and similarities that were too weird to ignore. He actually worked in the detective department at the San Jose PD back in the day and to his detective nose, something didn’t smell right.
So he coined the term Missing 411 and began writing books, the first one being published in 2012, which was actually a two parter, one that covered the Eastern US and one that covered the Western US. And then he basically just cranked out books every year after that until 2020.
In between books, he produced 3 different documentaries with his son, Ben Paulides, including Missing 411 in 2017, Missing 411: The Hunted in 2019, and in 2022…
Missing 411: The UFO Connection
Yeah, now might be a good time to point out that before he wrote his Missing 411 books, he wrote two books on Bigfoot. So he’s always had a bit of a chubby for the woo woo stuff.
The fact that he’s a former police detective lends him a lot of credibility… but I should also point out that in 1996, he was charged with a misdemeanor for fraudulently soliciting for a charity. He scammed people.
Now to be fair to David, researching bigfoot doesn’t make you a quack, and I’ve always been a bit of a paranormaphile myself but I do tend to be more skeptical of people who’s whole thing is selling a certain worldview or idea. Because there’s just too much of a monetary incentive to ignore evidence to the contrary.
And he has certainly created a cottage industry around Missing 411.
And his methods and ideas have been questioned
One of the first to really challenge the Missing 411 thing was Kyle Polich from the Monterrey County Skeptics society, who gave a talk about Missing 411 in 2017, just as his books came out.
He dug into the stories in the book and found that some information was left out, some details were incorrect, and pointed out that for a lot of these cases, while they make be creepy stories, they all have the potential for logical explanations, and he found that some of the wild “connections” he makes are tenuous to say the least.
For example, in the case of Amy Bechtel, who disappeared in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming, Paulides found one amazing coincidence that he felt was important to point out:
I’m going to stop short of calling Paulides a grifter or a BS artist, he may truly believe in all this, but I will say a lot of these stories don’t pass the Occam’s Razor test for me. Including the stories I talked about earlier.
DeOrr Kunz Jr. Debunk
For example, in the DeOrr Kunz case, a lot of attention has been paid to the parents, suggesting maybe they killed him, either on purpose or accidentally but the camping trip was all just an alibi.
In fact the sheriff investigating the case did name them as a person of interest.
It was apparently a very unplanned trip, and while they claimed to have had DeOrr with them when they took a trip to the store, the store employees claim they didn’t see him.
Which does, though, beg the question of why they would bring along two people, unless they just needed some credible witnesses… but that would imply that Grandpa Bob and Isaac were also in on it.
Grandpa Bob passed away a few years later so he’s not around to defend himself, Isaac has apparently maintained his story.
Some have argued that their behavior after the event and the way they speak in interviews is strange – I don’t want to go there because people grieve differently.
Plus there is a way to explain it in a way that absolves the parents, like the fact that Grandpa Bob, who was supposed to be watching DeOrr, he was showing signs of dementia. He may not have heard Jessica calling out to him and he had no idea he was supposed to be watching him.
Also DeOrr was 2 years old. It’s very possible he get distracted and ran off the path, like two year olds do. And if he did so, there was a river close by.
I mentioned before that’s one of the recurring elements in a lot of these stories, they often happen around water.
You know, where people drown and get swept away.
Kenny Veach Debunk
As for the Kenny Veach story, of course, the explanations around that have been all over the map.
Many have speculated that he found the cave and what he found inside did him in, everything from a cryptid to an evil Native American spirit, to some advanced technological device or aliens – it’s proximity to Area 51 doesn’t help with those.
Which, of course if it was some secret government thing, maybe he was silenced.
But Kenny’s ex-girlfriend came forward with a very plausible – if sad – explanation.
Her name is Sheryon Pilgrim and she commented on his M-cave video that she believes that unfortunately, Kenny took his own life.
She points out that his father left the same way when Kenny was young, and apparently he was having some financial difficulties. And that maybe part of why he spent so much time hiking in the desert was because he was struggling with some mental illness.
The fact that he left his camera behind says to her that he wasn’t going out there to find anything, he was going out there to disappear. And he left his phone at the mine shaft so nobody could find him.
There is the possibility that he didn’t actually end his life but maybe disappeared and started a new one.
A weird addendum of the story is an event that happened in 2018 where there was a burglary of a Reiki center owned by his sister, Debbie Veach.
It had to be a Reiki center, right? Not a coffee shop or a bodega.
Anyway, some believe, including Kenny’s sister-in-law, Susan, that the man shown in the CCTV footage is Kenny.
He knew where to find the iPad he stole and even grabs one of his knees at one point, which is the same knee Kenny had injured on a previous hike.
Also all he did was break in and grab an iPad, which is kinda weird.
This story was covered in a video from EWU Unsolved, where they interviewed her, it’s also been covered by the Urbex Hill guys, you should check them out. Actually there’s a plethora of videos that have covered this story.
But if Sheyron Pilgrim is right and he did decide to end his life, it makes me think a lot of the Peter Bergmann story I covered a while back. Some people do go out of their way to just disappear when they end their lives as a way to spare friends and family from having to deal with the aftermath.
Which by the way, this might be an explanation for a lot of these Missing 411 cases, people go into the woods with the intention to disappear.
I personally knew a guy who did exactly that, he found a spot in the woods by a river and waited for the water to rise before he shot himself so it would wash him away.
It’s certainly not a solution that most people want for stories like this, but it’s also certainly something that happens.
My Take
So… the Missing 411 thing is not new to me, in fact, (hold it up) I have the book. One of the first books actually. This was gifted to me at the very first fan meetup that I had in New York early early early on, in fact only two people showed up, but one of them – I think his name was Marco? I’m sorry if I got that wrong but he gave me this book. So I’ve known about it for a very long time, and it’s been requested a lot but I’ve never covered it because if I’m being honest?
I don’t think there’s anything to it. I’m sorry. I just don’t.
There’s a phrase I heard a while back about deep sea diving, it’s that when you go into the ocean, you re-enter the food chain. And I think that applies to the wilderness as well.
We as a species have become so disconnected from the natural world, we’re so used to living in environments that we built for our own comfort and safety that we forget – Nature doesn’t work like that.
Yes, there are wild predators that can attack you, but also just uneven ground, trees with pointy branches you can fall on, poisonous things, and it’s easy to get lost, there are no right angles, there’s extreme temperatures and a lack of water or food, there’s sinkholes and fissures and ravines and rivers – and no people that can help you. Or – yes, sometimes – there are people with bad intentions.
And if some accident does befall you, nature will quickly remove any and all evidence. I mean serial killers don’t hide their victims in the middle of a busy street, they take them to the woods.
The wilderness is beautiful, nature is amazing but it has its risks. That’s part of the allure. And National Parks are the most frequented wilderness spots, especially by “amateur” adventurers who are not exactly survival experts.
Amy and my story:
- Went to see the leaves turn in Woodstock Vermont
- Went to the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Park (smallest in US)
- Followed all-trails map to a viewing spot
- Leaves covered the trails; got lost
- Sun started going down. Phone battery running out. Getting darker and colder.
- Made it out but we were terrified. Blair Witch vibes
There’s a map that may or may not be in the thumbnail of this video but it shows the locations of Missing 411 cases overlayed on top of a map of cave systems in the United States. And they kinda line up perfectly.
Now I know this map has been criticized because it doesn’t show all the Missing 411 cases, it just kinda cherry-picks the ones around cave systems but still… That’s a lot!
But accurate or not, this map is a kind of a litmus test. Because there is a group of people who might see this map and say, well, obviously people are getting lost in cave systems. I mean… they’re caves.
But there’s another type of person who might see this map and say that it’s proof that bigfoot, or some other cryptid are living in the cave and feeding on people, or it’s proof of secret government underground stuff, or that’s a parking lot for alien tic-tacs, or demons from hell, or whatever it is they believe in.
And I think that’s what gets me about the Missing 411 thing because… (exhausted)
Does EVERYTHING have to be a conspiracy?
Can we just accept that we live in a random, chaotic world and sometimes bad things just happen?
I’m sure if you put up a map of drowning victims in California, you’ll find clusters of them around beaches.
WHAT AREN’T THE BEACHES TELLING US!?
If you put up a map of heat stroke victims, there would probably be a cluster in the Southwest.
THAT’S JUST BIG DESERT TRYING TO KILL US ALL!
I would make a joke that since a lot of people die in hospitals, then hospitals are conspiring to kill us all except for a lot of people, that’s not a joke – they actually believe that.
And yes, people are more likely to go missing in wilderness areas, including national parks. And each one is a tragedy. Each one is a family experiencing grief and loss.
Paulides’ strongest critics might accuse him of exploiting and profiting off of other people’s tragedies. And I don’t want to completely go there. I do think there’s an ethical gray area at best but let’s be honest, there’s an entire industry around the true crime thing, and it would go for all of that as well.
I will say though, as critical as I might be of David Paulides, he did suffer a tragedy of his own – his son Ben who produced the documentaries with him, took his own life in 2021. And that’s awful. And my heart goes out to the Paulides family.
And David did kind-of step back from the Missing 411 thing after that. That might just be him grieving but I can’t help but wonder if maybe experiencing this loss has make him think more about the loss and grief these families are going through and that maybe having that loss get saddled with a conspiracy theory is not something he’s comfortable with anymore.
Or maybe he’s just retired. He’s well into his 70s now.
But anyway, this video is likely to split the crowd a bit, I know that people who are into the Missing 411 thing are REALLY into it, but I tried to be objective here.
I wasn’t kidding by the way, there is SO MUCH content out there around this, from people who are way more skeptical than me to some real whackadoodles so discuss respectfully down below, feel free to share videos from other creators, I’ll link a few in the description as well. Share your favorite Missing 411 stories, I’m sure there will be lively conversation around this.
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