Unsolved mystery caught on camera | Missing 411 (Part 7)

every year hundreds of people go missing inside of national parks and forests all over north america of those hundreds there's always a few that baffle investigators because either they go missing under very strange circumstances like they were right in front of someone they were talking to someone and then you know in a second they're gone or where they're discovered doesn't make any sense that they've covered a distance that is too far for them to have covered or they're in locations that are just physically impossible to get to one man is making it his mission to research these very strange disappearances his name is david politis he's a former police detective he covers all of these cases in his book series called missing 4-1-1 i went out and bought all of them they're incredible he has a youtube channel called the can-am missing project that's linked below in the description and so today i'm going to share three missing person cases that have all been covered by david politis in missing 4-1-1 and hopefully by the end of this video you're just as interested in the missing 4-1-1 phenomenon that david politis has brought to light and hopefully you'll go over to his channel the can-am missing project and you'll give them a follow because he has poured tens of thousands of hours into this without david politis there would be no missing 4-1-1 project and many people that go missing would just be forgotten about so shout out to david politis for keeping their memories alive and keeping the public engaged in something that is truly baffling and needs more attention but before we get into today's stories if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format then you come to the right channel because that's all i do and i upload three four even five times every week if that's of interest to you then please sneak into the like button's house and replace all of their salt shakers with sugar also please subscribe to my channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of my weekly uploads alright let's get into today's stories so just a couple of weeks ago early on july 24th 2020 an 18 year old woman named gia fuda who was living with her parents in seattle washington wakes up in their home goes downstairs says good morning to her mother and to her father she has a sip of a seltzer water and then she heads out to her car and says okay i'll see you tonight and she drives off gia's mother said that because of the quarantine all of gia's college classes had been moved online and gia didn't like doing all of her work in the house she felt trapped and so her routine consisted of getting up early and heading to bellevue college which is just outside of seattle where she could do some work in their library do her online courses there and then come back sometime in the evening and so gia's parents assumed that's what she was doing that day but when gia left that morning she did not follow her typical kovid 19 routine of going to bellevue college to do school work instead she hopped on the highway and she drove 60 miles to a very rural part of washington state it's very heavily forested it's called index washington and she gets picked up on a camera inside of a coffee shop where she gets a cup of coffee and she buys a bigfoot keychain and then gets back in her car and drives another 30 miles away from seattle away from her parents home it's unclear where she's going until her car runs out of gas and when she ran out of gas it was like she wasn't prepared for it because she was only able to turn her car and barely pull off of highway 2. it didn't look like she'd intentionally parked and it's actually how investigators spotted it because it was jutting out into the road slightly she gets out and instead of walking on the highway to try to get help or trying to flag down another motorist she grabs her cell phone her bible and a journal and turns and starts walking directly uphill there's like this mountain right next to the highway and it's very densely forested and she just starts walking straight up this mountain it's important to note that david politis just recently came out with a video about this case on his can-am missing project channel and he says that the area she stopped in is an area where at least a dozen other people have gone missing under baffling circumstances that have all been covered in the missing 4-1-1 phenomena by 11 30 that night gia's parents were starting to get very concerned that they hadn't heard from their daughter and that she hadn't come home yet they started texting her and calling her no answer no response by 1am they called the police so this huge search is launched to go find gia hundreds of volunteers they've all these professional search and rescue people out there they have helicopters overhead and almost immediately within a few hours of the search being launched they find her car on highway 2. but no sign of her anywhere the area that she was in was actually a dead zone for cell phone service so they couldn't get in touch with her in part because they had no service and authorities weren't able to track her phone because there was no cell phone reception so they didn't have much to work with except that they generally knew where she might be which is in this very thick section of the cascade mountains and so for days and days they're searching and turning up nothing and unfortunately as time ticks on the likelihood of her being found alive is next to zero but seven days in to this huge search where nothing has been turned up they have this huge find a couple of the searchers that were miles away from where she had gone missing i mean at this point you're seven days into the search you have searchers combing miles and miles of territory and there's nothing they've found nothing and these searchers are up near the scenic creek where there's a little bit of a clearing there's this creek and they find in one area her jacket her shoes her phone her journal and her bible all in one area it looked like she had just suddenly stripped everything she had put it on the ground but she was nowhere to be found so while this find is certainly great progress towards discovering what happened it unfortunately sent a message to her parents that at this point you need to brace for the worst because now your daughter is not only missing and has been for a week she doesn't have any gear she has no clothes she has no phone she's just gone and has nothing so the omen was very bad at this point but her family and the searchers were not willing to give up so they continued to search this new area where all of her stuff had been found for another two days and on the ninth day from when she had gone missing they found her and she was alive she was sitting on a rock near this creek when they approached her she was very startled to see people coming near her she clearly was not expecting to be found she was also more or less incoherent she believed she'd only been out for maybe three days and just had gotten lost but they told her she had been gone for nine days but she was unhurt she had a couple scratches on her she was definitely emaciated but she had been drinking from the stream and eating huckleberries so she was you know taking care of herself but she was totally confused she didn't know why she was there and when she was pressed a little bit further she didn't know why she drove where she drove she doesn't know why she walked up a very steep mountain into the cascades she also has no idea what happened over the first six seven days she only recalled the last couple and thought that's the whole time she had been out there so it's a very confusing story and one that probably we will never get a clear answer to this will just become another one of the thousands of very odd disappearances that occur all over north america except at least in this case she was found alive tom mezik was the salty army veteran he had served in the 82nd airborne division which is an elite paratrooper division he taught survival training classes but more than anything he loved to hunt and he actually hunted in this one particular area in new york all the time with the same group of friends in fact for like 55 years tom and his six hunter friends would hunt this one area on november 15 2015 tom and his hunting buddies decide to go hunt in this area and they got a bit of a late start they didn't get out there till about noon so they decided in order to make up for lost time to use this technique that's referred to as a deer drive where you have stationary watchers that set up on a line about 100 meters apart from one another and you have a group of drivers that kind of corral any deer or any animals in the area and push them so that they go past the watchers who can take a shot at those animals and so tom along with three other hunters were made watchers and they set up along this hillside where tom was all the way on the left flank which meant on his left were no hunters he did have a hunter 100 meters to his right and then there was two other hunters all the way up the hill on the right as well but he was on the outer flank of that line and the three other hunters that were going to be doing the driving were to his right as well behind this hill they were going to try to push the deer up and over this hill down to this line of watchers after three hours and no luck they haven't seen one deer they start to also comment on the fact that there doesn't seem to be any wildlife at all no squirrels no birds no anything there's just silence which is very odd for this area and when you consider that this group has hunted this area for 55 years they have a really good understanding of what normal looks like and before anything happened with tom they were already talking about how strange that was also one of the watchers who was right next to where tom was about 100 meters away he recalled hearing a very distinct sound like a whooshing sound or a snapping sound coming generally from where tom was but he didn't think much of it at the time that is until they got back to their cars after calling off the hunt because they had been unsuccessful and everyone's there except for tom and they go back out they're yelling for tom they're wondering did he fall down like okay let's radio him because everybody had radios there's no answer from tom they're searching the area where he was they start shooting their rifles into the air they can't find him and they think okay well we don't know what he's doing but this guy is super competent he was healthy let's just go to the cars and wait for him and so they're sitting at the parking lot which is not very far from where they were hunting and this is an area they always parked in and this is an area they always hunted in so they knew that tom knows where they're going to be and so they sat there waiting and waiting and he's just not showing up so eventually the hunters call it in to the rangers that he's gone missing a massive search is launched for tom i mean they are combing this area they got helicopters professional search teams they're looking in lakes they're looking under logs they're looking everywhere and there's not a shred of evidence of tom they can't find his walkie-talkie they can't find his gun there's no clothes there's nothing he's just disappeared on the fourth day of the search the fbi shows up and they get involved in the search which didn't make any sense because why is the fbi getting involved four days into a search for an elderly hunter where there's no sign of foul play why are they getting involved it didn't really add up and all they would tell tom's wife is that they believed that something was off about this case and that's why they were there but they couldn't elaborate unless more information came in but nothing ever shows up even though tom was a bit older he literally taught survival classes he was the guy teaching other people how to survive in the woods he also has been hunting in that particular area for 55 years how is it that he in no way was able to signal that something was wrong and that all these people including the fbi can't find any trace of him it just seems like something is off i gotta agree with the fbi on this one in 2013 51 year old dale stelling decided to take a trip from texas where he lived with his wife and his parents up to colorado he was an avid outdoorsman and he had always wanted to go hiking and camping in colorado so he his wife and his parents load up the rv and they start making their way up to colorado on june 9th as they're making their way to colorado their rv breaks down in new mexico even though they were eager to get to colorado dale saw that where they had broken down was near the mesa verde national park and he thought well we weren't planning this but let's just stay here for a night and go check out the park tomorrow then we'll get the rv fixed and we'll be on our way to colorado and so they all agree they stay the night and the next morning they head over to mesa verde national park it was a very hot day that day and dale's wife was overweight and not very healthy and his parents were very elderly so when they got to the park they ended up just sitting at the visitor center and no one really wanted to actually go walk around but dale was an avid hiker and he didn't like the idea of just sitting around all day and so at some point dale just says hey i'm gonna go stretch my legs and walk this trail here down to the abandoned city ruins there was the city that had been built into the cliff that lots of tourists would go check out and so his wife and his parents they don't bat an eye they say okay we'll see in a little bit and dale was off dale made it seem like it was going to be a very quick trip and so when he didn't return in two hours his family decided to tell rangers and say hey you know our husband our son he went hiking down that trail there towards the ruins and we haven't heard from him we can't get in touch with him on the phone you know can you guys go look for him the rangers actually were not concerned at all they said that we've never had anybody go missing for more than a few hours here it's pretty hard to get lost you know there's lots of tourists here well-marked trails just give it a couple more hours and he doesn't show up then we'll go out and look for him but after about an hour and they still hadn't seen him his family really pressed the issue with the rangers and they would go looking for dale and of course they can't find him but they found a number of tourists that had seen him on the trail that he said he was going to be on they had even talked to him he was a very energetic charismatic guy and they would say that he seemed like he was just another tourist enjoying his time at the park there's nothing odd about his behavior at all and he was walking towards the area where he had told his family he was going while that information was certainly useful they still couldn't find dale and they were really fighting against the elements on this one you know the temperatures were over 100 degrees fahrenheit and had been all day and dale didn't have any water so they really had a limited amount of time to find him so within 24 hours there's this huge search that's launched for dale and interestingly in the first 24 hours of the search a woman was at the park and was walking along the trail that dale was on and she remembers hearing a weak male voice yelling for help and so she kind of looked over the edge she couldn't see down below her she was on a bit of a cliff fearing that if she went to look she might fall and become a victim she went back to the rangers and said hey here's the area i was in i heard someone yelling for help you should go check it out and the ranger said that actually we've been getting that report we got that report yesterday but when we went to look in that area we can't find anything there's no one over there so while it seems very likely that that person calling for help was most likely dale we don't know for sure because they were never able to locate who was asking for help and to this day we have no idea where dale is there's been no shred of evidence to indicate where he went he just vanished if you enjoyed today's story if you haven't already please sneak into the like button's house and replace all of their salt shakers with sugar also please subscribe to my channel and turn on all notifications you don't miss any of my weekly uploads so i'd love to get your reaction to these three stories what do you think happened and why and i'll do my best to get back to as many of you as i possibly can if you're interested in learning more about the missing 4-1-1 phenomenon as documented by david politis then you should check out david politis and his team at their youtube channel the can-am missing project i've also provided links in the description below to all of their work also i have a missing 4-1-1 playlist that you can save and watch that as well if you have a story suggestion for me to use on this channel go to our subreddit which is just mr ballen it's linked below it's a place where you can drop your story suggestions and if i intentionally use your suggestion i will absolutely credit you if you want to get in touch with me you can direct message me on instagram my username is johnballen416 also i'm very active on tick tock where my handle is mr ballen so whether i see you on reddit instagram ticktalk youtube some combination just know i'm incredibly thankful for your support and until next time see ya

Channel: MrBallen

Views: 1,461,229

Rating: 4.9516945 out of 5

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Id: 6uB15F9zZJY

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020