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Blaming Cryptids For Crimes & Other Incidents

Quite!

@AlchoPwn No need to appoint a spelling monitor! There are enough people here juggling cats and coffee, posting on the ragged edge of sleep, with dyslexia an acknowledged issue... Courtesy and realism please.

Frideswide
If someone on here can juggle cats and coffee, please take a video for us.
 
If someone on here can juggle cats and coffee, please take a video for us.

I have no doubt one will appear! My own efforts are more failing to juggle cats and coffee :)
 
Quite!

@AlchoPwn No need to appoint a spelling monitor! There are enough people here juggling cats and coffee, posting on the ragged edge of sleep, with dyslexia an acknowledged issue... Courtesy and realism please.

Frideswide
It may seem petty, but there was an implied insult for a principle that I hold in high regard when properly applied.
 
Going after someone for this IS petty.

Go for the argument not the poster - and if you can't then step back and select ignore or just move on.

Frideswide
 
You mean 'spelt', of course.
Not in US English. Spelt is a type of wheat to us. It is also only an option (and an unpopular one) in UK English to spell "spelled" that way, as it is also a type of wheat to you too.
 
Puh-lease ... :roll:

Unless there's some connection to (e.g.) cryptids being blamed for divergent spellings or bad spellings, I respectfully request a "cease and desist" on this tangential debate.
 
Puh-lease ... :roll: Unless there's some connection to (e.g.) cryptids being blamed for divergent spellings or bad spellings, I respectfully request a "cease and desist" on this tangential debate.
Perhaps moderators should stop baiting people then?
 
Ok, so who here has fact checked the stories published in Missing 411? I've looked up a few of them, but not many. Apparently something like .3% of the accounts Paulides used as his data set. What have you guys found when doing that?
 
Hmm so I checked closer to .2%. But yeah Klye Polich said much the same thing as I've observed about it. For example: It's not really surprising to have search dogs fail to get a scent in an area filled with the scents of the human rescue parties that spent all day trampling the scene. It's like finding a single set of footprints on a muddy field that's had a football game played on it. You might succeed, good luck with that though.
 
Oh wow, this was an interesting read:
Apparently there's quite a few people who think that.

Also I came across this comment:
Aaron Eastwood 7 months ago
David Paulides was fired from the San Jose police department for obtaining autographs from celebreties and selling them on for he's own personal gain, whilst obtaining theses autographs he would tell set celebrity that he intended to sell them on and donate the profits to charity. The guy is an absolute scum bag and con artist !! Look it up for yourself !!!!
Interesting... So I went and looked it up: https://www.sjretirement.com/Uploads/PF/Minutes - June 2011 (Signed).pdf
"Deferred Vested" retirement at 16.5 years of service? Regular retirement was anywhere from 21 to 30 years. hmm... https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plan...o-is-considered-a-deferred-vested-participant
So, they aren't actually giving him a retirement check but might after he gets old enough to be a senior citizen?

Then this which has more details: https://kzoomblog.wordpress.com/tag/david-paulides/
Is that true?
Archive Search Results

Searched for: allfields(Paulides) AND date(12/1/1995 to 12/31/1997)
Returned: 1 displays of 1 matches
  • Search result 1 of 1

    S.J. OFFICER ACCUSED OF FALSE SOLICITATION AUTOGRAPHS: A FORCE VETERAN ALLEGEDLY USED CITY STATIONERY TO ASK FOR MEMORABILIA. Author: SANDRA GONZALES, Mercury News Staff Writer
    Date: December 21, 1996
    Publication: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Page: 1B
    Wordcount: 496
    When a veteran San Jose police officer began soliciting celebrity autographs on city stationery, he wound up with more than just a friendly letter from singer Lionel Richie to hang on his wall.

    He also got an arrest warrant last week charging him with a misdemeanor count of falsely soliciting for charity - a crime for which he could face a year in jail.

    Officer David Paul Paulides, 40, aroused suspicions after he was seen using city stationery on the department's computer printers....
  • Apparently so. Gotta pay a newspaper subscription for the full article though. Well this is interesting. Not really relevant to whether the Missing 411 stuff is true, but.... interesting.
 
Well, one reddit post doesn't actually discredit anyone, and should be treated with the same skepticism as any other piece of information. What is its source? What is the actual evidence? What is the body of evidence like? Is there an identifiable pattern?

I mean, we know that Paulides left policing, and people seldom do so under happy circumstances unless it is as a form of retirement.
 
Well, one reddit post doesn't actually discredit anyone, and should be treated with the same skepticism as any other piece of information. What is its source? What is the actual evidence? What is the body of evidence like? Is there an identifiable pattern?

I mean, we know that Paulides left policing, and people seldom do so under happy circumstances unless it is as a form of retirement.
I'm not saying the post is "proof" but it does a fair bit of discussion of the flaws in Paulides's methodology. For an example I'll use the Stacey Arras case. It's one I looked up today because I felt like having a case other than Bart Schleyer to talk about. His presentation of the facts is actually reasonably accurate. She walked out of sight and was never seen again while on a family trip To Yosemite. It's a stupidly simple case because there are no details to discuss really.

The part that makes this seem "less than honest" is how Paulides is representing it as an example of his main theme of how the NPS is hiding the truth. The NPS website has a digital copy of the casefile that anyone can download. https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/foia/upload/Released-files-for-Stacy-Arras-case.pdf Are they actually hiding anything?
 
The part that makes this seem "less than honest" is how Paulides is representing it as an example of his main theme of how the NPS is hiding the truth. The NPS website has a digital copy of the casefile that anyone can download. https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/foia/upload/Released-files-for-Stacy-Arras-case.pdf Are they actually hiding anything?
Thanks for the link. It occurs to me that 4chan is extremely good at finding missing persons if they can be galvanized into action. I wonder what the hacker community would make of some of this. As to the claims on Paulides, my own correspondence with his outfit was pretty rudely received, so I don't discount the possibility that they are asshats by any means.
 
@marhawkman It appears from the news and the facts about his employment that he was caught doing something ugly and instead of going through a prolonged dismissal process for government employees, they said he could "retire". A formality. So he qualified for a pension but was not yet fulfilling full retirement criteria and will defer the collection of that pension until that age. Happens all the time with people who switch jobs or feel the need to leave for whatever reason.

How that relates to his Bigfoot and Missing 411 stuff is tenuous. But I agree that this further taints Paulides' reputation. He likes to tout his work history as an officer, but being a police officer hardly qualifies you as an honest person by default. I find a number of independent factors that cause me to conclude that both he and his work are disreputable.

I also agree that the NPS isn't hiding anything. There is no reason why they would. (Not even to protect Bigfoot disclosure.) When people don't like the dearth of facts, they assume there must be more to it. It sure is common for people to not understand that sometimes there just isn't a lot of information that was available for collection in the first place. So you can never figure out the solution.
 
@marhawkman It appears from the news and the facts about his employment that he was caught doing something ugly and instead of going through a prolonged dismissal process for government employees, they said he could "retire". A formality. So he qualified for a pension but was not yet fulfilling full retirement criteria and will defer the collection of that pension until that age. Happens all the time with people who switch jobs or feel the need to leave for whatever reason.

How that relates to his Bigfoot and Missing 411 stuff is tenuous. But I agree that this further taints Paulides' reputation. He likes to tout his work history as an officer, but being a police officer hardly qualifies you as an honest person by default. I find a number of independent factors that cause me to conclude that both he and his work are disreputable.

I also agree that the NPS isn't hiding anything. There is no reason why they would. (Not even to protect Bigfoot disclosure.) When people don't like the dearth of facts, they assume there must be more to it. It sure is common for people to not understand that sometimes there just isn't a lot of information that was available for collection in the first place. So you can never figure out the solution.
One comment I saw int he youtube comments repeated several times is that people "don't argue the merits of the casework and go after the man instead".

Well, if you look at the work from a PoV of questioning the motives of the researcher, his research is bitingly critical. He starts with an introduction criticizing the NPS and the rest of the work is treated as supporting evidence to what is a poorly explained claim. That's not the methodology of a person who's looking for the truth, it's the methodology of someone who's mudslinging.
 
Ive a couple of early 20th century books on woodmanship by American authors; Nessmuk and Kephart.

Both describe getting lost in the woods, and relate sad stories of the demise of expereinced woodsmen who panicked and were not able to save themselves

If the experts get lost, what hope do the inexperienced have?
 
Ive a couple of early 20th century books on woodmanship by American authors; Nessmuk and Kephart.

Both describe getting lost in the woods, and relate sad stories of the demise of expereinced woodsmen who panicked and were not able to save themselves

If the experts get lost, what hope do the inexperienced have?
Nature is dangerous. Maybe, especially, if you are overconfident.

It's funny how we both overestimate and neglect expertise in our society dependent on our own needs.
 
Personal Anecdote:
I used to go hiking on the slopes of Pike's Peak regularly(then I moved) but there was one day where I told this young lady to be careful not to shift here weight to the right. Why? she was standing on a granite boulder that was resting on a loose gravel slope. If she had shifted her weight towards the downhill side the boulder might have slid down hill. Yeah that sounds bad doesn't it? It's the sort of mistake where you might accidentally kill yourself.
 
This is entirely from memory but I do believe that there has been one boating accident which has been blamed on the Loch Ness Monster! If memory serves a sportsman was driving a speedboat when he hit something unseen in the Loch, and crashed and died as a result. I've got a feeling that this gets a mention on one of the versions of Nicholas Witchell's classic The Loch Ness Story (70's, and updated a few times). Needless to say the idea has been mocked since, and one doesn't hear much of it now.

There is also a disappearance of a young girl in the South of England - sorry to be vague -that has been blamed on a mystery big cat. Her bicycle was discovered but her body was nowhere to be found, I believe it may have been Di Francis who suggested that a big cat had pounced on her. The local police took the idea seriously.

Then of course the Himalayan Yeti has been accused of being behind many abductions of - mainly -women by the locals of that region : although I am not sure if any of these claims ever involved the law.

Recently mentioned by @taras of this parish.

 
There is also a disappearance of a young girl in the South of England - sorry to be vague -that has been blamed on a mystery big cat. Her bicycle was discovered but her body was nowhere to be found, I believe it may have been Di Francis who suggested that a big cat had pounced on her. The local police took the idea seriously.

Could you be remembering the April 1969 disappearance of April Fabb?

The bicycle matches, but l don’t recall an ABC having been posited.

maximus otter
 
Paulides says he has five or six criteria for considering a missing person case unusual. I think there's something to it all, not simply because of his claims in his books (though I've read twice each, making many notes), but because of cases that just slightly miss his criteria -- cases that often do not include a disappearance. I've devoted part of my own website to these cases:

Off Center

That said, I do find the occasional questionable statement in his works; for instance, he has a high opinion of the abilities of bloodhounds and cadaver dogs, while I've noticed in a few true crime books that some police officers think such animals are vastly overrated.
 
Paulides says he has five or six criteria for considering a missing person case unusual. I think there's something to it all, not simply because of his claims in his books (though I've read twice each, making many notes), but because of cases that just slightly miss his criteria -- cases that often do not include a disappearance. I've devoted part of my own website to these cases:

Off Center

That said, I do find the occasional questionable statement in his works; for instance, he has a high opinion of the abilities of bloodhounds and cadaver dogs, while I've noticed in a few true crime books that some police officers think such animals are vastly overrated.
My thoughts? well I've only verified a handful of the cases in Paulides's books. Every single one was inaccurate in some way as presented by Paulides. Are these cases legitimately unsolved mysteries? some are. One of the cases was a teen girl who disappeared on a family trip. She was never seen or heard from again and there was no evidence of where she went. Is that paranormal though? not necessarily. She wouldn't be the first person kidnapped and sold. :/ (the seeming inaccuracy in this case was that Paulides claimed the USFS refused to give him the case files. They're on the website in PDF form.)
 
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