Great Smoky Mountains on Late Night Radio

Monday, June 25, 2012

Every now and then I have a hard time getting to sleep - for whatever reason. Last night was one of those nights. After getting a little bored with the topics being discussed on the national sports talk station, I searched the dial for something a little more interesting. I happened upon a discussion on missing persons in national parks.

The program was on Coast to Coast with George Knapp as the host. His guest for the night was David Paulides, a former lawman turned investigative journalist. With some of his research highlighted in a couple of recently published books, Paulides has collected more than 450 cases of mysterious and baffling disappearances in our national parks over the last several decades.

The first hour, already in progress when I joined-in, focussed on missing cases throughout the western parks. However, Paulides spent the next hour discussing three disappearances in the Great Smoky Mountains, with most of that time spent on Dennis Martin, the six-year-old boy who disappeared at Spence Field in 1969. Over the years the father of the boy apparently refused to speak about the disappearance anymore, but Paulides was granted an interview at the Martin home recently. Paulides presents some interesting information about the case that was never discussed in the local press, including a quite fantastic observation made by Harold Key. I didn't know this either, but there were 80 armed Green Beret Special Forces that took part in that search for Dennis, that ultimately came up empty handed.

The interview was timely in light of the two young men that mysteriously disappeared in the Smokies back in March - just days apart from each other.

Although his conclusions as to what may have happened in many of these disappearances seems a little far-fetched, the interview and the facts surrounding the cases are quite compelling. If you wish to listen to the interview, the complete program is available here for download on the Coast to Coast website. Paulides was also featured in a fairly in-depth article recently published on a Las Vegas TV website.


Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

3 comments

Unknown said...

he was in town (knoxville) to promote his book a couple of months ago...

i had to go as a member of the media (all three tv and 2 newspapers were there) as this was around the general time frame as the two disappearances that have happened this spring...

most of the members of the media came away with the impression that this guy is a kook.....

his book is very very odd to say the least....

oh yeah.....he's also very heavily involved in the hunt for bigfoot....

Anonymous said...

As someone who has vetted 50+ of Mr. Paulides' stories in his book, everyone is pure fact, no opinions of what is happening, just facts.

The National Park Service is hiding a deep dark secret that Mr. Paulides and his team has uncovered. The NPS does not know hoe man people are missing in their system, they don't know where they are and they cannot supply numbers, why? When Paulides' team sent a freedom of information act out to the NPS asking for this data, numbers that should be at their fingertips, NPS stated they didn't have the info and wanted to charge his project $1.4 million for the info. To bolster this assertion, KLAS TV in Las Vegas did their own test and also asked for data on missing people, the NPS stated they didn't have it.

I would bet that a flustered park service employee wrote this comment. They have been caught with their pants down not doing their job. Every missing person group in the world should be on the attack asking why the park service can't keep a clipboard monitoring who and where people go missing.

The missing 411 books are the best written, most innovatine and hard core research I have read in years, they are fact!

Unknown said...

Please elaborate which stories did you vet?