I walked the Appalachian trail some years ago.  Even on a track as famous as this I got "lost" twice.  It's really really fucking easy.  People go missing in the woods all the time.  There's a very recent and very famous case of a woman walking the AT with friends, they turn around and she isn't there.  Huge search parties sent out almost instantly but no-one finds her for a year.  When they discover her, she'd made camp about 300 yards from the main trail, had eaten through her rations, kept a diary but just had the bad luck/timing to miss the trail and the hundreds of passing hikers.   Quite often when hikers/explorers die from exposure and hypothermia they remove their clothes towards the end of life - the fevers break out and they don't really know what they're doing.
I'd say it's all just really unfortunate timings.

Yup heard about that. It happens to a lot of mountaineering folk. Some of the disappeared people were found alive and some say they were wandering lost and confused but the interesting thing is how are they out there wandering(lets say they are somewhat mentally incapacitated because that throw away items that would have been very useful to them to signal/survive) but none of the search and rescue teams can find them.

Interesting, I didn't know about that.

I think if I went hiking, I'd want a satellite phone and a flare gun.

I should really read all the posts before replying shouldn't I.

The latest Joe Rogan podcast has some Everest rescue guy who talks about the stripping off of clothes when experiencing hypothermia, you go through a stage of euphoria apparently.

Aye, paradoxical undressing is well understood and documented. ‘Missing people found dead and naked in the woods’ is really not a mystery of the unexplained. Especially in countries with sparser populations, where there is so much more wilderness to get lost in.

poprock wrote:

Aye, paradoxical undressing is well understood and documented. ‘Missing people found dead and naked in the woods’ is really not a mystery of the unexplained. Especially in countries with sparser populations, where there is so much more wilderness to get lost in.

Its not the dead and naked part that is the mystery.

There was a legend of a guy who attempted to walk the Appalachian Trail a few years before me who kept getting lost and going off in the wrong direction.  Don't have *exact* figures to hand but he did walk a few hundred miles in the wrong direction for a month or so before realising his mistake and turning back round.  It took me about 5 months, it took him 10.

Anyway back to mysterious missing woodsmen.

Kazuo wrote:

I'm currently listening to the podcast about these missing forest cases and it's spectacularly dumb. "There was a victim who was ruled to have died from altitude sickness, therefore the suggestion is that this person has been in space" Daft but entertaining.

Were they, by any chance, missing in a forest at a higher altitude than they were used to?

It's just totally out of character for these people - they'd never been and died in a forest before, so why did they start now?

I can't believe we've not seen it all these years.

Guys, guys guys guys.Oh yeah those guys jump straight from 0 - lightspeed in their thinking. I just thought it was a fairly entertaining show and not meant to be at all serious. Like not serious AT ALL. Yeah the weather bit was chucklesome for sure.
From my understanding though the books are based on actual real life disappearances and that all paranormal aside is interesting.
@yourfavouriteuncle The mystery (well the most interesting thing) is how (even some very competent) people can just vanish in a forest so quickly. Freaky. That story you shared about the woman who went missing, thats really interesting.
But the tale spun in the podcast ties in nicely to all the chatter around inter dimension stuff being a factor in the explanation of lots of different strange phenomena. And it reminded me of a certain very recent show.....

I do feel like I need to include a disclaimer at this point as I think Im not making certain things clear.
1) I linked the Mysterious Universe podcast about this topic. I linked it because I found it a fairly entertaining ramble about this topic(that I had not heard of before). The hosts clearly don't seem to be taking any of this particularly seriously and seem like they are having fun thinking of sci-fi explanations for these disappearances.
2) This is the weird things thread so I dont think I should have to preface every post with "Now guys, I do not for a second think this is the correct explanation for x. This is an interesting take etc etc etc". For me at least its taken as read that this whole thread is taken with a pinch o salt.
3) The books from what I can tell are a collection of reports fitting a certain profile of missing person's cases. Id be curious as to how these incidents fit within the overall picture of disappearances. Take a big data approach to things possibly....

I most often listen to podcasts in general while commuting. Im not some nutter living in a shed setting up a bigfoot tracking grid or using crystals to fend off trans dimensional hyper beings. I take a lot of things as read and as such do not explicitly communicate them and so it leaves the door open for people to think I meant one thing when I meant something entirely different. But thats my own thing I gotta work out.

I suppose Im coming at it from an angle of not ever having camped even. So Im curious about how sniffer dogs dont find a scent or why the lost people never do any of the obvious things to aid their rescue. Assuming of course they want to be rescued. It amazing that someone can loose their shit to the extent that they throw away their lighter rather than start a fire or not use their gun to signal etc. Thats why Id be curious to see how the subset of data presented in the books stack up against the entire suite of data. Could be they are just edge cases. But (apparently) those edge cases exhibit enough commonalities that the author started to document them. Thats where I see the mystery.
But Im in no way interested enough to actually do proper research on any of this. Perish the thought

@Ninja,

Aye, sorry if I came across as dismissive or anything. Definitely not having a go, as I really am into this sort of stuff too; especially enjoyed the missing persons/staircases in the woods stuff from those Reddit threads when they were floating about. I do try to treat it all with a bit of common sense though, as a counterpoint to my permanently stoned older brother who buys into most of it and just ends up coming across as a bit daft. That podcast was a good laugh, it's all entertainment.