From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a journey to the fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journeys to the Fringe, where our research is generally better than
the assholes we cover.
And somehow they're the ones that make a career of this.
Go fish here.
We are your slightly salty podcast hosts, Taylor and Chelsea here continuing on with
one of these said researchers, David Politis.
If you didn't listen to part one, there's some stuff you should know, I think, before
we continue on.
So please go back and listen.
Long story short, he technically was a cop.
He says he retired.
I shouldn't say technically a cop.
He was a cop.
He says he retired.
Technically I guess you could say that, but more accurately he was definitely fired.
Yeah, there's a difference.
Before doing uncoply behaviors, I think is a good way to put it.
And we'll just continue from here.
Yeah, I just want to say that was a harsh reality that you started off with.
We could be doing better.
To me, I think our last episode on David Politis is probably the most important one
because that's not what you're hearing talked about.
All the other stuff that I'm going to talk about today about him being an excellent researcher,
an excellent person, is going to be a really short episode.
It's just going to be debunking of the Missing 411.
What we talked about in the previous episode about his police brutality, in his, what was
it referred to of, solicitation that he got actually fired for.
To me is the bigger thing.
But yeah, today we're just going to tackle Missing 411, so let's just jump right into
it.
According to Politis, his work on the subject began when he was doing research in the National
Park and an off-duty Park Ranger found him an expressed concern about the questionable
nature of some of the missing person cases that occurred in the parks.
What was he doing that a Park Ranger is like, you know, I got to go to David Politis.
He's the guy who could break this.
I assume, so the Ranger, he says, knew Politis's background and asked him to research the issue.
No, he did not know his background.
I assume the background that he's talking about is Bigfoot.
Not the police brutality, solicitation, and the one.
Yeah, you hear those stories.
You're like, oh, this guy needs to, you know what, maybe he's like, this guy needs something.
I'm going to give him something.
Yeah, he didn't even know who he was.
He was just like that guy right there.
Oh, that poor guy.
That guy looks like he needs something to do.
I assume it's Bigfoot.
So just in specul- speculizing, speculat-ationing, making speculation.
Speculatorying.
I think it's speculating.
Already someone who's into Bigfoot and would know David Politis about Bigfoot and the speculation
is of course that it was about Bigfoot.
But this guy, if that's what he's knowing him for, he's already a Bigfoot person.
I'm a Bigfoot person.
I'm into the paranormal things in life.
That's already what this guy's going to him with, right?
So he already is like of that mind going to Politis with this.
And I feel like Bigfoot people, they don't want to know the outside bad stuff about other
Bigfoot people.
They just want to focus on the good stuff together.
Yeah, the good stuff about Bigfoot.
So Politis is like out of the goodness of my heart, of course I will, and asserts that
he uncovered multiple lines of evidence suggesting negligence on the part of the park service
in failing to locate the missing people suggesting that there is some sort of cover-up happening.
This asserts that there are specific criteria in the missing person cases that must be met
in order to be considered by him in the missing 411 cases.
I started to develop some things that I call profile points.
And those are things that come up time and time again on these cases.
They are.
They're rural disappearances.
There's no suspects on the case.
No history of mental illness.
Can't be voluntarily disappeared.
Can't be A.
I wonder how often it comes up that he's like deep into researching a missing person and
it's like, oh wait, they wanted to disappear.
I just drop it.
I'm going to go on a limb after doing all this research and say that doesn't happen.
Not to spoil anything.
They can't be voluntary disappearances.
No evidence of animal attack.
Back of ascent of canine puppies for a scent trail, missing clothing or shoes, older fields
and berries are somehow related.
Right.
I forgot he did the berries stuff.
Yeah, the berries.
Bad weather found near creeks or bodies of water occur between 4 to 5 p.m. or slightly
later.
If found alive, they're found unconscious or semi-conscious.
And when questioned, they can't remember details about the event.
Low grade fevers are often involved and they're most often found in an area that had already
been searched.
So, he brought in his investigation to include missing people from across the world and this
led to his belief that he hasn't covered a mysterious series of worldwide disappearances,
which he said defied logical and conventional explanations.
There are now 10 missing 411 books, 3 missing 411 documentaries, one of which is called
Missing 411 the UFO Connection, which I find weird that has to be the closest he's ever
come to saying it's something.
So I was shocked to see that.
So we've got Eastern United States, unexplained disappearances of North Americans that have
never been solved, Western United States and Canada, unexplained disappearances of North
Americans that have never been solved, North America and beyond.
That's its own North American beyond.
The Devils and the Details, a sober and coincidence, Hunters, Off the Grid, Law, Canada and Montana.
Those are all the books.
I probably said that really weird so it sounds like all one book, but they're all different
books.
They're all 10 of them I just named.
You can't see the points that I have.
You're probably thinking now like this sounds very mysterious.
What way is this guy gonna take this?
I don't know.
I mean go listen to his interviews.
You can see where he takes it yourself.
This is not what this podcast is, that's just telling you what he's up to.
He's already covered that.
Yeah, he's covered it.
I've covered what Nassaly is in the first one.
Now let's just check out the critiques of his work.
Probably one of the biggest ones is that people go missing for various reasons and just are
plain never found.
Everywhere.
It doesn't have to be paranormal means.
I want to think it is personally, but the odds are so minuscule that it's actually something
paranormal.
Yeah.
I happily accept that it's aliens, reptilians, boulder rock people.
The options are limitless and that's what is so appealing to these people because he's
not to me and these people because he doesn't say.
So your mind just wanders like crazy.
It's like a horror movie where they never show the bad ghost, right?
Like you can think of how scary it is, but the minute they show it, it's like, oh that
sucks.
But it is really where all more movies lose their rewatch value is what they actually
are.
Oh yeah, when you show them monster.
Reasons for going missing in real life and probably most of his cases can include an individual
deliberately wanting to disappear to find a new identity, falling or a sudden health
crisis leading to a lone person becoming immobilized off trail, drowning, a bear or other animal
attack, environmental exposure or even deliberate disappear.
I just said that they make him up again.
Sorry.
In advance for anything that comes up more than once.
I do what I can.
These cases are not outside the frequency that one would expect or that there is anything
unexplainable that I was able to identify.
They're just regular missing persons cases, which I admit I am compelled by as well.
Just like unsolved mysteries.
You love it because there's no answer.
And I'm sorry to say love it because these are people who have families who are actually
it been impact dealing with this.
So I hate to say it that way.
I'm sorry.
But there's a huge market for true crime and stuff like that.
And it's it's very popular.
There's something about not knowing the answer.
Exactly.
Not only that, there's a huge market for not having an answer.
Oh yes.
And presenting it as being mysterious.
People want to know.
They want to know what the end result is.
They want closure when it comes to these things.
So there's something that's very fascinating.
I don't think with happened to this person.
I think in the unsolved persons or missing persons entire podcast genre, they don't want
to know the answer.
They just want to be able to speculate or think about all the different possibilities.
They don't want an actual.
In the end, that's Eva Plato's job.
Another big critique is the fact that people have independently looked into some of his
account and found major flaws that polite us does not correct.
Details like polite us claiming a person was never found.
But there are newspaper reports that the person was found a short time later.
Our polite is claiming no one knows why a person went missing when the missing person
contacted the news family or police to state why they ran off.
Some of the reasons people have given for going missing include avoiding abusive relationships.
Tired of being around host guests that overstay their welcome.
And so on.
So the fact that David Pallatus constantly tries to play up the paranormal angle is a
much lesser problem than the fact that you can't trust his version of events that are
being put forth by him.
Just a speculation on my part that this could be why he's self publishing because he's
not actually publishing correct facts.
And then just nobody wanted to publish it.
Yeah, not that it was wrong that they didn't want to publish it.
True.
I mean, I mean, you're going to have to factor it.
But yeah.
Yeah.
And also, yeah, there's no actual editor involved in his process.
I don't think either.
So nobody reviewing his research.
If he doesn't want it, then he doesn't have to have it.
A blog from one of the largest missing persons website on the internet.
Yep.
Are there non-internet blogs now?
There are non-internet websites.
Yes.
Okay.
I assume that's the newspaper.
Largest missing persons website reviewed one of the books in 2012.
They said some interesting things like the children being found impossibly far away.
But they also point out that it's never mentioned by David that two cases are thought to be serial
killer victims.
That would be both Thomas Bowman and Bruce Kremen, two of the people profiled in the book
and they are presumed victims of the serial killer, Mac Ray Edwards.
A fact, Pallatus fails to mention or correct.
Some of Pallatus's cases also go back a century or more, which would mean that some of those
people are not listed with law enforcement or on missing persons databases anywhere,
which is something he really gloms onto that there's no list or anything that he can find
in.
So he's independently doing all this research himself.
If you go back that far, we're talking about Pinkerton was just coming up with his investigation
skills from stumbling across those foragers.
No, some of them are that far back.
You would know that from listening to literally any interview.
He brings up really old cases.
Which I mean, if you have anything, you wouldn't be pulling anything from that long ago.
Another case where he never discusses the evidence of drug use at the camp where they
originated or positive drug screen, a case included in one of his books where a football
player was acting weird while drug use was brought up.
It's never been brought up.
The autopsy showed the victim had CTE, which is a
A concussion based brain issue.
One of the cases of a missing ranger is showcased on a show called disappeared, showed the ranger
to be depressed due to his divorce and life choices.
This is someone telling the story.
Sorry, I should have said that someone talking here.
The person claims he told David this and he said all the reports he had on the case didn't
show that the ranger was depressed due to divorce and life choices.
So that's another thing.
David won't contact survivors because before he wrote the book, he talked to search and
rescue people and said, don't.
So while he has talked to some relatives, it's not every case disappeared, had several
people directly involved in the disappearance speak on camera and didn't just go by reports
like David did for the case.
Yeah.
And when I've seen that he actually interviews family or people involved in the case, it's
generally because they disagree with what the reports found.
So he wants to use that.
Yeah.
I actually found a Reddit, good old Reddit that goes through case by case in great detail.
There's a lot of them and just tears them apart in absolute detail.
They find the original account, Plotus's research, there's charts, news articles, so and so on,
lots of information that's just not accurate on David Plotus's part of his reporting.
All in all, he misleads on cases, uses inaccurate information and makes bold claims on the case
being mysterious based on inaccurate information.
For example, going missing and traveling in total darkness during the night versus going
missing in the morning, which he says is a criteria of his, which he just ignores.
That's just one.
So Kyle Pollock did an article looking into the missing 411 books titled, quote, an investigation
of the missing 411 conspiracy.
He took the book, missing 411, Western United States in Canada and a random number generator
and selected several pages of the Hyman's categorical imperative, which is do not try
to explain something until you are sure there is something to be explained to start.
First off, he found Plotus did not make any disappearances up.
Point one, Plotus.
Good job.
He didn't make anything up.
I think that's the first good thing we've actually said.
Yeah.
It is.
Yeah.
That should go on his book, did not make anything up.
That's a quote.
Yet both cases are banal and devoid of any apparently unusual qualities, just random
disappearances.
But then the author finds these random duties, quote, the oldest victim in my audit involved
a 69 year old hiker climbing Mount Shasta, moving alone in wind conditions estimated
at 70 miles per hour.
Once he split off from his companions, he was never seen again.
I was finding these cases to be fairly mundane until I arrived at the hiker's disappearance.
Following a deadpan factual reporting of the details, Plotus quotes a local person saying
cryptically that according to local legend, beings called Lemurians lived underneath Mount
Shasta.
Maybe the Lemurians got Carl.
The text is decorated sparsely with this and other head scratching non sequit- quitters?
Non sequitur.
Don sequitur.
Just completely unrelated.
For example, in the last case of my brief audit, a woman named Amy disappears while
exercising.
Her body was never recovered, but her wristwatch was found in a riverbed years later.
Plotus points out that years after that, a woman named Anne disappeared from the same
place.
He felt the need to point out that both of their names start with A and their first names
only had three letters.
I can only presume Plotus is open to the possibility that some nefarious Batman villain is at work
in this area.
Beware of the three letter killers.
I remember that too and he was talking about people going missing in cities and the German
background.
Yeah.
Then you get things like the fact that Barry's and Barry Bush's play a common role in many
disappearances is quite intriguing.
End quote by Pollock.
I'm gonna go more into what he has to say, but he's kinda...
I don't know how he's coming to these conclusions of what these people have in common.
It's almost like he's looking for anything.
Anything that can tie one to another.
A's.
Literally A's.
Literally Barry Bush's.
Like, where are you gonna go into a bush and there's not Barry Bush's?
Yeah, that's kind of wilderness needs to eat.
Yeah.
That's true.
I'm frankly shocked that Lemuria came up in this episode.
Yep.
It did.
We should end an episode on it if you want to go back.
We sure have.
We always need to tie another episode into an episode.
Palatus describes the pattern of these cases.
The pattern consists of some loose criteria such as victims found deceased with clothing
removed, pants, shoes, or boots, typically.
Easily explained by paradoxical undressing.
Taylor brought it up in the last episode.
That's the word.
This is a condition found in people experiencing hypothermia who feel irrationally hot and
remove clothing to cool themselves.
Yeah, it's basically when you're about to die, your body releases the heat from the
vital organs to the rest of the body, which makes you feel very warm and people get undressed
when they're dying of hypothermia in the middle of winter.
Very easy to even dive exposure in the middle of summer when you're in the middle of woods
for a couple of days when it gets down.
We're used to the comfort of our home and stuff like that.
And when you don't know how to survive in the wilderness over a few days and you're
losing that heat and have nothing to keep you warm, this is what's going to happen,
even though it seems illogical for us to want to keep warm.
And he's saying there's a big mystery to it.
This also applies with the low grade fever that he has as a part of his criteria with
the paradoxical undressing.
Another is a deceased body recovered but found a distance or elevation away from the last
known whereabouts that defies common sense.
However, he doesn't talk about alive people that this has happened to.
People can move and gain a lot of ground.
Yeah.
And in fact, they can go to places where people have looked for them.
It's just, it's kind of like one of the rules that you're supposed to do when you're lost
is not move, but people do it all over brick and time.
And that's part of the problem is they end up in tracks and they work again.
Yeah, we're going to bring that up as well.
He loves to say whatever amount of distance is far.
It's against all odds.
I don't believe it.
It's impossible.
Which he uses especially with children.
And to back this up, he uses a search and rescue manual to quote that 95% of missing
seven year olds are found within a 4.5 mile radius.
You still have 5% who are going to be found outside of that 4.5 mile radius.
We're not found at all.
This means rescuers expect to find some children outside of this radius.
Finding a seven year old who traveled 10 to 15 miles is usually more difficult than finding
a seven year old who only traveled two miles.
Yeah.
Well, just think of how much area you have to cover because they could have walked seven
miles in any direction.
So that just exponentially increases how far you have to go.
Yeah.
And if a child is not found, we do not know how far they traveled.
This means the stats are incomplete regarding how far children walk.
That's a fair point.
A seven year old walking seven miles is not evidence that there is a missing 4.1.1 abductor
in the first place and many children are capable of walking considerable distances.
Despite live people doing this, most of these supposedly common self-defying distances
polite is mentions are just a few miles.
All it goes on to say granted, terrain and conditions have a huge impact on lost hikers.
I don't want to dismiss anything outright due to low magnitude, but I don't find anything
exceptional in the cases I reviewed.
The strangest case I recall was a hiker who was found three days later, 14 miles from
his last known location.
To me, a hiker, this is not an implausible distance to cover in that time.
I just want to say while I'm thinking of it, another one is bad weather around the
disappearance, which could also explain why the person is missing in the first place because
they get disoriented.
There's some freak weather event that happens to
Impact the path or the trail.
Impact the path of the person who's on the trail.
Yes, thank you.
Another criterion is to not actually be missing.
A minority of cases in the catalogue involved missing people who were recovered alive.
Curiously, they all seem to be young children.
I suppose an adult gone missing and found can self attest that their missing time was
explained by ordinary circumstances.
Children may not have the same developmental functions to coherently account for their
whereabouts, thus leaving a gap to be filled with the possibility of something unusual.
I do believe he talks about a child that says that they were taken by a bear.
I was also just going to say that children also lie just all the time.
Yes, you've come up before in this podcast.
Strangely nuts.
They sure do.
They make shit up.
With such imprecise criteria, it seems Flaity's considers himself the only person fully qualified
to identify a missing person's case as belonging to the missing 411 or not.
The proposed unusualness of these cases.
Wait, Elsie, are missing 411 cases like your criteria for a Fringy Mini?
It might be.
You know what?
It's a good cataloging system, okay?
I would not be surprised if someone else is using it.
I should trademark it.
I should send them a cease and desist.
And ask for an autograph too.
The proposed unusualness of these cases seems hardly greater than one would find for a rare
and unplanned occurrence such as a disappearance.
Basically, he's just taking disappearances and putting them into a book.
Flaity's relies heavily on look at all these cases, even if one or two explainable, it
can all be explainable, which doesn't equal something mysterious happening, unfortunately.
No, that also means that you're kind of lazy in how you're putting a book together if
you're just throwing them all in and say sure, some of these can be explained.
I mean, you see the same thing with UFOs, but surely you can apply the same logic to
this.
Another point Flaity's makes is that there are disproportionately large amounts of people
disappearing from national parks.
Turns out, if anything, you're less likely to disappear from a national park than from
a major city.
Hundreds of thousands and more visit the national parks each year, and in those people visiting,
there are a whole lot of dummies.
You see them in headlines.
They want to pet bison, they want to feed the wildlife, and you know, people want to
go on hikes.
We really could just make Friggin Minis out of these ridiculous stories and we would
never run out of them because people do not know how to act in nature.
These are the people going into national parks and of course some of them are going to want
to go hiking and they're not going, they're feeding wild animals.
Yeah, they heard about it on TV once, they want to try it out.
And they're not going to go into the wild, like think about like Grand Canyon National
Park, someone's going to be like, I want to hike and they're not prepared for the environment
that they're going into.
Of course something's going to happen.
Yeah, I mean, every time you read a headline that says Florida man and then it's continued
from there, that person has the potential to go into a national park and want to go hiking.
And go missing.
As an aside from this article, I'm giving you this information from which is the Kiopolic
one.
I'd like to add that on an interview on Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell, great episode
actually to listen to.
Art Bell actually asked him some good questions.
He doesn't know how to answer.
Art questions him and says, is this outside of the expected norm?
People going missing versus people visiting the park.
Are there more disappearances in the parks based on our expectation of national averages?
Let's hear the numbers.
Take your number of mysterious disappearances, divide the amount of people that visit the
parks and do it for North America.
What do we get?
Lightest says, no, thank you.
Just kidding.
What he actually says is I'd be playing into their hands by giving you a number.
That's literally what he says.
At this point, I'd be playing into their hands by giving you a number.
There's people that are against him.
It's the National Park Service, obviously.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, there's a conspiracy about them.
You know, that's also a part of his misinformed one-munch deck.
I thought the whole thing was just they were too lazy to put the list together.
I don't know.
He really gets it out there that there's a conspiracy with the National Park Service
being in.
There's a conspiracy about the National Parks because they're finding stairs in the middle
of nowhere and not anything.
But yeah, he definitely alludes to as well that the National Park Service is in on whatever
is going on.
So yeah, he won't give a number.
So we don't even know if it's like that big of a problem or not.
He says it's a huge problem.
Back to Pollock, his article.
In regards to Politis, claims about exorbitant amounts of money for the National Park Service
to provide a list of missing peoples or they don't keep a list.
So on and so on.
Pollock spoke with a National Park Service Public Affairs representative about the handling
of missing persons cases.
Cases are entered into the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, N-L-E-T-S.
This is a federated data sharing system used by law enforcement nationwide.
I await proof that any cases failed to be entered.
Obviously, the Park Service is going to go to law enforcement in the case that someone
is missing or found deceased.
Obviously, they have some means to go in and see what's going on.
But it's not like they're not going to contact anybody.
That actually is of the law and they're not like a governing body of law.
So they obviously have people.
For the most part, they're making sure that people are staying on trails and driving.
Looking after the park.
Yeah.
Like they got another job that isn't search and rescue.
Search and rescue does search and rescue.
And they're dealing with the idiots trying to feed wild life.
They're not going to go searching.
Like some of these people are a part of the search and rescue.
Yeah, that's the secondary to their actual job there.
Obviously, actual law enforcement is where the information is going to be tracked, not
through like a list on a piece of paper kept by the Park Service.
So I'm actually not sure what Pallatus is looking for here.
Now that I think about it too, why would the different national parks need to share this
information with each other?
Because national parks are big enough that they just deal with people missing in their
area.
Exactly.
And Pallatus is like, oh, well, they keep a list of movies filmed there.
And he actually says like the Western National Park Service keeps a list of movies that are
filmed there.
And it's like Western National Park.
So it's almost like they don't have to share that information as well, which would just
be for fun.
So it's almost like he's just kind of blowing hot air to find something that, you know,
people are going to be like, they should be keeping a list.
They absolutely should.
But like when you look at it logically like that, like no, they shouldn't.
It would just be someone like writing down, yeah, this person went missing in this park,
in which case I too would charge him exorbitant amounts of money to put that list together.
The list goes on with points, but those are the most interesting.
The rest are kind of bull claims with nothing to back them up by Pallatus, not Pollak, or
simply leaving out facts, whether he's aware of them or not.
Pollak says, I won't take the books of gospel.
And if any case interests you that Pallatus talks about, hit Google and dig deeper.
Missing 411 research boils down.
This is not Pollak anymore.
It's me.
So we're getting to the good stuff.
Missing 411 research boils down to Pallatus believing or disbelieving things, not Pallatus
collecting evidence and confirming things.
He reaches conclusions without sufficient evidence.
He beats around the bush saying he won't give an answer.
However, it's obvious he's not pointing to anything mundane.
He alludes to it being aliens or portals or paranormal of some sort.
You think it's because he would also have to put work in like more work to actually
give an answer?
Or do you think it's the miscreasable support part?
He knows the audience.
He's on the specific circuit of paranormal.
He knows who he's trying to sell these to.
Pallatus gives no reason for these disappearances, but finds odd correlations for them, which
we already talked about.
For example, the Amy and Anne thing.
In his analysis, he concludes with, I've exhausted my exploration for anything gen- oh no, this
is someone researching.
I've exhausted my exploration for anything genuinely unusual.
After careful review, to me not a single case stands out, nor do the frequencies involved
seen outside of expectations.
Is a quote from someone.
I'm sorry, you should be named, but you're not.
Another belief you're going to like is how he argues against serial killers, which if
you remember two of the cases he uses are actually thought to be victims of a serial
killer.
It's that he lives in Colorado and 80% of the people on trails are armed.
This is why it can't be serial killers.
That's the reason he gives.
Okay.
God, he's one of those people too.
Oh man, that argument when there's like a school shooting, we need to just have more
people with guns.
Yeah.
He's one of those people, isn't he?
It has to be.
Like what?
Who's going hiking out in the wilderness armed?
Can you imagine going on like an all day hike being armed?
I mean, we live in Canada, so maybe I'm off on that perspective, but surely this can't
be right.
Yeah.
80% of people on trails are armed.
I mean, Americans who listen, you may know better than us, but this just feels wrong.
It just feels wrong.
If we're out of line here, like please let us know, it just feels so wrong.
So this is.
Hikers and gun advocates just seem like different groups in my mind.
Yeah, that's his reason.
A lot of his points he specifically looks at to narrow down his cases can be debunked
as well.
People found in an area that has already been searched.
People do tend to walk in circles if they lost and even circle back.
So this is why they're searching most areas more than once in the first place and also
why they say stay put if you get lost so somebody can find you and you're not, you know, leaving
an area they're about to search.
And then you come up behind them.
That people are found near bodies of water.
Typically people will also seek out bodies of water like rivers to follow when they're
lost.
And not only that, lots can happen if you're already in water in the first place.
You can have a heart attack in the water.
You can get a poisonous bug bite.
You can slip and fall and hit your head.
So much stuff can happen and bam, you're how many miles downstream in water at a ridiculous
distance away.
And yeah, it's usually easy trail right beside water too.
Yep.
People like the water.
They have to look at it and so on.
Things about water.
You could go on about water.
Exactly.
Missing without a trace.
Obviously, this is part of the appeal of what he's talking about.
However, this is obviously a selection bias when you're looking at national parks, which
are huge.
You're going to have more people who do actually go missing without a trace than in a city
where there's cameras and stuff like that.
And it even happens in cities.
So you put that in a national park.
Obviously it's going to be higher.
Additionally, some have criticized the lack of peer reviewed research or scientific worker
in his work.
Again, he's self publishing.
He doesn't have to as well as the absence of transparency regarding his investigative
methods.
I think we did narrow that down.
We're on the same system as the my fringy minis.
Great system by the way.
Very reliable.
If that's not a criticism, that's one of his problems.
Yes.
The guy loves to not speculate on what it is.
I know I've said it before.
I think it's for a few reasons, but he says if he does that, if he gives a reason and then
he goes and interviews a family member, someone who's gone missing and they see him say it's
Bigfoot, his credibility is out the window.
Yeah, gone.
He says Bigfoot gone.
The person won't want to talk to him.
I love that argument for him because I'm betting he thinks no one knows why he's actually
not a credible person.
If they knew about the police brutality, I keep saying it and it's slipping my mind
now.
Listen to the first episode.
Go back if you forgot.
I don't have time right now, but that's actually why he's not a credible person.
So if I didn't already have you convinced that this guy's a shitty person, I have some
stories shared by redditors that I just don't think I have enough time for, but let me share
some of the highlights.
They don't like that he masquerades as a former police officer doing excellent research
when he's used his position to fraudulently obtain something out of it.
He doesn't research his case as well, often getting information incorrect, then self-publishes
incorrect information and does not correct it.
When faced with any criticism say of incorrect information, he gets angry and is quick to
fly off the handle.
When faced with a question he doesn't want to answer, he tells people to go read the
book.
It sounds like you haven't read the book and just misses them.
He says that a lot on like his interviews that he does.
Well yeah, and it's because there's not enough time to actually get into each case.
So it's a very easy way to avoid it.
And in fact, generally when you see people trying to say in criticism, that's taken
out of context.
It's so easy to just say and never have to go back.
Yeah, that's true.
Which leads me to the difficult ego, which I could see him having coming from the positions
he's held and situations he's been in.
Lacks professionalism, it's a sales job, he's not a dumb guy.
He was scamming celebrities, now he is using data presenting it as high strangeness and
touring the conspiracy conferences.
His books are vanity publishing, he has not been offered a book deal that has ever been
mentioned.
He's fascinated by the intrigue of 411.
People love mysteries, people love true crime.
I love Serpo, it doesn't make it true or like anything actually mysterious is going on.
And that brings me to the end of David Pilatus.
Wow.
Yeah.
While you were talking to, I looked up his Wikipedia page.
Yeah.
There's no section for criticism, which really surprised me.
And it's a lot of the stuff that really stays under the radar.
Wikipedia is one of the best for criticizing things.
I know for people in this category.
And I find it also funny that it has nothing about his police work on there and him being
fired.
Outside of like a brief statement.
Because this can all easily be sourced to be put onto there and added onto that page.
So I found that interesting because Wikipedia is usually on it to debunk something very
quickly.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
So yeah, Chelsea, thank you for that just because I do, I did like listening to David
Pilatus just like he's a, he's a good talker.
Even if the stuff he's saying is utter garbage.
I know.
They usually are to get that far.
It makes me think we could probably do a similar thing if we wanted to sell some books because
people obviously really like the missing people.
All you got to say is we don't know what happened, but it's probably really mysterious.
Yeah.
Then we just make a book about it.
We just got to find the time.
Yeah.
So we won't do it.
Here we are spending our time on actual research into these horrible people.
You're welcome.
Yes.
And with that, Chelsea, thank you very much for this episode.
I have been Taylor here with Chelsea.
We are Journey to the Fringe.
Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week.
Bye.
Okay.
You were a cop for 20 years.
20 years.
Regular cop?
I worked street crimes, detectives, SWAT team.
Okay.
Yeah.
Three or four different detective units.
Regular cop.
All right.
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