I'm a Search and Rescue Officer for the US Forest Service, I have some stories to tell

I wasn't sure where else to post these stories, so I figured I'd share them here. I've been an SAR officer for a few years now, and along the way I've seen some things that I think you guys will be interested in. <br><br>* I have a pretty good track record for finding missing people. Most of the time they just wander off the path, or slip down a small cliff, and they can't find their way back. The majority of them have heard the old 'stay where you are' thing, and they don't wander far. But I've had two cases where that didn't happen. Both bother me a lot, and I use them as motivation to search even harder on the missing persons cases I get called on. <br>The first was a little boy who was out berry-picking with his parents. He and his sister were together, and both of them went missing around the same time. Their parents lost sight of them for a few seconds, and in that time both the kids apparently wandered off. When their parents couldn't find them, they called us, and we came out to search the area. We found the daughter pretty quickly, and when we asked where her brother was, she told us that he'd been taken away by 'the bear man.' She said he gave her berries and told her to stay quiet, that he wanted to play with her brother for a while. The last she saw of her brother, he was riding on the shoulders of 'the bear man' and seemed calm. Of course, our first thought was abduction, but we never found a trace of another human being in that area. The little girl was also insistent that he wasn't a normal man, but that he was tall and covered in hair, 'like a bear', and that he had a 'weird face.' We searched that area for *weeks*, it was one of the longest calls I've ever been on, but we never found a single trace of that kid. <br>The other was a young woman who was out hiking with her mom and grandpa. According to the mother, her daughter had climbed up a tree to get a better view of the forest, and she'd never come back down. They waited at the base of the tree for hours, calling her name, before they called for help. Again, we searched everywhere, and we never found a trace of her. I have no idea where she could possibly have gone, because neither her mother or grandpa saw her come down.<br><br>* A few times, I've been out on my own searching with a canine, and they've tried to lead me straight up cliffs. Not hills, not even rock faces. Straight, sheer cliffs with no possible handholds. It's always baffling, and in those cases we usually find the person on the other side of the cliff, or miles away from where the canine has led us. I'm sure there's an explanation, but it's sort of strange.<br><br>* One particularly sad case involved the recovery of a body. A nine-year-old girl fell down an embankment and got impaled on a dead tree at the base. It was a complete freak accident, but I'll never forget the sound her mother made when we told her what had happened. She saw the body bag being loaded into the ambulance, and she let out the most haunting, heart-broken wail I've ever heard. It was like her whole life was crashing down around her, and a part of her had died with her daughter. I heard from another SAR officer that she killed herself a few weeks after it happened. She couldn't live with the loss of her daughter.<br><br>* I was teamed up with another SAR officer because we'd received reports of bears in the area. We were looking for a guy who hadn't come home from a climbing trip when he was supposed to, and we ended up having to do some serious climbing to get to where we figured he'd be. We found him trapped in a small crevasse with a broken leg. It was not pleasant. He'd been there for almost two days, and his leg was very obviously infected. We were able to get him into a chopper, and I heard from one of the EMTs that the guy was absolutely inconsolable. He kept talking about how he'd been doing fine, and when he'd gotten to the top, a man had been there. He said the guy had no climbing equipment, and he was wearing a parka and ski pants. He walked up to the guy, and when the guy turned around, he said he had no face, just a blank space where his eyes, nose, and mouth should have been. He said the faceless man had pushed him, and he'd fallen down the cliff. I don't know whether the guy delirious from his ordeal, or if something truly happened, but I know I didn't want to be out there alone after he told us that story.<br><br>* There have been times when I've talked to the families of missing people, and I've gotten strange feelings from them. Either it's over-parenting to the point where I feel like they're hiding something, or it's outright antagonism. One guy got so angry with me he punched me squarely in the face, knocking me out, and then disappeared. We never found out where he went, and I never found out what happened to his missing daughter. Another family refused to let us search their property, even though we were pretty sure the missing person had gone in that direction. They were incredibly rude, and I always wondered if they hadn't killed the person and hidden their body on their property.<br><br>* I was on a call with a couple of other SAR officers, and we were all teamed up as one group. We found the guy we were looking for, but he was dead. He'd shot himself in the head, and it had blown most of his face off. We figured he'd been dead for a few days, and we were all pretty shocked and distraught by the sight. One of my coworkers went back down the mountain to call the cops, and the other took our guy's gun and went to find his tent. I was alone for maybe five minutes, split between trying to comprehend what this guy had done and looking for any sign of why he'd done it, and I saw a man in a parka and ski pants walking through the forest. I called out to him, thinking he might be the guy who had encouraged our guy to kill himself, but he didn't seem to hear me. I started to walk towards him, but my coworkan came back right at that moment, and when I looked back towards the guy, he was gone. I asked my coworker if he'd seen him, and he said he hadn't, but that he'd heard me calling out. I never figured out who that guy was, or where he went.<br><br>These are my stories, and I hope you found them interesting. I'm going to go patrol the forest for a bit. Wish me luck.