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 and nose and mouth should have been. He said the guy had thrown him off the cliff, and he'd been stuck where we'd found him for almost two days. Obviously, we never found any evidence of another guy up there, and the guy was definitely high enough that he could have gotten oxygen poisoning and hallucinated. But I've had some pretty weird dreams myself about 'the man with no face' since I heard that story.<br><br>* I helped solve a murder once. We were looking for a guy who worked at a local bar/restaurant, and hadn't shown up to work one day. His mom figured something was wrong, and she called the cops. They sent us out to walk the trail he took to work, and we found some of his belongings all over the place. We followed the trail, and it sent us straight down a cliff into a gully. That's where we found his body, all cut up and broken. We figured it was an animal attack, but his mother was inconsolable. She insisted that he'd been murdered, and that his disappearance had nothing to do with animals. She knew her son, and he would never have gone over that cliff. We got some canine teams out there, and they followed the scent back to his mother's house. His mother's boyfriend had just returned from a walk, and his boots were covered in blood. When we confronted him, he wouldn't look at us, and he eventually broke down and told us that he'd been annoyed with how the guy treated his mother, and how he'd inheritted her house. He said he'd gone out to confront him, and in the heat of the moment, he'd pushed him down the cliff. Then he'd gone down and stabbed him repeatedly. I'm just glad we were able to bring the guy to justice.<br><br>I've seen a lot of other weird things, but these are the stories that stick out in my mind. I'm going to go through some of my old case files and see if I can remember anything else.<br><br>**Update:** I think I've decided to stop looking through my old case files. I've brought up some bad memories, and I think its time to leaves some things in the past. I'm going to try to forget some of these things happened, and move on with my life.<br><br>Also, thanks for platinumIndices, chrisjeff, SamuelEmmott,dealerofdoors and Cat__Lady_Who_Screams_Lots for the awards!