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 guy had thrown him off the cliff, and he'd gotten caught in the crevasse. I don't know whether that's true, or if it was just a hallucination from the pain. We never found any trace of another guy up on that cliff.<br><br>* There have been a few instances where the people we've found have asked for 'help getting out of here...before he comes back.' I don't know who they're talking about, but it's happened across different areas and different people. I think it might just be some weird psychological thing that happens, like a paranoia or something similar, but it's a bit strange.<br><br>I think that's all I've got for now. I might update this list in the future, but until then, I hope you guys found these interesting.<br><br>Edit: <br>I've never had anything happen to me personally while I'm out searching, but I do know of one guy who had something really weird happen. He and one of our vets (who's sort of like a mentor to younger SAR officers) were out looking for a guy who hadn't come home from a climbing trip. They'd gotten a report that he'd been seen in an area that was particularly difficult to access, and they were trying to get in there to look for him. According to the veteran, they were making their way up a cliff when the newbie just...disappeared. The vet said he'd been standing there, waiting for him to catch up, and he'd heard a noise from above, like the sound of boots scraping against rock. He'd looked up, and the newbie was about ten feet above him, trying to pull himself up and over a lip. The vet waited for a few minutes, figured that the newer officer was looking around and trying to figure out the best way to come back, and then he started getting worried. He called for the newbie, and he didn't get an answer. He decided that the guy must have gone over the lip and down the other side, and he'd come around the same way. When he got around, though, the guy was gone. He figured that the guy must have gone back to base camp, and he'd met up with him there. When he asked the guy about what he'd done, though, he told the vet that he'd never gone up the cliff at all. He said that the vet had been behind him, and he'd figured that the vet was just taking a moment to rest because he'd heard him call for him. <br>I don't know what happened there, but it creeped the vet out so badly that he quit his job. <br><br>Also, I think I'll just put this out here because it's the most common question I've been getting: <br>I don't know of any other SAR officers who have had these things happen to them. I think that most of the time they just don't want to talk about it, though. <br><br>For the people asking about the possibility that these people are just making up stories to get attention or justify something unexplained, I've met these people. I've seen them, talked to them, helped them. I know that they're not making this shit up. That's what bothers me so much. And as far as the guy who asked if I was on anything...No, I don't do drugs. I drink, but I'm not an alcoholic. I'm as normal as anyone else, and I don't know why these things have happened to me when they haven't happened to anyone else.