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 smooth flesh with no eyes or mouth. He said the faceless man had pushed him, and he'd fallen down the cliff. I don't know whether the guy just hit his head or what, but I'm sure there has to be some sort of explanation for what he saw.<br><br>* There was another incident with a faceless person. A woman claimed that she'd been out hiking, and a faceless woman had shown her the way to a waterfall. She said the faceless woman had spoken to her, told her all about the history of the forest and the animals that lived there. She said that the faceless woman had been wearing a parka and ski pants, and that she'd been blazing the trail so that they didn't have to climb over anything. She said they'd walked like that for hours, and she'd never noticed anything until the faceless woman had stopped walking and told her that the waterfall was up ahead. She said when she'd looked at the faceless woman, she'd realized that she had no face, and she'd run all the way back the way she came until she found someone to talk to. Neither of us believed her, but we went out to look anyway. We followed her footsteps until we reached a point where we couldn't go any further, and there, just like she'd said, was a waterfall. It was pretty, but it wasn't particularly special. I have no idea how the faceless woman had guided her there without the woman realizing that something was off.<br><br>* There have been a few instances where people have gone missing and we've found no trace of them until days or weeks later, when they've 'turned up' in places that we've already searched. For example, one was a woman who went missing on a hike with her boyfriend. We searched that area for *weeks*, and we never found a trace of her. It wasn't until a few weeks later that we got another report of someone missing, and when we went out to look for the person who'd made the report, we found the woman who'd gone missing weeks before. She was sitting in a little shed that was on someone's property, and she was completely inconsolable. She wouldn't talk to us, she just rocked back and forth, staring at the floor. We never found out what happened to her, and the last I heard she was in a psychward. <br><br>I have a lot more, but that's all I can think of for now. I'll post more later if you guys are interested.