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 explanaton, 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 in a small crevasse, and when we climbed down to get him, we saw that he had a harness and rope on him. He'd fallen somehow, because his rope had been cut, but we couldn't figure out what he'd used to cut it. We thought he'd probably just used scissors or something, but it was weird that we couldn't find them on him, or anywhere in the area. We figured he'd decided to cut himself loose and try to climb out, but he'd fallen and broken his neck. We had to call for help to get him out, because it was a bad spot. We had to repel down to get to him, and we didn't have any sort of pulley system to lift him out. As we were waiting, I heard a strange noise behind me. It sounded like rocks falling, but it was a strange, almost rhythmic beating. I turned to look and I saw a rock fall from higher up the cliff, straight at me. I realized that they weren't just falling, someone was dropping them. I yelled at my co-worker to look up, and we both tried to get out of the way as more and more rocks started falling. One of them hit me in the shoulder, and I got a cut on my hand from a shard of rock. We managed to get out of the way, and when we looked up we couldn't see anyone. We decided it was probably just a bear, and that the noise had spooked it and caused it to knock the rocks down. We're lucky that none of them were big enough to kill us, or we'd not be here today. <br><br>* I was doing some recon before calling in more SAR officers, and I found an abandoned campsite. There was an old tent that had been torn apart, and it looked like whoever was staying there had left in a hurry. I saw to weird things; the first was a small bag of food that was full of holes, like something big had torn into it from the inside. I'm sure it was probably just a raccoon, but it's weird that the holes were all on the inside of the bag. The second was a small journal that was under a bush. There were only two entries, and the second one ends really abruptly. The first entry was just the person talking about how they wanted to 'get away from it all' for a while, and they were going to climb a really difficult cliff and stay at the top for as long as they could. They drew a little map of where they were going to set up their tent, and where they was going to gather firewood and water. It was pretty detailed, and we used it to locate the campsite. The second entry was a little weird. The person was talking about hearing strange noises at night, and they'd found some strange footprints in a area where they didn't think it was possible for anyone to be. They said the prints were big, and the toes were misshapen, almost like claws. At the end of the entry, they just stop writing. There was a smear of blood on the last page, and there was a small stain on the ground where the notebook was. We never found out who the journal belonged to, and we never found any trace of them in the area. Like I said, there was no sign of anyone else in the campsite except for the tent, and the bookmark, and it looked like whoever it was had been there for a while. <br><br>I've seen a lot of other weird things, but these are the stories I think are the most relevant to this subreddit. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.