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 wandered off the path to pee, and when she didn't come back, they went looking for her. When they couldn't find her, they called us, and we came out to search the area. We never found any trace of the daughter, but we did find a bit of her shirt caught in a bush near a cliff. We of course thought the worst, but when we searched the base of the cliff, we didn't find any kind of body. We searched that area for a long time, because the family was convinced that she was still out there, but we never found any trace of her. <br>I don't know what happened to those people, but I hope they're still out there okay.<br><br>* A few times, I've been out on my own searching an area, and I've heard whispers in the wind. It's never really distinct, and if I'm being completely honest with myself, it could just be my brain playing tricks on me. But sometimes, when the wind's blowing and the trees are rustling, it sounds like people are saying things just out of my range of hearing. I've never felt threatened by it, but it's always bothered me. <br>I was out searching for the little boy I mentioned earlier, and while I was alone, I could have sworn I heard a little girl say 'can I be your friend?' I tried to respond, but nobody answered. I called out, but nobody called back. I never found a young girl, but I did find an old distraught-looking man who was definitely not the boy I was looking for. He was just sitting in a clearing, staring at the ground, and when I approached him and asked if he needed help, he just looked up at me and wailed. I was shocked, I don't really get shocked easily, but this poor guy was in such terrible shape. I tried to help him up, but it wasn't really working, so I called for my teammates to come help me, and we got him out. He wouldn't stop crying the whole time, and he kept looking back at whatever happened to be behind him. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but now I wonder if he was looking at something I couldn't see. We took him home, and I didn't think about him very much until a few days ago, when I got a weird phone call from a woman who said she was the man's wife. She asked if I was the person who had found her husband a few weeks ago, and I said I was. Then she asked if he had said anything when I found him, and I told her he hadn't. She was silent for a long time, and then she said 'thank you,' and hung up. I was pretty confused until I heard from a fellow SAR officer that the guy had lost his daughter about five years ago, in the exact same forest. The way that woman said 'he hasn't said a word?' made me think that something pretty heavy happened to that guy out there.<br><br>* I was out on a search with my new teammate, and when we were taking a break, he was telling me about past calls he'd been on. He was pretty new, and this was his first time in our forest, so I was asking him about where he came from, etc. He told me he came from Arizona, where he'd been an SAR officer for a few years. He said he left because a lot of the calls he'd been on had been really strange, and he wasn't comfortable staying. I was pretty curious, since I'd never met another SAR officer, so I asked him to tell me more. He told me that he'd been on a lot of calls where people were found dead, but the bodies had been mutilated in some way, or they'd been moved. He also said that he'd found a lot of people who were alive and mostly unharmed, but Out of their minds. He said they would scream and cry and attack people, and when they were taken to a hospital, they wouldn't talk about what happened. He said he'd found a lot of people who never spoke again after what happened to them in the wilderness. I don't have any personal experience to put alongside his claims, so I can't say for sure that he wasn't making it all up. But I do know that since he joined our team, we've had three calls that fit his Arizona experiences to the letter. Two were skinned animals whose bodies had been arranged in a dancelike pattern. The last was a man who we found sitting in a stream, carving out his own teeth. He was perfectly calm and seemed to be in control of his own faculties, but he wouldn't talk to us and he didn't seem to be in any pain. I don't know what the deal is, but I'm starting to think there's a lot going on out in the wilderness that we can't see, and I kind of wish I could go back to thinking I was imagining things.