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 legs were paralyzed from the waist down because a piece of cliff had fallen on top of him. We were able to get him into a chopper, and I.error heard that he made a full recovery. The weird part came when we were hiking back down. We decided to take a different route because one of the ropes had torn on the way up, and we didn't want to risk falling. We ended up coming out in a different location than we'd started in, and we had to walk through a small clearing to get back to the trailhead. In the center of the clearing, we found a pair of shoes and a parka. The shoes were laid out side-by-side, and the parka was laid neatly across them. It was the guy's parka, and his boots, and there was no sign of disturbance in the area. I guess he could have taken them off and left them there, but I have no idea why he would do that, or how he would have gotten up to where we found him with no shoes on and no trace of him anywhere between the two locations.<br><br>* I caught a case not long ago where a couple went hiking with their dog. They came back, but the dog didn't. They said it had slipped its collar and taken off after a deer, and they couldn't catch it. They looked for it for a while, but it never came back. They gave us the collar, and we took it out and started looking for the dog. The canine we had with us started barking almost immediately, and she led us straight to a nearby stream. She was breathing heavily at the water's edge, and when we looked into the water, we could see a collar caught in a rock. We figured the dog had slipped and fallen in, gotten its collar caught, and drowned. We got in the water to retrieve the collar, and it felt like something had gripped my arm. I looked at the other SAR officer, and he said he felt it too. It was a very strange sensation, and I'm not sure what caused it. We got out of the water and went back to the truck, and as we were driving away, we heard a loud, long howl. It sounded like a dog, but strange and almost haunting. We figured it was just a wolf or a coyote, but for some reason, it's stuck with me.<br><br>* I was out on a search with a few other SAR officers, and we were looking for a guy who hadn't come home from a climbing trip when he should have. We figured he'd either died on the way up and we'd have to recover his body, or he'd gotten stranded and we'd have to get him out. Either way, I wasn't super optimistic that we'd find him alive. We were climbing for a few hours, and we found him on a small outcropping of rock. He was alive, but he looked absolutely terrified. He kept looking over his shoulder and saying he couldn't believe 'them' hadn't followed him, and that he was sure 'they' were going to come for him soon. We figured he was just hallucinating from dehydration, but we humored him and told him we'd keep him safe. He said that he'd been climbing, and when it started getting dark, he'd settled in for the night and made a small fire. He said that somewhere in the night, something had come down from above, and he could see its eyes in the firelight. He stood up to get a better look, and its eyes were gone, but he could hear something moving around outside the circle of light. He didn't move, and he finally dozed off, but in the morning, he woke up and saw that something big had stood just outside of the fire, and it had left footprints that looked 'sort of human, but wrong.' We searched the area and saw exactly what he was talking about. The prints were huge, and the feet were shaped sort of like a human's, but the toes were the wrong length and there was no heel. We told him it had probably been bears or wolves, but he said that bears don't make prints that big, and wolves don't make prints that look even remotely human. We told him we'd finished the search and he didn't have to worry about whatever it was anymore, but he just kept saying that he was sure he'd be back, and 'he' would just take him again. We ended up getting him sent to a psych ward, and I heard a few days later that he'd committed suicide because he was so terrified of whatever it was. Like I said, I'm sure he was just hallucinating, but the aftereffect hit me pretty hard. I took a few days off and the whole thing just stuck with me. <br><br>* Another climber went missing, and we were called out to search for her. We found her car in the park lot at the base of the climb, so we knew she was out there. When we made it to the top, we found her car keys, her wallet, her phone, and her ID all stacked neatly on a rock. There was no trace of her anywhere, and we never did find her. I'm sure there has to be some kind of logical explanation, but I have no idea where to start looking.