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 story that sticks out in my mind was a few years ago, when a man called in to report that his son was missing. The boy was autistic, and had wandered off while his father was distracting his little girl for a moment. The father was in a panic, and said that his son was non-verbal. He was relatively small for his age, and extremely sensitive to sights, sounds, and smells. We did everything we could to find the kid, and we searched the area for more than two months before we finally found his body. It was deep in a gully, where it had been partially scavenged by animals. I don't know how the kid had made it that far, or how he'd climbed down into the gully, but it was absolutely heartbreaking. I kept wondering, as I looked down at the remains, what this kid had been thinking as he fell, and if he'd been scared. <br><br>* I was teamed up with another SAR officer because we'd gotten reports of bears in the area. We were looking for a woman who had gone out jogging along a twisting, wooded path, but hadn't come back. Her husband had waited for her, and when she hadn't shown up after a hour, he called for help. We figured that she'd probably been attacked by a bear, or maybe just asked for directions and forgotten to call her husband. But as we were searching, we started to find pieces of her. I mean, it was bear attacks, okay? But usually with bear attacks the bears don't move the bodies. They'll usually leave them in one place, and in this case we found pieces of this woman all over the forest. We even found her head, sitting in a tree. It had been placed there, and I'm sure of it. There's no way a bear would do that.<br><br>* I was on a call with another SAR officer, and we were looking for a little girl who'd wandered off from her campsite. She was only about five, and her parents had apparently been drinking that night. They'd gone to bed around 10, and when they woke up the next morning, their daughter was gone. We searched the area, and we found her sleeping in her favorite blanket, deep in the woods. The thing is, she'd never taken that blanket camping, and according to her parents, it was still back at their home. The little girl was alright, but she kept talking about how her 'friend' had shown her the way back to camp, even though we'd been searching that area for hours and never saw another person.