David Paulides is an American author, filmmaker and former police officer who catalogs unusual disappearances in national parks and other wild areas under the Missing 411 name. He also founded North America Bigfoot Search. In 2026 his suggestion that some of the missing may have been taken by non-human entities brought him onto major UFO and paranormal programs, including The Joe Rogan Experience.

According to his own biography, Paulides holds degrees from the University of San Francisco and spent about two decades in law enforcement from 1977, most of it with the San Jose Police Department in patrol, SWAT and detective assignments. Vice reported in 2017 that it could not independently verify that background. He first wrote about Bigfoot, publishing The Hoopa Project in 2008 and Tribal Bigfoot in 2009, and his group helped arrange the samples behind Melba Ketchum's 2013 Bigfoot DNA study, which skeptics judged poor and which The Scientist reported had returned human results or apparent technical artifacts.

Paulides says an off-duty park ranger prompted him to examine missing-person cases in national parks. Starting in the early 2010s he self-published Missing 411 volumes on the western and eastern United States, followed by thematic and regional books on hunters, law enforcement, Canada and Montana, and documentary films including Missing 411 (2016), The Hunted (2019), The UFO Connection (2022) and a 2026 film on Washington State's national parks. His case selection rests on recurring "clusters," such as disappearances near water, failed tracking dogs, missing clothing and sudden bad weather. He has highlighted that the National Park Service does not keep a list of missing people, which an agency FOIA officer confirmed to Vice, but he has not proposed a single cause.

Skeptics have challenged the pattern. In a 2017 Skeptical Inquirer investigation, data scientist Kyle Polich checked a random sample of cases and found them real but "disappointingly typical," with features such as clothing removal explained by paradoxical undressing in hypothermia. He concluded that neither individual cases nor the frequency of disappearances stood out from expectations.

Paulides became a fixture of UFO media in 2026. On Joe Rogan's episode 2502 in May he said many people who vanish and are later found have lost part of their memory, attributing it to abduction by "some kind of entity," and discussed the 1974 Carl Higdon abduction claim from Wyoming. He returned repeatedly to Coast to Coast AM with George Knapp, discussing the Washington State film in March and Alaska cases in September, and appeared on The Why Files. Across his books and films he has built one of the most widely circulated catalogs of wilderness disappearances, and in 2026 his own remarks drew that catalog into the UFO abduction debate.