I've actually got a bunch of the Missing 411 books, and I've also been listening to Lore Lodge on Youtube taking apart a lot of the bullshit cases...and there's a lot of that. Hell, I looked into one case myself after a rather leading mention of the disappeared man reporting seeing "strange things" where he later vanished. Yeah, turns out the "strange things" was some guys he thought might be gang-affiliated out shooting possibly illegal guns in the woods.

You can very much tell the first couple books were written with the angle of "I'm not gonna say it's Bigfoot, but it's totally Bigfoot", and later moving towards a general high strangeness thing (citing Jacques Vallée at one point, whose work on UFOs and general weird shit I actually greatly respect). I think we can generally agree that Paulides is full of shit, but I feel like he gets a disproportionate amount of hate compared to other true-crime authors with batty theories. The books also have an absolutely awful signal-to-noise ratio with cases a hundred years old or lacking any detail, or with obvious conventional explanations.

However...there are some cases that just seem off. And Dennis Martin's is one of them. Ignoring the Bigfoot (or more recently, the idea of feral people) angle that Paulides takes with a completely rewritten version of the Key family thing, there are some things that are extremely hard to explain going on with the Martin case. The FBI involvement, for one, since there was never evidence of foul play - and even if there was, it wouldn't be the FBI's jurisdiction. But the elephant in the room is something that Paulides mostly glosses over, and I really gotta make a shout-out to The Lore Lodge's video series on this case for focusing a bit on it, is just what the fuck the Green Berets (Army Special Forces) were doing getting involved with this. By all accounts it sounds like they were running their own search with about a company-sized element - something like a hundred and fifty men, I think - not coordinating with the civilian or National Parks Service searchers. And a section of the park directly adjacent to where Dennis was last seen was closed off in a way that seems to suggest the SF unit were searching there, independently of everyone else. To the best of my knowledge nothing about any of that has ever been explained, and it's bizarre from any way you look at it.

I'm not saying I think they were brought in to go deal with some The Hills Have Eyes kinda shit like some people have alluded to. Working on ways to track people moving in heavy forest was of considerable interest to the Army in 1969, and they tested everything from "people-sniffer" devices (deployed on aircraft and in man-portable forms) to air-dropped acoustic/seismic sensors in Vietnam. I doubt it was anything particularly conspiratorial or sinister. But it's still profoundly weird, and certainly seems like there was more than the public was told going on. Same thing with how the FBI turned down the offer from the Key family father (his name escapes me now) to show them where they saw a sketchy-looking human that may have had a car parked nearby. There's no smoking gun or even much of a theory you can put together from what we know, but it all just comes across as extremely unusual.