Oregon Deputy Finds Abandoned Truck, Driver Vanishes Without a Trace

There's a video making the rounds that every researcher needs to see, and honestly, it stopped me in my tracks the moment I hit play. A channel called Weekly Terror put together a deeply unsettling breakdown of an incident from March 3rd, 2018, just outside Sweet Home, Oregon, and the details are the kind that keep you up at night. For those unfamiliar with the area, Sweet Home sits right at the edge of the Willamette National Forest and the Santiam Wilderness, a corridor that has been a hot zone for credible sightings for decades. Researchers have been pointing to this stretch of Oregon for years, and the Linn County region in particular has produced more than its share of well-documented encounters. So when something strange happens on a quiet county road out there, it deserves attention. The story centers on a 63-year-old man named Delbert Ror, a retired mill worker and widower who lived alone outside town. Delbert had trouble sleeping, and his routine was well known to everyone who knew him. He'd drive into town for coffee at the only gas station open through the night, then cruise the back roads for an hour or two until he got tired enough to head home. So when his truck was spotted off the shoulder of a county road just after 2 a.m. with the hazards flashing and no driver in sight, the first assumption was that Delbert had wandered off on foot or maybe caught a ride with someone. A passing motorist called it in but didn't stop. When dispatch asked why, he couldn't really explain it. He just said something about the scene gave him a bad feeling and he kept driving. That detail alone is chilling, because that gut-level reaction, that sudden urge to get away, is something witnesses have described in Sasquatch encounters for as long as people have been reporting them. Deputy Aaron Puit, 31 years old and six years into his career with the county, took the call. He knew Delbert, knew the truck, knew the routine. He drove out expecting to help an old insomniac get home. What he found instead has never been fully explained. The truck was nose-down in a shallow ditch, hazards on, headlights still burning. The engine was cold, meaning it had been sitting for a while. But the gas station coffee in the cup holder was still warm. Delbert's wallet sat open on the passenger seat with cash still inside. His phone was in the door pocket. His jacket was hanging on the back of the seat. There was fresh mud on the pedals and floor mat, but no mud tracked out onto the running board or the gravel, as if whoever got in never stepped back out. Then there's the door. The driver's door was bent outward, away from the cab, peeled in a single hard motion with enough force to strain the hinges and crack the paint along the fold. Puit told himself it was impact damage from the crash, but the truck hadn't rolled, hadn't hit anything hard. The window was rolled all the way down in the cold March air, and the glass was intact. Whatever happened, it started with the window and escalated from there. Puit keyed up dispatch, said the driver wasn't on scene, and started walking the shoulder with his flashlight. His body camera was running the whole time, as standard procedure requires. What remains of that footage is just 11 seconds. The rest was withheld by the county, citing an open investigation. The deputy's original narrative report was redacted. The case is still officially listed as a missing person. It has never been closed and it has never been explained. Puit resigned in June of 2018 and has not spoken publicly since. The video walks through all of this with a careful, almost forensic pacing, laying out each detail the way you'd lay out evidence on a table. And then it gets to those 11 seconds. Without spoiling what the footage apparently shows, the title of the video alone is enough to send a chill through anyone who has spent time in the woods around the Santiam. Body camera footage from a sworn officer, timestamped, logged into county evidence, and then buried for years behind redactions and open-case exemptions until a public records request finally pried the file loose. This is the kind of case researchers have been asking about for years. A credible witness, a law enforcement officer with no reason to fabricate, physical evidence that doesn't add up under any conventional explanation, and a piece of footage that somebody in that county clearly did not want released. The pattern of door damage, the missing person, the warm coffee in a cold truck, the mud that goes nowhere, the window put down before the door was forced, all of it lines up with the kind of encounter reports that come out of the Pacific Northwest more than almost anywhere else. If you haven't seen the video yet, do yourself a favor and go watch it. The channel lays the whole thing out piece by piece, and the way they build toward those 11 seconds is genuinely masterful storytelling. Just make sure you're somewhere comfortable when you get to the end.