Former Detective David Paulides Investigates Bigfoot Evidence and Missing 411 Cases

Posted Saturday, June 27, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

So I just stumbled across this video on YouTube from a channel called Wild Assault, and honestly, I had to share it with you all because it dives deep into some of the most compelling evidence out there. The video focuses heavily on the work of David Paulides, a former police officer and detective who has spent over two decades investigating Sasquatch encounters with the same rigor he used in criminal investigations. What makes his approach so fascinating is that he isn't some random person making claims from their couch. This guy spent 20+ years in law enforcement, including time on SWAT teams and as a detective, so when he started digging into these reports, people actually listened. One of the most jaw-dropping segments covers the footprint evidence, and let me tell you, this is where things get really interesting. The video walks through the famous 1967 Bluff Creek tracks in California, where researchers discovered prints with dermal ridges (basically fingerprints on the soles), a midtarsal break that humans don't have but apes do, and dynamic pressure patterns consistent with a creature weighing 600 to 800 pounds. Dr. Jeff Meldrum from Idaho State University, who has examined over 200 footprint casts, has stated that roughly 10 to 15% of these prints show anatomical features that would require extensive knowledge to fake. Features that weren't even known to science when the prints were first discovered. Think about that for a second. Whoever made these tracks would have had to understand biomechanics that scientists hadn't even uncovered yet. The video also touches on some of the more remote footprint finds, including a case from Alaska where a hunting guide discovered a trail of prints stretching over 15 miles through terrain so rough it would take a human with full gear at least two days to cross. The prints were made in a single night. Whatever made those tracks was moving through that wilderness like it owned the place. Then there's the biological evidence, which is where things get even more intriguing. Dr. Henner Fahrenbach, a biomedical research scientist, analyzed more than 20 hair samples back in 2003 and found primate characteristics that didn't match any known primate in North America. The hair had a unique structural pattern similar to human hair but significantly thicker with a different medulla pattern. And in 2012, the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project analyzed 36 hair samples from around the world, and two samples from the Pacific Northwest showed DNA matches to an unknown primate species, something between a polar bear and an ancient bear species that supposedly went extinct 40,000 years ago. The video makes a compelling point about why mainstream science keeps shutting down funding for large-scale DNA studies on these samples, and honestly, it makes you wonder what's really going on behind the scenes. What really got me, though, was the section on witness descriptions. Paulides has cataloged thousands of eyewitness reports, and when you interview people separately who have never met each other, from different states and different decades, and they all describe the same specific details, that's something you can't just dismiss. Witnesses consistently describe beings 7 to 10 feet tall, weighing 600 to 1,000 pounds, with broad shoulders, almost no visible neck, long arms that hang past the knees, and covered entirely in dark brown, black, or reddish hair. The eyes reflect light like an animal's but with an unmistakable intelligence behind them. And almost every single witness mentions the same horrific stench, like rotting meat mixed with wet dog and something chemical. A smell so overwhelming it makes people physically ill. But here's where the video takes a darker turn. Paulides' Missing 411 series documents thousands of mysterious disappearances in national parks and wilderness areas across North America, and the patterns are genuinely unsettling. These aren't typical lost hiker cases. We're talking about people vanishing in areas that have been thoroughly searched multiple times, bodies found in locations search teams had already covered extensively, missing persons found miles away from where they disappeared in terrain they couldn't have possibly crossed, and children found alive after weeks in the wilderness with no memory of how they survived. The clusters of these disappearances are what really make you pause. If you haven't seen this video yet, definitely check it out. It's a solid deep dive into the evidence that Paulides has compiled over the years, and it presents the information in a way that even skeptics would have a hard time dismissing. The connection between Sasquatch sightings and these mysterious disappearances is something that deserves a lot more attention than it gets.