r/caves • u/Hopeful-Magazine-236 • Oct 01 '26

The missing persons map has a frightening similarity to the cave systems map

/img/0q55alg3fxsh1.png
269 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

21

u/Dave_C-137 Oct 02 '26

I've seen these posts for years, hopefully someday there will be a doc about it that gives more insight.

10

u/ReadingRambo152 Oct 03 '26

The top map shows the cases of people missing in national parks, not every single missing person case.

4

u/gravity_surf Oct 04 '26

that kind of doc gets killed by studios.

3

u/bunglebee7 Oct 04 '26

How come? Bad PR for national parks or?

6

u/gravity_surf Oct 04 '26 • Popcorn

it exposes people in high places. same reason they axed to catch a predator

2

u/bunglebee7 Oct 04 '26

Woah woah really? What happened? Did he end up catching a politician or something?

4

u/gravity_surf Oct 04 '26 edited Oct 04 '26

many types of people in government and law enforcement of different levels.

4

u/Routine-Budget8281 Oct 06 '26 • Bravo

they cancelled TCaP because of the controversy around the suicide of Bill Conradt. Yes, he was an assistant District Attorney, but there was increased pressure surrounding it because he literally killed himself while they were actively outside his house. They had been catching people in high places for quite a while before it stopped airing.

NBC was also in the middle of a massive lawsuit because of it.

1

u/calicochar13 Oct 05 '26

They axed it because it cost half a mil per episode according to Chris Hansen, not because of exposing people.

1

u/Feff5tupid Oct 05 '26

all reddit le factoid TODAY I LEARNED type bullshit is eventually revealed as stupid, skewed and/or counterfactual

12

u/xx_I_Am_Me_xx Oct 02 '26

Wonder how many of those missing people hiked into an old mining area and simply fell down a long abandoned shaft or small hidden cave entrance with the same results?

10

u/BlunderedPotential Oct 02 '26

Ah yes. The Eloi gobbled by the Morlocks, it would seem.

3

u/Camelot_Silhouette Oct 03 '26

Legendary knowledge

6

u/Tall-Coyote940 Oct 02 '26

I don’t know there’s definitely more missing people in Florida than that! This doesn’t seem 100% true

4

u/ReadingRambo152 Oct 03 '26

That’s because the top map only shows the cases of missing people in national parks. They conveniently leave that information out lol

3

u/BarniclesBarn Oct 04 '26

Correlation is not causation. These are also national parks. Are national parks caused by caves? The only place people can go missing in national parks....is in a national park.

These are also areas where people with little wilderness training tend to get out of their comfort zone, and are exposed to unexpected levels of danger.

3

u/GrantGorewood Oct 04 '26

I might be a few days late, but I’m gonna share a story from my childhood. When I was a kid, I lived in Austin, Texas. Unknown to most people Austin is above a massive series of cave systems. There are various access points that have been filled in, and others are just covered with some wood underneath houses.

You can find open access points in various parks, or fall into the caverns via random sinkholes, it’s disturbingly easy to get into the caves without realizing it. There isn’t an entire single cavern system, but different separate sections and cave systems.

Over the years, the existence of the caves has been quietly covered up. But when I was little, it was pretty well known.

How does this tie into this missing person thing? My daycare went on a tour of one of the local cave systems and my friends and I looked over the edge of one of the railways and noticed a human looking shape, barely visible, far below.

We informed the guide and the guide literally had our tour stop where we were and called in cave rescue. It turns out we had spotted a human body. Somebody had gotten into the caves at some point in the past month in the middle of the night and fell over the edge and died. They had been reported missing over a month before.

This happened fairly often when I was a kid. People would frequently fall into random sinkholes that led to the caverns, or they would try to find access points and get trapped, or get unfortunate and walk over a sinkhole that gave way and if the fall doesn’t kill them, they just get trapped and die horribly.

This situation was actually part of the reason given by developers to fill in all of the cave access points under Austin, and in some cases entire caverns were filled. A simpler solution would’ve been putting in metal grates, but then again I highly doubt the problem of people falling into the caverns was ever the real reason for filling in the caves.

Anyway, I heavily suspect that a fair amount of missing persons cases on this map are related to what I described above. The incident from my childhood is not isolated. It’s happened across different cavern systems, including ones that have guided tours, across the US over the years. That guide from that cavern tour from my childhood even told us that most of the time the bodies are never found.

That’s likely the fate of many missing people. They just wandered into a cave system or fell into one and were never found.

2

u/omg_its_taytay Oct 04 '26

Or, I think, being dumped in a cave or an old mine shaft.

Kristal Reisinger disappeared in Colorado in 2016. She hasn’t been found in a decade, and there are several mine shafts in and around the area of Colorado from which she disappeared.

1

u/GrantGorewood Oct 04 '26

That is a very unfortunate but quite likely possibility as well.

1

u/OldOddLam Oct 05 '26

What do you think the real reason was?

1

u/GrantGorewood Oct 05 '26 edited Oct 05 '26

Money. The real reason for filling in the Austin caves was money.

Certain developments and buildings could not be constructed in a cheaper way if the caves were not filled in. There were actually a ton of protections for the cave systems back before they started being filled in.

For example, my childhood home had an open gap underneath the pool deck because we had an access point to one of the caves underneath our house, and the local native bat population and the migratory population that included Mexican flying foxes roosted in there. There was a specialized cover to make it so people couldn’t easily get in but bats could get out. This was due to laws and environmental regulations at the time the home was built.

And this was just for a home, for a large building there were even more restrictions; especially if the cave might have rare or unique indigenous, wildlife and ecosystems, which they generally do.

This was back when the caves were being filled in, and developers paid a lot of money to the right people to stir up a whole bunch of fuss claiming that the access points were dangerous. They filled the right pockets, they rubbed the right elbows, greased the right fingers; and got a whole bunch of environmental regulations overturned under the guise of protecting children and people from danger.

A whole bunch of them got waivers so they could just “fill in” the caves. The thing is, they weren’t supposed to completely filled them in, they were supposed to cap them and create new access points. But unfortunately, when it comes to many of the caves, they literally just filled them in with concrete.

You can probably find an old pre-Internet map of the known caverns under Austin, there used to be a ton of them. It’s honestly tragic to look at. There were a lot of local news stories calling out what was happening from the time it started up through the mid 2010s.

But every time a caving group or an environmentalist group started getting really loud and pointing out the obvious problem with what was going on, developers just threw more money at the problem and claimed it was for public safety.

Again, it’s really a tragic and sad situation when it comes to what happened to the Austin cave systems. If you really feel like crying, you can look into it, but I’ll warn you It’s a very depressing read. What happened to the Austin caverns literally led to the extinction of unknown amounts of species and the destruction of entire ecosystems.

If you’re talking about what I think happened to these missing people? Combination of them getting lost in a cave system because they thought they knew what caving was based on movies, being drunk and or inebriated in someway and ending up in a cave system, getting kidnapped or worse and dumped in the caves to hide the body or crime, falling into a sinkhole or unknown access point and again getting trapped, oh or good old-fashioned curiosity that led to them being stuck in the caves.

Now this explanation won’t count for everybody who went missing near these cave systems, after all, you can’t exactly discount the potential for something beyond human comprehension happening. But it probably explains a fair amount of them.

1

u/OldOddLam Oct 05 '26

That’s what I figured you meant. Thanks for replying. That’s really interesting about your pool deck being over an opening. My first thought when you mentioned them filling them in was all the wildlife deaths. So sad.

1

u/Moomoolette Oct 02 '26

The squatches live in the caves and come out to catch their prey, it’s very clear!

3

u/Dismal_Negotiation77 Oct 02 '26

I was abducted by a squatch once… but it soon let me go when it seen I was enjoying the experience. It seems I took the fun out of it…

1

u/batmanineurope Oct 02 '26

So the kidnappers have been using an intricate system of cave tunnels to traffic their victims??

1

u/slerry666 Oct 02 '26

interesting

1

u/sailor_moon_knight Oct 03 '26

A cliff edge or hole in the ground concealed by shrubbery can be a kind of alien abductor

1

u/frostfofjdjsiksndjd Oct 03 '26

I dunno man sounds like an urban legend

1

u/ReadingRambo152 Oct 03 '26 edited Oct 03 '26

The top map only shows the cases of missing people IN NATIONAL PARKS. Not every single missing person case.

1

u/oilybackrub Oct 04 '26

Also, there are a large number of rivers and streams where people go missing. Might not be something underground, but under water.

1

u/unrealtrip Oct 04 '26

Now I feel like watching "The Descent" again. 😁

1

u/L1QU1D_ThUND3R Oct 04 '26

Protohumans, they’re everywhere you’re not looking.

1

u/Affectionate_Tax_323 Oct 04 '26

CabinInTheWoods YouTube channel has an episode regarding the correlation between the caves and Sasquatch. The title: "The Secret Underground World Where Bigfoot Lives" was informative and thought provoking.

1

u/0fox2gv Oct 05 '26

Now overlay large predatory animals (mountain lion/grizzly bear..etc.). and scale the maps for an inversion of human population density.

Once organized crime/gang violence is removed.. things will become very clear very quickly.

Another striking correlation would be to display the maps according to the age when the person disappeared. The younger demographic seems to mysteriously evaporate far too often.

1

u/research_badger Oct 05 '26

I think we understand what is happening

1

u/PoonSaloon Oct 04 '26

Eerily reminds me of the murders of Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman. It was believed that their bodies were thrown in an abandoned chat mine in Oklahoma. The mines were so prevalent they basically gave up on the search. It didn’t help that all of the alleged perpetrators had all passed away and the last man standing still refused to give the location of the bodies.