Missing 411: The U.F.O. Connection is the most haunting UFO documentary out there – and I’ve seen them all.
The premise sees the film’s director and star David Paulides take viewers through a series of baffling missing person cases tied to reported UFO activity. The result is a chilling watch that poses an intriguing mystery, even if you don’t believe in UFOs and aliens.
Missing 411: The U.F.O. Connection is the latest entry in the popular Missing 411 series of movies and books. Paulides is a former San Jose police officer who worked in vice intelligence, street crimes, SWAT, and various detective roles. The Missing 411 series sees the law enforcement vet put his years of experience to the test investigating missing person cases (usually occurring in American national parks).
People go missing in the United States every day. At first glance, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about folks disappearing in national parks – especially amateur campers who aren’t used to being outdoors in rugged terrain. But Missing 411 cases fall into a whole other category of weird due to what Paulides calls unique “profile points.”
Missing 411 profile points separate rare cases from 99% of other missing person investigations. And some of these distinctions are so unsettling they’ll make you think twice about venturing into the wilderness.
The first profile point is that in 97% of these special cases, canines can’t pick up a scent trail. What’s more confounding is that trackers can’t find any tracks either. Again, we’re talking about experienced search and rescue teams made up of dozens of people coordinating searches by land, sea, and air. From their perspective, it’s as though the missing person vanished into thin air.
In some cases, the search team will find the missing person’s clothing or personal items, with no hint of how it got there.
Another profile point is people vanishing while in a group. It’s as though certain people get snatched away the second their travelling companions turn their backs. Making matters more complicated, Paulides points out that harsh weather events tend to happen after disappearances, which inhibits search and rescue efforts.
But here’s the profile point that keeps people up at night. On the occasions when dead bodies do turn up, they’re found in places the search party already covered many times over. It’s as though someone, or something, waited until nobody was around to dump the corpse in the search area.
There are no tracks around the body, no scent trail, and no blood or signs of struggle, which rules out animal attacks. And what type of kidnapper would lurk around the crime scene waiting for a chance to dispose of the corpse with a search party close by?
Missing 411: The U.F.O. Connection consists of several chapters, each one focusing on a separate missing person case. The first chapter covers the disappearance of Ray Salmen, an experienced outdoorsman who vanished from a campsite he visited 20 times over 20 years.
Rescuers found Salmen’s two dogs locked inside his camper with no sign of their owner. His clothes, pistol, and rifle turned up in three separate locations with no hint of how they got there. Almost a decade later, there’s still no evidence of what happened to Ray Salmen. The rest of the stories featured in the doc only get more perplexing.
While Ray Salmen’s disappearance comes across like a run-of-the-mill mystery, the rest of the film dives headfirst down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Paulides starts connecting disappearances to UFO sightings, alien abductions, and secret underground travelling networks.
The lines the film draws between UFO activity and missing people often feels like a stretch. In some cases, the missing people had at some point witnessed UFO activity. In other instances, people reported seeing UFOs in regions where people went missing. The connections are tenuous at best.
However, Paulides doesn’t have to hypothesize about the link between the two when he presents a living, breathing UFO experiencer willing to share his close encounter. I won’t spill all the details here, but his account sound ripped from a Jordan Peele sci-fi epic.
Carl Higdon claims he (and several elk) were abducted by aliens. Higdon believes the aliens only let him go because his vasectomy made him an unsuitable specimen for their experiments. It’s a compelling story filled with bizarre details that Higdon tells with conviction. But that doesn’t make his account any easier to swallow. By the time the credits roll Missing 411: The U.F.O. Connection provides a lot of fantastic tales for you to try and wrap your mind around.
Despite the doc’s out-of-this-world claims, it’s not as trashy and misleading as most other UFO docs that cover similar material. So even though the movie includes some wild claims, they’re tame by UFO doc standards. There’s no speculation about reptilian overlords, galactic federations, or secret bases in Antarctica.
Paulides lays out each case’s details like making a courtroom argument and allows viewers to make up their own mind. It helps that the witnesses present as credible, down-to-earth people. And the film’s cast of interviewees include members of current and retired law enforcement officials, UFO investigators, and experiencers.
Retired FBI Special Agent John DeSouza has the resume of a real-life Fox Mulder. He spent 25 years working on everything from violent crimes to the World Trade Center bombing. Here, DeSouza discusses special profiling units dealing with UFOs, aliens, and abductions.
To be clear, he’s not speaking on behalf of the FBI, but after working these cases, he says, “We report on, the ones that we talk about, those are real. And I do believe that they are connected to extra-dimensional beings – beings that come from outside of our reality.” DeSouza states that some of these disappearances happen so quickly that they’re “Not possible in our purely physical world.”
Paulides does an excellent job highlighting the unusual circumstances around certain missing persons cases, but his paranormal conclusions feel like reaches. But as someone who grew up watching Unsolved Mysteries and Sightings, I still enjoyed every minute of the film, even when I wasn’t onboard with its hard-to-swallow claims. The U.F.O. Connection scratches the same itch as a well-told true crime doc, but with the intrigue of a creepy campfire tale.
The film comes off more credibly than any given Ancient Aliens episode. But making a stronger case than Ancient Aliens is setting a low bar. The investigations highlighted in this doc may sway somebody on the fence about the UFO phenomenon, but I wouldn’t bet on it. And the movie definitely won’t convince UFO naysayers that an otherworldly presence is preying on unlucky campers in America’s national parks. But if you’re someone who subscribes to Earthfiles or you’re plugged into UFO Twitter, Paulides presents plenty of intriguing theories to unpack.
Keep in mind, the stories highlighted in this doc are the stuff of nightmares, even if you don’t buy into the extra-terrestrial hypothesis. In a world where we’re all plugged in 24-7, there’s nothing more terrifying than someone – or something – snatching us off the grid. If Jaws left people afraid to go back in the water, Missing 411: The U.F.O. Connection will make you hesitant to go into the woods.
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