Fortean Winds: Anolmalous Research

A person going missing in a thick fog

The Profile: What the Near Missing Tell Us

This article accompanies our podcast episode of the same name. It is the third piece in the Near Missing series. Read the source package before citing anything. The evidentiary grades matter.

There is a shape to it.

Someone disappears near a known location, in proximity to companions or community. Search efforts — sometimes extensive ones — find nothing. The person is experienced in that environment, not a lost tourist. When they come back, they have no memory of the intervening time, or fragmented memory of somewhere else. They are unharmed. They are returned to exactly where they started, or close enough that their presence confounds searchers who had already covered the area.

That is the profile. And it is old. Far older than Roswell, far older than the modern abduction narrative, far older than any cultural framework that could plausibly have contaminated witness accounts.

What follows is the sourced record behind tonight’s episode — the cases, their evidentiary grades, the skeptical challenges, and the links so you can verify everything yourself.

The Anchor: Jacob Jacobsson, September 16, 1759

On the evening of September 16, 1759, Jacob Jacobsson — 22 years old, son of a Swedish farmer — crossed Lake Västra Kiölsjön on a routine errand. He returned the boat to shore and encountered a road where none had been. He followed it. He found himself inside a large chamber with small figures moving in every direction, a chubby man in a red cap at the head of a table, and a beautiful young woman offering him food and drink. He declined. He prayed to be sent home. He was returned to the lakeshore, instantaneously, with no road and no mansion in sight. He walked home. His community had been searching for him for four days. He remembered minutes.

The Reverend Vigelius, parish priest of the Church of Ramsberg, heard Jacob’s testimony personally in the presence of his parents, recorded it in the parish registers, and noted that Jacob was of sound character, well-liked, and known for religious devotion. Those handwritten registers are preserved today in the archives of Uppsala Library in Sweden, where they can be consulted.

The case was brought to modern attention by Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck in Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times (Tarcher/Penguin, 2009), the most comprehensive academic survey of pre-modern anomalous aerial phenomena ever compiled. It is documented in detail at Think Anomalous and Strange Strange Strange, both of which cite the primary Uppsala archive.

The evidentiary grade here is as high as a 266-year-old case can achieve: a named primary witness, a named documenting official, a surviving institutional record, and no motive for fabrication identified by any researcher who has examined it. The hallucination hypothesis does not account for the four-day absence. The wandering hypothesis does not account for Jacob’s physical state — not hungry, not thirsty, no signs of wear — upon return. The profile is what it is.

The Silence

Before examining the near-missing cases, the precursor phenomenon requires documentation of its own. Across decades of Paulides’ research, and independently through the testimonies of hunters, hikers, and park service personnel, a consistent precursor state has been reported. It is called The Silence.

The ambient sounds of the natural environment — wind, water, birds, insects — cease entirely and simultaneously. Not as they would near a predator. Entirely. The atmosphere is described as becoming physically thick. Witnesses report an overwhelming sensation of being observed. It is not fear of a specific threat — it is fear of a specific condition.

This is reported independently across geography and time by people who do not know each other. It appears in Paulides’ research as a recurring feature of cases that precede disappearances. It is not proof of anything. But it is a consistent variable, and consistent variables matter.

David Paulides’ full research into the near-missing phenomenon is available through his documentary Missing 411: The UFO Connection (2022), which for the first time explicitly connects the disappearance cluster to UAP encounter data.

The Threshold: The Smoky Mountains Ranger, May 1992

In May of 1992, an unnamed park ranger working in Great Smoky Mountains National Park stopped to drink water during a regular patrol. The Silence descended. He moved to a tree and sat with his back against it. After several minutes, he stood to leave — and found the front portion of his foot had vanished past an invisible threshold. He moved his foot forward and watched more of it disappear. He pulled it back and it returned whole. He repeated the test with his right hand — same result. He felt a tingling sensation in both affected limbs. He backed away and sat against the tree again. Five to ten minutes later, the sounds of the forest returned. He left without proceeding further.

This account is sourced through Paulides’ research and the Bedtime Stories YouTube channel’s Near Missing 411 series. The witness is unnamed. No corroboration exists beyond his account. This is witness testimony, clearly labeled as such. It is included here because of the specific physical detail — the invisible threshold located and tested repeatedly — which is not the kind of detail a fabricator tends to generate. A man found something, tested it methodically, and backed away.

The Photograph: Jan Maccabee, Ohio, Late September 2010

Jan Maccabee — wife of Dr. Bruce Maccabee, the late U.S. Navy optical physicist, MUFON Maryland state director for 30 years, and one of the most credentialed photo analysts in the history of UAP research — was hunting from a tree stand fifteen to twenty feet off the ground in the woods near her home in Ohio. She was texting her husband. The Silence descended. She texted him about it.

Then she saw a distortion — described as resembling a heat shimmer — clinging to a tree approximately twenty feet away from her, about ten feet above her position. She closed and rubbed her eyes. It remained. It then descended in a controlled, silent glide to the forest floor. Just before it reached the ground she photographed it with her Blackberry. The moment it made contact with the forest floor, it vanished. Every sound in the forest returned simultaneously.

The photograph was subsequently analyzed by Dr. Maccabee, whose professional credentials included 36 years at the Naval Surface Warfare Center working on optical data processing, SDI laser systems, and ballistic missile defense optical sensors. His analysis found the image showed a reflective distortion with no defined shape — something diverting and bending light around it, creating a prism effect. No lens artifact. No film defect. An object in the photograph.

Later the same evening, a band rehearsal at a local high school was interrupted by a bright object hovering overhead that changed color and departed at speed, witnessed by students and faculty.

Dr. Bruce Maccabee died on May 10, 2024, at his home in Lima, Ohio. He was 82. His biography and research record is documented at MUFON and Wikipedia.

The Profile Case: Donald Shrum, Cisco Grove, California, September 4, 1964

This is the strongest near-missing case in the record that does not involve mass corroboration. It has a named witness, a named corroborating witness, a written affidavit, a contemporaneous federal investigation, physical evidence recovered at the site, and a 60-year history of consistent testimony.

Donald Shrum, 28, was a welder at Aerojet Corporation in Sacramento — working on Polaris and Titan nuclear missile systems. On September 4, 1964, he went bow hunting in the Tahoe National Forest near Cisco Grove, Placer County, California, with two colleagues: Vincent Alvarez and Tim Trueblood. The group separated. Shrum became disoriented as darkness fell. He climbed a large pine tree on a cliff edge and secured himself with his military belt to wait out the night.

What followed was an encounter lasting several hours. A large silent craft, which he estimated as roughly the size of a 14-story building, landed approximately fifty yards away. A smaller scout craft emerged and landed closer. Three figures appeared — two humanoid in silver reflective suits, approximately five feet tall, and a third of different composition: larger, with awkward movements, metallic in appearance, orange-glowing eyes, and an opening that produced white gas rendering Shrum unconscious repeatedly. He fought the encounter with arrows and fire throughout the night. At dawn the craft and figures were gone.

When Shrum reached camp the next morning, his colleagues could see by his condition that something had happened. Vincent Alvarez signed a written affidavit stating he had witnessed the larger craft moving over the trees and departing the area — corroboration in the form of a sworn document from an independent witness.

The case was investigated by Paul Cerney of NICAP in 1964–65. The Air Force interviewed Shrum, took a bent arrow for analysis, and — as Shrum discovered when he returned to the site two to three weeks later — had thoroughly raked and searched the area, removing all physical evidence. They told him he’d been pranked by teenagers. The raked site told a different story.

Shrum kept his account anonymous for decades, declining financial offers, out of concern for his security clearance at Aerojet. The full case is documented in Aliens in the Forest: The Cisco Grove UFO Encounter by Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte (2009), at UFO Insight, UFO Casebook, and the Paranormal Catalog. A full-length interview with Shrum is on YouTube.

The Time Case: Yosemite, Undated

A couple hiking near Glacier Point as part of a larger group experienced a sudden transition from mid-afternoon daylight to full night — stars, crescent moon — while their watches still read approximately 3 p.m. They were found by their friends and park rangers and told they had been missing for three days. The boulder field where they stood had been searched multiple times. No trace had been found. They have no memory of the intervening time.

This case is sourced exclusively through Paulides’ research. The witnesses are unnamed. No independent verification is possible. It is included here as a documented account that fits the profile — searched location, no trace, temporal displacement, return with no memory — and for the structural parallel it presents to Jacob Jacobsson’s account from 1759. Three days experienced as no time. Four days experienced as minutes. Searched by park rangers. Searched by the whole parish community. No trace either time.

This is witness testimony, clearly labeled. It is not offered as verified fact.

The Account from Inside: The Mount Shasta Case, September 2, 2011

On September 2, 2011, a three-and-a-half-year-old boy went missing from his family’s campsite at Fowler’s Campground in the foothills of Mount Shasta, Northern California. The family dog returned alone — soaked and shivering. Hundreds of searchers responded. Four hours into the search, a canine unit found the boy alive, hiding under a bush near the McLeod River bank — in an area that had already been searched.

Three weeks later, the boy spontaneously told his grandmother Kathy what had happened. He said another figure — who looked exactly like his grandmother but moved and spoke wrongly — had taken him underground. There were other figures, frozen and unmoving. There were examinations. There was a story about where this figure was from. Then he was returned to the surface and told to wait in the bushes until searchers found him.

His grandmother, upon hearing this, disclosed something she had not previously shared with the family. A year earlier, at the same McLeod River campsite, she had woken face down in the dirt outside her tent with no memory of how she came to be there. She was violently ill. She had a mark on the back of her neck — initially assumed to be an insect bite — until her camping companion emerged exhibiting identical symptoms and an identical mark in the same location. Neither of them could remember anything after seeing red eyes watching them from the nearby trees.

The boy’s account was spontaneous — given three weeks after the event, without prompting, to his grandmother rather than investigators. His parents subsequently forbade further questioning out of concern about false memory formation. At age four and a half, the boy repeated the account with consistent detail, substituting “dungeon” for “cave.” No adult had reinforced or prompted the account in the interim.

We are not claiming this account is literally true. Child memory is unreliable. The source chain runs through online forums and Paulides’ research, not an independent institutional investigation. What we are noting is that the structural elements — taken from a known location, held briefly by his own experience of time, returned to exactly where searchers could find him, unharmed — are the same structural elements that appear in Jacob Jacobsson’s account from 1759. Neither witness had access to the other’s account. The vocabulary is completely different. The shape is the same.

The case is documented at Missing Enigma, United Squid and Squatchable.

The Argument

1759. 1964. 1992. 2010. 2011.

Sweden. California. Tennessee. Ohio. Northern California.

A 22-year-old Swedish farm laborer. A 28-year-old Californian missile welder. An unnamed park ranger. A Navy physicist’s wife. A three-and-a-half-year-old boy.

None of these people had access to each other’s accounts. Most of them didn’t come forward publicly for years, or didn’t come forward at all. Several had professional reasons to stay silent. The boy was three years old.

The vocabulary they used to describe what happened differs completely — fairies and a red mansion in 1759, craft and entities in 1964, an invisible threshold in 1992, a heat-shimmer in 2010, a robot grandma in 2011. Of course it differs. The vocabulary is a function of when and where and how old you were. It tells you nothing about what actually happened.

The structure of what happened does not differ. Someone was removed from their location near companions or community. No trace was found in a search. They were returned to exactly where they started or close enough to confound searchers. They experienced the time as brief or not at all. They were unharmed.

That structure appears in a primary source document preserved in the Uppsala Library archives in Sweden, dated September 1759. It appears in a NICAP-investigated case from 1964 with a corroborating sworn affidavit. It appears in a photograph analyzed by a Navy optical physicist. It appears in the spontaneous testimony of a child who had no framework for understanding what he described.

Monica Reza disappeared on June 22, 2025, in the Angeles National Forest. Thirty feet behind her companion. Smiling and waving. Gone. No scent trail. No body. No physical evidence of movement in any direction. The most extensive search the region had seen in years. Nothing.

She fits the profile. Every element of it except the last.

She hasn’t come back.

The near-missing cases tell us what happens to the ones who do come back. They don’t answer what happened to Monica Reza. But they tell us this kind of thing happens. They tell us it has been happening for a very long time. And they tell us that the people who have been classifying every piece of evidence related to this phenomenon for seventy years have had access to this record the entire time.

Source Reference Package

Jacob Jacobsson, 1759:

The Silence / Near Missing Framework:

Jan Maccabee / Bruce Maccabee:

Donald Shrum / Cisco Grove, 1964:

Yosemite time-displacement case:

Mount Shasta / Robot Grandma, 2011:

Monica Reza:

The evidentiary grades in this article are our own and reflect the FW standard: confirmed fact, direct record, witness account, and pattern under examination are different things and are labeled as such. The argument does not depend on any single case being literally true. It depends on the profile being consistent — and across these cases, and 266 years of documented record, it is.

— Fortean Winds

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