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- On the 1st of July, 2011, the owner of a cafe
in a small West Yorkshire town noticed something strange.
A man who walked into the cafe placed a small container
under a flower box and then left.
She quickly contacted authorities
who had arrived to the scene moments later.
No doubt fueled by the lingering anxieties
from the 7/7 bombings of 2005,
the police decided to seal the area
and oversee a controlled explosive.
It turned out that the container was nothing more
than a plastic box placed as part
of a global scavenger hunt.
But this incident pointed to something bigger,
the increasing friction between geocaching,
its public perception, and the law.
While doing my research
for the Google Earth Anomalies video,
I kept coming across stories like these.
Geocaching has been around for more than two decades now,
and some of it's history delves into the dark
and just plain bizarre.
Today, I wanted to share some of what I found
in the strange world of geocaching.
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It's called the Big Blue Switch.
On May 2nd of 2000, Bill Clinton officially
discontinued the Selective Availability Program.
Up until then, the 24 satellite systems orbiting the Earth
had been subject to a degradation order,
which severely hampered the accuracy of public signals.
In a single instant, what GPS was and what it could be
was forever transformed.
No longer was it confined to the realm of national security.
It was now in the hands of the public.
As documented on the official geocaching website,
the day after this historic moment,
a man named Dave Ulmer hid a bucket in the woods
of Portland, Oregon, and posted the coordinates online.
The first hunt had begun.
And things would only snowball from there.
Today, geocaching has become
a worldwide recreational phenomenon.
Participants use a GPS receiver to find caches.
A cache can be anything from a Tupperware container
to an old army ammo box
and can be hidden anywhere in the world.
Finding these caches often involves
solving complicated puzzles.
Some encourage going off the beaten path.
Since Ulmer hid the first cache all the way back
in the year 2000, the game has grown
to over 3 million caches hidden worldwide
with millions of active users.
And as the popularity grew, of course,
so did the chance that something would go wrong.
The same year as the West Yorkshire bomb scare,
in December of 2011, the geocaching community
would be shaken by the death of a 21-year-old cacher
who died while trying to reach a container in Germany.
The young man who went under the handle
Willi of Team willimax died after falling
from a pipe on a bridge 20 feet over a river.
Two things stood out to me about this incident.
The first was the fact that the cache
had specifically been marked by the creator
as being safe with no clear indication of its true danger.
The second much more chilling part was that a previous log
of the cache seemed to point to it being much more dangerous
than the original posting suggested.
In a translation from a user by the name veit,
in 2011 two cachers described climbing over a bridge
to reach the cache only for one of them
to narrowly avoid plummeting down.
They logged this close call in jest,
probably not knowing that they had just dodged a tragedy
that someone else would fall victim to.
The tragedy would earn geocaching its fair share of critics.
But for the most part, it seemed like an outlier.
It wouldn't be matched in terms of attention
until seven years later in the first recorded incident
where multiple cachers were killed.
A party of four were following coordinates
that led them to a drainage tunnel in Prague.
A storm quickly rose out of nowhere leading to all of them
being washed away by the rising waters.
Although two of the members would survive
with relatively minor injuries all things considered,
the other two were not as fortunate.
Their bodies were eventually recovered deep
in the Vltava River that the tunnel spilled into.
Of course, where people stumble into the wrong places,
I can't help but note the incidents where geocaching
has prevented rather than caused tragedy.
On an October morning in 2016, four friends departed
from their hotel to spend the day searching
for numerous caches.
On their way back, the fog relented enough
and they spotted a crashed vehicle in a ravine.
Initially thinking the car had been abandoned,
the group realized the driver was still inside
and seriously injured.
There was little doubt that if they hadn't spotted her
when they did and called for help,
things could have ended much worse.
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For all of the places that geocaching can take you,
it shouldn't be a surprise that geocachers tend
to stumble on some weird stuff.
While looking into things, I found multiple forum posts
detailing how when going off the beaten path,
geocachers have stumbled on everything from drug farms
to stashes of money.
But while the incidence of geocachers being killed
while hunting are infrequent, the actuality of death
surrounding many caches caught my attention.
First, there are the common occurrences
of geocaches being hidden intentionally close
to the site of real world deaths.
There are numerous examples, but one that stood out to me
was a cache hidden in memory of Barbara Schwartz.
Over a three year period from 1979 to 1981,
nine people would be murdered
on the hiking trails of Mount Tamalpais in California.
Schwartz was the second of these victims
and the cache as the hider describes it
is placed as a memorial within 100 feet
of where her body was found.
Caches like these are often classified as being intended
to be memorials and they are just about as common
as they are morbid.
Geocaching has also led to the resolution
of missing persons cases.
One story that my research constantly pointed to
happened in Aiken, South Carolina.
Although much of the press coverage
from the time has not been archived properly,
a user now named TBoneTheOriginal posted
on Reddit about the time he and his friend went off trail
during a geocaching hunt in 2001.
TBone's dog was acting strange,
sniffing and clawing at the ground.
Eventually the dog uncovered human remains.
After contacting authorities, TBone was immediately flooded
by journalists trying to schedule an interview.
As it turned out,
he had just solved a decade long missing person's case.
The remains were conclusively identified
as a young man who disappeared in 1992.
According to the information I could find on it,
it seems the case was finally concluded to be a suicide.
The logs for the cache are especially interesting.
TBone, back then going as BigBassDrummer
on the geocaching forums posted that he never happened
to find the cache.
And jokingly mentioned
that he would've uploaded the pictures of the remains
if the police had not taken his camera.
He suggested changing his name to something along the lines
of Bone Collector only for another user named Planet
to enter the forum.
It turned out that Planet had been a geocacher
for over two years and was related to the person found.
He thanked those who were involved
in finally bringing closure to the tragedy
but also made multiple posts calling out users
who found the idea of finding a body fun,
those who made jokes, and even TBone,
for suggesting he'd post pictures of the remains.
But geocaching hasn't always been on the right side
of resolving missing person's cases.
One example happened in 2016 when Australian authorities
were directed to a tree with the words
"Jesus saves William Tyrrell" sprayed onto it with graffiti.
This was only a couple of miles away
from where Tyrrell had last been seen.
The police found various random objects hidden in the tree,
quickly concluding that it had been part
of a geocaching hunt.
Tyrrell was three-years-old when he were went missing
in September of 2014.
And police quickly expressed their disappointment
that the morbid circumstances seemed
to have been capitalized on by a group of geocachers.
A compass, a coin, Post It notes, and a torch
were hidden in the cache.
According to an archived Yahoo news article,
speculation on Facebook saw some suggesting
that the cache had been intentionally left there
either by someone involved in Tyrrell's disappearance
or that the items were meant to symbolize Tyrrell
finding his way back home.
From the logs and cachers' accounts,
it seems to all have been a terrible coincidence.
It turned out that the graffiti came
after the cache was hidden and whoever was responsible,
having no association with geocaching,
not knowing what was hidden inside the tree.
As of the time of this video's posting,
Tyrrell still remains missing.
While researching for this video,
I couldn't help but check for caches in my area.
Sure enough, there were plenty around me.
I checked out geocaching myself a couple years ago
while exploring some older parks
and was shocked to see how the community
has grown a lot since then.
I only bring this point up
because I don't want geocaching to get a bad name.
Geocaching is historically very safe.
And the outliers that I've gone over in this video
are just that, outliers.
As with anything that becomes popular enough,
there are bound to be some strange events that took place.
I personally think the entire thought of geocaching
and the way it's implemented is an amazing
and awesome branch between the advancements
of technology and connecting with the real world itself,
a hidden world with stashes and puzzles
just about anywhere you go
and a history of its own slowly unfolding.
Thanks for watching.
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Thanks again for watching and have a good night.