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In order for police to be able to file a missing-persons report,
that person will usually have to have been missing for about 24 hours.
This might differ from country to country
but if police think there is sufficient information to make a report
they will.
The USA's National Crime Information Center tells us that in 2017
There were just under five hundred thousand missing people reported both male and female and under the age of 21.
Over 21 the number of reports added up to around one hundred fifty eight thousand.
That's a lot of people reported missing but many are found quite quickly.
Some having been on a two day drinking binge,
others hiding in the garden shed.
Unfortunately others go missing for a long time.
Today, we'll look at some of the strangest cases in this episode of the infographic show
Number 8: The missing doctor
We'll start with perhaps a happier case of a missing person and finish with more gruesome cases.
This is the story of Carlos Sanchez Ortiz de Salazar, a Spanish doctor that went missing in 1995.
For years people searched for him and then in 2010, he was presumed dead,
but the doctor was resurrected. He was found alive in
2015 living as a hermit in a forest close to the Marama coast in Tuscany. According to reports,
he was found by mushroom pickers who he told "I am Spanish.
My name is Carlos and I have been here for 20 years."
His family was over the moon, but when they arrived at the forest the man of the wild had already gone.
Unfortunately, the media didn't write any updates on the matter.
Number 7: The man who lost himself
This is the case of an Australian man named Gabrielle Nike
According to Australian news reports the father of 2 called his wife to say he'd be home for lunch.
That was in 1987
He didn't have lunch that day or the day after in fact, he wasn't seen for a very long time
His burnt-out car was found but he wasn't. His daughter later told the press
"It really affected me emotionally. People would ask. Where's your dad? It was too much, too painful."
Where did Gabriel go? After years of searching, the family just thought he must be dead.
More than 20 years later,
he was about to be officially presumed dead and one final check and Medicare records revealed the name
Gabriel Nagy.
It turned out that after his crash, he'd been living in a state of dissociative fugue
which is a rare mental condition wherein someone can lose their memories and their identity.
It can last for years and the people just create a new identity.
After he was found, Nagy told the press
"I'd been living under a pseudonym for a long time
but I'd been having flashes of my proper name. Things were slowly returning."
He wandered around Australia doing odd jobs working on boats,
sometimes sleeping rough and taking up drinking.
He was scooped up and taken to meet his family more than two decades later.
"The person who found me asked me lots of questions and started showing me photographs.
It was like a cartoon where flashbulbs go off on top of people's heads"
he told the press. He was reintroduced to his daughters with many tears flowing.
One daughter, now in her 30s said
"I want to give people hope that sometimes good things can happen, miracles can happen."
Number 6: Missing half a century.
This has to be one of the longest periods of time that someone has gone missing.
American-Canadian, Lucy Ann Johnson disappeared in
1961 and wasn't found until 2013.
Where had she been all that time?
She'd been living in British Columbia with her new husband and two kids when she went missing.
The police believed that the husband might have killed her, but that wasn't the case.
He had been abusing her and that's why she took off.
The husband died in the 90s and police never gave up on this mysterious disappearing woman.
Then in 2013, she was featured in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
as missing person of the month initiative.
Lucy's daughter, now with grown up kids of her own,
also found out her mother could be in Yukon and started a search there.
The daughter was then contacted by a woman who said she was also Lucy's daughter but living in Yukon.
Aged 77, Lucy was found.
She had four kids and told the police
she had left all those years ago because her husband was a violent man.
She was reunited with her old family minus the husband, of course.
Number 5: Finding himself.
This has got to be one of the strangest cases ever as this guy, Edgar Latulip, was missing for 30 years
but was also about a 90 minute drive from where he went missing.
He disappeared in 1986 from a town in Ontario, Canada and was found close to that town some 30 years later,
now aged 50. It said he was in a home when he went missing as he suffered from mental health problems.
He never mentally grew up. The last time his mother had seen him,
he was in a hospital, recovering from an attempted suicide and then he was gone.
Police report that Latulip went missing without his medication and it was unlikely he could survive on his own but he did
albeit with memory problems after hitting his head.
Gradually, his old life came back to him and one day he told a social worker that he could even remember the name he used
to have, Edgar Latulip. She contacted authorities and the missing man was found.
He found himself really. Cops called his mother and told her the news. After 30 years of not knowing where her son is,
knowing that he's alive she's pretty excited about that.They told the press. Number four- Abducted.
Abductions could be a show in themselves. We'll discuss only one. This was the abduction of an American girl called Jaycee Dugard.
She went missing in 1991, aged just 11 years, old from her house in South Lake Tahoe, California.
Her stepfather even saw her being abducted and gave chase, but he couldn't catch the assailant.
She was held captive by a man that would abuse her and have children with her. That went on for
18 years in total the abductors were Philip and Nancy Garrido. Philip had a history of rape and kidnapping,
but he wasn't caught until he turned up at the University of California in 2009.
That led to suspicion after background checks were done and the man was arrested. Police then searched his home and found Dugard, now a woman.
She explained she'd been kept in handcuffs for almost two years.
But then allowed some freedom in the basement of the couple's house. After years
she had two kids with the man and developed what we call Stockholm Syndrome, meaning she trusted her own captor.
She even left the house at times and started working as a graphic designer
in her captor's company. To the neighbours, the woman and her kids just looked like normal folks.
Dugard has since written two books and numerous TV documentaries have been made about her experience and one of her books she wrote,
'I don't believe in hate. To me,
it wastes too much time.
People who hate waste so much of their life hating that they miss out on all of the other stuff out there.'
Number three- Jungle paranoia. Okay, so you might have heard this story before, but how could we not include this amazing tale? Hiro
Onoda was a Japanese soldier who was sent to the Philippines during World War two.
The thing is while he was there, the war ended and Japan lost.
The man went into the hills and started a guerrilla campaign against the locals, still believing a war was going on.
According to reports, the Japanese knew soldiers were there and even dropped leaflets into the jungle
but Onoda thought they were a trap.
He soldiered on, and on he went for years with reports saying the men, he was with, were all but dead. Come
1972, Onoda's own family had no hopes he would ever return
He was like Colonel Kurtz in the Joseph Conrad book, 'Heart of Darkness'.
The story gets even crazier when we hear that a man called
Norio Suzuki went in search of Onoda. Suzuki was an explorer and he believed he could find the missing man
and he found what he was looking for. Onoda later told the press "This hippie boy,
Suzuki came to the island to listen to the feelings of a Japanese soldier.
Suzuki asked me why I would not come out." The army was then sent to the jungle and relieved
Onoda of his duty. The soldier gave up his sword, his rifle, his ammunition and said he would go home.
He returned to Japan a hero and wrote a book called 'No Surrender- My thirty year war'.
He wasn't as popular with the Filipino people as he had killed quite a few of them while he was in hiding.
Number two- Missing mom. In
1970, an American woman called Lula Cora Hood left her family after an argument. Then, in 1996
Illinois cops contacted the three kids that had been left behind and
informed them that they thought they had found the remains of their mother and that was that, goodbye mom.
But it wasn't the case after more DNA tests were done and Hood was found some 40 years after she'd gone missing.
She was living in Florida, aged 84 and was doing just fine.
"I was too young to know what it was about."
But she was told to leave and that's exactly what she did, one of her daughters told the press.
She never came back.
It turns out her mother had 14 kids over her lifetime. Number one- Scandal on Dewsbury Moor.
This has to be one of the craziest stories about missing people,
one that kept the tabloid media in the UK busy for a time and ended up causing mayhem on a council estate in a rundown
industrial town in northern England. The story takes place in
2009, only a couple of years after a young girl, named Madeleine Beth McCann, went missing while on holiday with her parents and Portugal.
McCann had never been found and so when a girl went missing again,
it had the tabloid-reading public in a frenzy,
except this case was a whole lot different. The mob was certainly moved and an entire
community went out looking for this 9 year old girl. At one point, writes the Yorkshire Post, a
43 year old man, who lived down the road from the missing girl was overpowered by a mob and nailed to wood,
essentially crucified. It could have been drug-related but the timing made police think differently.
Anyway, after tearful appeals on TV by Shannon's mother, it turned out she disappeared her own daughter.
Shannon was found almost one month later, hidden in a bed inside a house, owned by the uncle of the mother's boyfriend.
It turned out they'd seen how the public had gone behind the parents of little Madeleine a couple of years before and thought they could
pull off a stunt and get away with some decent reward money, once they figured out how to find Shannon.
Subsequent investigators revealed that the mother was horrid and she had often given Shannon strong sleeping pills to keep her quiet. The mother's boyfriend
was charged with having movies involving children doing things
they should not be doing. Poor Shannon was given a new name and put into foster care.
The mother had to change her name when she was out of jail lest she ended up with a fate worse than
crucifixion. You can see what happened in detail in a number of
documentaries that were made about the case. You wouldn't
want to end up in one of our lost and found videos, and we wouldn't want to ever have to make one about you.
So why not brush up on some of your survival skills with one of Skillshare's over
24,000 online classes, with classes such as
preserving 101, drying and dehydration and street fighting for self-defence.
Skills air has the tools you need to make sure you never go missing or if you do, that
you know how to survive. The first 1,000 people to sign up by visiting skillshare.com/infographics35
or by clicking the link in the description, will receive two months of Skillshare
absolutely free. Join Skillshare and start learning today. So what do you think about these stories?
Do you know anyone that has gone missing. Let us know in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video called America's most evil serial killer, Ted Bundy. Thanks for watching,
and as always don't forget to like share and subscribe.
See you next time.