Supernatural Summer Safety | Tom Messick Missing 411 Part 4

Haley and Mary are still in the woods and on this episode they are digging deep into one Missing 411 case. The case of Tom Messick who went missing went on November 15th, 2015. Tom was with his son and six other men who were all proficient in hunting safety and survival training.

Thank you for listening! 

Rebel Road theme music by: B3yondBeatz Tony Simms

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hey friends, it's Haley of the Rebel Road Podcast, and of course, Mary. Hey, if you're new here, welcome. All summer long, we're going to be bringing you our shorter episodes, which we like to call road snacks. And for the past three weeks, we've been sharing these missing 411 stories, along with some tips for hiking and camping to help keep you safe out there all summer long.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

We hope you've been as perplexed with those missing 411 cases as we have been. And before we moved on to some supernatural safety tips for visiting lakes and bodies of water, we wanted to bring you just one more missing 411 case and do a little deeper dig. Haley, I don't know about you, but I think I could keep sharing these stories for as long as I continue to read about them. And I just want to say to the families that may hear our podcast one day, our prayers and our hearts go out to you. To have a loved one simply vanish is a loss I would not wish on anyone. So with that said, let's share our final missing 411 case for the summer, the case of Tom Mesick.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

On a cold, quiet Sunday morning, 82-year-old Tom Mesick, an Army veteran, former paratrooper, and highly experienced hunter safety instructor, walked into the Lake George Wild Forest near Lily Pond Road in Horicon, New York. He was dressed in camouflage coveralls, duck boots, and a distinctive red and black checkered hat. He carried a rifle and a walkie-talkie, tucked in his jacket a few bite-sized Snickers, and a white bucket to sit on. Because of his age, a bad back, and a missing right eye, Tom was designated as a watcher along with three other men. The younger hunters in his seven-man group, including one of his sons, split up to hike through the woods and drive the deer toward Tom's stationary position. Tom was left sitting quietly on a log, waiting. The watchers were all positioned a hundred yards from each other, in a line. Tom was the furthest in the woods.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Around 2 p.m., the woods reportedly fell into an unnerving, absolute silence. In the final window of time before Tom disappeared, another hunter stationed a distance away reported hearing a strange, out-of-place, loud metallic sound echoing through the trees. It was not a gunshot. It sounded like a heavy piece of metal striking another metal object, or a mechanical trap snapping shut. Because the woods were so quiet, the sound stood out sharply, but its source could not be identified. Between 2 and 3 p.m., the drivers completed their loot and converged on Tom's designated location. Tom was gone. No signs of a struggle. There were no broken branches, no scuff marks in the dirt, and no blood. Total radio silence. Tom's walkie-talkie remained completely silent. He never pressed the button to call for help, and he did not answer when his family repeatedly called out to him over the radio waves. No warning shot. As an expert hunter, Tom knew that firing three consecutive shots into the air was the universal signal for a hunter who is lost or is in distress. No gunshots were ever fired.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

His hunting party spent an hour and a half searching the immediate area, even driving their pickup truck along the nearby woodline while honking the horn, assuming Tom might have stepped away and gotten disoriented. There was no response. At 4:30 p.m., they contacted Forest Rangers. In the days that followed, a massive force of over 300 searchers, canine units, helicopters, and divers combed a 29-square mile grid around Lily Pond. Astoundingly, the search dogs could never pick up his scent trail, and not a single piece of his gear, neither his bright red hat nor his heavy rifle, have ever been recovered from the forest floors. Even a decade later, search and rescue teams still returned to those woods to look for him.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

So, Haley, this case was a little different than the others we shared in our last three episodes. First, Tom had a rifle. He was armed, and second, a noise was heard by one of his lifelong friends that he couldn't really identify. But he said it was not a normal sound you would hear in the woods. It was like the sound of a giant metal trap being set off.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Yeah, Mary, that is absolutely mysterious. We have this group of very well-trained outdoorsmen who clearly know how to hunt. They know the woods. And what did they report? That the woods were silent. And if you've been listening to our last episodes for the summer, what do we say? When the woods go silent, it's time to get back to your car, your tent, uh, your cabin, you go silent. But the metallic sound, that is actually so fascinating. And it really makes my mind first go to UFOs, but then also too, just the details of the story, my mind goes to portal.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

It's really hard not to go to those two areas, a UFO or a portal. But let's look at a few scenarios. Because of his age, people thought that maybe he had experienced some sort of a medical event and became disoriented. Okay, that's very plausible. Even his son, who was on the trip with him, initially thought that he phoned his mom, told her, Hey, dad's missing, but we're gonna find you, don't worry. And he was one million percent confident in their ability to locate his dad. Well, there are some things with that. If someone becomes disoriented, especially an elderly person, they are gonna stumble. So there would have been some evidence of confusion. But there were no footprints, no tracks, no branches snapped, no leaf disturbance. His bucket he was using to sit on, it was gone. His hat, that was never found. And if you're in a daze, if you're having some sort of an episode and you're stumbling around, your hat's probably gonna come off in the disorientation. You're not gonna remember to pick up your bucket. And on top of that, a rifle is very heavy. And so he probably would have dropped that too if something had happened like that. But they found absolutely nothing.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

I just gotta say, Mary, I could not imagine that phone call to my mom or even receiving that phone call as a mother. Uh, but you are right. When someone is disoriented, they typically are stumbling around. There absolutely would be some evidence of that. Now, they brought in the canine dogs, and again, this is a huge part of being included in a missing 411 case. The dogs, they failed to find his scent. Now, the air scent they found briefly, but they could not follow it. And the dogs could not even determine which way to go. So most of the dogs couldn't even find his initial location.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Yeah, that is so, so weird. These dogs they live for finding the scent and catching the scent. So that's what makes it even crazier. He vanished, and with him, his scent seemed to evaporate as well. So let's look at another theory that's going on with the Tom case. Um, let's look at the prey theory. So some say that maybe a bear or a large cat was able to sneak up on him and I guess drag him off. Well, Tom, even though he was elderly and he had some limitation, he was still a very with it man. He would have gotten off a shot and he would not have gone willingly. So there would be evidence of scarter. You would see the bucket turned over, his rifle dropped, his hat, drag marks, you'd see some blood. He wasn't a toddler that could get snatched and carried away with no evidence. Again, the place where they left him, it was undisturbed. A bear or a mountain lion, that's not going back to pick up his bucket and his gun.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

That's not gonna so let's say he got up and he decided, I don't know, maybe he needed to use the bathroom. Uh again, if he did, he's not bringing the bucket. And if he's gonna come right back, think about that, he's not gonna take everything with him. So if he did slip into, let's say, like a fissure or a sinkhole, where did that bucket go? If he even slipped, you know, even if you're stumbling around, you slip and you're wearing a hat, that hat's coming off your head. And again, if you're peeing in the woods or something like that, that tracking dog is absolutely going to find that.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

100% they would. And let's look at his position. He was a watcher, and he was a watcher that was last in the line into the woods. But this is still, he wasn't like miles into the woods, he was only a few hundred yards away from the parking lot. So he did have a little heart trouble and a bad back, but he loved hunting and the outdoors. So if he was in distress, he would have called on his walkie-talkie or fired a shot in the air. Tom was all about safety. He taught survival training and hunter safety to almost everyone in his hometown. That man was a legend to the people.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

And that alone, it just adds to the case, I think. If you think about it, Mary, it gets dark fast in November. So when it got dark, Tom's son and his friends they did not wait until that first light. They got in their cars, they started honking the horns, shining their lights, and yelling for him all through the night, using all the tools that were taught by Tom to help locate him. But all of those efforts failed.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

I mean, just that limbo is terrifying. But by first light, Tom had a slew of organizations out there looking for him. And they included the canine teams, the lower edirondack search and rescue, or the LASAR, and the Northeastern Mobile Search and Rescue. There were even teams from the New York State Police, the DEC, the Environmental Conservation Police Officers, and the Heavily Structured Correction Emergency Response Team, or the CERT, the cert numbers were deployed in grid formations along with helicopters using FLIR. And all of these teams arrived at dawn. So within the hours that followed, and then the days, the number of searchers out there looking for Tom grew to over 300 people. And they did a meticulous 28 square mile search with grid work. And this is where they used ropes and would walk within a few feet of each other and mark where they had been. And once they did those grids, a few days later they would go back to the grids and rework them in the opposite angle. I mean, they scoured the woods for Tom.

SPEAKER_01 11:54

Another bit of weird that did pop up was the FBI actually came out. They showed up just a few days after Tom's disappearance. Now, on the surface, that might not seem strange, but what most people may not realize is that the FBI, they typically just do not get involved with missing people. Unless it's a child under some certain circumstances, like a known kidnapping. Tom's wife, she said in an interview that the FBI told her they weren't sure what was happening with Tom's case, but that something was not right. And agents admitted that without physical evidence, they were completely at a loss. But the total absence of a scent trail, total absence of the gear, no footprints pointing away, all of that, that standard wilderness accident, it didn't exist. So, you know, Mary, you know what this reminds me of? No, what the X-Files and Fox Mulder. He always had his nose to the ground and would investigate things that were not normal. So I think their presence there absolutely solidifies that Tom just didn't wander away.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

Good point, Haley. Much like if we go back to that Dennis Martin case and the green berets that showed up. Sometimes a government agency shows up and you may think, yes, we need the help. But that's not normal, folks. Their presence is showing something is wildly off. And I just also want to add, um, that several people who were searching the woods all said the same thing. The woods were silent, and one even went as far as to say he didn't even see evidence of wildlife. There was no scat, no wildlife trail, nothing. And he thought that was completely odd. It was like the woods were dead.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Yeah, I can't remember if we mentioned this, but the men had never been to that particular spot to hunt before either. So it's almost like it was a dead zone.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

It's called the wild for a reason, and I think we've said that before. But with this case and the others, we mentioned in our first three episodes on this series that please, please be careful. Even when you're with a group of people, don't lose sight of each other and always be aware of your surroundings. I wish he had had a whistle, but then again, he had a walkie-talkie and he wasn't that far away from his people and he had a rifle.

SPEAKER_01 14:31

And to our listeners out there, we are still sending out a few whistles. All you have to do is comment on our podcast wherever you are listening to it. Uh, you can comment on our website, any of our social medias, and just send us an email with your address, and we'll choose a few more people to send out some Rebel Road swag. It's a sticker. We'll send a sticker and a whistle your way. So we have a few left. Reach out and let us help you stay a little safer out there. But remember, stay on the path and always keep Jesus and prayer in your front pocket.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Yeah, the outdoors, it's crazy beautiful, peaceful, but man, so dangerous. Stay safe, friends, and we hope you listen to us next week as we dive into some crazy stories and safety tips while visiting lakes and water.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

We're gonna have more tips and tales to tell, but until then, keep it weird out there. And if it gets too weird, pull it back to Jesus. Bye. Bye.