Cryptid researcher Bob Gymlan presents a detailed account of a truly chilling missing persons case: the disappearance of six-year-old Dennis Martin from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

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Though he does list Sasquatch among the potential suspects, he readily considers more mundane culprits.

In light of the recent Finders revelations, I've developed an alternate theory.

Let's look at some known facts:

1. The CIA sponsored a hippie network called the Finders, which was involved in kidnapping young children.

2. An unusual number of disappearances take place in national parks. The National Park Service doesn't keep an official tally, but independent researchers estimate the figure at 1600 on the low end.

3. Public lands play host to extensive and well-organized criminal enterprises. It's been an open secret among law enforcement for years that the cartels keep large marijuana farms in national parks.

4. It's also a barely kept secret that large hippie communes--some the size of small towns--have become fixtures in national forests. They're not confined to the US, either. These hippies were caught squatting in an Australian national park. Guess how they were funding their lifestyle.

What if a hippie offshoot subculture is entrenched deep in a number of national parks? What if they funded their activities through a combination of government sponsorship and the drug trade? What do the glow-in-the-darks get in exchange for giving these hippies money and protection? How about a steady stream of abducted children for their foreign and domestic clientele?

The value of a model depends on how well it explains observed phenomena. In this case:

* Finders style child trafficking rings based out of national parks would explain a percentage of the missing children cases.

* Hikers who stumble upon illegal drug farms and are quickly sunsetted to hush it up would explain some of the other missing persons reports.

* The relative ineffectiveness of law enforcement in solving these cases may be partly due to CIA secret classifications and Do Not Prosecute orders, as were issued in the Finders case.

* The seemingly preternatural ease with which some of the victims are abducted could be attributed to feral hippies' far greater familiarity with the terrain. Generations of these people may have been living in these forests since the 60s, giving them a decisive home field advantage.