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Comment by vaidhy | Hacker News Reader

So, we spent all the time and money confirming what USN already knew?

You can't "know" with 100% certainty from a sound, and generally searchers don't give up until they must.

This reminds me of a thorough and depressing write up of the lost hikers in a south western desert. An experienced search and rescue guy spent years finding where they perished, navigating bureaucracy and the arid landscape even though the victims were certainly deceased.

There's a guy whose truck was found in the bushes off a gravel road in the mountains. Subsequent searching turned up camping equipment and a laptop. He had terminal cancer. Some years later I spotted a thigh bone that turned out to be from a moose.

Aahh, you're probably talking about Tom Mahood's: The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans. They were in Death Valley NP.

An epic and gripping tale for sure. It made quite an impression on me as I was joining my local SAR team.

https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hu...

Well there goes my evening. thank ya kindly for sharing sir. I hear tell lots of independent people who are doing things anyway, like magnet fishers or sonar people and the like. Lots of times local PD's are very hostile like that story sort of indicated about the local sheriff with sharing information, threatening tresspassing where there ain't no tresspass or laws broken, refusing to share any information, things like that. Wish that sorta thing would stop. Meanwhile you get others who welcome any help at all and seems to me like they usually get answers that way at least by exclusion. We could use more of that where people got the skills and stuff to do it safely, but that's my mostly ignorant guess of the situation. Don't know nothin about SAR or the like so take my limited notion for what it is I suppose.

If you've more to tell or share I'd be much obliged

the same searcher documents the search for Bill at a nearby park, and whom was finally found just recently. There’s some good YouTube on the theory on that one.

Been lookin over that and it's a very interesting one. The man has got to have done the most extensive and exhaustive search for a missing person in goddamn history damn near by himself what with all the criss-crossing lines and different search methods. There's a kind of fascination with that sort of dedication makes one darn near want to jump up and volunteer just from the pull of it.

Though have to edit to say, I can't goddamn believe they didn't save the cell data. Good lord. So many kinds of frustration reading over this stuff while I'm waitin here today.

This video offered a good theory based on all data: https://youtu.be/2J9wsJb8P1Y

A sobering realization how dangerous a simple walk can be.

I had stumbled my way there, but I appreciate it in case I hadn't. I should have linked that once I found it in my edit on reflection so much obliged sir for the help there

my thinking is there's a lot of learning to be had from people who are doing this kind of thing. How much faster could we find people if we act like they've got good reasons to them that got them lost? Like with bad maps. Or even being better able to find people while they're alive if things like those maps and other things are looked over and you try to mentally figure out what they think might make sense? Walk a mile in someone's shoes. I ain't no expert on this but I keep reading police reports or park reports on missing people and a lot of times it seems like searchers mistake their idea of the fact with the lost persons idea of the fact. am I crazy or does that seem like a really big mistake? I'd like to know more just don't know where to go learning more about this sorta thing

One thing to remember is that for the major agencies the rescue part is important; so they will search all the likely survivable locations first because those are the best chance of saving a life, even if there are technically more likely locations that assume death.

It’s also why the “tell people where you’re planning on going, don’t leave the trail, stick to the plan, make it easy to find you” are important survival techniques.

Even just learning how to make markings on the ground that can be seen from low-flying aircraft may save you someday (contact a local civil air patrol and ask to go along on a training flight to see how hard it can be to identify even something as large as a plane from the air).

Sorry since I don't know about it I probably explained myself very bad. I did mean about the rescue part. Like the guy was still alive while they were searching so I wonder how important getting into the persons head is for "figure out what makes sense to that person given what they know" to finding people before they die especially. Like could they have found the guy if they looked at the maps people knew he had, and saw that the topography thing makes it look to someone who doesn't know the area that well that it might be the best way to get toward the road again if he got lost? That's what I'm trying to get at. The lessons these guys learn trying to piece together where someone ended up and how they died it seems really important to learn those lessons to find people before they die too.

I'm sorry I don't know any of the terms for search and rescue or anything so I have no idea how to make what I am saying make sense.

Even with the USN knowing it was fruitless, the USCG can use the activity to look at its operations and determine what improvements for SAR might exist in a way that pre-planned training exercises can not.

Good OPSEC comes at a price.

USN != USCG. See my other comment in this thread that can explain it well.

That doesn't matter, dude. This is all set up on an ICS model. They're highly coordinated. Turn on your news sometime and one guy, a fire chief, a sheriff, or maybe rarely a military guy will be speaking and it won't be because they rock-paper-scissored for it.

I'm the last person to deny the massive frustrating bureaucracy that is the US military, but in this kind of thing, that's not an issue.

Former O-4 17 alpha. I was even less connected to the Coast Guard than the Navy is, but since they do port security, including cyber, if there was an issue there they were involved.

Wouldn't it be possible, if the Navy program were too secret, that they had no counterpart in the Coast Guard cleared for it?

Of course it's possible, but this isn't one of those things. Certain aspects of the systems are breathtakingly reported as "top secret" in the press, but the existence of sonar systems good at hearing and sifting noise to recognize that kind of sound is widely known. We know Coca Cola exists. Hell we know the ingredients, but we don't know the recipe.

One of the first things I imagine an incident commander would do would be to ask if anyone has anything like that. Any ships in the area, military or civilian or foreign hear/see anything that they know of. Sounds like he got that information soon. Does that mean the whole thing was a waste of time?

Without knowing more about exactly what they did or didn't do, I can't say. And whether they should have done all of this is besides the point. They decided to do a search. And until they could connect that sound with the vessel, they needed to keep looking.

This is why stupid people doing stupid shit isn't just a Darwin Award situation. Search and rescue types don't want to stop until they succeed and you're putting them at risk too. They leave bodies on Everest, I would hope this was only ever just to confirm they were dead and no one was going down there but who knows.

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