Lost in the Outback for 43 Days: The Man Who Didn't Want to be Found | E261

When tourists found an abandoned bicycle on a remote track in Australia's Great Sandy Desert, it triggered one of the strangest missing person searches in outback history — police, aircraft, and Aboriginal trackers combing the Kimberley for a man who had vanished without telling anyone where he was going. Twelve days in, the search was called off and his family was told he was almost certainly dead, so they hired a private American wilderness rescue team led by a man who insisted on being called Gunslinger. What none of them knew was that he had walked into the desert deliberately, on a spiritual quest, and had no idea anyone was searching for him at all. Forty-three days of starvation, dehydration and roughly 250 miles on foot later, a helicopter found him alive — and set off a fight that reached the Premier of Western Australia, while the man who led the rescue turned out to have invented his entire past. Twenty-five years on, one of the trackers who searched for him asked him for a single word, and what he said instead is still an uncomfortable part of this story.

Timestamps:

00:00 Podcast Intro Setup

00:30 Mud Water In The Desert

02:22 Abandoned Bike Mystery

03:18 No One Knew The Plan

06:36 Spiritual Quest Revealed

07:34 Search Begins With Trackers

09:27 Media Frenzy And Survival Math

10:28 Search Called Off Parents React

11:57 Gunslinger Arrives Private Team

15:06 Fresh Tracks And Desert Ordeal