“Why Humans Totally Freak Out When They Get Lost: People Really Do Circle past the Same Tree over and over Again—It Doesn’t Just Happen in Movies”, 2020-05-13 ():
She left a note for her would-be rescuers: “When you find my body please call my husband George and my daughter Kerry, it will be the greatest kindness for them to know that I am dead and where you found me—no matter how many years from now. Please find it in your heart to mail the contents of this bag to one of them.” She survived at least 19 days on her own in the wilderness before succumbing to the effects of exposure and starvation, longer than many experts believed possible. She did not know that a dog team had passed within 100 yards of her, that her campsite was only half a mile from the trail as the crow flies, or that if she had walked downhill she would have soon reached an old railroad track that would have taken her, in either direction, straight out of the woods.
…When the aviator Francis Chichester was teaching navigation to RAF pilots during the Second World War, two of his students went missing during an exercise. Chichester searched for them for days in his light aircraft in the Welsh hills, without success. Three months later, he heard that they were prisoners of war: They had misread their compass and flown 180° in the wrong direction, traveling southeast instead of northwest, and had crossed the English Channel thinking it was the Bristol Channel. “They were grateful when an airfield put up a cone of searchlights for them”, Chichester recounted in his autobiography, “and it was not until they had finished their landing run on the airstrip and a German soldier poked a tommy-gun into the cockpit that they realised that they were not on an English airfield.” This was the wartime equivalent of following a satnav into a river.
…Some years ago Kenneth Hill, a psychologist at St Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada, who has dedicated his career to studying how lost people behave, reviewed more than 800 search and rescue reports from his home province of Nova Scotia, which is 80% forest and is known as the “lost person capital of North America.” In Nova Scotia you can get lost by stepping away from your backyard. He found only two cases out of those 800-plus in which the lost person had stayed put: an 80-year-old woman out picking apples, and an 11-year-old boy who had taken a “Hug a Tree and Survive” course at school (as the name implies, it teaches kids to stay where they are). He says most lost people are stationary when they are found, but only because they have run themselves into the ground and are too tired or ill to continue…Circling happens where there are no prominent landmarks (a cell phone mast or a tall tree, for example) or spatial boundaries (a fence or a line of hills), and where all the vistas look similar. Without a fixed reference point, we drift. A view of the sun or the moon can help keep us grounded, though the sun is a dangerous guide if you’re not aware of how it moves across the sky. In an appendix to Canadian Crusoes, Catharine Traill relates the true story of a girl who, lost in the woods of Ontario for three weeks, believed the sun would lead her out and so followed it hopefully all day as it arced from east to west and thus, inevitably, found herself at night in almost the same place she had been that morning…In 2009, Jan Souman tracked volunteers using GPS monitors as they attempted to walk in a straight line through the Sahara Desert and Germany’s Bienwald forest. When the sun wasn’t visible, none of them managed it: Errors quickly accumulated, small deviations became large ones, and they ended up walking in circles. Souman concluded that with no external cues to help them, people will not travel more than around 100 meters from their starting position, regardless of how long they walk for.
…It is common for lost people to lose their head as well as their heading direction. Stories of people walking “trance-like” past search parties, or running off and having to be chased down and tackled, are part of search and rescue lore. Ed Cornell, the psychologist who studies lost person behavior, says it is very difficult to interview someone just after they’ve been found: “They are basically scrambled” and can remember little about what happened to them.