Five friends drove to a basketball game in 1978. By the next morning, they had vanished.

This week on Para(normal), Marie dives into one of America’s strangest unsolved mysteries: The Yuba County Five. What should have been a simple drive home after a college basketball game turned into a decades-long mystery involving an abandoned car, an unexplained detour into the Sierra Nevada mountains, a survival trailer stocked with food that was barely used, and one man who has never been found.

Why did the group leave a perfectly functional vehicle? Who survived for weeks inside the trailer? And what happened to Gary Mathias?

Before the mystery begins, Nicolina gets an unforgettable early birthday surprise from legendary Canadian TV personality Rick Campanelli, leading to one of the podcast’s funniest openings yet.

Could this have been a tragic series of mistakes, or is there still a missing piece investigators have never uncovered? Listen now and decide for yourself.

Sources & Further Reading

• The Yuba County Five (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuba_County_Five
• All That’s Interesting – The Yuba County Five: https://allthatsinteresting.com/yuba-county-five
• Ranker – The Strange Case of the Yuba County Five: https://www.ranker.com/list/yuba-county-five-facts/erin-mccann
• The Charlie Project (Gary Mathias): https://charleyproject.org/case/gary-dale-mathias
• Unsolved Mysteries Wiki – Yuba County Five: https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Yuba_County_Five

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