In 2018, a man was on a routine skiing trip with some friends when he suddenly disappeared without a trace. Despite a massive, extensive search being launched in the area surrounding the ski resort. This guy was simply nowhere to be found. It was really as if he had just vanished into thin air. And as hours quickly turned into days with still no sign of him.

It seemed like he might never be found. But six entire days after this man had first gone missing, he suddenly turned up again. He was almost 3000 miles away from the place where he had disappeared from and in absolutely zero memory of how he had gotten there. Not only that, he was still wearing the exact same ski gear that he had been when people last saw him and was still even carrying his helmet.

And as this man's entire story continued to unfold, it would end up as one of the strangest disappearance cases in history. Welcome back, guys. My name is Andy Jiang, and this is the hidden stories. On February 7th, 2018, a 49 year old firefighter from Toronto named Danny Phillip Addis was skiing at Whiteface Mountain in Wellington, New York, with eight other off duty and retired firefighters.

It was an annual skiing trip that they always took. And Danny, who was an intermediate skier, was definitely no amateur to the sport or to the chilly mountain terrain. At around 2:30 p.m.. However, since it was the very last day of their trip and they had all been constantly skiing for the past couple of days already one of the firefighters was tired and wanted to just head back to the resort to rest before they had to make their way back home.

Although most of the other guys were also pretty tired and agreed to call it a day. Danny decided that he wanted to make just one last run down the mountain before leaving. As a result, while everyone else began to make their way downhill. Danny began to make his way back uphill alone. Given his past skiing experience, his friends weren't worried about him at all, and they just waited for him at the wrestling lodge halfway down the mountain, figuring that he would be joining them within no time.

However, before long, a strong snowstorm suddenly hit, making it very hard for anyone outside to see too far ahead of them. As this storm continued to reach on for a while and there was still no sign of Danny. The rest of the firefighters begin to start worrying that something may have actually happened to them, but there was still fairly confident that he would be back at any moment by the time 4 p.m. rolled around, though, which was the time when all of the mountain's ski lifts would close for the day.

They were really starting to worry. And when another 30 minutes had gone by and Danny still had and returned. The firefighters finally decided to report him as missing. Within the hour, a large search party composed of forest rangers ski patrols and other skiers was quickly organized to comb the surrounding areas for any sign of Danny. While they were all searching for him, the group of firefighters rushed over to the resort.

They were all staying at to check and see whether Danny had, for some reason, gone back without them. When they only found his car, passport, phone and I.D. exactly where he had left them earlier that day, they became even more concerned. As the sun began to set and the snowstorm only continued to get worse. Despite the search parties best efforts, there was still no sign of Danny whatsoever.

So they decided to call it a night and continue looking again the next day when weather conditions were better. When the sun rose again the next morning, even more people joined the search, including officials from the New York State Police, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Border Patrol. As news of Danny's disappearance traveled back to his hometown of Toronto, Canada.

Over a hundred of his fellow firefighters also immediately made their way down to Whiteface Mountain to help with the search. But despite even the assistance of various helicopters, drones and K-9 units to look for Danny as well. By the end of the second day, somehow still not even a trace of him had been felt. His wife and their two young children were devastated as days continued to just keep on going by.

Still, without any sign of Danny. They became more and more convinced that he would be found dead, or even worse, that he would never be found. By the time Day six of Danny's disappearance had rolled around, almost 6000 people in total were helping look for him, to no avail. But in the afternoon of that day, Danny's wife was meeting with some members of a search party near White Mountain when she suddenly received a phone call from an unknown number.

When she answered it, her heart practically skipped a beat. Somehow it was Danny's voice calling her a nickname that only Danny would know. As then, his wife almost suffered the relief, frantically asking him where he was and what had happened to him. Danny told her that he was alone at the Sacramento airport in California. His wife was stunned.

This was on the far other side of the country, almost 3000 miles away from Whiteface Mountain, the place where he had first gone missing. But although this made absolutely zero sense to her and she had so many different questions that she desperately wanted to ask him. She just told Danny to call number one immediately and that she would be there to take them home soon.

So Danny did. A short while later, local police arrived in the Sacramento airport and finally safely took Danny into their custody to their sock. It was almost as if he had traveled straight through time and space. Despite being in California in the scorching heat. Danny was somehow still wearing the same exact ski clothes that he had on six days earlier on Whiteface Mountain and was even still carrying his ski helmet as well.

His jacket and boots were all dirty and ragged, as if he hadn't taken them off even once since disappearing. But outside of that, it was very clear that Danny had been doing completely nothing during the time that he had been missing. When police searched them, they found a brand new iPhone, a credit card, and $1,000 in cash. His hair was also neatly trimmed, as if he had recently gotten a small haircut.

And he seemed to be in a very disoriented and confused state as well, to the point where he described the blue colored sign as being green. When police asked Daniel how he had managed to get all the way from New York to Sacramento, he simply told them that he didn't remember, although he could remember hazy parts of small memories, like riding as a passenger in a big rig style truck, throwing up on the side of the road, feeling a crushing headache and intense fatigue and sleeping a lot.

He had no idea who had been driving him, how he had ended up in their truck or really anything else about the past six days of his life. The only thing that Danny did kind of remember was what had happened after he arrived in Sacramento, California. Once the truck driver had dropped him off, telling him that it was the end of the line, Danny had gone out and decided that he needed a way to contact his wife.

However, since he left his phone all the way back at the ski resort, he decided to take out some cards from his credit card to buy himself a new iPhone. But after he had painstakingly set up the phone and then finally tried calling his wife, he suddenly realized that he couldn't remember her phone number as Danny was trying to jog his memory.

He decided to search Whiteface Mountain online and realized to his shock, that everyone was frantically looking for him and that he was a missing person. As a result, he decided to hop on a flight the very next day to return back home. But after apparently sleeping on the streets overnight for some reason and then taking a taxi to the Sacramento airport the very next day, when Danny got there, he finally remembered his wife's phone number.

According to him, that's when he called her and then called 911. But he couldn't remember much else outside of Sacramento. Danny told the police officers that he suspected that he had somehow suffered a head injury on Whiteface Mountain, which was why he couldn't remember anything from the past six days. In his eyes, the last thing that he could remember were skiing down the mountain to his car to get his phone to take some photos.

As a result, he figured that he must have taken a wrong turn somewhere and then had a bad fall, that he couldn't remember where he hit his head. After waking up all dazed and confused, he must have held down a truck to get a ride back into town, but was so disoriented from his concussion that he fell asleep and wasn't able to get back up again until the driver had finished his route six days later, all the way in Sacramento.

But although the story was kind of plausible and the officers verified that Danny wasn't on any sort of drugs or alcohol. Bits and pieces of everything still made absolutely no sense. If Danny had been so visibly out of it, to the point where he was losing consciousness and throwing up on the side of the road, why didn't that truck driver send him to a hospital or contacted the police?

Since Danny had been wearing full ski gear as well, most people should have instantly been able to see that this guy was clearly not okay and gotten him help. But for some reason, this driver had apparently decided to just ignore Danny and let him stay in his passenger seat for six entire days. In addition, when Danny arrived in Sacramento, if he had just wanted to call his wife, why hasn't he used a payphone or asked a stranger to use their phone?

That would have been so much cheaper and quicker than buying a brand new phone. Furthermore, why didn't Danny call 911 immediately after finding out that he was a missing person? And lastly, when in the world had Danny managed to get a haircut as news of Danny's strange but miraculous reappearance began to make its way across the country, police officers, journalists and independent investigators began to try to get to the bottom of the story.

However, despite their attempts at locating the truck driver that had driven Danny, the man was never identified. And as a result, no one could quite figure out just how Danny had managed to travel all the way from New York to California with no memory of anything. A few medical experts, such as Toronto brain surgeon Dr. Charles Tator, have theorized that Danny could have suffered from a very unusual and long lasting form of amnesia that he got from a head injury.

A different theory was posed by a senior Toronto scientist named Dr. Jennifer Ryan, who suspected that Danny may have entered a dissociative fugue state. A fugue state would have caused Danny to appear normal from the outside and also would have made him impulsively wander away from his normal surroundings and do strange stuff, all while having zero memory of anything.

However, most people online seem to think that neither of these theories are true and that there is actually a much simpler explanation to everything you see because of just how absurd and unprovable Danny's story is. Many people suspect that the reality is Danny never lost his memory at all, and that he just made everything up to hide the fact that he was cheating on his wife or doing something else in California that he didn't want anyone knowing about.

Some people believe that there was never a random truck driver all along. They believed that the truth was Danny had simply driven himself or just as a friend to drive him, which would explain many of the small details that make no sense about his story. The one piece of evidence that does support this theory is the fact that some reports say that soon after Danny was found again and taken into the hospital for medical treatment, he was released due to the fact that he was more or less fun.

However, Danny himself has always maintained that he has since visited several neurologists in Toronto. We've all been able to verify his brain injury through tests. Whatever the case may be, after Danny was able to return home, he expressed that because of this incident, his family is much closer now and much more grateful for one another. He went back to work as a firefighter soon after, and to this day he still doesn't remember much about that span of six days when he was gone.

It's unlikely that the true story behind his disappearance will ever fully be uncovered. Take care, guys, and I'll see you all next week.