How Would You Vanish for a Month?

Alas my application for the Vanish challenge was rejected (I did get a nice thanks but no thanks email though). Although I am not the most technically savvy person, thus not one to be a "searcher" who hunts down the contestants, I was damn sure that I could hide out in plain sight for a month and collect up the $10,000 prize. Here were some of my ideas, feel free to add your own ideas in the comment section below...

• Location matters. If you know that the people who are hunting for you are some of the most technically savvy in the country, you obviously wouldn't want to be hanging out in techie hot spots (Bay Area, Seattle, etc), where people would be more likely to have heard about the contest or be an active participant. I would head for places where the demographics would support a group of people less likely to know about or be participating in the contest (rural areas, Indian reservations, South Central LA, etc).
• Technology matters. The people who would be interested in participating in such a contest are the hackers, techies, and others who will go to great lengths to follow your every move through technology--credit card swipes, Twitter reports, cell phone transmissions, etc. Thus, use cash, minimize your communications via web, minimize your (obviously prepaid) cell phone use, etc.
• Your habits matter. The guy who originated the contest was found because he used technology to search out a gluten free pizza. Um, strike one (technology) and strike two (how many people would be searching out a gluten free pizza??). More often than not, if you ask detectives and those who search for people in hiding, it's the people's habits (which of course are well researched ahead of time) that trip them up. In other words, if you are going into hiding and you have a two pack a day smoking habit along with a taste for dive bars, pole dancers, and Jack Daniels, unless you become the stellar opposite of these habits, you will be much easier to find.
• Your looks matter. When people try to disappear, they think that dying their hair or shaving it off completely will be a good enough disguise. Wrong. A good disguise requires a total transformation so that you actually become another person. Uniforms are good since people often look, and quickly dismiss, a uniform and barely notice the person in it. How closely would you look at a nun in full nun's dress? Or a guy dressed as a janitor who is sweeping up trash in a city park? A woman in a McDonalds uniform with her hair pulled back and no makeup? Taking on a homeless disguise is also effective as most people barely acknowledge and quickly want to be away from the homeless people they encounter.
• Your persona matters. Store security, undercover cops, even Air Marshals are fairly easy to pick out of a crowd no matter how dressed down they are because the air about them is different. Their body language usually affects a subconscious, confident, intimidating manner just because they can't get past their training. The way people speak matters--if you look like a minimum wage waitress but sound like you just escaped from an Ivy League college, people will notice. People who have just returned from deployment in a war zone or just got released from prison are easy to spot because they have so many mannerism that served them well in their previous environment that they stick out like a sore thumb in your average American community.
• Your price tag matters. The more someone wants to pay to find you, the bigger the target you become. If the price is high enough (and in some circles that isn't very much), your best friend will turn you in. In other words, if you are on the run, trust no one.

Well those are a few of the thoughts that were going through my mind as I carefully planned my month-long escape. Any other ideas?

Hiding Your Stuff

The Haiti earthquake pointed out a number of things that people need to consider during a disaster, everything from the difficulty of procuring fresh water to the need for emergency medical care when there isn't any to be had.

One of the most disturbing news stories about how people react after a disaster was a short blurb in the newspapers about desperate people using force to loot food and water from orphanages in Haiti's capital. Orphanages! People--adults--who are hungry and thirsty were actually taking food and water away from children by force. Hard to believe but then again, when people's world goes to hell in a handbasket, there is no telling what desperate people will do. Which brings us to the point of this blog post...if you want to be able to keep your stuff after a disaster, you are going to need to be able to hide it.

Take this time now, when there is no urgent need, to plan what you could do with your important stuff (food, water, cash, gold, tools, guns, etc) to hide it and protect it from the marauding masses in the event of a disaster. Right now, you probably couldn't even imagine that your friends, neighbors, and even strangers would see that you have something they desperately want (this could be something as simple as water or a can of Spam) and use force to take it from you. But then again, right now, these people are happily complacent with food and water of their own. Should the situation change, all bets are off.

You may think that you will protect yourself, your family, and your stuff with force if necessary. After all, you have a nice stockpile of firearms along with your prudently thought out supply of food and water, but there is only one of you, you will have a limited supply of ammo, and you will need to sleep sometime.

Here are some things to consider:

• Think about how you could make a buried cache. Obviously you will need to remember where you buried your stash of supplies and you will also have to consider its location (ie: you don't want to place it where development could inadvertently dig up your stuff). You need to make sure that the elements (water, vermin, etc) can not get to your stuff, and that it is easy enough to retrieve your stuff when you need to get it.
• How can you spread your stuff out so you don't have one huge stash of stuff that could be easily looted. Stores make great places to loot after a disaster because there are shelves and shelves of goods just sitting there. It would be a very different situation if people had to go from place to place to acquire only a can or two--it may not be worth their effort.
• Look around your house. After a disaster you don't want your place (home or BOL) to look like the Taj Mahal when everyone else has nothing. How can you make you place look, as a friend says, like a Romanian orphanage--very sparse and bleak--when you actually have all of the stuff you need to survive for quite a good long time? If no one has electricity and your house it lit up like a Christmas tree, this will bring people to your door. If people don't have heat and you have a nice bonfire going complete with lots of smoke signaling your location, how will you conceal this? If people break into your garage, will they see walls and walls of food? How about if you have false walls that can conceal your stuff and hidden space in the attic in which to store the stuff you want to keep away from others? The idea is to make your place to look like every other place so you don't draw unnecessary attention to yourself, even though you may have enough stuff to weather a nuclear winter. You want to look like you are in the same situation as everyone else.
• Some of the basics for hiding your stuff: you want hiding places that aren't very obvious. You want an easy way to store your stuff in these hiding places or you may get lazy and not use the places because of the difficulty of access. You want places that won't be inadvertently disturbed (if you hide gold in the lining of an old jacket and the spouse donates it to the Goodwill you're going to have a problem). You want a place where you can un-cache your stuff without bringing much attention to yourself. You want to practice caching and un-cashing your stuff; the more easily and inconspicuously you can do this, the better.
• Keep your caches secret, even from the kids. Hopefully you can trust your spouse and if anything ever happens to you at least the spouse will know where your caches are but your kids are a different story. They often talk with their friends, tell them secrets, and can inadvertently spill the info on your caches which could come back to haunt you. Don't tell your friends or family either. If and when you need to help them, you can, but bragging about your stash of food/firearms/cash will bring you nothing but trouble.
• Get creative. With some caveats. While it would be nice to post a list of locations that would make great places to stash your stuff, once this is done it becomes the looters handbook, which is why you will see articles about caching your stuff, but you won't see much specific info about where you should do this. So it is up to you to get creative and come up with your own cache locations. I would warn against caching your stuff in dangerous locations (ie: anywhere around water, electricity, extreme heights, etc) because while it may deter the looters, it could injure or kill you.

It is hard to think that all of your hard earned preps which you have taken care (and cash) to develop, could be taken away when you most need them. While I am not saying that you shouldn't use force to protect what is yours, using force should be your last resort for a variety of reasons. It is much better to blend in with everyone else, hide what you have, bring out what you need in small quantities so as not to bring attention to yourself, and save yourself the problems associated with defending large supplies of stuff that everyone else wants to get their hands on. After all, if people will take food from starving orphans, they would probably think nothing of doing this to you.

Hiding Stuff Around the House--20 Places

Say you need to hide something, either to retrieve it later or to pass it off to someone else at a later time. Let's say the item is small such as money, a document, a key, or a thumb drive. With a ziploc bag and some duct tape, you can hide the item in the following locations (just remember where you hid it):

1. Behind the wall switch plate or electrical outlet plate (take off the plate and stick it on the back side of the adjoining 2x4).
2. Inside the case of your desktop computer or television.
3. Under the carpet and pad (be sure to restretch the carpet back to the tack strips).
4. Inside the exterior mainline drain clean out access port.
5. Buried in a sealed plastic container in a non-obvious place in your yard (use GPS coordinates to remember exactly where it is).
6. Remove the toilet, stick it up under the toilet in the crevice, replace the wax ring, and reinstall it.
7. In the attic under the insulation.
8. In the heavy seam of a blanket (re-sew the seam of course).
9. In the hollow leg of of a modern desk (some are made with hollow steel tubes).
10. Inside the closet perched above the sliding door rollers.
11. Buried in the dirt of a potted plant (not under the plant pot but buried in the dirt, the larger the plant the better).
12. The kids have a large gumball machine; when it is full of gumballs you cant tell what is hidden in the middle of it (keep the gumballs full).
13. Underneath drawers (drawer under the over, freezer drawers, etc).
14. In a bottle of shampoo, can of paint, etc. (you may want to use a plastic heat sealing device for absolute water-proofness).
15. In between the slices of bread in a frozen loaf in the freezer or in the center of a frozen chicken.
16. In a custom-made collar for your Rottweiler.
17. Under your 150 gallon aquarium (before you fill it with water).
18. In a decoration (we have those big bottles of decorative vegetables in water that do noting more but sit on the counter and be decorative).
19. In an old hollowed out tree.
20. In an old shoe.

All of these places are temporary of course, and you also need to be careful that the place you hide them item doesn't walk away, be given away, be thrown away, or be stolen.
Here's some more ideas...http://www.cockeyed.com/lessons/hiding/hiding2.shtml