ScubaNurse758
Contributor
Although I normally tend to just read along and enjoy the banter on here, I feel like throwing my 2 psi in today..... I think that anyone who has an unbiased view of this situation and can intelligently discern between fact and assumption can easily come to the conclusion that Ben McDaniel is not in Vortex Spring. With that being said, I also think that the argument that he would never disappear because he knows how bad it would hurt his family is unbelievable too. While my specialty is not psychological in nature, I have dealt with this on several occasions and can state for a fact that a diseased mind, be it chronic or acute, will do things and make decisions that have no regard for anyone else in the world, be it friend or family. In my mind, someone who had all the skeletons in the closet that Ben seemed to have would be the perfect candidate to "snap" and do something unbelievable, such as stage a death and simply leave it all behind. The more I read about how his log books were kept and the large amounts of research and highlighting and reading he had been doing on caving seems in hindsight to lend itself more to a disjointed and manic thought process than a calculated and reasoning study of a subject. I do strongly hope that the recent death at Vortex had no relation to the reward for finding Ben and that no one will attempt such a foolish thing. I do hope that the McDaniel family will someday be able to come to grips with the fact that Ben is NOT in that cave and find some type of closure, if such a thing can be found in this situation. As had already been stated many times before, I thank the cave divers who took great risk to search for him and I feel they did a very conclusive job of ruling out where he is not. Sorry if I rambled, just a few thoughts that have been rattling around in my head for a while!
Jordan.
Jordan.
