Man Goes Missing While Skiing In New York, Is Found Six Days Later In Sacramento

On Feb. 7, Constantinos “Danny” Filippidis was reported missing after he disappeared from a ski trip to Whiteface Mountain in upstate New York. Oddly, his car was still in the parking lot and all his belongings were intact at the ski lodge. Department of Environmental Conservation forest rangers, New York state police, and resort staff headed up the search that grew to include the New York state Emergency Management and Fire Prevention Department, several of Filippidis’s coworkers, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Yet nobody could find the Candian skier.

Until he turned up in Sacramento this Tuesday, alive and unharmed, six days after going missing. Sacramento County Sheriff’s deputies found Filippidis around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday morning by the car rental zone at Sacramento International Airport. He was wearing the same clothes he wore when he went missing, had a credit card and $1,000 in cash, did not know where he was or, and remembered very little about the previous few days. He said he thought he had sustained a head injury of some sort, and that he made his way across the country in a “big rig” before being dropped off by a “McDonald’s near a tall building” Monday night.

Filippidis might not have been found so quickly had he not purchased a cell phone at some point. He called his wife, who persuaded him to call 911, which eventually led Sacramento authorities to him. “He was very nonchalant, and kind of out of it,” a spokesman said, “Our officers were adamant to take him to the hospital to have him treated.”

Despite the very odd circumstances of his disappearance and reemergence, authorities do not believe he was drugged or kidnapped. He will apparently return back to the Lake Placid area soon as the New York state police department continues investigating his case.