I wonder if George may have wandered from his home due to Alzheimers Disease or other similar memory issues? Could he be living among the homeless? There is an unidentified male victim of the Nov 2018 Camp Fire:
CA - CA - Butte Co, Male, Victim #53 of Camp Fire, In Burned Home on Schwyhart Ln, Concow, Nov 2018
The location is about 80 miles from Nevada City:
خرائط Google
I can provide some very little additional context here for the curious. Note that most of this comes second-hand through my parents or my aunt.
George was my paternal uncle, the second-eldest of six kids, and a Santa Clara Valley native. Our family is not particularly close and I had not seen him in person for many years at the time that he went missing. Although he owned 40 acres outside of Grass Valley, he chose to live in my grandmother's garage in Santa Clara until the time of her death, at which point my father sold the house to distribute inheritance among his siblings. George was a bit of a hoarder and refused to vacate; my parents evicted him and hired a third-party to clear all of his trash out of the garage when he failed to do so. They weren't in much contact after that, if any, and I did not see him again.
He was a bit volatile and somewhat paranoid about the government. He had traveled to China on multiple occasions and had a wife over there. His eventual plan was supposedly to bring her over and live off-grid on his 40 acres. He was in weekly contact with my aunt and used to walk into town from his property on the regular, so people did notice in fairly short order when he went missing, but what became of him remains a mystery.
His wife was contacted, but apparently refused to speak with the family, which caused some suspicion and controversy over the idea that he was in China. However, there is no record of him leaving the country and the last my aunt had heard, he had misplaced his passport and was unable to locate it.
Another theory, more plausible, is that he decided to take a walk about his property and either had an unfortunate encounter with a bear or cougar or lost his footing on the steep/uneven terrain and took a fatal fall before being carried off by such. The property was searched; he was not found.
He did not have Alzheimers or any other memory issues or forms of dementia to the best of my knowledge, nor do such conditions run in the family as far as I am aware. He was however, mostly blind from diabetes, for which he refused treatment for many years. This has raised a great deal of doubt regarding how he managed to travel any distance on his own, since he was unable to drive.
Although he could be impulsive at times, I think it very unlikely that he would have been some 70 miles away and in the vicinity of Paradise at the time of the Camp Fire; he had been missing for the better part of a year at that time.
As of today, he has been missing for more than three years and is generally presumed dead by family, though I privately hope that he will appear out of nowhere one day like nothing happened and laugh at us for having thought him deceased, just to give the story an even more eccentric ending.
