For one afternoon in the capital city, the usual talk of state politics and cruise ship timetables took a detour into interdimensional portals, glowing orbs, and vanishing planes.

Every year in the United States, roughly 600,000 people are reported missing. A subset of those cases — known as “Missing 411” — has fueled theories about cryptids, portals, and government cover-ups.

Missing 411 pulls people in because it turns disappearances in the wild into something bigger — a hidden pattern, a cover-up, ...