It’s been one year since 41‑year‑old Valerie Elder Smiley vanished without a trace. Her vehicle, a large red SUV, is missing as well, and investigators know only that her cell phone last pinged in this area. “You never know,” one searcher says. “We’re going to scan out here, put the boat in, and see what we can find.” Before long, they spot something underwater: “Oh, there is the car. I think it’s… It does have a tag, dude. It has a tag on it.” This, they note soberly, is exactly the kind of car that often gets stolen and dumped.

They are determined not to give up hope until Valerie is found. You might call them “scuba detectives,” though that barely scratches the surface of what they do. What began as a casual hobby—cleaning up trash from local waterways—has evolved into a mission of solving real‑life mysteries. It has also become a powerful public service. Jeremy Sides and Adam Brown now travel across the country searching for answers in cold cases.

The work they do is remarkable. The gift of closure to grieving families, as one commentator puts it, is absolutely priceless. Today, their journey brings them to Union City, Georgia, to search for the missing person case of Valerie Smiley. She disappeared in June 2024 and was last seen driving a 2004 red Ford Expedition.

It’s a strange, puzzling case. Valerie was from Chattanooga, Tennessee, yet her digital trail led far south. According to investigators, she was tracked through several apps as her phone moved down toward Fayetteville and eventually to Union City. Her phone’s last known ping was in this area. That’s why Jeremy and Adam are here, hoping that somewhere beneath the surface of a pond or lake lies the key to what happened.

Valerie’s disappearance has haunted her family for a year. The 41‑year‑old wife and mother of four boys was last seen leaving Chattanooga on the evening of June 28th. She had planned to attend her twin sons’ baseball game that night but never arrived. It was the last time her family saw her. Reporter Madison Sims spoke with her loved ones, who say they refuse to give up hope until she is found.

On June 28, 2024, Valerie got into her red Ford Expedition and pulled away from her home in Chattanooga. The plan was simple: go to the game, cheer on her boys, and come home. But she never made it to the ballpark. Later that night, concerned relatives started to worry when they couldn’t find her anywhere.

One family member went to the house to check on Valerie. The home was empty—no sign of Valerie, no sign of her big red SUV. Her husband, Patrick, immediately began searching for her. “By the time I made it home, it was around maybe close to 10:30, 11:00 at night,” he recalls. Once they realized something was seriously wrong, they called the police and reported her missing, then waited for officers to arrive to take an official missing person report.

The next day, police traced her phone to Fayetteville, Georgia. On the following day, records showed her phone roughly 30 minutes away in Union City, Georgia. That movement raised disturbing questions. Why would a married mother of four leave Chattanooga and travel this far without telling anyone? Was someone else with her—or using her phone?

Out on the road, Jeremy is joined by fellow searcher “Exploring With Nug.” Together, they try to piece together what might have happened. They go over the theories: was this an accident, or does it point to foul play? The case, they agree, has several elements that feel like foul play. “It definitely reads like foul play,” one of them says, “but we could speculate all day and not really know.” What they do know is that Valerie was last seen in Chattanooga, her car is missing—a large Ford Expedition—and her cell phone last pinged here.

They don’t know exactly which cell tower handled that final ping, but they do know Union City isn’t very large. “Luckily, Union City is not that big,” they remark. The city has only a handful of ponds—enough to raise suspicion but few enough that they can realistically search them all. The first pond they select looks particularly promising.

“This one is perfect,” Jeremy says as they arrive. It offers easy access and is tucked away behind a neighborhood, encircled by a road. It’s a public neighborhood pond, quiet and secluded, the kind of place a vehicle could be driven into under cover of darkness. If it’s deep enough, they think, there’s a real chance they might find something. They launch their remote‑controlled sonar boat, a tool that has already helped them find multiple submerged vehicles recently—including, in the past month alone, two vehicles that contained missing people.

Their hope is simple but weighty: to find Valerie, or at least find her car, and give her family long‑awaited answers. “They’re desperate for answers,” Jeremy says. “It’s such a strange case and they just want to know where she is.” With that, they head to the water, ready to begin the methodical search.

They set up their sonar boat and Jeremy powers up his Triple Tech tablet, which happens to be the sponsor of that day’s video. He explains that it’s a rugged, outdoor‑ready device—waterproof, heavy‑duty, and, most importantly, extremely bright in direct sunlight. “Even on the low setting, you can see it clear as day,” he notes, making it ideal for drones and underwater sonar. He mentions that he’ll leave a link for viewers interested in one and emphasizes that it’s gear for serious users.

With the equipment ready, they ease the sonar boat onto the water. First, they need to determine if the pond is deep enough to hide a vehicle. Out in the middle, it appears deeper, but the edges are uncertain. The depth readings flicker on the screen: three feet… four feet. Jeremy’s hopes dip. “Oh man, starting to get sad. I was hoping it’d drop off,” he says. They need at least five or six feet to conceal a large SUV.

They consider the layout of the pond. There’s a road running right alongside one section, which is exactly where a car would likely enter the water. The depth readings slowly increase. It’s getting deeper, but still not ideal. Jeremy decides to run the sonar around the entire pond but suspects the key area is that road‑adjacent stretch. “Usually cars don’t go too far off the edge in a pond,” he explains. “You don’t have a lot of space to drive.”

An Expedition is a huge vehicle, and he doubts it could roll, float, and drift far into the center before hitting the bottom. Still, every pond is different. The sonar passes over a post and other small objects, but nothing that looks like a full‑sized SUV. In the end, this pond turns up nothing. “All right, this is clear, surprisingly,” Jeremy says. “We’ll move on to the next one.”

The next location is another pond, this one along a curve in the road. At first glance, it doesn’t make a lot of sense as a dump site, but given the limited search area, they can’t afford to skip it. Jeremy comments that the area isn’t very busy and that they might as well check. Once again, they launch the sonar.

The water looks shallow near the edges, but farther out it begins to drop. The readings climb to seven feet. On the sonar screen, they see what appears to be a tall object—a post or a pile of rocks. It’s definitely got potential depth‑wise, especially if a car could float a little way off the bank. “I don’t see nothing, but it’s definitely got potential depending on how far out a car can float,” Jeremy notes.

They begin speculating about Valerie’s movements. No one really knows why she would have come to this spot. It doesn’t seem like a destination; more like an area she might have driven through. Her phone’s path suggests movement from Fayetteville, up through Union City, perhaps heading back toward Chattanooga. “We’re still really far south from Chattanooga,” they remind themselves. Maybe she was meeting someone, they suggest. Or maybe someone else had her phone.

Sonar searching can be a grind. They describe it as “pond hopping”—moving from one body of water to another with no guarantee of success. “You could search all day and then finally, boom, there’s a car that does not belong anywhere,” Jeremy says. Often, it seems to be at the very first or very last spot of the day when they finally make a critical find.

In this pond, they notice a small object on the far side. On sonar, it appears under ten feet long—too small to be a Ford Expedition. They get a closer look and determine it’s something man‑made but tiny, maybe three or four feet in length. It could be a boulder or a fishing habitat dropped into the water, but it’s definitely not Valerie’s SUV. Once again, they move on.

A drained battery forces them to bring the sonar boat back in, but not before they’ve thoroughly scanned that pond. The good news: the water is deep enough to hide a vehicle; the bad news: there’s nothing there. By now, they’ve checked two ponds and have about ten marked in the Union City area. There are many more water bodies closer to Atlanta, but they’re focusing on the ones that are realistically accessible by road and likely within the radius of her last phone ping.

At one of the ponds, they notice signs of a past accident. Tire marks and disturbed ground suggest that a wrecker had to back up recently, probably to remove a crashed car. “It’s a good spot that’s prone to accidents,” Jeremy points out. On their maps, they look for places where roads curve near water—prime locations where a vehicle could leave the roadway and end up submerged. The next pond they’ll search fits that profile.

The following site is another neighborhood pond sitting on a curve in the road. A few trees line the bank—some older, some newer—which tells them that a year ago, when Valerie disappeared, there may have been clear paths for a car to go in. They mention that the neighborhood reportedly has security cameras and joke that they fully expect to see large rocks placed along the edge, a deterrent to prevent cars from accidentally plunging into the water.

This pond, at least, is definitely deep enough for a vehicle. The water appears older, and the shoreline suggests it might have been widened or altered in the past. Depth readings show 11 feet, the deepest they’ve seen so far that day. As the sonar sweeps the bottom, something square appears on the screen. It looks like an object with clean edges surrounded by large rocks.

At first glance, the shape could be mistaken for a vehicle, perhaps even an Expedition. But closer passes reveal that the area is packed with big rocks. It begins to look more like a rocky slope than a submerged car. It might be remnants from building the road or nearby structures, or leftover material from a quarry. While it’s still possible a car could be nestled among the rocks, the obstacles, guardrails, and thick trees around the pond make it seem less likely that a large SUV could have gone in unnoticed.

They continue scouting the Union City area. At one point, they arrive at a large park pond surrounded by gates and fences. As they walk toward the water, they’re greeted by a noisy flock of geese—an odd but somewhat comical interruption. They joke about whether the geese are male or female, noting the markings on their heads, before refocusing on the search. This pond, like many others, may be deep enough in the middle but seems muddy and shallow near the edges. After a walk around it, they conclude it’s mostly just mud and not an ideal hiding place for a big SUV.

As the day wears on, they’ve covered most of the main ponds they identified in Union City. Another neighborhood pond catches their attention. It sits in a pleasant area with no guardrail along the road—a potential entry point for a car. The depth is unknown, so they put the boat in again. They’re running out of prime locations in this immediate area and now begin branching out farther, toward ponds that may not make perfect sense but can’t be entirely ruled out.

The sonar readings here show about seven feet of depth, enough to conceal a car under the right conditions. The bottom is muddy and sandy, which actually helps—any large object will stand out clearly against a soft, flat bed. At one point, they notice a large shadow near a drain. It might be a dirt mound or depression, but they make multiple passes. In the end, nothing matches the shape of a vehicle.

Finally, they wrap up the Union City portion of the search. They’ve scanned all the key ponds in the area and found no sign of Valerie’s Ford Expedition. It’s both frustrating and oddly reassuring. “It was deep enough,” Jeremy notes about the last pond, “but we didn’t see a thing.” They discuss possible scenarios: If foul play was involved, maybe her car was stolen and her phone carried to Union City, where it was discarded. “Maybe they realized it in Union City and dumped the phone,” they speculate. But if that’s the case, where is the SUV?

The Ford Expedition is a big vehicle. Hiding it in a small pond would require at least ten feet of water and the right entry angle. As they think it through, they begin to wonder if the car ended up elsewhere—perhaps in a river near Chattanooga, where she was last definitively known to be with the vehicle. They have searched parts of the rivers there before and found many old cars, some tied to past cases, others abandoned long ago.

“It never hurts to double check,” they remind themselves. Sonar searches can miss things—everyone makes mistakes, and river currents, debris, and limited visibility make it easy for a vehicle to slip past unnoticed. They still like Chattanooga as a primary focus area, given that it’s where Valerie and her car were last confirmed. For now, though, their day around Union City is coming to an end. They’ve cleared many locations and can say with confidence that she—and her SUV—do not appear to be in any of those ponds.

Just as they’re winding down, new information prompts a sudden change of plans. They receive word that there might be a vehicle submerged at a spot south of Lake Oconee, heading toward Augusta—roughly an hour and a half to two hours away from their current position. It’s outside the immediate search radius for Valerie’s case, but the lead is interesting enough to pursue. They decide to shift gears and investigate.

They arrive at a secluded boat ramp as the sun sinks toward the horizon. The area is quiet, rural—“pretty far out in the country,” as they describe it. Jeremy mentions he’s never been around this particular part of Georgia before. They’ve searched other lakes in the region, but this is new territory. The location’s isolation makes it a plausible place for someone to dump a car and expect it not to be found for years.

On sonar, the lake shows significant depth—21 feet, then 24 feet. The equipment returns crisp, high‑detail images of the bottom, but at first, they see nothing conclusive. There’s a lot of debris down there, a clutter of shapes that could be natural or man‑made. They spot some objects that resemble trees, which can easily mimic the outlines of cars on sonar. Awareness of these false positives makes them cautious, double‑checking from multiple angles.

Then, something else emerges on the screen. A shape appears that looks like an upside‑down boat. Nearby, another object draws their attention—this one more convincing. “That might be a car,” one of them says. Off to the right, a rectangular mass takes form. “That definitely is. That looks like one,” Jeremy remarks. They consider how it might have gotten there: perhaps it was pushed off near the road instead of at the boat ramp.

They make another pass, positioning the boat directly above the suspected vehicle. Now the contours become unmistakable. “That’s definitely a car,” they confirm. It appears to be resting on its wheels, not rolled or flipped, which can sometimes provide better access for divers and underwater drones. Another anomaly nearby looks like it could be a second vehicle, possibly upside‑down.

As they pass right over the first car, the sonar image sharpens. They can see the outline of the hood, roofline, and rear. The front has a distinctive look—what appear to be recessed headlight openings that suggest flip‑up lights. “Oh, dude, that’s like a Firebird,” one says excitedly. “It’s got the front flippy lights.” Others suggest it might be an older Corvette or a Nissan 300ZX. The sleek shape and low profile clearly mark it as a sports car, not an SUV.

They don’t have daylight to waste. Using the sonar, they mark the car’s location precisely. Once that’s done, they no longer need sunlight to find it again. Still, they want a closer look, and there’s a chance that one of the nearby shapes could be another vehicle. To get visual confirmation, they decide to deploy their underwater drone.

They bring out their Chasing M2S underwater drone, a tethered submersible they’ve come to rely on for search and recovery. Jeremy explains that it’s perfect for underwater exploration—useful for finding vehicles, evidence, or even potential human remains. He mentions that anyone interested in getting one can find a link in the video description, highlighting how crucial such tools are to their work.

They lower the drone into the lake and guide it along the tether toward the vehicle. On the live video feed, the murky green water gradually reveals shapes. At first, all they see is a line stretching into the darkness—a rope or cable running toward the car. It appears that someone else’s line is already attached to it, perhaps an anchor dropped by a fisherman who snagged the vehicle unknowingly.

Then, the car comes into view. The windshield is down, partially collapsed, and the roofline slopes toward the bow of the vehicle. Something that looks like a seatbelt or loose strap dangles near the front window. The visibility is surprisingly good, allowing them to get clear footage. The rope extends through the windshield and into the interior, suggesting someone dropped it directly into the car rather than intentionally tying it off.

The drone glides along the side of the vehicle. They can see the color now: red, though underwater it appears almost pink. “Red looks pink underwater,” they note. The wheels are steel, without visible emblems. The tires are wrinkled and “starfishing,” a term Jeremy uses to describe the way old, deflated tires spread outward under long‑term pressure at the bottom.

They maneuver the drone around to inspect the front end. The distinctive headlight arrangement becomes clearer: recessed openings that might once have housed pop‑up headlights or a similar design. It doesn’t quite match a Corvette, but it still suggests a sporty, late‑80s or early‑90s model. They speculate about various makes and models—Mitsubishi, Nissan, Chevy—trying to match the lines to cars they’ve seen before.

Moving toward the rear, they focus on the license plate. To their surprise, it’s still attached. “It does have a tag, dude. It has a tag on it,” one of them says. They think they can make out “90” on the registration decal, hinting that the car may date back to around 1990. A Georgia plate suggests it likely belonged to someone local. The presence of a license tag also raises a possibility: maybe this car has never been officially discovered or removed.

To car enthusiasts watching the footage, the shape might be instantly recognizable. To Jeremy and Adam, it looks like an old Camaro—possibly an ’80s or early ’90s Chevy Camaro IROC‑Z or similar model. The distinctive tail lights and body style support that guess. Still, they emphasize that commenters will surely have their own opinions and might identify it more precisely.

They note that there appear to be two lines running off the rear of the vehicle, reinforcing the theory that fishermen have snagged it in the past. Despite the lines, the car doesn’t seem to be part of any active investigation—when they peer inside with the drone, they see no human remains, just debris and silt. “This is the perfect type of car people steal and dump,” Jeremy observes.

Given that the car seems to have been there for decades, and that no one is inside, they suspect it was stolen long ago and driven into the lake to destroy evidence. The muddy, rocky bottom appears to have wedged the wheels against submerged logs and stones, helping to keep the vehicle from shifting. For a car that may have been underwater for more than 30 years, it’s in surprisingly solid condition.

They continue to scan the surrounding area, looking for the second suspected vehicle. The sonar’s high resolution shows a confusing jumble of trees, rocks, and debris. At one point, a large log tricked them into thinking it might be another car, but further passes reveal its true nature. In the end, it seems there’s only the one sports car in that immediate area.

As the light fades completely, they head back to shore. It’s been a long, scattered day—starting near southwest Atlanta, then moving to Union City, and finally winding up east of Atlanta, well outside the main search radius for Valerie’s case. They didn’t find her Expedition, but they did locate an old Camaro‑style sports car that had been hidden underwater for decades. And they cleared numerous ponds of suspicion, which is a crucial piece of the search process.

“Sometimes it’s the reality of searching that you just don’t find anything,” Jeremy says. “But it’s the search that matters.” By scanning and eliminating these locations, they can tell families and investigators with confidence: Valerie is not here. The ponds around Union City, as best as they can tell, hold no trace of her or her Ford Expedition.

Before signing off, Jeremy thanks viewers for watching and supporting their work. He mentions their nonprofit organization, rapidccc.org, and explains that donations go directly toward gas, equipment, food, and other costs that allow them to keep traveling and searching for missing people and lost loved ones. He encourages viewers to check out Exploring With Nug’s channel as well, where additional footage and perspectives can be found.

The day ends without the breakthrough everyone hoped for—no sign of Valerie, no definitive answers for her family. But another car has been documented, and many bodies of water have been meticulously cleared. For Jeremy, Adam, and the families following their efforts, the mission continues. As long as there are missing people and unexplained disappearances, they will keep launching their boats, dropping their drones, watching their sonar screens, and holding out hope that the next shadow on the bottom might finally bring someone home.