The diving expert drafted in to help police in the search for missing mother-of-two Nicola Bulley has said if he does not find her in the river today he believes she is not in there and that a third party is involved.
Ms Bulley, 45, vanished while walking her dog near the River Wyre in Lancashire on January 27. Police said their primary theory is that she fell into the river, despite not having found any evidence of this.
Forensic expert Peter Faulding, founder of Specialist Group International whose team joined the search yesterday, said he has never seen a case so unusual in his 20 years of working in the field. 'We just don't know, we're looking for an invisible person at the moment and we've got no idea.'
He said his 'gut instinct' tells him that Ms Bulley is not in the water.
'I personally think if I rule this stretch of river out today where we're working I don't think she's here, I think there's probably a third party involved,' Mr Faulding told Good Morning Britain on Tuesday.
He told MailOnline 'there is a possibility that she has been abducted, but there is no information on that.'
Mr Faulding said he spoken with Ms Bulley's 'distraught' husband last night to keep him updated on the search.
He said: 'I spoke to Paul last night and asked him if she had any enemies, any stalkers, the normal questions you would ask. And nothing, he said no. And she was totally normal that day when she left, nothing out the ordinary.'
He told LBC: 'It was a totally normal day, she didn't take much with her, and she's just disappeared like she's been taken by aliens.
'There are detectives working all hours trying to piece the missing parts of the jigsaw puzzle that no-one - nobody knows where Nicola is.
'The river has got to be searched, police can't ignore the river, but in the background there's lots of other good work going on. This is just one part of a huge police operation.'
Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Mr Faulding said: 'Normally when we deal with a drowning victim, they are where they go down.
'I would expect to find Nicola in the water right in front of the bench where she went down. She would not have moved, maybe two or three feet.'
He added: 'This is so strange. In my 20-odd years of doing this, I have worked on hundreds of cases, I have never seen anything so unusual.'
The expert also told TalkTV: 'I personally don't think she's in the river, that's just my gut instinct at this point.'
The diving expert fears Ms Bulley's mobile phone discovered on the bench next to the river was left as a 'decoy.'
Forensic expert Mr Faulding says the case has left him 'truly baffled' and says if she had drowned her body would have been found by now.
Former undercover detective for the Met Police Peter Bleksley spoke on This Morning about why he believes Fitbit data is key in the disappearance case.
'Fitbits are a device largely worn on your wrist which will track physical activity, heart rate and particular steps whether you're walking, running or swimming - as some of the more expensive ones are waterproof to a depth of 50m,' he explained.
'Let me just hypothesise for a moment please, as opposed to speculate. Say for example I was sitting here wearing a Fitbit for the minutes this conversation was going ahead. That Fitbit would show that I was static, that I wasn't moving. If I then after some minutes being still get up and take just a few steps to walk off set, before becoming static again, those few steps would be synced to a phone or iPad.
'So if the police have looked at the Fitbit, which they say they have, and they have Fitbit data which might support their theory Nicola has gone into the water, I really don't think it's unreasonable to make that public.'
He argued that police police have 'nothing to go on' and suggested that a third-party, who may have left her phone behind as a decoy, is involved.
This comes after he noted that had she fallen in the water, her dog - which was found at the scene - would have caused a disturbance.
Ms Bulley's friend Jill Peck today said they are taking things 'one step at a time, one day at a time, and trying not to speculate on what has happened.'
Speaking to Lorraine, she said: 'Nikki is one of the school mums, one of us, very kind and giving, very loving, and her children - her girls - are her world.
'She thinks a lot about family and spent a lot of time trying to make memories with family.
'She is just a lovely person, it's absolutely devastating.
'It's a living nightmare for them (her girls), they need their mum, every day it seems to be getting harder and harder. For Paul to try keep things going, it's very difficult.'
She added: 'We want facts, we want dashcam footage, we really do appeal for the smallest amount of factual information that could help us so please come forward with what you have. We are trying to stay positive and we're a team.'
Mr Faulding and his team of expert divers are back on site today after scouring 'three or four miles' of river until darkness fell last night.
He revealed that today the team will 'focus our search upstream in the non tidal section above the weir, and about one mile upstream including past the bench where Nicola's phone was found.'
The group, which is based in Dorking, Surrey, and has been volunteering its services free of charge, has been using specialist sonar equipment to look for Ms Bulley in the River Wyre.
After spending Monday searching 'three or four miles' of the river until it grew dark alongside Lancashire Police, Mr Faulding told the PA news agency: 'It's a negative search, no signs of Nicola'.
He added that his team will look through another stretch of river today 'towards where Nicola went originally missing'.
Mr Faulding said earlier this week that not enough factors added up, in his opinion, to believe that Ms Bulley fell into the water.
'We dealt with a drowning a couple of years ago where a gentleman went into a river and Ripley, his dog, was screaming by the riverbank when we got there,' he told GB News earlier this week.
'When we arrived it was howling, and literally pointing exactly where he was. He stayed with his owner.
'The phone on the bench, I mean, you have to ask, normally someone would have a phone in their hand especially if they were walking around.'
Mr Faulding, who describes himself as a 'human mole', also argued that with the amount of searching that has occurred in the River Wyre, Ms Bulley's body likely 'would have been found by now.'
'Normally when a person drowns, if they are left a number of days they don't move very far,' he explained. 'This is not a fast tidal river. So I would have expected her to be found by the police divers by now.
'It's as clear as that. And you know, none of this rings right to me. My belief is she's not in not in the river at all.'
He also said it 'feels odd' that no one spoke of the fact that Ms Bulley was not wearing clothes that would have absorbed water quickly, there were no marks at the scene and that not one person heard screams.
Additionally, he criticised the fact that the location has not remained cordoned off.
He said: 'People have been walking past the bench. There's no police tape up.
'This would normally be sealed off as a crime scene so potentially crime scene investigators can go in and see if there are any microfibres, evidence, slip marks down the bank etc and I don't believe that has actually happened here.'
The underwater search for Ms Bulley is continuing for its 11th day today following a fresh appeal by her partner, who said her two daughters 'desperately' miss her and 'need her back'.
In a statement released yesterday through Lancashire Police, her partner Paul Ansell said: 'I have two little girls who miss their mummy desperately and who need her back.
'If anyone has any information which could help find Nicola, I urge them to get in touch with the police and help us provide the answers we all so badly need.'
Mr Ansell added: 'We are also really grateful to Peter and his team from SGI for coming up and helping support the work of Lancashire Police as they continue their investigation.'
Investigators have searched the river and riverbank all the way to the sea, using search teams, sonar, search dogs, drone, helicopter and CCTV.
Yesterday, Lancashire Police released two new images of Ms Bulley on the day she went missing, when she dropped her two daughters, aged six and nine, off at school and then went on her usual dog walk alongside the river.
Her phone, still connected to a Teams call for her job as a mortgage adviser, was found on a bench on a steep riverbank overlooking the water, along with the dog lead, with the dog harness on the ground.
'Our working hypothesis remains that Nicola sadly fell into the river for some reason, but we remain open minded, and we are continuing to carry out a huge number of inquiries,' police said.
The force is confident, after reviewing CCTV, that Ms Bulley did not leave the field near the river via Rowanwater – either through the site itself or the piece of land at the side – and she did not return from the fields along Allotment Lane or via the path at the rear of the Grapes pub onto Garstang Road.
'We have also spoken to numerous witnesses, analysed Nicola's mobile phone and Fitbit and searched the derelict house on the other side of the river as well as any empty caravans in the vicinity,' police added.
'We have received a huge amount of information into the enquiry, all of which is being looked at, and we are extremely grateful to everyone who has assisted our investigation so far.'
Officers are now focusing on the river path leading from the fields back to Garstang Road, and urged drivers and cyclists who travelled that way on January 27, as well as anyone with CCTV or Ring Doorbell footage, to contact them.
Dogs are believed to be able to find the last location of their owners through their sense of smell.
Experts advise those searching should go back to where the dog was last spotted because it will backtrack to its owner and their scent.
A dog's sense of smell is 10,000 times more powerful than a human and can pick up locational scent.
If its home is far away and the dog can't find its owner, it will get worried and try to return home to somewhere familiar.
In certain cases, some dogs will return home along or attempt to follow their missing owner, according to Colin Tennant, director of the Cambridge Institute of Dog Behaviour and Training, who wrote in The Sunday Times.
Dogs cannot, however, process what is happening if a human falls into water. In this case, the dog might run along the bank looking for eye-contact or stop on the bank as the last place of detection.
Mr Faulding, who previously described the Lancashire force's operation to find Ms Bulley as a 'mess', praised the efforts of police divers thus far.
He was also part of a team that surveyed the area by helicopter yesterday to survey the landscape.
The forensic expert continued: 'We are putting the maximum into this. We just want to help the family. The more hands on deck, the better.
'There is a missing part of a jigsaw that cannot be completed. It is all a bit odd.'
It comes after a huge presence of emergency services were spotted combing an area near Shard Bridge last night - around seven miles from where the mother was last seen.
A spokesperson for Lancashire Police said yesterday: 'We were called at 5.51pm today to Shard Road, Hambleton, in relation to the search for Nicola Bulley who is missing from St Michael's on Wyre.
'The search of the sand and surrounding area near to Shard Bridge by Lancashire Police and the Coastguard proved negative.'
Dive teams worked into the evening yesterday to try and locate the missing woman, but family and friends remain unconvinced that she was ever in the water.
Emma White, a friend of the missing mother, said yesterday that she hopes the specialist underwater teams will uncover nothing – because then it rules out the police's theory that she fell into the river.
Ms White said they were pleased Mr Faulding's team are assisting police – but are keeping everything crossed that they don't find anything.
She told ITV's Good Morning Britain on Monday: 'We hope they uncover nothing, like the police have done for the last ten days, and we hope Nicola is not in that river.'
Ms White said she believes Mr Faulding's equipment is more sophisticated than the kit police have.
'Peter's here, working with Lancashire Police, and we just have to have everything crossed that the search continues and Nicola is not in that river,' she said.
'We don't want to undermine all the work police have done but when you get that glimmer of hope and you look at what the company does, his records and what he has achieved then you think we need to get this expert here – and we can't thank you enough for bringing the team down.'
Ms White, who has known Ms Bulley for ten years, said the police theory that she fell into the Wyre 'is based on a theory, with no actual evidence to support it'.
She told Radio 4's Today programme: 'The hypothesis is based on limited information – I've said before it's a theory, and we sadly can't base life on a theory.'
She thanked the public for their support and kindness shown towards Ms Bulley's family, and said at the core of their rescue campaign are 'two little girls who want their mummy'.
Meanwhile, a friend of Ms Bulley shared 11 key details about her disappearance in a Facebook post following the 45-year-old's disappearance.
In the list, Tilly Ann wrote that the only CCTV camera at a residential caravan park 'that would have seen Nikki' is not working.
She also said Ms Bulley is 'an incredibly strong swimmer', and that her dog Willow who she was walking at the time was completely dry when found.
She wrote that the dog would never have a harness on during the familiar walk, after speculation about why Willow's harness was removed. When the dog was found, it was very close to the bench with the harness on the floor.
She added that her friend would often put her phone on loud-speaker when talking. Ms Bulley's phone was discovered close to the river bank and she had been on a conference call before she vanished.
The family friend thanked those who had shared their support and contributed to the search for Nicola - saying it had 'created such a comfort to Nikki's family'.
Detailing the impact on Paul, she wrote that he is struggling to hold back his pain, but is focusing on his children and does not want to worry them 'more than they already are'.
After detectives confirmed Ms Bulley's dog was found dry, a canine expert said the dog could have panicked and gone into 'fight or flight' mode.
Another expert explained that dogs, who cannot find their owner, will often circle the area they were last present.
Writing in The Times, Colin Tennant, director of the Cambridge Institute of Dog Behaviour and Training, said: 'A dog can help you find the last location of its owner through its sense of smell.
'If people lose their dog, the advice I always give to them is to stay in the exact position you were when you last saw the dog, because it will always backtrack to you.
'So if somebody fell in a river, the dog would always tend to circulate in that area, because that's where all the owner's scents are, on the ground and vegetation.'
He added: 'It will often migrate back to the last spot where it was with the owner because they're its pack leader.'
The expert added that usually if the dog can't find its owner, and the home is nearby, it will often run back home.
Addressing speculation that the fact Ms Bulley's dog was found dry meant that the mother did not fall into the river, dog behaviour expert Ross McCarthy says that is not necessarily the case.
He told the Express: 'It all depends on the dog's association with water, and their relationship with the owner and so on, as to whether they would jump in.
'Some would through play or investigation and others would just mooch about on the side and some would panic at the strange situation.'
He said that, just like humans, dogs go into fight or flight mode.
'Presumably this dog has been walked along the canal and water often and been discouraged from going in or naturally just avoided going in,' he added.
On Saturday, police released an image of a potential witness, wearing a yellow rain jacket and pushing a pram, who was in the area at the time of Ms Bulley's disappearance.
That evening they said they were 'pleased to say that the woman came forward very quickly' and were treating her as a 'key witness' in the investigation.
Officers believe she was in the same area as Ms Bulley on Friday January 27.
Within minutes of the appeal being made public, a relative confirmed the woman was 'on the phone' to police.
The Facebook post by Lancashire Police added: 'Our enquiries to find Nicola are extensive and will include speaking to as many members of the public as possible.'
Photos of police scouring the River Wyre have been released as they continue to search.
A line of inquiry relates to a Fitbit Ms Bulley was wearing on the morning she vanished.
Police hope to use technology to help track her whereabouts via the smart watch.
Fitbits are also capable of monitoring a heart rate and could provide vital clues relating to Ms Bulley's last known movements before she disappeared.
Police are still trying to piece together about ten minutes from the morning Ms Bulley disappeared.
Lancashire Police Superintendent Sally Riley told The Sunday Times: 'This is a low-crime area. It's genuinely a safe, tight-knit area, people look out for each other. A third-party [being] involved that we haven't yet had sightings of, we haven't caught on CCTV or dash-cam or all the other things I've mentioned, is just not likely.'
This does not mean they've entirely ruled out other scenarios.
Police are particularly interested in speaking with people who may have been travelling near Blackpool Lane and Garstang Road between 9am and 10am on Friday 27 January, the day Ms Bulley vanished.
'Whilst you may not think that you hold any relevant information, it is really important that we gather as much footage as possible from the area that morning so we can review every piece meticulously to establish whether Nicola can be seen,' police said.
'We know from the footage we are currently reviewing, that this is a busy road, particularly at that time in the morning.
'There will be many people who were in that area at the time who may not think they can help, however we would urge you not to make that decision yourself and to come forward so we can have as much material as possible to assist the investigation.'
The 45-year-old dropped her daughters - aged six and nine - off at school in the morning before walking her dog, Willow, in St Michael's on Wyre, Lancashire.
Lancashire Police have said the mortgage adviser, from nearby Inskip, had been walking along a path beside the River Wyre just before 9am.
She was seen by a dog walker who knew her at around 8.50am, and their pets interacted briefly before they parted ways, according to the force.
At 8.53am, Ms Bulley sent an email to her boss, before logging on to a Microsoft Teams call at 9.01am. She was seen by a second witness at 9.10am - the last known sighting.
By 9.30am, Ms Bulley's Teams call had ended, but her phone stayed connected to the call. Approximately five minutes later, another dog walker found her phone on a bench beside the river, with Willow darting between the two.
At 10.50am, Ms Bulley's family and the school attended by her children were told about her disappearance.
Lancashire Constabulary launched an investigation into Ms Bulley's whereabouts and appealed for witnesses.
Lancashire Constabulary deployed drones, helicopters and police search dogs as part of the major missing person operation.
They were assisted by Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service, as well as Bowland Pennine Mountain Rescue team and the North West Underwater Search Team.
Local residents held a meeting at the village hall to organise a search for Ms Bulley at 10.30am on Sunday, according to reports from The Mirror, and around 100 people joined the search.
Police urged volunteers to exercise caution, describing the river and its banks as 'extremely dangerous' and saying that activity in these areas presented 'a genuine risk to the public'.
Superintendent Sally Riley from Lancashire Constabulary said police were 'keeping a really open mind about what could have happened', and that they were not treating Ms Bulley's disappearance as suspicious.
Lancashire Constabulary spoke with a potential witness - a man who had been walking a small white fluffy dog near the River Wyre at the time of Ms Bulley's disappearance.
Her family released a statement saying they had been 'overwhelmed by the support' in their community, and that her daughters were 'desperate to have their mummy back home safe'.
Ms Bulley's parents, Ernest and Dot Bulley, spoke to The Mirror about the 'horror' they faced over the possibility of never seeing her again.
Her father told the newspaper: 'We just dread to think we will never see her again, if the worst came to the worst and she was never found, how will we deal with that for the rest of our lives.'
Lancashire Constabulary spoke with a second witness who they had identified with the help of the public using CCTV - but they told police they did not have any further information to aid their inquiry.
Officers from the North West Police Underwater and Marine support unit searched the area close to where Ms Bulley's mobile phone was found, while police divers scoured the River Wyre.
Ms Bulley's family appealed to the public for help tracing her. Speaking with Sky News, her sister Louise Cunningham said: 'There has got to be somebody who knows something and all we are asking is, no matter how small or big, if there is anything you remember that doesn't seem right, then please reach out to the police. Get in touch and get my sister back.'
Ms Bulley's father said that his family hoped their interview would 'spark a light' that would lead to her being found.
Lancashire Police said they were working on the hypothesis that Ms Bulley may have fallen into the River Wyre.
Supt Riley urged against speculation, but said it was 'possible' that an 'issue' with Ms Bulley's dog may have led her to the water's edge.
She urged the public to look out for items of clothing Ms Bulley was last seen wearing, and gave an extensive list.
Ms Bulley's friends also shared heartfelt appeals via television interviews, including Emma White, who told the BBC that Ms Bulley's daughters were continually asking where she was.
Friends reveal police are hoping to utilise Ms Bulley's Fitbit data to help track her.
A new appeal is issued for a 'woman in yellow' to come forward. The woman was pictured walking in the same area as Ms Bulley, pushing a stroller with a young child. The woman came forward shortly afterwards.
Ms Bulley's partner cast doubt over the police theory she had fallen in the river. Mr Ansell says he will never give up hope of finding her.
Police confirm there is 'no evidence' Ms Bulley fell in the river, despite maintaining it is their lead theory.
A close family friend, named Tilly Ann, shared 11 key facts about her friend's disappearance to Facebook.
Police are pictured scouring the riverbank as they continue to search for Ms Bulley.
