Three years ago in the early spring, two hunters from South America, Louis and Franco, traveled to the Alaska Peninsula for an expensive guided wolf and bear combination hunt. Dropped off by a bush pilot on the outskirts of Katmai, the pair hacked out a ten-foot pocket in the dense willows to shelter their tent from the wind before climbing a high shelf to glass a long valley below. From their elevated vantage point at dusk, they spotted what initially appeared to be two black bears and a massive brown bear chasing each other where a larger river meets a smaller creek. That night, Louis’s sleep was repeatedly shattered by bellowing howls and screams that sounded far too deep and powerful for any wolf, followed by a fleeting glimpse of eye shine in the distance outside camp.
Just before daybreak, Franco woke Louis to something moving outside. Louis crawled out with his .375 H&H rifle and caught large eye shine forty yards out in the tundra before a dark figure crashed through the willows and was gone. Later that morning, Louis maxed out his rifle scope on the valley and watched a black figure repeatedly tumbling, standing upright on two legs, sprinting, and darting back into the trees. Back at camp, heavy footsteps began pacing back and forth directly behind the willows—on two feet, not four, Franco insisted. Circling around to confront what they still assumed was a bear, the hunters were stunned when an upright, pitch-black figure well over seven feet tall rose to its full height barely thirty-five feet away. The slender, basketball-player-built figure grunted at the startled men before running uphill toward the shelf they had glassed from the day before.
Retreating to their tent in shock, Franco began reciting prayers with his rosary while Louis kept watch through his scope on a black shape crouched on the hillside. Heading back up the game trail to investigate, the men stopped and looked up toward the ridge—only to see three upright figures standing in plain sight roughly 220 yards above them: a large, lighter-brown creature alongside two smaller, dark ones staring down at them. Overwhelmed by a sudden wave of spiritual exhaustion and dread, the men retreated to camp and prayed as screams and breaking brush echoed around them. For the next three days until their pilot returned, the shaken hunters stayed inside their tent taking shifts on watch, and the experience ruined the rest of their Alaskan hunt.
