Fred opens with footage from his buddy Elijah, filmed a couple of seasons ago at the house where Elijah lived at the time. While working outside one night, Elijah kept catching movement in the corner of his eye that was gone whenever he looked, and pairs of eyes kept turning up in different spots. Feeling like he was being messed with, he started chucking rocks, then went inside, propped the tinted storm door open, and recorded the eyes watching him from a brushy ditch at the end of his driveway, about 80 feet away. One morning around the same time, he recorded rustling in the brush before a tree off to the right began shaking hard and was pushed over, its fibers audibly cracking. Fred points out there was no wind, and that a dead tree falling on its own doesn't shake like that.
The second story comes from Gregory, a longtime viewer, and happened about ten years ago in May during herring season near Togiak. Gregory was running a 22-foot aluminum skiff for a tender anchored near Pinnacle Rock, not far from Round Island. When the tender had mechanical trouble, he was sent for a mechanic on a backup 25-horse kicker. Fighting the current and a weather system with gusts of 60 to 75 mph, he was blown ashore short of Togiak. He pulled the skiff up, set an anchor line, and hunkered down in the brush with a handheld radio and a .357, listening to a gurgling, guttural growl he took for an injured sea lion. Across the brush he spotted a rusty, auburn-colored mound that didn't match anything around it.
Just after a catch boat radioed that its skiff was on the way, Gregory pushed through the brush to put what he thought was a hurt sea lion out of its misery. From a small rise he saw that the mound was the rump of something lying pancake-flat on the ground. It huffed, rose onto all fours and then stood, swaying and looking down at him from 20 to 30 feet away, with a hairless, wrinkled face the color of wet cement, a wide jaw and black eyes, unfazed by the wind. Gregory raised the pistol without firing and called out "hey bear," and it answered with a growl he felt vibrate up from the soles of his feet before it walked off. He tumbled down a slope, lost the .357, and ran back to the beach, coming out about 100 yards from where he had gone in, and called for help as he watched it climb a distant hillside. A skiff from the catch boat towed him off the beach. Both the Dillingham captain who picked him up and Gregory's own boss told him to keep quiet about it.
