In 1997, an experienced bush pilot flew a wealthy, inexperienced hunting client west of Iliamna toward the Bering coast to scout for massive moose. After landing his floatplane on a remote lake and tying off the pontoons near a beaver slip, the two men hiked a narrow game trail into the dense black spruce. The situation took a disastrous turn when the client pulled out an elk bugle he didn't know how to use and blew a horrific call into the woods, instantly triggering a terrifying chain of events that sent them sprinting back to the water.
Because the bush plane had no reverse function, the terrified pilot was forced to jump out into the lake to manually push the pontoons backward. As he waded into the water, a deafening scream erupted from the brush just twenty feet away. A 7.5-foot-tall, heavily grizzled female creature with a pronounced brow and broad hips had been perfectly camouflaged on the bank the entire time. The massive entity let out one continuous, terrifying scream as it aggressively paced the shoreline alongside the drifting plane. In utter shock, the pilot scrambled back into the cockpit, gunned the throttle, and flew all the way back to Iliamna with his door still wide open.
