Oral History

An encounter shared by an Athabaskan couple, Alvin and Myrna, occurred in February 2020 while hiking the Devil's Creek Trail near the Kenai Peninsula with their nine-month-old Tibetan Mastiff, Skippy. While navigating an uphill stretch on a packed snowmachine trail, Alvin was walking slightly ahead of Myrna, who was admiring the scenery further down the path. Suddenly, a voice perfectly replicating Myrna's exact pitch and tone called out the dog's name from a thick patch of snow-covered willow shrubs directly ahead of Alvin.

A 1990 encounter from a fisherman named Timothy, who was 20 years old at the time and completely new to the Alaskan wilderness. While working out of Naknek on a drift boat, the crew had to take a small wooden skiff up the Kvichak River toward Igiugig to retrieve a different fishing net. When the skiff's outboard motor began having mechanical issues, the crew pulled into a small tributary to fix it. Timothy was given a hunting rifle for protection and went to explore the nearby tundra. While sitting on a ridge, Timothy spotted two dark spots about 300 to 400 yards away.

In the early fall in a remote, unspecified Alaskan village, an early-20s woman named Shiloh and her young female cousin take a four-wheeler out into the wide-open tundra to scout local berry patches. While traveling along a horseshoe-shaped trail roughly a mile from the nearest tree line, they spot a hulking, nine-foot-tall figure standing about 50 yards away. The creature begins gently gesturing toward them, casting an immediate psychological trance over Shiloh.

Take a journey back to the early 1974 pipeline boom in the Alaskan bush. While taking a one-week vacation from his strenuous work as a pipeline welding assistant, a welder named Sam accompanies his Native Alaskan friend to a remote area outside of Fort Yukon heading toward Venetie Landing. What was intended to be a relaxing camping trip along the banks of the Yukon River quickly devolves into a terrifying, multi-hour psychological standoff. After nightfall, Sam spots a static set of glowing eyes reflecting the campfire from less than 30 yards away.

At a commercial salmon set netting fish camp in the Bristol Bay / Dillingham region, a young boy named Joe Jr. experienced multi-year contact with Sasquatch entities starting at age four. Initially, he told his family about a 'man' waving at him from the beach, which escalated to multiple hairy creatures whispering to him when his grandmother was distracted, attempting to lure him away to play. Interestingly, the creatures explicitly told Joe Jr. they could not cross a semi-circular boundary line where his grandmother had walked and sprayed a spiritual prayer of protection.

In August, an experienced outdoorsman in his mid-60s named Douglas traveled by four-wheeler to the Savage River area where it intersects the Stampede Trail to search for signs of a missing person, Mary Wilson. Arriving near twilight under dense forest canopy, he heard loud, abnormal yelling sounds and witnessed a large silhouette cross the trail.

In early spring 1987, a professional analog wildlife photographer named Derek and his wife Gabrielle (Gabby) set up duck-hunting photography blinds near a large pond in a vast marshland just west of the cabins located at the confluence of the Mulchatna and Koktuli Rivers near the Jack Rabbit Hills. Having left general equipment behind at the site during a multi-day blind construction process, Derek arrived alone at 4:00 AM in the dim pre-dawn silhouette light to swap film canisters.

Around late July in 2017 or 2018, a group of four friends from Colorado—Billy, Chuck, Dennis, and Maria—set up a large two-room blackout tent on a gravel wash in Rainbow Basin, situated at the northwestern corner of Lake Nerka within Wood-Tikchik State Park. After encountering deep, sub-audible grunts that physically vibrated their folding chairs and a series of sharp, crisp whistles that closely shadowed Dennis and Maria during a walk, the group constructed a wide 50-foot perimeter using fine fishing lines rigged with 12-gauge shotgun shell proximity alarms.

A few years prior to 2023, Heather and Carl flew via floatplane from Lake Hood to a remote state park cabin at Klutina Lake near the mouth of the Mahlo River, northeast of Valdez. While exploring the marshy mouth of the river for wilderness photography, they were unsettled by a long, mournful, and sorrowful howl echoing through the tall grass. That night, while sitting outside, they observed a powerful, anomalous bright light across the lake that rapidly dimmed and performed an oblong, figure-eight tracking motion up and down the beach.

Around 2013, a seasonal lodge worker named Tim took four days off to join two indigenous local friends in a 20-foot Lund skiff traveling up the Kokwok River, a tributary of the Nushagak River below Ekwok. Half a mile past a teardrop-shaped gravel bar at the river's mouth, they discovered a local subsistence gill net that had been intentionally and intricately woven through with thick tree branches and driftwood.

Outside of Yakutat within the Tongass National Forest, siblings Tatiana and Nikolai spent five years renovating an inherited family cabin that had been abandoned for two decades. The aggressive encounters escalations began in the second year when Nikolai used a weed-whacker to clear a switchback trail behind the cabin to mitigate bear encounters, unaware that Tatiana's Australian Shepherd had been consistently alerting to a presence hiding on the slope. Three years later, Tatiana returned with her city-dwelling fiance, Robert, and their dog, Roscoe.

A few years prior to 2023, Tabitha and Nicholas, two experienced long-distance hikers, set out on the Power Creek Trail near Cordova to reach the Ohman Falls cabin. After successfully navigating an initial major landslide approximately 0.8 miles into the trek under heavy rain, they reached a low saddle section of the trail filled with clear standing water and deep mud. Nicholas stepped off the trail to avoid the pool, prompting Tabitha to discover a fresh series of massive, water-filled muddy tracks that initially resembled large double bear prints.

In the summer of 2003, a university biology student named Roger participated in a salmon-fry field study along the Nuyakuk River drainage, a component of the Nushagak River system. Dropped off alone on a remote riverbank roughly three miles below the Nuyakuk Falls to dip-net samples out from underneath the river's cutbank, Roger experienced an intense, overwhelming sensation of being watched by 'a thousand eyes' amidst total silence and swarming mosquitoes. Moving down the shoreline trail, he heard a rapid, distinctive 'bloop' sound of small stones splashing into the channel.