Shares of Sasquatch Encounters in Alaska

While enjoying a private family fishing trip drifting down the lower Nushagak River, Michelle, her husband, and their teenage son were interrupted by a piercing, two-finger whistle echoing from the shoreline. Assuming it was just another angler celebrating a catch, they ignored it—until the sharp whistle was followed by a bizarre, garbled chatter resembling a twisted form of Pig Latin mixed with animal grunts.

Hoping to harvest some fresh morels, Cheryl and two of her retired friends drove just north of Willow to explore an old, steep wildfire burnout area near the Alaska Speedway. Navigating the tangled, charred "pickup sticks" of fallen trees was exhausting work, so the ladies sat down on a sun-bleached log around midday to enjoy some tea. Their peaceful afternoon shattered when the entire interconnected pile of logs beneath them began to shift and jiggle.

While taking advantage of the perpetual daylight of an Alaskan summer, Fred and two cousins took a skiff up the McClung River—a small tidal tributary of the Wood River near Dillingham—to fish for early king salmon. After beaching the boat in a narrow, high-banked stretch of the river to reminisce and mourn the recent passing of a friend, they killed the outboard motor and began silently drifting back down the current.

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.

In the winter of 1970, Thomas traveled to Kaltag along the Yukon River to help his recently widowed niece with house repairs. Hyper-vigilant from his past terrifying encounters, Thomas spent his afternoons scouting the nearby valleys on a snowmachine. His worst fears were realized when he spotted a Hairy Man sprinting up a mountain and disappearing into a cave. For weeks, he desperately tried to keep his niece’s two young children close to the house, but his refusal to explain exactly what was out in the woods caused a bitter rift between them.

Four years after the terrifying standoff in the Tongass National Forest, Thomas traveled deep into the remote Copper River Valley to help his friend build a cabin on a Native allotment plot. The peaceful construction project took a dark turn when Thomas discovered his friend had been casually dumping food scraps behind the tree line, inadvertently feeding and habituating a local Hairy Man. Thomas immediately warned him about the extreme danger of creating dependency, but the warning came too late.

Stranded and broke on Prince of Wales Island after being denied logging work in 1961, Thomas and his two friends set up a survival camp in the towering old-growth timber of the Tongass National Forest. Their desperation deepened when a massive arm reached from behind a tree, ripped down the rope holding their freshly hunted black-tailed deer, and vanished into the 200-foot canopy above. Upon returning from a day-labor job the next evening, they found a towering entity rummaging through their camp before it effortlessly scrambled up a massive Douglas fir.