Bigfoot Down: A Soldiers Story

every single one of them. But every now and then one comes across my desk that just hits different, one that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, not just because of what happened, but because of what it implies, because of the doors it opens in your mind that you can never quite close again. This was one of those emails. A man who wrote

to me asked that I call him Matt. That's not his real name, and I think by the time you hear this story, you'll understand exactly why he doesn't want his identity out there. Matt's a veteran. He served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan, and the man he's going to

tell you about served right alongside him. They were brothers in the truest sense of the word, the kind of bond that only forms when you've bled together, when you've held security on a rooftop and Kandahar Province at three in the morning while tracers light up the sky around you, when you've carried a wounded buddy to a Metavac, bird under fire. That kind of bond, the kind that means when a man tells you something, even something that sounds impossible,

you listen and you believe him. Before I read Matt's account to you, I want to say something. Matt told me in his email that he listens to all of my shows. He said he heard me say that if you've had an experience, or if you know someone who has, to email in and share it. He said that although this isn't his experience directly, he wants people to know

that it happened. He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that too many things get buried, too many stories get silenced, and he's tired of good men carrying secrets that eat them alive. He wants this out there, and I respect that more than I can say. So let me share Matt's story with you, and I'll let you decide what you think. Matt writes, Hey, I'm not sure exactly how to start this, so I'll just get into it. I've been going back and forth about whether to send this

email for over a year now. I keep coming back to it, and I keep hearing your voice in my head saying you want to hear from people who have stories, and I think that means something. I think it means this needs to be told. I've been listening to your shows for a couple of years now, all of them,

the Bigfoot encounters, the backwoods stories, all of it. My wife thinks I'm losing it by the way she hears your shows coming through my earbuds when I'm doing yard work or tinkering in the garage, and she just shakes her head at me. But she doesn't know what I know. She doesn't know this story. Nobody does except me and the man who told it to me. And I reckon whatever nameless people were involved in the events I'm about to describe. I've heard you say more than once that

if somebody has a story, you want to hear it. Well, I've got one. It's not mine, but it's real. And the man who told it to me is one of the most solid, dependable, honest men I've ever known in my life. I'd trust him with my life. I have trusted him with my life more times than I can count, in places most people couldn't find on a map, the kind of places where trusting the wrong person gets you sent home in a flag draped box. I served in

the United States Army. I did multiple deployments to Afghanistan, and the man I'm going to tell you about, I'll call him Joe, served with me on every single one of those tours. Joe was the kind of guy you wanted beside you when things went sideways. He was calm, methodical,

He didn't rattle. You could be taking contact from three directions, round snapping over your head, dirt kicking up around your feet, and Joe would be right there, steady as a rock, calling out targets, returning fire with precision, moving like he'd done it a thousand times, which by the time I knew him, he pretty much had.

mouth shut if you know what's good for you. But one night that changed. We were stateside between deployment. We'd been doing some training maneuvers, the kind of stuff that's meant to keep you sharp between rotations, field exercises, land navigation, small unit tactics, that sort of thing. It was late fall and we were somewhere in the southeastern United States at a military installation.

of whiskey, and settled in. The place was maybe half full, a mix of soldiers and locals, and a few women sitting at the bar who'd probably heard that military.

whatever they're about to do or say. The conversation started the way it always did, talking trash, telling jokes, complaining about the food in the chow hall, debating which deployment had been the worst, normal stuff, soldier stuff, the kind of meaningless back and forth that men engage in when they're trying to decompress from something that can't really be

decompressed from. We argued about football for a while. Somebody brought up a sergeant major we all hated, and told a story about him that had us laughing so hard the table shook. It was good, it was normal. It felt almost like being a regular person in a regular bar, having a regular night. But as the night wore on and the whiskey kept flowing, the conversation got quieter, more serious. The laughter came less frequently, pauses between words got longer.

That's how it always goes with soldiers who've been down ranged together. You start with the jokes and then the jokes run out, and then you're left with the silence and whatever's living inside it. The other two guys eventually drifted off to the bar to watch a football game on the television, and it was just me and Joe sitting across from each other in that booth with a bottle of Jamison between us. That was a lot emptier than it had been a couple hours earlier. The jukebox

had gone quiet. Somebody had apparently run out of quarters, or maybe the thing just broke. Either way, the bar had gotten noticeably quieter, and in that relative silence, something shifted between me and Joe. I could feel it.

before he'd identify something. The rest of us had missed a trip wire, a disturbed patch of earth that shouldn't have been disturbed, some tiny detail that meant the difference between walking home and getting carried home. It was the look of a man wrestling with something internally. He stared at his glass for a long time, swirling the whiskey around, watching the amber liquid catch the light from the neon sign in the window, and then he looked up at

me and said something I'll never forget. He said, Matt, have you ever seen something that you know is real, something you experienced with your own hands and your own eyes, but you can't tell anybody about it, because they'd either think you were crazy or you'd end up in a cell somewhere. I told him I hadn't, not like that. I mean, we'd all seen things in combat that we couldn't talk about with civilians, things that would make normal people lose their minds. But that wasn't what he was

talking about. This was something else entirely. He poured himself another drink, knocked it back, and then he started talking. Joe told me that back in the mid nineteen nineties, years before September eleventh, years before any of us ever heard of Tora Bora or Hellman Province or any of the rest of it. He was part of a small specialized team. He didn't call it special forces exactly, but

he made it clear these weren't regular infantry guys. These were men who'd been selected for specific skills tracking, marksmanship, field craft, the ability to operate in remote wilderness environments for extended periods without support. He said the team was small, maybe eight to ten men total, and they trained together regularly for missions that were, as he put it, outside

the normal channels. He said most of what they did was boring training exercises, readiness drills, sitting around waiting for a call that might never come. But then one day the call came.

told him this wasn't a normal operation. In Joe's experience, colonels didn't defer to anybody who wasn't wearing stars on their shoulders, and they sure as hell didn't defer to civilians, but this one did. The civilian told them that two hikers had gone missing in a national park. He didn't name the park, he didn't name the state. He simply referred to it as the operational area.

fork between two thick branches. His head canted at an angle that no living person's head should ever be at. His neck was broken, snapped. The body was still mostly intact, but there was significant bruising visible on the torso and arms, the kind of deep tissue damage you see from massive blunt force trauma.

The civilian told them that extensive search and rescue efforts had been conducted in the immediate aftermath of the hikers being reported overdue, and that the male's body had been located by a search and rescue dog team, but that the female had never been found, not a trace. He paused after saying that, and let it sink in, And then he said something that changed the entire tone of the room. He said, we believe we know what took them, and we need you to go in and deal with it.

Joe said. The civilian told them that based on the stride length and the depth of the tracks, their analysts estimated the largest creature to be somewhere between seven and a half and eight and a half feet tall and weighing in excess of six hundred pounds. Creature, that was the word he used, not suspect, not animal creature, Joe said.

The civilian never once used the word sasquatch. He never said bigfoot, He never referenced anything that would connect what he was describing to folklore or legend or campfire stories. He spoke about it in purely clinical terms, as if he were describing a known species, something that had been studied and cataloged and understood at least to some degree. And stay tuned for more sasquatch. Otta see, We'll be

right back after these messages. And that, Joe said, was more unsettling than anything else about the briefing, because it meant that whoever this man represented, whatever agency or organization, was pulling the strings, they already knew. They knew these things existed. This wasn't a discovery for them. This was a problem that needed to be solved.

ever been given. They were told to treat the targets as hostile combatants with extreme physical capabilities. They were told that the creatures were believed to be highly intelligent, possibly more intelligent than any known primate species, and that they should not be underestimated under any circumstances. They were warned that the creatures were believed to operate in a family group a clan structure, and that where one was found,

others would likely be close by. They were told to expect between three and five individuals based on the track analysis. They were also told, and Joe said this part was delivered with a coldness that made the hair on his arms stand up, that upon completion of the mission, they would be met at a designated extraction point by a recovery team that would handle the remains. The recovery team was not military, Joe said, the civilian made that clear.

The recovery team would arrive, they would take custody of whatever was left, and the soldier's involvement would end at that point permanently. The civilian looked each man in the eye and told them that this mission was classified above top secret. He said that there was no official designation, no operation name, no paper trail. As far as the United States government was concerned, this mission did not exist,

had never existed, and would never exist. Anyone who spoke about it to anyone ever would face consequences that went far beyond a court martial. Joe said he believed him. They shipped out at four hundred the next morning. It was still dark when the helicopter lifted off from a small airfield that Joe said wasn't on any map he'd ever seen. There was no tower, no ground crew in visible uniforms, just a flat strip of asphalt carved out of the forest with a single hangar and a fuel

truck parked beside it. The pilots never introduced themselves. They were already in the cockpit when the team arrived, visors down, and they didn't say a word to any of the operators during the entire flight. Joe said that told him everything he needed to know about the level of compartmentalization they were dealing with. The pilots knew where to go and when to go, and that was all they knew,

or all they were willing to acknowledge. Knowing, they flew for what Joe estimated was about two hours, heading generally northwest, though he said the pilots took a circuitous route, making several course changes and at one point flying for a long stretch at very low altitude through a river canyon, which made it difficult to determine exactly where they were going.

A couple of the guys on the team tried to track their position using landmarks, but the combination of the early morning darkness and the deliberate evasion made it nearly impossible. Somebody asked Joe if he thought they were in the Pacific northwest. Joe said maybe the terrain fit, but he couldn't say for certain, and he got the distinct impression

that was exactly how it was supposed to be. When they finally sat down, it was in a clearing on the side of a mountain, surrounded by old growth forests so thick and tall that the trees looked like the columns of some ancient cathedral. The morning light was just starting to filter through the canopy, thin and pale and golden, and it caught the mist that hung between the trunks

in long, luminous sheets. Under other circumstances, Joe said it would have been one of the most beautiful places he'd ever seen, the kind of place that makes you feel small in a way that isn't unpleasant, the kind that reminds you how old and vast and indifferent the natural world really is. But Joe didn't feel any of that beauty that morning. What he felt was watched from the moment his boots hit the ground. He felt like something

in those trees knew they were there. The air was cold and wet and heavy with the smell of pine and decaying leaves and something else, something Joe said he couldn't identify at first, but that he'd later come to associate with the creatures themselves, a musky, pungent, almost overpowering odor that was unlike anything he'd encountered in nature before. He said, he'd spent time in bear country. He'd been around elk and moose and mountain lions and every other

large mammal the North American continent had to offer. He knew what animals smelled like. This wasn't that it was organic, clearly biological, but it had an almost chemical quality to it, like the smell of a large predator's den mixed with something sharper, something almost sulfuric. It burned the back of your throat if you breathed too deeply, and it triggered something primal, some deep seated alarm system in the body that said you were not at the top of.

something that might not go down easy. They also carried standard field equipment radios, GPS units, first aid kits rations for three days. The expectation, Joe said, was that the mission would be completed within forty eight to seventy two hours. They moved out at first light, heading along a ridge line that the aerial photographs had shown leading toward the

creek where the largest tracks had been found. Joe was on point for the first leg, and he said that within the first hour he knew something was wrong with the forest. Not wrong exactly, but different. Off The woods were too quiet. There were no birds singing, no squirrels chattering, no insects buzzing. The forest around them was utterly, completely, depressively silent, as if every living thing within a mile

radius had packed up and left. Joe had spent years training and operating in wilderness environments all over the country, and he said he'd never experienced anything like it. They reached the creek around mid morning and immediately found what they were looking for, tracks, dozens of them. The creek bank was soft, alluvial soil, the kind of dark, wet, clay rich earth that holds an impression like a mold,

perfect for preserving detail, and the detail was extraordinary. Joe said these weren't vague depressions in the dirt that could be dismissed as natural features or misidentified animal prints. These were clear, unmistakable, anatomically consistent footprints, showing individual toes, a defined heel strike, a mid foot flection crease, and in several of the deeper prints, visible dermal ridges. The equivalent of fingerprints on.

perhaps as a fishing spot, Joe said. The tracker took photographs of every print he could, and then spent about twenty minutes cataloging what he found while the rest of the team pulled security in a loose perimeter around the creek. The tracker identified at least four distinct sets of prints. The largest match the twenty three inch measurements from the briefing photographs. These were the ones that commanded the most attention, not just because of their size, but because of their depth.

The print was sunk nearly three inches into the soil, which, given the consistency of the ground, suggested a creature of extraordinary weight bearing down on a single foot during the stride cycle. The second largest set was slightly smaller, around eighteen inches, with a similar morphology but subtle differences in the toe's play and arch shape that suggested a different individual.

The third set was narrower and showed a different gait pattern, a shorter stride length with a slight inward rotation of the foot, which the tracker believed indicated a female. And the fourth set was significantly smaller than the others, maybe sixteen inches, with a shallower depth of impression that suggested something lighter, younger, a juvenile, Joe said. The tracker looked up from the fourth set of prints with an expression that Joe would remember for.

four creatures, A family, Joe said. They followed the tracks upstream for most of the day. The terrain was brutal, steep ravines choked with dead fall boulder fields covered in slick moss, creek crossings where the water ran fast and cold over slippery rock. But the tracks were consistent and clear. Whatever these things were, they weren't trying to hide their trail. Joe said that bothered him in his experience, anything that wasn't worried about being tracked either didn't know it was

being followed or it didn't care. And everything about the briefing had told him these things were smart enough to know. They made camp that first night on a small plateau overlooking the creek drainage. The plateau was maybe thirty meters across, ringed on three sides by dense timber, and dropping off sharply on the fourth side into the ravine they'd been

following all day. It was a defensible position, decent sight lines, natural obstacles to slow anything approaching from the tree line, and the steep drop behind them meant they only had to worry about three directions.

how to compartmentalize fear and focus on the task. But there was an undercurrent of something Joe had never felt before on any mission, a sense of being fundamentally out of their depth of operating in a domain where their training and technology and firepower might not be enough. In Afghanistan, they'd faced enemies with rifles and mortars and improvised explosives. Those threats were terrifying, but they were understood. They existed within a framework of human conflict that soldiers had been

navigating for thousands of years. This was something else. Entirely, this was a hunt, but Joe said he wasn't entirely sure they were the hunters. They set up a watch rotation, two men on at all times, equipped with night vision. Joe pulled the first watch with another team member, a man he called Ramirez, though Joe said that wasn't his real name either. Ramirez was a quiet, intense guy from

somewhere in the Southwest. He'd grown up hunting in the desert and could sit motionless for hours, watching and waiting without losing focus. He was the kind of man you wanted on watch when the stakes were high. The first few hours were uneventful. The night settled over the mountain like a heavy blanket, darkness so complete and absolute that without night vision, you couldn't see your hand in front

of your face. The canopy above blocked out the stars and whatever moonlight there might have been, creating a world of impenetrable black that pressed against you from all sides. Through the green phosphor glow of his night vision, Joe could see the tree line around their perimeter, the ghostly shapes of the trunk standing like silent sentinels, the occasional movement of a branch, and a breeze. He couldn't feel. Everything was still. Everything was quiet, too quiet. Joe said,

that was the thing that kept gnawing at him. At any campsite he'd ever occupied, in any forest he'd ever operated in, the night was alive with sound, owl's calling, mice rustling through leaf litter, the distant yip of coyotes, the hum and chirp of a thousand insects, creating a constant sonic backdrop that you stopped noticing after a while because it was just always there. But here on this

mountain there was nothing. The silence was total and oppressive, so complete that Joe said he could hear the blood moving through his own ears, could hear each eat of his heart, could hear Ramirez breathing twelve feet to his left. It was the kind of silence that made you realize how much background noise you normally take for granted, and its absence was profoundly viscerally wrong. It was during that first watch that they heard them. Joe said, it started

around two hundred two o'clock in the morning. The silence had been unbroken for hours, so total and so sustained that Joe had almost begun to accept it as normal, to adjust to this soundless world as the new baseline. And then, from somewhere up the drainage, maybe half a mile away, maybe less, a sound rose out of the darkness that Joe said turned his blood to ice water

in his veins. It was a vocalization, that was the clinical term for it, but calling what Joe described, a vocalization is like calling a hurricane a breeze.

to see. We'll be right back after these messages. It was like the growl of something impossibly large, something with a chest cavity the size of a fifty gallon drum, resonating at a frequency that seemed to bypass his ears entirely and go straight to some primal, ancient part of his brain that knew exactly what it was hearing, even if his conscious mind couldn't process it.

He estimated the call lasted between fifteen and twenty seven seconds before it finally tapered off and faded into the darkness. The silence that followed was worse.

And then the call was answered from behind them, from uphill, deeper in the forest, maybe a quarter mile away. A second voice rose in response. This one was higher in pitch but no less powerful, and it was joined almost immediately by a third, this one more of a rapid, staccato, barking sound, percussive and aggressive, like something hitting a hollow

log with a baseball bat while simultaneously screaming. The three voices overlapped and intertwined for what Joe said felt like an hour but was probably less than a minute, and then they stopped all at once, as if someone had thrown a switch, and the silence returned. Joe said. Nobody slept for the rest of that night. Every man on the team sat with his weapon across his knees, staring into the darkness, listening, but there was nothing more to hear.

The forest was silent, and somehow that was the most frightening thing of all. They broke camp at first light and resumed tracking. Joe said nobody needed to be told to move. They'd been awake for hours, every man sitting rigid in the darkness with his weapon across his knees, replaying those vocalizations in his mind, trying to reconcile what his ears had heard with what his training and education told him should exist in a North American forest. Nobody

had an explanation. Nobody offered one. They just packed their gear in silence and moved out. Trail led them higher into the mountains, along the spine of a ridge that rose steeply through stands of enormous Douglas fir and western red cedar. Joe said, the trees up there were ancient, massive, some of them six or seven feet in diameter, their trunks rising straight and branchless for forty or fifty feet before the canopy started. Many of them had to be five hundred maybe eight hundred years old.

language the team couldn't read. The understory was a tangle of ferns and fallen logs and devil's club, the kind of vegetation that grabs at your legs and tears at your clothing and slows you to a crawl. Every step required effort and attention, and the physical demands of the terrain, combined with the sleep deprivation and the constant low grade adrenaline that had been coursing through every man since those

vocalizations the night before was taking a toll. Joe said he could see it in the faces of his teammates, the tight jaws, the darting eyes, the way everybody's head was on a swivel, scanning the tree line, constantly flinching at every snap twig and every rustle of wind through the canopy. These were men who'd kept their composure under mortar fire, and they were spooked. That fact alone, more than anything else, told Joe how far outside the boundaries

of normal experience they traveled. The light that filtered down through the canopy was dim and green and had a quality to it that Joe described as almost submarine, like being underwater in a murky lakesi Ability was limited, maybe forty or fifty meters in any direction before the trunks and the undergrowth swallowed everything in shadow. It was perfect ambush terrain, and every man on the team knew it. Around midday, the tracker signaled a halt he'd found something.

The team moved up to his position and found what Joe described as a structure, not a nest, not a den, a structure. It was built against the base of an enormous fallen tree using branches and smaller logs that had been deliberately placed, interlocked and woven together to form a rough shelter about eight feet tall and maybe ten feet across.

The opening faced downhill away from the prevailing wind, and the ground inside was covered with a thick layer of dried ferns and grass and strips of bark that had been shredded and laid down like bedding. The smell was staggering, Joe said. The musky odor they detected at the insertion point was nothing compared to what hit them at that structure. It was concentrated, overwhelming, so thick in the air that

several of the men gagged. Joe said, it was the smell of something alive, something huge and wild and absolutely real. And standing in front of that shelter, looking at the clear evidence of intelligence and deliberate construction, he said, the last trace of doubt left his mind. Whatever they were tracking, it wasn't an animal, not in the way he understood the word. It was something else, something that fell into a category that didn't have a name in any field

manual he'd ever read. The tracker determined that the structure had been recently occupied within the last twenty four hours. Based on the freshness of the bedding material and the intensity of the odor. The tracks leading away from it headed further up the ridge, and they were deep and fresh. The team was close. They moved out in a staggered tactical formation, maintaining noise discipline, communicating with hand signals. Joe

said the tension was suffocating. Every man on that team had operated in combat environments where the thread of death was constant and real, but this was different. In combat, you knew what you were up against. You understood your enemy, You'd studied his tactics, his weapons, his patterns of behavior. But out here in this ancient forest, tracking something that the United States government apparently knew about but refused to acknowledge, something that could rip a grown man apart and throw

his body twenty five feet into a tree. They were in completely unknown territory, and every one of them knew it. The encounter happened around fourteen hundred hours that afternoon, two o'clock. They'd been moving along the ridge for about two hours when the point man, who had taken over from Joe after the midday halt, raised his fist. Everybody froze. Joe was about fifteen meters back in the formation, and from his position he could see the point man slowly lower

himself to one knee and raise his rifle. Joe followed his line of sight and saw movement in the trees ahead, something large, something dark, moving between the trunks with the fluidity that Joe said was deeply disturbing, because nothing that big should be able to move that quietly. Joe raised his optic and got his first clear look at one of them through.

and a half and seven feet tall. Its body was covered in dark brown hair, not fur in the way a bear's coat is fur, but hair coarse and matted and hanging in places, thinner in others. It was broad across the shoulders, enormously broad, whiter than any human Joe had ever seen, and its arms were long relative to its body, hanging past what would have been the knee

on a human frame. Its hands were visible, and Joe said they were massive, easily twice the size of a large man's hands, with thick fingers that curled slightly as it walked. The head sat on a short, thick neck, and Joe said the most striking feature of the head was the brow, a heavy, pronounced, bony ridge that jutted out over the eyes and gave the face a look that he described as simultaneously primitive and frighteningly aware. The thing was looking around as it moved. It was scanning,

It was alert. It was not simply ambling through the forest the way a bear or a deer mite.

the underbrush with a sound like a falling tree. But before the echo of those first shots had faded, the forest erupted from the right from a thicket of devil's club and vine maple that was so dense Joe hadn't thought anything could possibly be hiding in it. A second creature burst into the open. This one was slightly smaller than the first, with lighter colored hair and a narrower build that Joe would later associate with the female tracks

they'd cataloged at the creek. It moved with a speed that Joe said defied everything he understood about biomechanics and large body mass. It covered ground like a sprinter, arms pumping, legs, churning, crashing through vegetation that would have stopped a man cold. It was screaming as it ran, producing a vocalization that Joe described as the most horrifying sound he'd ever heard

in his life. A piercing, wailing shriek that oscillated between frequencies so rapidly it sounded almost electronic, like a siren being fed through a distortion pedal. Two men engaged the creature as it charged. Joe said the rounds impacted visibly. He could see the hair puff.

a man houses. His conscience rebelled against what he was about to do, but training took over. Orders took over, the mission took over. Two rounds from different shooters hit the juvenile almost simultaneously, and it went down.

The big male hit them from uphill. It came out of the timber above the ridge like something out of a nightmare, moving downhill with the force and speed of an avalanche. Joe said it was the largest living thing he'd ever seen that wasn't behind a fence in a zoo. It was easily over eight feet tall, probably closer to eight and a half, and it was built like something designed by nature specifically for the purpose of destroying things. Its chest was a barrel of muscle covered in thick, dark,

almost black hair. Its shoulders were so broad that it turned slightly sideways to pass between trees that were four feet apart. Its face was a mask of rage, the lips pulled back to reveal massive teeth, the brow ridge casting deep shadows over eyes that burned with something Joe said he could only disco as fury, not animal aggression, not instinct fury understanding. This creature knew exactly what had happened to the others, and it was coming for the

men who'd done it. It covered the distance between the tree line and the nearest team member in what Joe estimated was less than three seconds, maybe two. Joe said later that he'd seen men move under fire, he'd seen the physical feats that adrenaline and combat can produce in a human body, and nothing he'd ever witnessed came close

to the explosive speed of that creature. The nearest man, one of the younger members of the team, managed to get his weapon up and fire a burst, but the creature swatted the rifle aside with one hand like it was a stick, and hit the soldier in the chest with the other. Joe said the impact launched the man off his feet. He didn't stumble backward, he didn't stagger.

He was physically lifted off the ground and thrown sideways through the air, crashing into a tree trunk eight or nine feet away, with a sound that Joe said was distinctly, horrifyingly different from any impact sound he'd heard in combat. And stay tuned for more sasquatch otta see, We'll be right back after these messages. There was a crack, a wet, organic crack, and the soldier crumpled to the ground and

didn't get up. The creature didn't pause. It pivoted, turning toward the next closest man with a speed that shouldn't have been possible for something that size.

other men were firing. The creature took hit after hit, rounds impacting its torso, its shoulders, its legs, and it kept coming. It grabbed a fallen log, a piece of dead fall that Joe estimated weighed at least one hundred and fifty pounds, and hurled it at the men firing on it from the left side. The log hit one of the soldiers across the legs and put him down, screaming.

The creature charged again, coming at the main body of the team, and Joe said, time did that thing it does in combat, that expansion, that slowing where everything becomes crystal clear and hyper focused. He could see the individual hairs on the creature's body, He could see the muscles moving under the skin. He could see the dark eyes fixed on him, and he knew with absolute certainty that he was looking at something that intended to kill him.

Joe shifted his aim up. He'd been firing center mass, but the creature's chest was so heavily muscled, so thick and dense, that the round seemed to be having mental effect. He raised his point of aim and fired three rounds in rapid succession at the creature's head. At least one of them connected. The creature's forward momentum faltered. It staggered. Its left hand went up to the side of its head in a gesture that Joe said was so terribly,

heartbreakingly human that it almost made him stop firing. But he didn't stop, neither did the others. They poured fire into the creature, and it went to one knee and then the other, and then it pitched forward onto the forest floor with an impact that Joe said he felt through the soles of his boots. It was still alive. It was on the ground, face down, its massive body heaving with labored breaths, blood pooling around it, dark and

thick and steaming in the cold air. It tried to push itself up, one enormous arm braced against the ground, and the creature lifted its head and looked at the men who had shot it, And Joe said the expression on its face in that moment was something he has

never been able to reconcile with the word animal. There was pain in that face, there was confusion, and there was something else, something Joe struggled to name, and finally settled on the word sorrow, like it knew, like it understood not just what was happening, but what it meant, what had been lost. The team leader stepped forward and put two more rounds into the creature, and it went

down for the last time. The massive chest stopped heaving, the dark eyes glazed over, The arm that had been trying to push itself up collapsed, and eight hundred plus pounds of something that wasn't supposed to exist settled into the mountain earth and was still. Joe said, the silence that followed the last gunshot was unlike any silence he'd ever known. It wasn't the silence of absence, the mere

lack of sound. It was a loaded silence, a heavy, pregnant, accusing silence that seemed to hang over the killing ground like smoke. The smell of cordite with that overpowering musky odor now tinged with the copper tang of blood, and the combination was nauseating. The forest floor around the creatures was torn up from the violence of the encounter. Ferns flattened, soil, churned, bark stripped from tree trunks by ricochets and impacts. It looked like a bomb had gone off in the middle

of paradise, Joe said. Nobody spoke for a long time after that. He stood there, looking at the massive body of the male, at the sheer impossible size of the thing, at the way its hair was matted with blood and debris, at the way one of its enormous hands was still curled, fingers partially closed, as if it had been reaching for something when it died. He looked at its face, even in death, even with the damage the rounds had inflicted, there was something in that face that was so close

to human it made Joe's stomach turn. The brow ridge, the deep set eyes, the shape of the jaw. It was like looking at a rough draft of a hue human face, or maybe a final draft of something that had come before humans, something older and more primal, that had taken a different evolutionary path and ended up here on this mountain, in the crosshairs of men with guns. The immediate aftermath was all business securing the perimeter, checking

the wounded, inventoring ammunition, calling in a situation report. The team medic, a steady handed specialist who Joe said could stay calm in the middle of an earthquake, went to work on the two injured men. The soldier who'd been struck by the creature had a broken sternum and three fractured ribs, Joe said. The medic told him later that the impact had been so severe that it was a miracle the man's heart hadn't been stopped by the blunt

force trauma. The kid, and Joe called him a kid because he was the youngest on the team, was conscious, but in tremendous pain, and his breathing was shallow and labored in a way that suggested one of those fractured ribs might have nicked a lung. The man who been hit by the throne log had a compound fracture of his left tibia. The bone visible threw a gash in his calf, and he was going into shock. The medic stabilized both of them as best he could, splinting the leg,

administering morphine, monitoring vitals, but they needed evacuation. They needed a hospital. The team leader called it in and within an hour a helicopter was inbound. But it wasn't a military helicopter.

but not standard military body bags. These were larger, much larger, heavy gauge material reinforced, clearly designed for something far bigger than a human being. The men moved with practiced deficiency. They didn't acknowledge the soldiers beyond a cursory nod from the man who appeared to be in charge. They went straight to the bodies and began their work. Joe said he watched them examine the creatures, briefly, taking photographs, making notes on handheld devices, and then bag them. It took

multiple men to move each body. The adult male required six men working together to lift it into the bag and then drag the bag to the helicopter on a makeshift sled.

even fatigue. It was resignation, the look of a man who was being told something he already knew, something he'd accepted before the mission even began, and was now hearing it confirmed in a way that left no room for ambiguity. When the team leader came back, his face was tight, and he told the men to pack up their gear

and prepare for extraction. He also told them, in a voice that Joe said carried more weight than any order he'd ever been given in a combat zone, that what they had seen and done on this mountain did not happen. It would never be spoken of again, not to their families, not to their friends, not to their chaplains, not to their therapists, not to anyone ever for any reason. He said, he understood the weight of what he was asking them

to carry. He said he was sorry, and then he turned away and went to check on the wounded, and that was the last time the subject was addressed through official channels.

multiple times before. And that thought, more than almost anything else about the entire experience, kept Joe awake at night because it meant this wasn't an isolated incident. It meant this had happened before and it would probably happen again, Joe said. The civilian team loaded the bodies in their equipment into the helicopter in under an hour and were gone just like that. The efficiency was clinical, almost surgical. Four creatures that challenged everything science and biology and the

natural order claimed to understand about the world. Four bodies that represented proof of something that millions of people had been searching for, wondering about, and debating for centuries, loaded into reinforced bags and flown away to God knows where, erased, removed from the record, made to not exist. The team was extracted separately on a different helicopter that arrived about

thirty minutes after the civilian aircraft departed. During that thirty minutes of waiting, Joe said, the men sat in a rough circle among the trees and didn't talk. A few guys smoked. One man, a team member Joe had always considered among the toughest men he'd ever known, a man who'd done things in combat that would have earned most people a medal of honor if anyone had been allowed to talk about them. Sat by himself against a tree

and cried. He didn't make a sound, The tears just rolled down his face while he stared at the ground where the large male had died, at the dark stain in the earth that was the only remaining evidence that any of this had happened. They were flown back to the same un marked airfield they departed from, debriefed by the same nameless civilian in the same windowless room, and released back to their regular units within twenty four hours.

No paperwork was filed, no after action report was written, no commendations were issued, No medical records for the two wounded men mentioned anything about how they'd actually been injured. As far as the official record was concerned, those men were hurt in a training accident, and the mission to the mountain never took place. Joe stopped talking after that. He sat there in the booth, staring at his empty glass, and I could see his hands were shaking, just slightly,

just enough to notice. This was a man who could field strip a weapon blindfolded, who could put around through a playing card at three hundred meters, who could keep his hands steady through things that would make most people fall apart, and his hands were shaking. I didn't know what to say. I mean, what do you say to something like that. Part of me wanted to chalk it up to the whiskey we'd been drinking for hours. Joe was not a man given to tall tales or exaggeration.

But alcohol does things to people, loosens things up, makes the truth and fiction blend together until you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. I thought about that, But then I looked at his face. I looked at his eyes, and I knew he wasn't making it up. I'd looked into Joe's eyes and situations where a lie could get you killed, where the truth was the only thing standing between you and a body bag, and I knew what that man looked like when he was telling

the truth. He was telling the truth. He told me one more thing before we left the bar that night.

of distress and terror. And incomprehension, he said, he doesn't know what those things were. He doesn't know if they were sasquatch or bigfoot, or Gigantopithecus descendants or undiscovered primates or something else.

all this. He said, maybe it was the whiskey. Maybe it was the fact that he was tired of carrying it alone. Maybe it was because he looked at me and saw somebody who might believe him, somebody who wouldn't laugh or call him crazy or report him to somebody who'd make his life very difficult. I don't know why he told me, but he did. And now I'm telling you, I want to say one more thing. Joe isn't the kind of guy who makes things up. He's not a storyteller.

He's not somebody who embellishes or exaggerates or creates drama where there isn't any. In all the years I knew him, through all the things we went through together, he never once gave me a reason to doubt his word, not once. And when he told me this story, sitting in that booth with the whisky and the country music and the neon light from the bar sign casting red and blue shadows across his face, he wasn't performing. He wasn't trying to entertain me or impress me or get a reaction

out of me. He was confessed. That's the word for it. He was confessing something that had been eating him alive for years, something he'd locked away in a box in the back of his mind and tried to forget but couldn't because some things don't stay in the box. Some things have claws and teeth, and they tear their way out eventually, no matter how hard you try to hold them in and stay.

Joe described, I'd bet my life there are. I don't know any of that. All I know is what Joe told me. And I'm telling you because I think people deserve to know, because those creatures deserved better than to be erased, and because Joe deserves to have someone believe him. Thanks for all of your shows, Thanks for giving people like me a place to share things like this. I

know it sounds insane. I know some people are going to hear this and think I'm full of it, or that Joe was full of it, or that we were just two drunk soldiers telling lies in a bar. That's fine. People can think what they want. But I know what I saw in Joe's eyes that night. I know what I heard in his voice, and I know the truth when I see it.

from my desk and walk away. I went outside and stood in my yard for about twenty minutes, just staring at the tree line at the edge of my property, thinking about what I just read, and the thing that kept coming back to me, the thing that kept turning over in my mind like a stone in a river, was the detail about the hikers. The male hiker twenty five feet up in a tree, neck broken. The female hiker never found, not her body, not her remains, just

some shredded clothing in one boot, gone completely gone. Now, if you've been following this subject as long as I have, you know that those details fit a pattern that's been documented time and time again. People going missing in national parks and national forests under circumstances that defy conventional explanation. Bodies found in locations that are inaccessible by normal means, places where no accident or animimal attack could reasonably deposit them.

People who vanish without a trace in areas where extensive search and rescue operations turn up nothing, absolutely nothing, as if the person simply ceased to exist.

But something put that man up there, Something with the strength to lift a full grown adult twenty five feet off the ground, something with hands capable of grasping and lifting and placing. I've been researching this subject for close to four decades. I had my own encounter back in nineteen eighty six in the mountains of Georgia, and that moment changed the entire trajectory of my life. I've stood in front of audiences at conferences, I've been in documentaries.

I've been deep into the woods and places all over this country, listening to people tell me what they've seen and what they've heard, and what they know in their gut to be true even when the world tells them they're wrong. And in all that time, in all those conversations, in all those thousands of emails and messages and late night phone calls, the stories that scare me the most

aren't the encounter stories. Don't get me wrong. Those are terrifying enough when somebody tells you they were twenty yards from an eight foot tall creature covered in hair that looked at them with eyes that were too intelligent, too aware, too knowing. That's enough to keep you up at night. But what keeps me up even later, what truly gets under my skin and stays there, are the cover up stories.

The ones where somebody saw something, or somebody shot something, or somebody found something and then the men in the unmarked vehicle showed up, or the men in the dark suits appeared, or the phone call came from a number that didn't exist, telling them to forget what they'd seen.

I've heard these stories for decades. I've talked to retired law enforcement officers who've told me about being called to scenes involving large, unidentified creatures and then being told by federal agents to write it up as a bear encounter. I've talked to forestry workers who found tracks and structures deep in the back country and been told by their supervisors to leave it alone and not file a report.

I've talked to military veterans men a lot like Matt and Joe, who've hinted at things they've seen or been involved in but couldn't talk about because of oaths they took and threats that were made. Matt's story Joe's story fits a pattern, and I think most of you listening

know that we've heard the whispers for years. Stories about government teams being dispatched into national parks and national forests, stories about bodies being recovered and disappearing into classified facilities, stories about researchers being threatened, witnesses being silenced, evidence being confiscated. We hear these things and we file them away, and we wonder how much of it is real and how

much is smoke and mirrors. But when a combat veteran, a man who's put his life on the line for this country multiple times, a man whose body served beside him in the worst conditions imaginable and never once gave him a reason to question his honesty, when that man sits down and tells a story like this one with shaking hands and haunted eyes, I listen, and I believe.

I think about that juvenile I think about that sound Matt described, that keening cry, and it turns my stomach, because if Joe's account is accurate, and I believe it is, then what we're talking about isn't just the elimination of some mysterious animals. We're talking about the destruction of a family, a mother, a father, their child, and an another member of their clan, living their lives in the mountains the way their kind has probably been living for longer than

our civilization has existed. They built shelters, they communicated with each other, they moved as a group, a family unit, through territory, they knew intimately they were, by any reasonable definition, a people, not just animals, and a team of men was sent in.

and examined, the implications would be staggering. The scientific community would be turned upside down. Every textbook would have to be rewritten. The conservation and environmental regulations that govern how we manage our public lands would have to be completely overhauled. The economic consequences alone, the impact on logging, mining, energy development, recreation,

tourism would be astronomical. We're talking about an endangered species of primate, potentially the most significant zoological discovery in the history of science, and the entire apparatus of federal land management would have to pivot to protect them. Think about how much money is at stake. Think about the industries that depend on access to federal lands. Think about the

political pressure that would come to bear. So they sent in a kill team, and then they sent in a cleanup crew, and then they told everybody involved to shut up and forget it ever happened, And those four creatures, that family was loaded into bags and flown away to some facility that probably doesn't officially exist, to be studied or stored or destroyed. And the rest of us were left with nothing but legends and grainy footage and the unshakable feeling that we're being lied to. I want you

to also think about something else. Joe told Matt that

this happened in the mid nineteen nineties. That's thirty years ago, thirty years of silence, thirty years of good men carrying a secret that eats at them, that wakes them up at three in the morning, that sits in the corner of the room when they're trying to have a normal conversation with their families, and won't let them forget what they did on that mountain thirty years how many other teams were sent on similar missions that we'll never hear about.

How many other families, other clans were eliminated in the same cold, efficient, classified manner. Are these operations still happening today right now as I record this, Is there a team of men somewhere in the back country of some national park doing what Joe's team did thirty years ago. I don't know, and that uncertainty that not knowing is almost as disturbing as the story itself. I'm not going to tell you what to believe. That's never been my style,

and it's not going to start now. I share these stories because I think they matter. I share them because the people who experience them, whether directly or secondhand, deserve to be heard. And I share them because I believe with everything in me that the truth, whatever it is, is better than the silence. Matt, if you're listening, thank you. Thank you for having the courage to write in. Thank

you for trusting me with Joe's story. And tell Joe, if he's in a place where he'd want to hear it, that there's a whole community of people out there who believe him, who've always believed, and who aren't going to stop asking questions just because somebody in a black helicopter told us to stay safe out there. Everybody, watch the tree line, listen to the silence, and as always, if you've got a story, I want to hear it.