Speaker 1: Now one of your putty. I got a string going
Speaker 1: on here, something just cause my dog. Something killed your dog.
Speaker 1: My dog. We're flying through the air over the tree.
Speaker 1: I don't know how it did it, Okay, Damn, I'm
Speaker 1: really confused. All I saw was my dog coming over
Speaker 1: the fence and he was dead. And once you hit
Speaker 1: the ground like, I didn't see any cars. All I
Speaker 1: saw was my dog coming over the fence.
Speaker 2: Set.
Speaker 1: What are you putting? We got some wonder or something
Speaker 1: crawling around out here? Did you see what it was
Speaker 1: or was it was? Standing enough? I'm out here looking
Speaker 1: through the window now and I don't see anything. I
Speaker 1: don't want to go outside. Jesus Quice, you better hello,
Speaker 1: get the body out here. Quin, I'm out there.
Speaker 2: I thought of a.
Speaker 1: Bench about tech forty nine. I don't know. Easy annount there, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm walking right. Hey.
Speaker 2: Before we start tonight's episode, listener discretion is advised. This
Speaker 2: story contains violence, death, and subject matter that may not
Speaker 2: be suitable for younger listeners or anyone sensitive to this
Speaker 2: kind of content. With that said, let's get into it.
Speaker 2: I got an email a few weeks back that stopped
Speaker 2: me cold. I mean, I've received thousands of emails over
Speaker 2: the years from people sharing their encounters, their sightings, their
Speaker 2: strange experiences out in the woods, and I'm grateful for
Speaker 2: every single one of them. But every now and then
Speaker 2: one comes across my desk that just hits different, one
Speaker 2: that makes the hair on the back of my neck
Speaker 2: stand up, not just because of what happened, but because
Speaker 2: of what it implies, because of the doors it opens
Speaker 2: in your mind that you can never quite close again.
Speaker 2: This was one of those emails. A man who wrote
Speaker 2: to me asked that I call him Matt. That's not
Speaker 2: his real name, and I think by the time you
Speaker 2: hear this story, you'll understand exactly why he doesn't want
Speaker 2: his identity out there. Matt's a veteran. He served multiple
Speaker 2: combat tours in Afghanistan, and the man he's going to
Speaker 2: tell you about served right alongside him. They were brothers
Speaker 2: in the truest sense of the word, the kind of
Speaker 2: bond that only forms when you've bled together, when you've
Speaker 2: held security on a rooftop and Kandahar Province at three
Speaker 2: in the morning while tracers light up the sky around you,
Speaker 2: when you've carried a wounded buddy to a Metavac, bird
Speaker 2: under fire. That kind of bond, the kind that means
Speaker 2: when a man tells you something, even something that sounds impossible,
Speaker 2: you listen and you believe him. Before I read Matt's
Speaker 2: account to you, I want to say something. Matt told
Speaker 2: me in his email that he listens to all of
Speaker 2: my shows. He said he heard me say that if
Speaker 2: you've had an experience, or if you know someone who has,
Speaker 2: to email in and share it. He said that although
Speaker 2: this isn't his experience directly, he wants people to know
Speaker 2: that it happened. He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that
Speaker 2: too many things get buried, too many stories get silenced,
Speaker 2: and he's tired of good men carrying secrets that eat
Speaker 2: them alive. He wants this out there, and I respect
Speaker 2: that more than I can say. So let me share
Speaker 2: Matt's story with you, and I'll let you decide what
Speaker 2: you think. Matt writes, Hey, I'm not sure exactly how
Speaker 2: to start this, so I'll just get into it. I've
Speaker 2: been going back and forth about whether to send this
Speaker 2: email for over a year now. I keep coming back
Speaker 2: to it, and I keep hearing your voice in my
Speaker 2: head saying you want to hear from people who have stories,
Speaker 2: and I think that means something. I think it means
Speaker 2: this needs to be told. I've been listening to your
Speaker 2: shows for a couple of years now, all of them,
Speaker 2: the Bigfoot encounters, the backwoods stories, all of it. My
Speaker 2: wife thinks I'm losing it by the way she hears
Speaker 2: your shows coming through my earbuds when I'm doing yard
Speaker 2: work or tinkering in the garage, and she just shakes
Speaker 2: her head at me. But she doesn't know what I know.
Speaker 2: She doesn't know this story. Nobody does except me and
Speaker 2: the man who told it to me. And I reckon
Speaker 2: whatever nameless people were involved in the events I'm about
Speaker 2: to describe. I've heard you say more than once that
Speaker 2: if somebody has a story, you want to hear it. Well,
Speaker 2: I've got one. It's not mine, but it's real. And
Speaker 2: the man who told it to me is one of
Speaker 2: the most solid, dependable, honest men I've ever known in
Speaker 2: my life. I'd trust him with my life. I have
Speaker 2: trusted him with my life more times than I can count,
Speaker 2: in places most people couldn't find on a map, the
Speaker 2: kind of places where trusting the wrong person gets you
Speaker 2: sent home in a flag draped box. I served in
Speaker 2: the United States Army. I did multiple deployments to Afghanistan,
Speaker 2: and the man I'm going to tell you about, I'll
Speaker 2: call him Joe, served with me on every single one
Speaker 2: of those tours. Joe was the kind of guy you
Speaker 2: wanted beside you when things went sideways. He was calm, methodical,
Speaker 2: He didn't rattle. You could be taking contact from three directions,
Speaker 2: round snapping over your head, dirt kicking up around your feet,
Speaker 2: and Joe would be right there, steady as a rock,
Speaker 2: calling out targets, returning fire with precision, moving like he'd
Speaker 2: done it a thousand times, which by the time I
Speaker 2: knew him, he pretty much had.
Speaker 3: Joe was a few years older.
Speaker 2: Than me, he'd been in longer, done more, seen more.
Speaker 2: He didn't talk much about his early years in the service,
Speaker 2: not the specifics anyway. He'd mentioned things here and there,
Speaker 2: little fragments, but he never really sat down and laid
Speaker 2: it all out. I got the sense that there were
Speaker 2: things in his past that he'd been told not to
Speaker 2: talk about. And Joe was the kind of man who
Speaker 2: took orders seriously, even the ones that came with a
Speaker 2: handshake and a look that said, you'd better keep your
Speaker 2: mouth shut if you know what's good for you. But
Speaker 2: one night that changed. We were stateside between deployment. We'd
Speaker 2: been doing some training maneuvers, the kind of stuff that's
Speaker 2: meant to keep you sharp between rotations, field exercises, land navigation,
Speaker 2: small unit tactics, that sort of thing. It was late
Speaker 2: fall and we were somewhere in the southeastern United States
Speaker 2: at a military installation.
Speaker 3: I'd rather not name.
Speaker 2: The training had wrapped up for the day and a
Speaker 2: few of us headed off posts to a little bar
Speaker 2: that catered to the military crowd. Nothing fancy, neon signs
Speaker 2: in the window, peanut shells on the floor, a jukebox
Speaker 2: in the corner playing country music that nobody was listening to,
Speaker 2: the kind of place where men who've seen too much
Speaker 2: go to not think about it for a while. It
Speaker 2: was me and Joe and two other guys from our unit.
Speaker 2: We grabbed a booth in the back, ordered a round
Speaker 2: of whiskey, and settled in. The place was maybe half full,
Speaker 2: a mix of soldiers and locals, and a few women
Speaker 2: sitting at the bar who'd probably heard that military.
Speaker 3: Payday had just hit. There was a pool.
Speaker 2: Table in the back corner, where a couple of guys
Speaker 2: from another unit were running a game of the balls,
Speaker 2: barely audible over the music. The lighting was dim, the
Speaker 2: kind of intentional dimness that bars cultivate, so everybody looks
Speaker 2: a little better and feels a little less accountable for
Speaker 2: whatever they're about to do or say. The conversation started
Speaker 2: the way it always did, talking trash, telling jokes, complaining
Speaker 2: about the food in the chow hall, debating which deployment
Speaker 2: had been the worst, normal stuff, soldier stuff, the kind
Speaker 2: of meaningless back and forth that men engage in when
Speaker 2: they're trying to decompress from something that can't really be
Speaker 2: decompressed from. We argued about football for a while. Somebody
Speaker 2: brought up a sergeant major we all hated, and told
Speaker 2: a story about him that had us laughing so hard
Speaker 2: the table shook. It was good, it was normal. It
Speaker 2: felt almost like being a regular person in a regular bar,
Speaker 2: having a regular night. But as the night wore on
Speaker 2: and the whiskey kept flowing, the conversation got quieter, more serious.
Speaker 2: The laughter came less frequently, pauses between words got longer.
Speaker 2: That's how it always goes with soldiers who've been down
Speaker 2: ranged together. You start with the jokes and then the
Speaker 2: jokes run out, and then you're left with the silence
Speaker 2: and whatever's living inside it. The other two guys eventually
Speaker 2: drifted off to the bar to watch a football game
Speaker 2: on the television, and it was just me and Joe
Speaker 2: sitting across from each other in that booth with a
Speaker 2: bottle of Jamison between us. That was a lot emptier
Speaker 2: than it had been a couple hours earlier. The jukebox
Speaker 2: had gone quiet. Somebody had apparently run out of quarters,
Speaker 2: or maybe the thing just broke. Either way, the bar
Speaker 2: had gotten noticeably quieter, and in that relative silence, something
Speaker 2: shifted between me and Joe. I could feel it.
Speaker 3: It was like a.
Speaker 2: Change in barometric pressure, that sensation you get before a
Speaker 2: storm rolls in, when the air gets heavy and electric,
Speaker 2: and you know something's coming, even if you can't see
Speaker 2: it yet. Joe got this look on his face. I'd
Speaker 2: seen it before. It was the look he got when
Speaker 2: something was working on him, when something was turning over
Speaker 2: behind his eyes that he couldn't quite let go of.
Speaker 2: He'd get that same look sometimes in the field, right
Speaker 2: before he'd identify something. The rest of us had missed
Speaker 2: a trip wire, a disturbed patch of earth that shouldn't
Speaker 2: have been disturbed, some tiny detail that meant the difference
Speaker 2: between walking home and getting carried home. It was the
Speaker 2: look of a man wrestling with something internally. He stared
Speaker 2: at his glass for a long time, swirling the whiskey around,
Speaker 2: watching the amber liquid catch the light from the neon
Speaker 2: sign in the window, and then he looked up at
Speaker 2: me and said something I'll never forget. He said, Matt,
Speaker 2: have you ever seen something that you know is real,
Speaker 2: something you experienced with your own hands and your own eyes,
Speaker 2: but you can't tell anybody about it, because they'd either
Speaker 2: think you were crazy or you'd end up in a
Speaker 2: cell somewhere. I told him I hadn't, not like that.
Speaker 2: I mean, we'd all seen things in combat that we
Speaker 2: couldn't talk about with civilians, things that would make normal
Speaker 2: people lose their minds. But that wasn't what he was
Speaker 2: talking about. This was something else entirely. He poured himself
Speaker 2: another drink, knocked it back, and then he started talking.
Speaker 2: Joe told me that back in the mid nineteen nineties,
Speaker 2: years before September eleventh, years before any of us ever
Speaker 2: heard of Tora Bora or Hellman Province or any of
Speaker 2: the rest of it. He was part of a small
Speaker 2: specialized team. He didn't call it special forces exactly, but
Speaker 2: he made it clear these weren't regular infantry guys. These
Speaker 2: were men who'd been selected for specific skills tracking, marksmanship,
Speaker 2: field craft, the ability to operate in remote wilderness environments
Speaker 2: for extended periods without support. He said the team was small,
Speaker 2: maybe eight to ten men total, and they trained together
Speaker 2: regularly for missions that were, as he put it, outside
Speaker 2: the normal channels. He said most of what they did
Speaker 2: was boring training exercises, readiness drills, sitting around waiting for
Speaker 2: a call that might never come. But then one day
Speaker 2: the call came.
Speaker 3: Joe said.
Speaker 2: They were assembled on short notice and briefed in a
Speaker 2: room with no windows. The briefing was conducted by a
Speaker 2: man in civilian clothes who never gave his name and
Speaker 2: whom Joe had never seen before. There was also a
Speaker 2: colonel present, but the colonel deferred to the civilian the
Speaker 2: entire time, which Joe said was the first thing that
Speaker 2: told him this wasn't a normal operation. In Joe's experience,
Speaker 2: colonels didn't defer to anybody who wasn't wearing stars on
Speaker 2: their shoulders, and they sure as hell didn't defer to civilians,
Speaker 2: but this one did. The civilian told them that two
Speaker 2: hikers had gone missing in a national park. He didn't
Speaker 2: name the park, he didn't name the state. He simply
Speaker 2: referred to it as the operational area.
Speaker 3: Joe said.
Speaker 2: The man spoke and clipped precise language, no wasted words,
Speaker 2: no emotion. He put up photographs on a screen, aerial
Speaker 2: shots of dense forest, a topographic map marked with grid coordinates,
Speaker 2: and two photographs that Joe said he'll never get out
Speaker 2: of his head as long as he lives. The first
Speaker 2: photograph showed a man's body in a tree, not at
Speaker 2: the base of a tree, not leaning against a tree,
Speaker 2: in the tree, twenty five feet up, wedged into a
Speaker 2: fork between two thick branches. His head canted at an
Speaker 2: angle that no living person's head should ever be at.
Speaker 2: His neck was broken, snapped. The body was still mostly intact,
Speaker 2: but there was significant bruising visible on the torso and arms,
Speaker 2: the kind of deep tissue damage you see from massive
Speaker 2: blunt force trauma.
Speaker 3: Joe said it.
Speaker 2: Looked like the man had been grabbed, crushed, and thrown
Speaker 2: up into that tree like a rag doll, Like he
Speaker 2: weighed nothing. The second photograph was worse in a way
Speaker 2: because of what it didn't show. It was a photograph
Speaker 2: of the area where the female hiker's belongings had been found,
Speaker 2: her backpack, one of her hiking boots, shredded pieces of
Speaker 2: her jacket scattered across the forest floor. But there was
Speaker 2: no body, no remains, nothing, She was simply gone, Joe said.
Speaker 2: The civilian told them that extensive search and rescue efforts
Speaker 2: had been conducted in the immediate aftermath of the hikers
Speaker 2: being reported overdue, and that the male's body had been
Speaker 2: located by a search and rescue dog team, but that
Speaker 2: the female had never been found, not a trace. He
Speaker 2: paused after saying that, and let it sink in, And
Speaker 2: then he said something that changed the entire tone of
Speaker 2: the room. He said, we believe we know what took them,
Speaker 2: and we need you to go in and deal with it.
Speaker 3: Joe said.
Speaker 2: Nobody spoke for about ten seconds, which in a room
Speaker 2: full of soldiers is an eternity. Then one of the
Speaker 2: guys on the team, a staff sergeant who'd been around
Speaker 2: even longer than Joe, asked the obvious question. He asked
Speaker 2: what exactly it was they were being sent to deal with.
Speaker 2: The civilian clicked to the next image on the screen.
Speaker 2: It was a photograph of a footprint, not a bootprint,
Speaker 2: not a shoe print, a bare footprint pressed deep into
Speaker 2: soft earth along the bank of a creer.
Speaker 3: And it was enormous, Joe said.
Speaker 2: The photograph included a measuring tape laid alongside the print
Speaker 2: for scale, and the print measured over sixteen inches long
Speaker 2: and roughly seven inches wide. But that wasn't the one
Speaker 2: that got everybody's attention. The civilian clicked again, and the
Speaker 2: next photograph showed another print, this one found about a
Speaker 2: quarter mile from the first, and it was significantly larger,
Speaker 2: twenty three inches long nine inches wide. The depth of
Speaker 2: the impression in the soil suggested something of extraordinary mass,
Speaker 2: Joe said. The civilian told them that based on the
Speaker 2: stride length and the depth of the tracks, their analysts
Speaker 2: estimated the largest creature to be somewhere between seven and
Speaker 2: a half and eight and a half feet tall and
Speaker 2: weighing in excess of six hundred pounds. Creature, that was
Speaker 2: the word he used, not suspect, not animal creature, Joe said.
Speaker 2: The civilian never once used the word sasquatch. He never
Speaker 2: said bigfoot, He never referenced anything that would connect what
Speaker 2: he was describing to folklore or legend or campfire stories.
Speaker 2: He spoke about it in purely clinical terms, as if
Speaker 2: he were describing a known species, something that had been
Speaker 2: studied and cataloged and understood at least to some degree.
Speaker 2: And stay tuned for more sasquatch. Otta see, We'll be
Speaker 2: right back after these messages. And that, Joe said, was
Speaker 2: more unsettling than anything else about the briefing, because it
Speaker 2: meant that whoever this man represented, whatever agency or organization,
Speaker 2: was pulling the strings, they already knew. They knew these
Speaker 2: things existed. This wasn't a discovery for them. This was
Speaker 2: a problem that needed to be solved.
Speaker 3: The team was.
Speaker 2: Told that the operational area had been quietly closed to
Speaker 2: the public under the guise of a wildfire hazard. Rangers
Speaker 2: and Park Service personnel had been moved out. The area
Speaker 2: was isolated, and it would remain isolated until the mission
Speaker 2: was complete. They were given coords for an insertion point
Speaker 2: and told they'd be helicoptered in at dawn. Their objective
Speaker 2: was simple, locate the creatures, eliminate them, and then get out.
Speaker 2: Joe said the rules of engagement were unlike anything he'd
Speaker 2: ever been given. They were told to treat the targets
Speaker 2: as hostile combatants with extreme physical capabilities. They were told
Speaker 2: that the creatures were believed to be highly intelligent, possibly
Speaker 2: more intelligent than any known primate species, and that they
Speaker 2: should not be underestimated under any circumstances. They were warned
Speaker 2: that the creatures were believed to operate in a family
Speaker 2: group a clan structure, and that where one was found,
Speaker 2: others would likely be close by. They were told to
Speaker 2: expect between three and five individuals based on the track analysis.
Speaker 2: They were also told, and Joe said this part was
Speaker 2: delivered with a coldness that made the hair on his
Speaker 2: arms stand up, that upon completion of the mission, they
Speaker 2: would be met at a designated extraction point by a
Speaker 2: recovery team that would handle the remains. The recovery team
Speaker 2: was not military, Joe said, the civilian made that clear.
Speaker 2: The recovery team would arrive, they would take custody of
Speaker 2: whatever was left, and the soldier's involvement would end at
Speaker 2: that point permanently. The civilian looked each man in the
Speaker 2: eye and told them that this mission was classified above
Speaker 2: top secret. He said that there was no official designation,
Speaker 2: no operation name, no paper trail. As far as the
Speaker 2: United States government was concerned, this mission did not exist,
Speaker 2: had never existed, and would never exist. Anyone who spoke
Speaker 2: about it to anyone ever would face consequences that went
Speaker 2: far beyond a court martial. Joe said he believed him.
Speaker 2: They shipped out at four hundred the next morning. It
Speaker 2: was still dark when the helicopter lifted off from a
Speaker 2: small airfield that Joe said wasn't on any map he'd
Speaker 2: ever seen. There was no tower, no ground crew in
Speaker 2: visible uniforms, just a flat strip of asphalt carved out
Speaker 2: of the forest with a single hangar and a fuel
Speaker 2: truck parked beside it. The pilots never introduced themselves. They
Speaker 2: were already in the cockpit when the team arrived, visors down,
Speaker 2: and they didn't say a word to any of the
Speaker 2: operators during the entire flight. Joe said that told him
Speaker 2: everything he needed to know about the level of compartmentalization
Speaker 2: they were dealing with. The pilots knew where to go
Speaker 2: and when to go, and that was all they knew,
Speaker 2: or all they were willing to acknowledge. Knowing, they flew
Speaker 2: for what Joe estimated was about two hours, heading generally northwest,
Speaker 2: though he said the pilots took a circuitous route, making
Speaker 2: several course changes and at one point flying for a
Speaker 2: long stretch at very low altitude through a river canyon,
Speaker 2: which made it difficult to determine exactly where they were going.
Speaker 2: A couple of the guys on the team tried to
Speaker 2: track their position using landmarks, but the combination of the
Speaker 2: early morning darkness and the deliberate evasion made it nearly impossible.
Speaker 2: Somebody asked Joe if he thought they were in the
Speaker 2: Pacific northwest. Joe said maybe the terrain fit, but he
Speaker 2: couldn't say for certain, and he got the distinct impression
Speaker 2: that was exactly how it was supposed to be. When
Speaker 2: they finally sat down, it was in a clearing on
Speaker 2: the side of a mountain, surrounded by old growth forests
Speaker 2: so thick and tall that the trees looked like the
Speaker 2: columns of some ancient cathedral. The morning light was just
Speaker 2: starting to filter through the canopy, thin and pale and golden,
Speaker 2: and it caught the mist that hung between the trunks
Speaker 2: in long, luminous sheets. Under other circumstances, Joe said it
Speaker 2: would have been one of the most beautiful places he'd
Speaker 2: ever seen, the kind of place that makes you feel
Speaker 2: small in a way that isn't unpleasant, the kind that
Speaker 2: reminds you how old and vast and indifferent the natural
Speaker 2: world really is. But Joe didn't feel any of that
Speaker 2: beauty that morning. What he felt was watched from the
Speaker 2: moment his boots hit the ground. He felt like something
Speaker 2: in those trees knew they were there. The air was
Speaker 2: cold and wet and heavy with the smell of pine
Speaker 2: and decaying leaves and something else, something Joe said he
Speaker 2: couldn't identify at first, but that he'd later come to
Speaker 2: associate with the creatures themselves, a musky, pungent, almost overpowering
Speaker 2: odor that was unlike anything he'd encountered in nature before.
Speaker 2: He said, he'd spent time in bear country. He'd been
Speaker 2: around elk and moose and mountain lions and every other
Speaker 2: large mammal the North American continent had to offer. He
Speaker 2: knew what animals smelled like. This wasn't that it was organic,
Speaker 2: clearly biological, but it had an almost chemical quality to it,
Speaker 2: like the smell of a large predator's den mixed with
Speaker 2: something sharper, something almost sulfuric. It burned the back of
Speaker 2: your throat if you breathed too deeply, and it triggered
Speaker 2: something primal, some deep seated alarm system in the body
Speaker 2: that said you were not at the top of.
Speaker 3: The food chain.
Speaker 2: Here, the team assembled in the clearing and conducted a
Speaker 2: final equipment check. Joe said they were armed with standard
Speaker 2: issue rifles and side arms, but that each man also
Speaker 2: carried a weapon that Joe described as significantly heavier caliber
Speaker 2: than what they'd normally take into the field. He didn't
Speaker 2: specify exactly what, but he implied they were carrying the
Speaker 2: kind of firepower you'd bring to stop something large and dangerous,
Speaker 2: something that might not go down easy. They also carried
Speaker 2: standard field equipment radios, GPS units, first aid kits rations
Speaker 2: for three days. The expectation, Joe said, was that the
Speaker 2: mission would be completed within forty eight to seventy two hours.
Speaker 2: They moved out at first light, heading along a ridge
Speaker 2: line that the aerial photographs had shown leading toward the
Speaker 2: creek where the largest tracks had been found. Joe was
Speaker 2: on point for the first leg, and he said that
Speaker 2: within the first hour he knew something was wrong with
Speaker 2: the forest. Not wrong exactly, but different. Off The woods
Speaker 2: were too quiet. There were no birds singing, no squirrels chattering,
Speaker 2: no insects buzzing. The forest around them was utterly, completely,
Speaker 2: depressively silent, as if every living thing within a mile
Speaker 2: radius had packed up and left. Joe had spent years
Speaker 2: training and operating in wilderness environments all over the country,
Speaker 2: and he said he'd never experienced anything like it. They
Speaker 2: reached the creek around mid morning and immediately found what
Speaker 2: they were looking for, tracks, dozens of them. The creek
Speaker 2: bank was soft, alluvial soil, the kind of dark, wet,
Speaker 2: clay rich earth that holds an impression like a mold,
Speaker 2: perfect for preserving detail, and the detail was extraordinary. Joe
Speaker 2: said these weren't vague depressions in the dirt that could
Speaker 2: be dismissed as natural features or misidentified animal prints. These
Speaker 2: were clear, unmistakable, anatomically consistent footprints, showing individual toes, a
Speaker 2: defined heel strike, a mid foot flection crease, and in
Speaker 2: several of the deeper prints, visible dermal ridges. The equivalent
Speaker 2: of fingerprints on.
Speaker 3: The soles of the feet.
Speaker 2: These were the footprints of a living bipedal prime I
Speaker 2: mate like creature, and they were everywhere. The creek bank
Speaker 2: was covered with footprints of various sizes layered over each
Speaker 2: other in places, suggesting that this area was used repeatedly,
Speaker 2: perhaps as a water source, perhaps as a crossing point,
Speaker 2: perhaps as a fishing spot, Joe said. The tracker took
Speaker 2: photographs of every print he could, and then spent about
Speaker 2: twenty minutes cataloging what he found while the rest of
Speaker 2: the team pulled security in a loose perimeter around the creek.
Speaker 2: The tracker identified at least four distinct sets of prints.
Speaker 2: The largest match the twenty three inch measurements from the
Speaker 2: briefing photographs. These were the ones that commanded the most attention,
Speaker 2: not just because of their size, but because of their depth.
Speaker 2: The print was sunk nearly three inches into the soil, which,
Speaker 2: given the consistency of the ground, suggested a creature of
Speaker 2: extraordinary weight bearing down on a single foot during the
Speaker 2: stride cycle. The second largest set was slightly smaller, around
Speaker 2: eighteen inches, with a similar morphology but subtle differences in
Speaker 2: the toe's play and arch shape that suggested a different individual.
Speaker 2: The third set was narrower and showed a different gait pattern,
Speaker 2: a shorter stride length with a slight inward rotation of
Speaker 2: the foot, which the tracker believed indicated a female. And
Speaker 2: the fourth set was significantly smaller than the others, maybe
Speaker 2: sixteen inches, with a shallower depth of impression that suggested
Speaker 2: something lighter, younger, a juvenile, Joe said. The tracker looked
Speaker 2: up from the fourth set of prints with an expression
Speaker 2: that Joe would remember for.
Speaker 3: The rest of his life.
Speaker 2: It wasn't fear, exactly, though there was certainly fear in it.
Speaker 2: It was more like a kind of awe mixed with
Speaker 2: something that might have been sadness. The tracker was a
Speaker 2: man who had spent his entire adult life studying the
Speaker 2: movement patterns of living things, and Joe could see in
Speaker 2: his face the moment when everything the man thought he
Speaker 2: knew about the natural world shifted on its axis. The
Speaker 2: tracker looked at the team leader and said one word family,
Speaker 2: four creatures, A family, Joe said. They followed the tracks
Speaker 2: upstream for most of the day. The terrain was brutal,
Speaker 2: steep ravines choked with dead fall boulder fields covered in
Speaker 2: slick moss, creek crossings where the water ran fast and
Speaker 2: cold over slippery rock. But the tracks were consistent and clear.
Speaker 2: Whatever these things were, they weren't trying to hide their trail.
Speaker 2: Joe said that bothered him in his experience, anything that
Speaker 2: wasn't worried about being tracked either didn't know it was
Speaker 2: being followed or it didn't care. And everything about the
Speaker 2: briefing had told him these things were smart enough to know.
Speaker 2: They made camp that first night on a small plateau
Speaker 2: overlooking the creek drainage. The plateau was maybe thirty meters across,
Speaker 2: ringed on three sides by dense timber, and dropping off
Speaker 2: sharply on the fourth side into the ravine they'd been
Speaker 2: following all day. It was a defensible position, decent sight lines,
Speaker 2: natural obstacles to slow anything approaching from the tree line,
Speaker 2: and the steep drop behind them meant they only had
Speaker 2: to worry about three directions.
Speaker 3: Joe said.
Speaker 2: The team leader chose the position with the same tactical
Speaker 2: instinct you'd use selecting a patrol base in hostile territory,
Speaker 2: and that fact, the fact that they were treating this
Speaker 2: wilderness as hostile territory wasn't lost on any of them.
Speaker 2: They didn't build fires. They ate cold rations in silence,
Speaker 2: each man sitting with his back to a tree or
Speaker 2: a rock, weapons within arm's reach. Joe said the mood
Speaker 2: was tense but professional. These were experienced operators. They knew
Speaker 2: how to compartmentalize fear and focus on the task. But
Speaker 2: there was an undercurrent of something Joe had never felt
Speaker 2: before on any mission, a sense of being fundamentally out
Speaker 2: of their depth of operating in a domain where their
Speaker 2: training and technology and firepower might not be enough. In Afghanistan,
Speaker 2: they'd faced enemies with rifles and mortars and improvised explosives.
Speaker 2: Those threats were terrifying, but they were understood. They existed
Speaker 2: within a framework of human conflict that soldiers had been
Speaker 2: navigating for thousands of years. This was something else. Entirely,
Speaker 2: this was a hunt, but Joe said he wasn't entirely
Speaker 2: sure they were the hunters. They set up a watch rotation,
Speaker 2: two men on at all times, equipped with night vision.
Speaker 2: Joe pulled the first watch with another team member, a
Speaker 2: man he called Ramirez, though Joe said that wasn't his
Speaker 2: real name either. Ramirez was a quiet, intense guy from
Speaker 2: somewhere in the Southwest. He'd grown up hunting in the
Speaker 2: desert and could sit motionless for hours, watching and waiting
Speaker 2: without losing focus. He was the kind of man you
Speaker 2: wanted on watch when the stakes were high. The first
Speaker 2: few hours were uneventful. The night settled over the mountain
Speaker 2: like a heavy blanket, darkness so complete and absolute that
Speaker 2: without night vision, you couldn't see your hand in front
Speaker 2: of your face. The canopy above blocked out the stars
Speaker 2: and whatever moonlight there might have been, creating a world
Speaker 2: of impenetrable black that pressed against you from all sides.
Speaker 2: Through the green phosphor glow of his night vision, Joe
Speaker 2: could see the tree line around their perimeter, the ghostly
Speaker 2: shapes of the trunk standing like silent sentinels, the occasional
Speaker 2: movement of a branch, and a breeze. He couldn't feel.
Speaker 2: Everything was still. Everything was quiet, too quiet. Joe said,
Speaker 2: that was the thing that kept gnawing at him. At
Speaker 2: any campsite he'd ever occupied, in any forest he'd ever
Speaker 2: operated in, the night was alive with sound, owl's calling,
Speaker 2: mice rustling through leaf litter, the distant yip of coyotes,
Speaker 2: the hum and chirp of a thousand insects, creating a
Speaker 2: constant sonic backdrop that you stopped noticing after a while
Speaker 2: because it was just always there. But here on this
Speaker 2: mountain there was nothing. The silence was total and oppressive,
Speaker 2: so complete that Joe said he could hear the blood
Speaker 2: moving through his own ears, could hear each eat of
Speaker 2: his heart, could hear Ramirez breathing twelve feet to his left.
Speaker 2: It was the kind of silence that made you realize
Speaker 2: how much background noise you normally take for granted, and
Speaker 2: its absence was profoundly viscerally wrong. It was during that
Speaker 2: first watch that they heard them. Joe said, it started
Speaker 2: around two hundred two o'clock in the morning. The silence
Speaker 2: had been unbroken for hours, so total and so sustained
Speaker 2: that Joe had almost begun to accept it as normal,
Speaker 2: to adjust to this soundless world as the new baseline.
Speaker 2: And then, from somewhere up the drainage, maybe half a
Speaker 2: mile away, maybe less, a sound rose out of the
Speaker 2: darkness that Joe said turned his blood to ice water
Speaker 2: in his veins. It was a vocalization, that was the
Speaker 2: clinical term for it, but calling what Joe described, a
Speaker 2: vocalization is like calling a hurricane a breeze.
Speaker 3: He said.
Speaker 2: It started low, a deep, rumbling chest vibrating bass note
Speaker 2: that he felt in his stern before he heard it
Speaker 2: with his ears, and stay tuned for more sasquatch ott
Speaker 2: to see. We'll be right back after these messages. It
Speaker 2: was like the growl of something impossibly large, something with
Speaker 2: a chest cavity the size of a fifty gallon drum,
Speaker 2: resonating at a frequency that seemed to bypass his ears
Speaker 2: entirely and go straight to some primal, ancient part of
Speaker 2: his brain that knew exactly what it was hearing, even
Speaker 2: if his conscious mind couldn't process it.
Speaker 3: And then it rose.
Speaker 2: The sound climbed in pitch and volume until it became
Speaker 2: a howl, a scream, a roar, something that combined all
Speaker 2: three and was somehow worse than any of them individually.
Speaker 2: It echoed off the mountain sides and rolled through the
Speaker 2: valley like thunder, and Joe said it went on and
Speaker 2: on and on, far longer than any human could sustain
Speaker 2: a vocalization, far longer than any animal he'd ever heard.
Speaker 2: He estimated the call lasted between fifteen and twenty seven
Speaker 2: seconds before it finally tapered off and faded into the darkness.
Speaker 2: The silence that followed was worse.
Speaker 3: Joe said.
Speaker 2: He looked over at Ramirez and saw that the man's
Speaker 2: face had gone completely white in the green glow of
Speaker 2: the night vision. Ramirez was a combat veteran. He'd been
Speaker 2: in firefights in places that would make your skin crawl,
Speaker 2: But in that moment, on that dark mountain side, listening
Speaker 2: to the echo of something that shouldn't exist rolling through
Speaker 2: the timber, Ramirez looked like a man who was seriously
Speaker 2: reconsidering every decision that had led him to this particular moment.
Speaker 2: And then the call was answered from behind them, from uphill,
Speaker 2: deeper in the forest, maybe a quarter mile away. A
Speaker 2: second voice rose in response. This one was higher in
Speaker 2: pitch but no less powerful, and it was joined almost
Speaker 2: immediately by a third, this one more of a rapid, staccato,
Speaker 2: barking sound, percussive and aggressive, like something hitting a hollow
Speaker 2: log with a baseball bat while simultaneously screaming. The three
Speaker 2: voices overlapped and intertwined for what Joe said felt like
Speaker 2: an hour but was probably less than a minute, and
Speaker 2: then they stopped all at once, as if someone had
Speaker 2: thrown a switch, and the silence returned. Joe said. Nobody
Speaker 2: slept for the rest of that night. Every man on
Speaker 2: the team sat with his weapon across his knees, staring
Speaker 2: into the darkness, listening, but there was nothing more to hear.
Speaker 2: The forest was silent, and somehow that was the most
Speaker 2: frightening thing of all. They broke camp at first light
Speaker 2: and resumed tracking. Joe said nobody needed to be told
Speaker 2: to move. They'd been awake for hours, every man sitting
Speaker 2: rigid in the darkness with his weapon across his knees,
Speaker 2: replaying those vocalizations in his mind, trying to reconcile what
Speaker 2: his ears had heard with what his training and education
Speaker 2: told him should exist in a North American forest. Nobody
Speaker 2: had an explanation. Nobody offered one. They just packed their
Speaker 2: gear in silence and moved out. Trail led them higher
Speaker 2: into the mountains, along the spine of a ridge that
Speaker 2: rose steeply through stands of enormous Douglas fir and western
Speaker 2: red cedar. Joe said, the trees up there were ancient, massive,
Speaker 2: some of them six or seven feet in diameter, their
Speaker 2: trunks rising straight and branchless for forty or fifty feet
Speaker 2: before the canopy started. Many of them had to be
Speaker 2: five hundred maybe eight hundred years old.
Speaker 3: These were trees that.
Speaker 2: Had been standing when Columbus set sail, trees that had
Speaker 2: witnessed the entirety of European presents on this continent and
Speaker 2: hadn't moved an inch. Their bark was thick and deeply furrowed,
Speaker 2: and in places it was scarred with long, vertical gouges
Speaker 2: that the tracker pointed out and said were not natural.
Speaker 2: Something with claws or fingers had scraped those marks into
Speaker 2: the wood at heights ranging from five to nearly nine
Speaker 2: feet off the ground, territorial markers, maybe signposts. In the
Speaker 2: language the team couldn't read. The understory was a tangle
Speaker 2: of ferns and fallen logs and devil's club, the kind
Speaker 2: of vegetation that grabs at your legs and tears at
Speaker 2: your clothing and slows you to a crawl. Every step
Speaker 2: required effort and attention, and the physical demands of the terrain,
Speaker 2: combined with the sleep deprivation and the constant low grade
Speaker 2: adrenaline that had been coursing through every man since those
Speaker 2: vocalizations the night before was taking a toll. Joe said
Speaker 2: he could see it in the faces of his teammates,
Speaker 2: the tight jaws, the darting eyes, the way everybody's head
Speaker 2: was on a swivel, scanning the tree line, constantly flinching
Speaker 2: at every snap twig and every rustle of wind through
Speaker 2: the canopy. These were men who'd kept their composure under
Speaker 2: mortar fire, and they were spooked. That fact alone, more
Speaker 2: than anything else, told Joe how far outside the boundaries
Speaker 2: of normal experience they traveled. The light that filtered down
Speaker 2: through the canopy was dim and green and had a
Speaker 2: quality to it that Joe described as almost submarine, like
Speaker 2: being underwater in a murky lakesi Ability was limited, maybe
Speaker 2: forty or fifty meters in any direction before the trunks
Speaker 2: and the undergrowth swallowed everything in shadow. It was perfect
Speaker 2: ambush terrain, and every man on the team knew it.
Speaker 2: Around midday, the tracker signaled a halt he'd found something.
Speaker 2: The team moved up to his position and found what
Speaker 2: Joe described as a structure, not a nest, not a den,
Speaker 2: a structure. It was built against the base of an
Speaker 2: enormous fallen tree using branches and smaller logs that had
Speaker 2: been deliberately placed, interlocked and woven together to form a
Speaker 2: rough shelter about eight feet tall and maybe ten feet across.
Speaker 2: The opening faced downhill away from the prevailing wind, and
Speaker 2: the ground inside was covered with a thick layer of
Speaker 2: dried ferns and grass and strips of bark that had
Speaker 2: been shredded and laid down like bedding. The smell was staggering,
Speaker 2: Joe said. The musky odor they detected at the insertion
Speaker 2: point was nothing compared to what hit them at that structure.
Speaker 2: It was concentrated, overwhelming, so thick in the air that
Speaker 2: several of the men gagged. Joe said, it was the
Speaker 2: smell of something alive, something huge and wild and absolutely real.
Speaker 2: And standing in front of that shelter, looking at the
Speaker 2: clear evidence of intelligence and deliberate construction, he said, the
Speaker 2: last trace of doubt left his mind. Whatever they were tracking,
Speaker 2: it wasn't an animal, not in the way he understood
Speaker 2: the word. It was something else, something that fell into
Speaker 2: a category that didn't have a name in any field
Speaker 2: manual he'd ever read. The tracker determined that the structure
Speaker 2: had been recently occupied within the last twenty four hours.
Speaker 2: Based on the freshness of the bedding material and the
Speaker 2: intensity of the odor. The tracks leading away from it
Speaker 2: headed further up the ridge, and they were deep and fresh.
Speaker 2: The team was close. They moved out in a staggered
Speaker 2: tactical formation, maintaining noise discipline, communicating with hand signals. Joe
Speaker 2: said the tension was suffocating. Every man on that team
Speaker 2: had operated in combat environments where the thread of death
Speaker 2: was constant and real, but this was different. In combat,
Speaker 2: you knew what you were up against. You understood your enemy,
Speaker 2: You'd studied his tactics, his weapons, his patterns of behavior.
Speaker 2: But out here in this ancient forest, tracking something that
Speaker 2: the United States government apparently knew about but refused to acknowledge,
Speaker 2: something that could rip a grown man apart and throw
Speaker 2: his body twenty five feet into a tree. They were
Speaker 2: in completely unknown territory, and every one of them knew it.
Speaker 2: The encounter happened around fourteen hundred hours that afternoon, two o'clock.
Speaker 2: They'd been moving along the ridge for about two hours
Speaker 2: when the point man, who had taken over from Joe
Speaker 2: after the midday halt, raised his fist. Everybody froze. Joe
Speaker 2: was about fifteen meters back in the formation, and from
Speaker 2: his position he could see the point man slowly lower
Speaker 2: himself to one knee and raise his rifle. Joe followed
Speaker 2: his line of sight and saw movement in the trees ahead,
Speaker 2: something large, something dark, moving between the trunks with the
Speaker 2: fluidity that Joe said was deeply disturbing, because nothing that
Speaker 2: big should be able to move that quietly. Joe raised
Speaker 2: his optic and got his first clear look at one
Speaker 2: of them through.
Speaker 3: His rifle scope.
Speaker 2: He said his first thought was that it was a man.
Speaker 2: His brain defaulted to the most logical explanation that what
Speaker 2: he was seeing was a very large human being moving
Speaker 2: through the forest, but that interpretation lasted about two seconds
Speaker 2: before it collapsed under the weight of what his eyes
Speaker 2: were actually telling him. It was humanoid bipedal upright, but
Speaker 2: it was not human. Joe estimated it stood between six
Speaker 2: and a half and seven feet tall. Its body was
Speaker 2: covered in dark brown hair, not fur in the way
Speaker 2: a bear's coat is fur, but hair coarse and matted
Speaker 2: and hanging in places, thinner in others. It was broad
Speaker 2: across the shoulders, enormously broad, whiter than any human Joe
Speaker 2: had ever seen, and its arms were long relative to
Speaker 2: its body, hanging past what would have been the knee
Speaker 2: on a human frame. Its hands were visible, and Joe
Speaker 2: said they were massive, easily twice the size of a
Speaker 2: large man's hands, with thick fingers that curled slightly as
Speaker 2: it walked. The head sat on a short, thick neck,
Speaker 2: and Joe said the most striking feature of the head
Speaker 2: was the brow, a heavy, pronounced, bony ridge that jutted
Speaker 2: out over the eyes and gave the face a look
Speaker 2: that he described as simultaneously primitive and frighteningly aware. The
Speaker 2: thing was looking around as it moved. It was scanning,
Speaker 2: It was alert. It was not simply ambling through the
Speaker 2: forest the way a bear or a deer mite.
Speaker 3: It was watching. Joe said.
Speaker 2: There was a moment, a fraction of a second, where
Speaker 2: the creature turned its head and seemed to look directly
Speaker 2: in his direction, and even though he was well concealed
Speaker 2: and making no sound, he felt with absolute certainty.
Speaker 3: That it knew he was there. He said.
Speaker 2: The eyes were dark, deeply set under that heavy brow,
Speaker 2: and there was an intelligence behind them that was unmistakable
Speaker 2: and profoundly disturbing. The team leader, who was positioned about
Speaker 2: ten meters to Joe's left, made the call. He gave
Speaker 2: the signal to engage, Joe said, three rifles fired almost simultaneously.
Speaker 2: The creature in the open took multiple hits in the
Speaker 2: center of mass and went down hard, crashing forward into
Speaker 2: the underbrush with a sound like a falling tree. But
Speaker 2: before the echo of those first shots had faded, the
Speaker 2: forest erupted from the right from a thicket of devil's
Speaker 2: club and vine maple that was so dense Joe hadn't
Speaker 2: thought anything could possibly be hiding in it. A second
Speaker 2: creature burst into the open. This one was slightly smaller
Speaker 2: than the first, with lighter colored hair and a narrower
Speaker 2: build that Joe would later associate with the female tracks
Speaker 2: they'd cataloged at the creek. It moved with a speed
Speaker 2: that Joe said defied everything he understood about biomechanics and
Speaker 2: large body mass. It covered ground like a sprinter, arms pumping, legs, churning,
Speaker 2: crashing through vegetation that would have stopped a man cold.
Speaker 2: It was screaming as it ran, producing a vocalization that
Speaker 2: Joe described as the most horrifying sound he'd ever heard
Speaker 2: in his life. A piercing, wailing shriek that oscillated between
Speaker 2: frequencies so rapidly it sounded almost electronic, like a siren
Speaker 2: being fed through a distortion pedal. Two men engaged the
Speaker 2: creature as it charged. Joe said the rounds impacted visibly.
Speaker 2: He could see the hair puff.
Speaker 3: With each hit.
Speaker 2: But the creature kept coming for another three or four
Speaker 2: strides before its legs seemed to give out and it
Speaker 2: collapsed forward, sliding through the ferns and dead leaves and
Speaker 2: coming to rest against the base of a cedar tree.
Speaker 2: And then the juvenile appeared. It came out of the
Speaker 2: same thicket as the female, slightly behind and to the left.
Speaker 3: Joe said.
Speaker 2: It was about five feet tall, covered in lighter hair
Speaker 2: than the adults, almost auburn in color, and it was
Speaker 2: making a that, Joe said, almost broke him. It wasn't
Speaker 2: a roar, it wasn't a scream. It was a cry,
Speaker 2: a keening, wavering, high pitched cry that sounded so much
Speaker 2: like a human child in distress that Joe's finger hesitated
Speaker 2: on the trigger for a fraction of a second, for
Speaker 2: the smallest sliver of time, Something in him resisted, something
Speaker 2: in his gut in his chest in whatever part of
Speaker 2: a man houses. His conscience rebelled against what he was
Speaker 2: about to do, but training took over. Orders took over,
Speaker 2: the mission took over. Two rounds from different shooters hit
Speaker 2: the juvenile almost simultaneously, and it went down.
Speaker 3: Joe said.
Speaker 2: It fell forward and didn't move, and the sound it
Speaker 2: had been making stopped instantly, and the silence that replaced
Speaker 2: it was the loudest thing Joe had ever heard.
Speaker 3: Three down.
Speaker 2: Three creatures lying in the old growth forest on a
Speaker 2: mountain side that officially didn't have any creatures on it
Speaker 2: at all, their dark blood soaking into the ferns and
Speaker 2: the fallen needles, steam rising from the wounds in the
Speaker 2: cold mountain air. But it wasn't over, Joe said. The
Speaker 2: team leader was on the radio reporting three targets down,
Speaker 2: requesting status on the fourth when the world came apart.
Speaker 2: The big male hit them from uphill. It came out
Speaker 2: of the timber above the ridge like something out of
Speaker 2: a nightmare, moving downhill with the force and speed of
Speaker 2: an avalanche. Joe said it was the largest living thing
Speaker 2: he'd ever seen that wasn't behind a fence in a zoo.
Speaker 2: It was easily over eight feet tall, probably closer to
Speaker 2: eight and a half, and it was built like something
Speaker 2: designed by nature specifically for the purpose of destroying things.
Speaker 2: Its chest was a barrel of muscle covered in thick, dark,
Speaker 2: almost black hair. Its shoulders were so broad that it
Speaker 2: turned slightly sideways to pass between trees that were four
Speaker 2: feet apart. Its face was a mask of rage, the
Speaker 2: lips pulled back to reveal massive teeth, the brow ridge
Speaker 2: casting deep shadows over eyes that burned with something Joe
Speaker 2: said he could only disco as fury, not animal aggression,
Speaker 2: not instinct fury understanding. This creature knew exactly what had
Speaker 2: happened to the others, and it was coming for the
Speaker 2: men who'd done it. It covered the distance between the
Speaker 2: tree line and the nearest team member in what Joe
Speaker 2: estimated was less than three seconds, maybe two. Joe said
Speaker 2: later that he'd seen men move under fire, he'd seen
Speaker 2: the physical feats that adrenaline and combat can produce in
Speaker 2: a human body, and nothing he'd ever witnessed came close
Speaker 2: to the explosive speed of that creature. The nearest man,
Speaker 2: one of the younger members of the team, managed to
Speaker 2: get his weapon up and fire a burst, but the
Speaker 2: creature swatted the rifle aside with one hand like it
Speaker 2: was a stick, and hit the soldier in the chest
Speaker 2: with the other. Joe said the impact launched the man
Speaker 2: off his feet. He didn't stumble backward, he didn't stagger.
Speaker 2: He was physically lifted off the ground and thrown sideways
Speaker 2: through the air, crashing into a tree trunk eight or
Speaker 2: nine feet away, with a sound that Joe said was distinctly,
Speaker 2: horrifyingly different from any impact sound he'd heard in combat.
Speaker 2: And stay tuned for more sasquatch otta see, We'll be
Speaker 2: right back after these messages. There was a crack, a wet,
Speaker 2: organic crack, and the soldier crumpled to the ground and
Speaker 2: didn't get up. The creature didn't pause. It pivoted, turning
Speaker 2: toward the next closest man with a speed that shouldn't
Speaker 2: have been possible for something that size.
Speaker 3: And it roared.
Speaker 2: Joe said, the roar at close range was a physical force.
Speaker 2: He felt it hit his chest, He felt it in
Speaker 2: his teeth. It was so loud and so deep and
Speaker 2: so fundamentally wrong that something in his hind brain, something
Speaker 2: ancient and pre verbal and utterly beyond his control, told
Speaker 2: him to run. Every survival instinct he had screamed at
Speaker 2: him to drop his weapon and flee. He didn't, Joe said.
Speaker 2: He shouldered his rifle and began firing. Ramirez was firing,
Speaker 2: other men were firing. The creature took hit after hit,
Speaker 2: rounds impacting its torso, its shoulders, its legs, and it
Speaker 2: kept coming. It grabbed a fallen log, a piece of
Speaker 2: dead fall that Joe estimated weighed at least one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty pounds, and hurled it at the men firing
Speaker 2: on it from the left side. The log hit one
Speaker 2: of the soldiers across the legs and put him down, screaming.
Speaker 2: The creature charged again, coming at the main body of
Speaker 2: the team, and Joe said, time did that thing it
Speaker 2: does in combat, that expansion, that slowing where everything becomes
Speaker 2: crystal clear and hyper focused. He could see the individual
Speaker 2: hairs on the creature's body, He could see the muscles
Speaker 2: moving under the skin. He could see the dark eyes
Speaker 2: fixed on him, and he knew with absolute certainty that
Speaker 2: he was looking at something that intended to kill him.
Speaker 2: Joe shifted his aim up. He'd been firing center mass,
Speaker 2: but the creature's chest was so heavily muscled, so thick
Speaker 2: and dense, that the round seemed to be having mental effect.
Speaker 2: He raised his point of aim and fired three rounds
Speaker 2: in rapid succession at the creature's head. At least one
Speaker 2: of them connected. The creature's forward momentum faltered. It staggered.
Speaker 2: Its left hand went up to the side of its
Speaker 2: head in a gesture that Joe said was so terribly,
Speaker 2: heartbreakingly human that it almost made him stop firing. But
Speaker 2: he didn't stop, neither did the others. They poured fire
Speaker 2: into the creature, and it went to one knee and
Speaker 2: then the other, and then it pitched forward onto the
Speaker 2: forest floor with an impact that Joe said he felt
Speaker 2: through the soles of his boots. It was still alive.
Speaker 2: It was on the ground, face down, its massive body
Speaker 2: heaving with labored breaths, blood pooling around it, dark and
Speaker 2: thick and steaming in the cold air. It tried to
Speaker 2: push itself up, one enormous arm braced against the ground,
Speaker 2: and the creature lifted its head and looked at the
Speaker 2: men who had shot it, And Joe said the expression
Speaker 2: on its face in that moment was something he has
Speaker 2: never been able to reconcile with the word animal. There
Speaker 2: was pain in that face, there was confusion, and there
Speaker 2: was something else, something Joe struggled to name, and finally
Speaker 2: settled on the word sorrow, like it knew, like it
Speaker 2: understood not just what was happening, but what it meant,
Speaker 2: what had been lost. The team leader stepped forward and
Speaker 2: put two more rounds into the creature, and it went
Speaker 2: down for the last time. The massive chest stopped heaving,
Speaker 2: the dark eyes glazed over, The arm that had been
Speaker 2: trying to push itself up collapsed, and eight hundred plus
Speaker 2: pounds of something that wasn't supposed to exist settled into
Speaker 2: the mountain earth and was still. Joe said, the silence
Speaker 2: that followed the last gunshot was unlike any silence he'd
Speaker 2: ever known. It wasn't the silence of absence, the mere
Speaker 2: lack of sound. It was a loaded silence, a heavy, pregnant,
Speaker 2: accusing silence that seemed to hang over the killing ground
Speaker 2: like smoke. The smell of cordite with that overpowering musky
Speaker 2: odor now tinged with the copper tang of blood, and
Speaker 2: the combination was nauseating. The forest floor around the creatures
Speaker 2: was torn up from the violence of the encounter. Ferns flattened, soil, churned,
Speaker 2: bark stripped from tree trunks by ricochets and impacts. It
Speaker 2: looked like a bomb had gone off in the middle
Speaker 2: of paradise, Joe said. Nobody spoke for a long time
Speaker 2: after that. He stood there, looking at the massive body
Speaker 2: of the male, at the sheer impossible size of the thing,
Speaker 2: at the way its hair was matted with blood and debris,
Speaker 2: at the way one of its enormous hands was still curled,
Speaker 2: fingers partially closed, as if it had been reaching for
Speaker 2: something when it died. He looked at its face, even
Speaker 2: in death, even with the damage the rounds had inflicted,
Speaker 2: there was something in that face that was so close
Speaker 2: to human it made Joe's stomach turn. The brow ridge,
Speaker 2: the deep set eyes, the shape of the jaw. It
Speaker 2: was like looking at a rough draft of a hue
Speaker 2: human face, or maybe a final draft of something that
Speaker 2: had come before humans, something older and more primal, that
Speaker 2: had taken a different evolutionary path and ended up here
Speaker 2: on this mountain, in the crosshairs of men with guns.
Speaker 2: The immediate aftermath was all business securing the perimeter, checking
Speaker 2: the wounded, inventoring ammunition, calling in a situation report. The
Speaker 2: team medic, a steady handed specialist who Joe said could
Speaker 2: stay calm in the middle of an earthquake, went to
Speaker 2: work on the two injured men. The soldier who'd been
Speaker 2: struck by the creature had a broken sternum and three
Speaker 2: fractured ribs, Joe said. The medic told him later that
Speaker 2: the impact had been so severe that it was a
Speaker 2: miracle the man's heart hadn't been stopped by the blunt
Speaker 2: force trauma. The kid, and Joe called him a kid
Speaker 2: because he was the youngest on the team, was conscious,
Speaker 2: but in tremendous pain, and his breathing was shallow and
Speaker 2: labored in a way that suggested one of those fractured
Speaker 2: ribs might have nicked a lung. The man who been
Speaker 2: hit by the throne log had a compound fracture of
Speaker 2: his left tibia. The bone visible threw a gash in
Speaker 2: his calf, and he was going into shock. The medic
Speaker 2: stabilized both of them as best he could, splinting the leg,
Speaker 2: administering morphine, monitoring vitals, but they needed evacuation. They needed
Speaker 2: a hospital. The team leader called it in and within
Speaker 2: an hour a helicopter was inbound. But it wasn't a
Speaker 2: military helicopter.
Speaker 3: Joe said.
Speaker 2: It was a large, unmarked black helicopter with no visible
Speaker 2: identification numbers, no branch markings, no unit insignia, nothing. It
Speaker 2: came in low over the ridge, flaring hard, and set
Speaker 2: down in a clearing about two hundred meters from where
Speaker 2: the creatures lay. Before the rotors had even slowed to idle,
Speaker 2: men began disembarking. Joe said there were eight or ten
Speaker 2: of them, all wearing civilian clothing, dark pants, dark jackets, unmarked.
Speaker 2: They carried equipment cases and what Joe recognized his body bags,
Speaker 2: but not standard military body bags. These were larger, much larger,
Speaker 2: heavy gauge material reinforced, clearly designed for something far bigger
Speaker 2: than a human being. The men moved with practiced deficiency.
Speaker 2: They didn't acknowledge the soldiers beyond a cursory nod from
Speaker 2: the man who appeared to be in charge. They went
Speaker 2: straight to the bodies and began their work. Joe said
Speaker 2: he watched them examine the creatures, briefly, taking photographs, making
Speaker 2: notes on handheld devices, and then bag them. It took
Speaker 2: multiple men to move each body. The adult male required
Speaker 2: six men working together to lift it into the bag
Speaker 2: and then drag the bag to the helicopter on a
Speaker 2: makeshift sled.
Speaker 3: They'd brought with them.
Speaker 2: Joe said, the man in charge, the one who seemed
Speaker 2: to be running the recovery operation, came over to the
Speaker 2: team leader at one point and spoke to him quietly
Speaker 2: for about two minutes. Joe couldn't hear what was said,
Speaker 2: but he watched the team leader's face during the conversation,
Speaker 2: and what he saw there wasn't anger or frustration or
Speaker 2: even fatigue. It was resignation, the look of a man
Speaker 2: who was being told something he already knew, something he'd
Speaker 2: accepted before the mission even began, and was now hearing
Speaker 2: it confirmed in a way that left no room for ambiguity.
Speaker 2: When the team leader came back, his face was tight,
Speaker 2: and he told the men to pack up their gear
Speaker 2: and prepare for extraction. He also told them, in a
Speaker 2: voice that Joe said carried more weight than any order
Speaker 2: he'd ever been given in a combat zone, that what
Speaker 2: they had seen and done on this mountain did not happen.
Speaker 2: It would never be spoken of again, not to their families,
Speaker 2: not to their friends, not to their chaplains, not to
Speaker 2: their therapists, not to anyone ever for any reason. He said,
Speaker 2: he understood the weight of what he was asking them
Speaker 2: to carry. He said he was sorry, and then he
Speaker 2: turned away and went to check on the wounded, and
Speaker 2: that was the last time the subject was addressed through
Speaker 2: official channels.
Speaker 3: Joe said.
Speaker 2: One of the things that stuck with him about the
Speaker 2: recovery operation was the efficiency of it. These people had
Speaker 2: done this before, This wasn't their first time. The way
Speaker 2: they moved, the way they had the right equipment, the
Speaker 2: right sized bags, the right number of personnel, the way
Speaker 2: they knew to bring a sled for the large mail.
Speaker 2: None of that was improvised. That was preparation born of experience.
Speaker 2: That was an operation that had been rehearsed or conducted
Speaker 2: multiple times before. And that thought, more than almost anything
Speaker 2: else about the entire experience, kept Joe awake at night
Speaker 2: because it meant this wasn't an isolated incident. It meant
Speaker 2: this had happened before and it would probably happen again,
Speaker 2: Joe said. The civilian team loaded the bodies in their
Speaker 2: equipment into the helicopter in under an hour and were
Speaker 2: gone just like that. The efficiency was clinical, almost surgical.
Speaker 2: Four creatures that challenged everything science and biology and the
Speaker 2: natural order claimed to understand about the world. Four bodies
Speaker 2: that represented proof of something that millions of people had
Speaker 2: been searching for, wondering about, and debating for centuries, loaded
Speaker 2: into reinforced bags and flown away to God knows where, erased,
Speaker 2: removed from the record, made to not exist. The team
Speaker 2: was extracted separately on a different helicopter that arrived about
Speaker 2: thirty minutes after the civilian aircraft departed. During that thirty
Speaker 2: minutes of waiting, Joe said, the men sat in a
Speaker 2: rough circle among the trees and didn't talk. A few
Speaker 2: guys smoked. One man, a team member Joe had always
Speaker 2: considered among the toughest men he'd ever known, a man
Speaker 2: who'd done things in combat that would have earned most
Speaker 2: people a medal of honor if anyone had been allowed
Speaker 2: to talk about them. Sat by himself against a tree
Speaker 2: and cried. He didn't make a sound, The tears just
Speaker 2: rolled down his face while he stared at the ground
Speaker 2: where the large male had died, at the dark stain
Speaker 2: in the earth that was the only remaining evidence that
Speaker 2: any of this had happened. They were flown back to
Speaker 2: the same un marked airfield they departed from, debriefed by
Speaker 2: the same nameless civilian in the same windowless room, and
Speaker 2: released back to their regular units within twenty four hours.
Speaker 2: No paperwork was filed, no after action report was written,
Speaker 2: no commendations were issued, No medical records for the two
Speaker 2: wounded men mentioned anything about how they'd actually been injured.
Speaker 2: As far as the official record was concerned, those men
Speaker 2: were hurt in a training accident, and the mission to
Speaker 2: the mountain never took place. Joe stopped talking after that.
Speaker 2: He sat there in the booth, staring at his empty glass,
Speaker 2: and I could see his hands were shaking, just slightly,
Speaker 2: just enough to notice. This was a man who could
Speaker 2: field strip a weapon blindfolded, who could put around through
Speaker 2: a playing card at three hundred meters, who could keep
Speaker 2: his hands steady through things that would make most people
Speaker 2: fall apart, and his hands were shaking. I didn't know
Speaker 2: what to say. I mean, what do you say to
Speaker 2: something like that. Part of me wanted to chalk it
Speaker 2: up to the whiskey we'd been drinking for hours. Joe
Speaker 2: was not a man given to tall tales or exaggeration.
Speaker 2: But alcohol does things to people, loosens things up, makes
Speaker 2: the truth and fiction blend together until you can't tell
Speaker 2: where one ends and the other begins. I thought about that,
Speaker 2: But then I looked at his face. I looked at
Speaker 2: his eyes, and I knew he wasn't making it up.
Speaker 2: I'd looked into Joe's eyes and situations where a lie
Speaker 2: could get you killed, where the truth was the only
Speaker 2: thing standing between you and a body bag, and I
Speaker 2: knew what that man looked like when he was telling
Speaker 2: the truth. He was telling the truth. He told me
Speaker 2: one more thing before we left the bar that night.
Speaker 3: He said.
Speaker 2: The thing that haunted him wasn't the big male. It
Speaker 2: wasn't the charge, or the violence, or the sheer, terrifying
Speaker 2: power of the creature.
Speaker 3: He said.
Speaker 2: What haunted him was the juvenile. He said he thought
Speaker 2: about that five foot tall creature every single day. He
Speaker 2: thought about the sound it made, that keening cry, that
Speaker 2: sound like a lost child calling for its mother. He
Speaker 2: said he'd heard children cry in combat zones, in villages
Speaker 2: that had been shelled, in refugee camps, in the aftermath
Speaker 2: of things that no child should ever have to experience,
Speaker 2: and the sound that juvenile creature made was the same.
Speaker 2: It was the same kind of sound, the same frequency
Speaker 2: of distress and terror. And incomprehension, he said, he doesn't
Speaker 2: know what those things were. He doesn't know if they
Speaker 2: were sasquatch or bigfoot, or Gigantopithecus descendants or undiscovered primates
Speaker 2: or something else.
Speaker 3: Entirely.
Speaker 2: He just knows they were alive, they were intelligent, They
Speaker 2: had a family structure, a social bond, a way of
Speaker 2: life that had probably existed in those mountains for thousands
Speaker 2: of years. And his team killed them all in about
Speaker 2: ninety seconds, and then somebody in a black helicopter took
Speaker 2: the evidence away, and the whole thing disappeared like it
Speaker 2: never happened, like they never existed. Joe told me that
Speaker 2: night that he wasn't sure why he was telling me
Speaker 2: all this. He said, maybe it was the whiskey. Maybe
Speaker 2: it was the fact that he was tired of carrying
Speaker 2: it alone. Maybe it was because he looked at me
Speaker 2: and saw somebody who might believe him, somebody who wouldn't
Speaker 2: laugh or call him crazy or report him to somebody
Speaker 2: who'd make his life very difficult. I don't know why
Speaker 2: he told me, but he did. And now I'm telling you,
Speaker 2: I want to say one more thing. Joe isn't the
Speaker 2: kind of guy who makes things up. He's not a storyteller.
Speaker 2: He's not somebody who embellishes or exaggerates or creates drama
Speaker 2: where there isn't any. In all the years I knew him,
Speaker 2: through all the things we went through together, he never
Speaker 2: once gave me a reason to doubt his word, not once.
Speaker 2: And when he told me this story, sitting in that
Speaker 2: booth with the whisky and the country music and the
Speaker 2: neon light from the bar sign casting red and blue
Speaker 2: shadows across his face, he wasn't performing. He wasn't trying
Speaker 2: to entertain me or impress me or get a reaction
Speaker 2: out of me. He was confessed. That's the word for it.
Speaker 2: He was confessing something that had been eating him alive
Speaker 2: for years, something he'd locked away in a box in
Speaker 2: the back of his mind and tried to forget but
Speaker 2: couldn't because some things don't stay in the box. Some
Speaker 2: things have claws and teeth, and they tear their way
Speaker 2: out eventually, no matter how hard you try to hold
Speaker 2: them in and stay.
Speaker 3: Tuned for more Sasquatch oat to see. We'll be right
Speaker 3: back after these messages. Do I think Joe was telling
Speaker 3: the truth? Yeah? I do.
Speaker 2: I believe every word he said, not because I'm naive
Speaker 2: and not because I was drunk, but because I know
Speaker 2: the man, and I know what truth looks like when
Speaker 2: it comes out of a man who's been carrying it
Speaker 2: too long. I don't know which National Park it was.
Speaker 2: I don't know which three letter agency sent the civilian team.
Speaker 2: I don't know where those bodies ended up or what
Speaker 2: was done with them. I don't know if there are
Speaker 2: more of these things out there, though, based on what
Speaker 2: Joe described, I'd bet my life there are. I don't
Speaker 2: know any of that. All I know is what Joe
Speaker 2: told me. And I'm telling you because I think people
Speaker 2: deserve to know, because those creatures deserved better than to
Speaker 2: be erased, and because Joe deserves to have someone believe him.
Speaker 2: Thanks for all of your shows, Thanks for giving people
Speaker 2: like me a place to share things like this. I
Speaker 2: know it sounds insane. I know some people are going
Speaker 2: to hear this and think I'm full of it, or
Speaker 2: that Joe was full of it, or that we were
Speaker 2: just two drunk soldiers telling lies in a bar. That's fine.
Speaker 2: People can think what they want. But I know what
Speaker 2: I saw in Joe's eyes that night. I know what
Speaker 2: I heard in his voice, and I know the truth
Speaker 2: when I see it.
Speaker 3: Matthew.
Speaker 2: That's where the email ends, folks. And I've got to
Speaker 2: tell you, I sat with this one for a long
Speaker 2: time before I decided to put it on the air,
Speaker 2: not because I doubted it. If anything, it's because I
Speaker 2: believed it a little too much, because it confirmed things
Speaker 2: that I've suspected for a very long time, things that
Speaker 2: a lot of you out there have suspected too. When
Speaker 2: I first read Matt's email, I had to get up
Speaker 2: from my desk and walk away. I went outside and
Speaker 2: stood in my yard for about twenty minutes, just staring
Speaker 2: at the tree line at the edge of my property,
Speaker 2: thinking about what I just read, and the thing that
Speaker 2: kept coming back to me, the thing that kept turning
Speaker 2: over in my mind like a stone in a river,
Speaker 2: was the detail about the hikers. The male hiker twenty
Speaker 2: five feet up in a tree, neck broken. The female
Speaker 2: hiker never found, not her body, not her remains, just
Speaker 2: some shredded clothing in one boot, gone completely gone. Now,
Speaker 2: if you've been following this subject as long as I have,
Speaker 2: you know that those details fit a pattern that's been
Speaker 2: documented time and time again. People going missing in national
Speaker 2: parks and national forests under circumstances that defy conventional explanation.
Speaker 2: Bodies found in locations that are inaccessible by normal means,
Speaker 2: places where no accident or animimal attack could reasonably deposit them.
Speaker 2: People who vanish without a trace in areas where extensive
Speaker 2: search and rescue operations turn up nothing, absolutely nothing, as
Speaker 2: if the person simply ceased to exist.
Speaker 3: These cases have.
Speaker 2: Been cataloged, studied, and written about extensively, and the parallels
Speaker 2: between them are striking and deeply troubling. A man found
Speaker 2: twenty five feet up in a tree with a broken neck.
Speaker 2: That's not a bear attack. Bears don't put their victims
Speaker 2: in trees. That's not a mountain lion kill. Mountain lions
Speaker 2: drag their prey to cover, they don't hoist it into
Speaker 2: the upper branches of an old growth fur. There is
Speaker 2: no conventional predator in North America that behaves that way.
Speaker 2: But something put that man up there, Something with the
Speaker 2: strength to lift a full grown adult twenty five feet
Speaker 2: off the ground, something with hands capable of grasping and
Speaker 2: lifting and placing. I've been researching this subject for close
Speaker 2: to four decades. I had my own encounter back in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty six in the mountains of Georgia, and that
Speaker 2: moment changed the entire trajectory of my life. I've stood
Speaker 2: in front of audiences at conferences, I've been in documentaries.
Speaker 2: I've been deep into the woods and places all over
Speaker 2: this country, listening to people tell me what they've seen
Speaker 2: and what they've heard, and what they know in their
Speaker 2: gut to be true even when the world tells them
Speaker 2: they're wrong. And in all that time, in all those conversations,
Speaker 2: in all those thousands of emails and messages and late
Speaker 2: night phone calls, the stories that scare me the most
Speaker 2: aren't the encounter stories. Don't get me wrong. Those are
Speaker 2: terrifying enough when somebody tells you they were twenty yards
Speaker 2: from an eight foot tall creature covered in hair that
Speaker 2: looked at them with eyes that were too intelligent, too aware,
Speaker 2: too knowing. That's enough to keep you up at night.
Speaker 2: But what keeps me up even later, what truly gets
Speaker 2: under my skin and stays there, are the cover up stories.
Speaker 2: The ones where somebody saw something, or somebody shot something,
Speaker 2: or somebody found something and then the men in the
Speaker 2: unmarked vehicle showed up, or the men in the dark
Speaker 2: suits appeared, or the phone call came from a number
Speaker 2: that didn't exist, telling them to forget what they'd seen.
Speaker 2: I've heard these stories for decades. I've talked to retired
Speaker 2: law enforcement officers who've told me about being called to
Speaker 2: scenes involving large, unidentified creatures and then being told by
Speaker 2: federal agents to write it up as a bear encounter.
Speaker 2: I've talked to forestry workers who found tracks and structures
Speaker 2: deep in the back country and been told by their
Speaker 2: supervisors to leave it alone and not file a report.
Speaker 2: I've talked to military veterans men a lot like Matt
Speaker 2: and Joe, who've hinted at things they've seen or been
Speaker 2: involved in but couldn't talk about because of oaths they
Speaker 2: took and threats that were made. Matt's story Joe's story
Speaker 2: fits a pattern, and I think most of you listening
Speaker 2: know that we've heard the whispers for years. Stories about
Speaker 2: government teams being dispatched into national parks and national forests,
Speaker 2: stories about bodies being recovered and disappearing into classified facilities,
Speaker 2: stories about researchers being threatened, witnesses being silenced, evidence being confiscated.
Speaker 2: We hear these things and we file them away, and
Speaker 2: we wonder how much of it is real and how
Speaker 2: much is smoke and mirrors. But when a combat veteran,
Speaker 2: a man who's put his life on the line for
Speaker 2: this country multiple times, a man whose body served beside
Speaker 2: him in the worst conditions imaginable and never once gave
Speaker 2: him a reason to question his honesty, when that man
Speaker 2: sits down and tells a story like this one with
Speaker 2: shaking hands and haunted eyes, I listen, and I believe.
Speaker 2: I think about that juvenile I think about that sound
Speaker 2: Matt described, that keening cry, and it turns my stomach,
Speaker 2: because if Joe's account is accurate, and I believe it is,
Speaker 2: then what we're talking about isn't just the elimination of
Speaker 2: some mysterious animals. We're talking about the destruction of a family,
Speaker 2: a mother, a father, their child, and an another member
Speaker 2: of their clan, living their lives in the mountains the
Speaker 2: way their kind has probably been living for longer than
Speaker 2: our civilization has existed. They built shelters, they communicated with
Speaker 2: each other, they moved as a group, a family unit,
Speaker 2: through territory, they knew intimately they were, by any reasonable definition,
Speaker 2: a people, not just animals, and a team of men
Speaker 2: was sent in.
Speaker 3: To wipe them out.
Speaker 2: Not because they posed an ongoing threat to the public,
Speaker 2: though I understand that the death of that male hiker
Speaker 2: and the disappearance of the female hiker were horrific and tragic,
Speaker 2: but because their existence was inconvenient. Because if the world
Speaker 2: found out that these things were real, actually real, not legend,
Speaker 2: not folklore, not blurry photographs and disputed footprint casts, but
Speaker 2: flesh and blood creatures that could be shot and killed
Speaker 2: and examined, the implications would be staggering. The scientific community
Speaker 2: would be turned upside down. Every textbook would have to
Speaker 2: be rewritten. The conservation and environmental regulations that govern how
Speaker 2: we manage our public lands would have to be completely overhauled.
Speaker 2: The economic consequences alone, the impact on logging, mining, energy development, recreation,
Speaker 2: tourism would be astronomical. We're talking about an endangered species
Speaker 2: of primate, potentially the most significant zoological discovery in the
Speaker 2: history of science, and the entire apparatus of federal land
Speaker 2: management would have to pivot to protect them. Think about
Speaker 2: how much money is at stake. Think about the industries
Speaker 2: that depend on access to federal lands. Think about the
Speaker 2: political pressure that would come to bear. So they sent
Speaker 2: in a kill team, and then they sent in a
Speaker 2: cleanup crew, and then they told everybody involved to shut
Speaker 2: up and forget it ever happened, And those four creatures,
Speaker 2: that family was loaded into bags and flown away to
Speaker 2: some facility that probably doesn't officially exist, to be studied
Speaker 2: or stored or destroyed. And the rest of us were
Speaker 2: left with nothing but legends and grainy footage and the
Speaker 2: unshakable feeling that we're being lied to. I want you
Speaker 2: to also think about something else. Joe told Matt that
Speaker 2: this happened in the mid nineteen nineties. That's thirty years ago,
Speaker 2: thirty years of silence, thirty years of good men carrying
Speaker 2: a secret that eats at them, that wakes them up
Speaker 2: at three in the morning, that sits in the corner
Speaker 2: of the room when they're trying to have a normal
Speaker 2: conversation with their families, and won't let them forget what
Speaker 2: they did on that mountain thirty years how many other
Speaker 2: teams were sent on similar missions that we'll never hear about.
Speaker 2: How many other families, other clans were eliminated in the
Speaker 2: same cold, efficient, classified manner. Are these operations still happening
Speaker 2: today right now as I record this, Is there a
Speaker 2: team of men somewhere in the back country of some
Speaker 2: national park doing what Joe's team did thirty years ago.
Speaker 2: I don't know, and that uncertainty that not knowing is
Speaker 2: almost as disturbing as the story itself. I'm not going
Speaker 2: to tell you what to believe. That's never been my style,
Speaker 2: and it's not going to start now. I share these
Speaker 2: stories because I think they matter. I share them because
Speaker 2: the people who experience them, whether directly or secondhand, deserve
Speaker 2: to be heard. And I share them because I believe
Speaker 2: with everything in me that the truth, whatever it is,
Speaker 2: is better than the silence. Matt, if you're listening, thank you.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having the courage to write in. Thank
Speaker 2: you for trusting me with Joe's story. And tell Joe,
Speaker 2: if he's in a place where he'd want to hear it,
Speaker 2: that there's a whole community of people out there who
Speaker 2: believe him, who've always believed, and who aren't going to
Speaker 2: stop asking questions just because somebody in a black helicopter
Speaker 2: told us to stay safe out there. Everybody, watch the
Speaker 2: tree line, listen to the silence, and as always, if
Speaker 2: you've got a story, I want to hear it.
Speaker 1: Did did Di