Speaker 1: If you take a town of ten thousand people in
Speaker 1: the Alaska Triangle, well fifty of them will vanish this year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just to manage no trace, uh, no footprints, no goodbye nothing.
Speaker 1: Imagine you are standing in the vast, freezing frontier of
Speaker 1: you know, millions of acres of untamed wilderness, right dense forests,
Speaker 1: these massive, snowblind valleys, and people are just evaporating into
Speaker 1: a darkness that feels frankly incredibly heavy.
Speaker 2: It's staggering, it really is.
Speaker 1: So today we are looking at the exact biological threshold
Speaker 1: when natural wilderness ends and something entirely inexplicable begins.
Speaker 2: I mean that transition is exactly what we need to
Speaker 2: focus here exactly.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's untack this. Our deep dive today is taking
Speaker 1: us into a massive like just a huge stack of
Speaker 1: investigation records, field notes, and eyewitness accounts.
Speaker 2: And these were compiled by a very specific team.
Speaker 1: Right right, compiled by three men who went looking for answers.
Speaker 1: So we have Jax, who is a former.
Speaker 2: Police officer, being that forensic perspective exactly.
Speaker 1: Then there's Ken and strange phenomena, and Tommy, an expert
Speaker 1: on Alaskan legends, and I want to be clear to
Speaker 1: you listening, we aren't just going.
Speaker 2: On a monster hunt here, No, not at all.
Speaker 1: We are diving into the intersection of indigenous lore, modern biology,
Speaker 1: and the absolute limits of human perception when it meets
Speaker 1: the wild. We are examining unexplained disappearances and asking the
Speaker 1: ultimate question, like what is actually out there in the dark?
Speaker 2: And you know, we have to approach this with a rigorous,
Speaker 2: highly analytical mindset. Right, the source material we are examining
Speaker 2: today walks a very thin, very precarious line. On one side,
Speaker 2: we have the very real, very harsh realities of extreme nature.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the elements out there are no.
Speaker 2: Joke, precisely, we are talking about elements and temperatures that
Speaker 2: can erase a human life in minutes, leaving virtually no
Speaker 2: evidence behind. But then on the other side, we have
Speaker 2: physical evidence and consistent accounts that frankly defy modern zoological
Speaker 2: classifications wild. It is, so my goal here is to
Speaker 2: look at this Impartially, we need to balance the natural
Speaker 2: biological explanations with the terrifyingly inexplicable evidence these investigators uncovered.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, so to lay the groundwork, I mean, we really
Speaker 1: have to look at the inciting incident that brought this
Speaker 1: specific investigation team together in.
Speaker 2: The first place, the twenty eleven case.
Speaker 1: Right, we are going back to a freezing winter's night
Speaker 1: in twenty eleven. The location is the northern edge of
Speaker 1: Denali Park in Alaska, which is incredibly remote, oh completely isolated.
Speaker 1: So we have three friends, Ben, Jones, Mark and Tom.
Speaker 1: They are heading out to a favorite overnight hunting spot
Speaker 1: to look for caribou. Okay, it is rugged terrain, sure,
Speaker 1: but these guys are experienced, they know the area well.
Speaker 2: They aren't amateurs, not at all.
Speaker 1: So they stop to take a break, indulge in a
Speaker 1: quick smoke, and you know, have a couple of drinks
Speaker 1: from a flask, just to warm up in the sub
Speaker 1: zero temperatures. It is classic hunting trip camaraderie.
Speaker 2: It is a very ordinary setup. But I have to
Speaker 2: say the environmental cond text is crucial here. Well, when
Speaker 2: you are in Denali in winter, you were operating at
Speaker 2: the absolute edge of human biological tolerance. The darkness isn't
Speaker 2: just an absence of light. It's almost like a sensory
Speaker 2: deprivation chamber.
Speaker 1: Wow, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: Your vision is severely limited, sounds are dampened by snow
Speaker 2: or distorted by wind, and the cold forces your body
Speaker 2: to expend massive amounts of energy just to maintain a
Speaker 2: core temperature.
Speaker 1: Just to stay alive.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Yea, it is the perfect recipe for cognitive strain.
Speaker 1: Right, and that cognitive strain it comes into play almost immediately.
Speaker 1: So they're hanging out and Ben decides he needs a
Speaker 1: pit stop. Sure, he wants some privacy, so he trudges
Speaker 1: off into the tree line. But according to Mark, who
Speaker 1: the investigators actually interviewed at this exact location years later,
Speaker 1: Ben walks much further into the woods than you normally
Speaker 1: would for a simple bathroom break.
Speaker 2: That's odd.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was as if something caught his attention or
Speaker 1: I don't know, drew him deeper into the dark.
Speaker 2: And this is where the first sensory anomaly occurred. Right
Speaker 2: out of the darkness, Mark and Tom hear a distinct
Speaker 2: chilling sound. A howl, just a random howl, but not
Speaker 2: a gust of wind howling through the branches, and not
Speaker 2: a bird, a deep, guttural mammalian howl.
Speaker 1: They immediately scramble, I mean, the camaraderie breaks, Adrenaline spikes
Speaker 1: and they hurry to check on Ben. But Ben is gone.
Speaker 2: What's gone?
Speaker 1: Nowhere to be found, and instead of their friend, Mark
Speaker 1: looks out into the trees and sees something else, entirely
Speaker 1: the sighting. Yeah, let's look at the exact description from
Speaker 1: Jacks's interview notes, because it's nuts. Mark describes a monstrous
Speaker 1: beast standing among the trees. He estimated it weighed easily
Speaker 1: nine hundred pounds.
Speaker 2: Nine hundred pounds, that's massive.
Speaker 1: Massive. He said, it looked like the biggest brown bear
Speaker 1: he had ever seen. But, and this is key, with nasty,
Speaker 1: matted gray fur and crucially, a wolf's snout.
Speaker 2: A wolf's facial structure.
Speaker 1: Exactly a wolf's nose and face on a massive bear's body.
Speaker 1: They ran for their lives and well, Jones hasn't been
Speaker 1: seen since.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly tragic. And if we break this down biologically,
Speaker 2: starting with the auditory evidence that how we immediately run
Speaker 2: into a behavioral contradiction in.
Speaker 1: The while, because of the bears.
Speaker 2: Right, Howling is a behavior unique to wolves and some
Speaker 2: closely related canines. Bears, despite their massive size, their lung capacity,
Speaker 2: and territorial nature, they do.
Speaker 1: Not howl, wait, really never never.
Speaker 2: They growl. They huff they roar, but they literally do
Speaker 2: not possess the vocal cord structure or the instinctual drive
Speaker 2: to howl. Okay, wow, but here is the critical nuance
Speaker 2: of wolf biology. Wolves generally use howling as a rallying
Speaker 2: cry for the pack. Yeah, it is basically a biological
Speaker 2: GPS system to locate each other and coordinate movements across
Speaker 2: vast distances.
Speaker 1: So they aren't just howling at the moon for fun.
Speaker 2: Exactly. For solitary animal to make a deep guttural howl,
Speaker 2: especially a mass of one holding its ground, it is
Speaker 2: almost exclusively a territorial warning. It is a broadcast and
Speaker 2: an intruder saying I am here and you are in
Speaker 2: my domain.
Speaker 1: Okay, but I have to push back here, or at
Speaker 1: least challenge the baseline reliability of Mark's memory. Sure enough,
Speaker 1: we are talking about three guys who admitted they were
Speaker 1: drinking alcohol to warm up and freezing temperatures. It is
Speaker 1: the dead of night. They are highly stressed, their friend
Speaker 1: is missing. We know how the brain works under dress
Speaker 1: big struggles. Yeah, when you are deprived of clear visual
Speaker 1: data in the dark, your brain engages in predictive processing.
Speaker 2: It fills in the gaps exactly.
Speaker 1: It hallucinates reality based on its deepest fears to keep
Speaker 1: you safe, like a game of telephone in the Pitch Black.
Speaker 1: Could the alcohol, the adrenaline, the hypothermic conditions, and the
Speaker 1: sheer terror of the situation have caused Mark's brain to just,
Speaker 1: you know, stitch together the two most dangerous predators he
Speaker 1: knows into one composite monster.
Speaker 2: That is the logical first assumption. And as an investigator,
Speaker 2: Jax points out exactly this concern in his field notes.
Speaker 2: Oh he does, he does. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable,
Speaker 2: even under perfect conditions. When you introduce extreme cold, low visibility,
Speaker 2: and alcohol, the cognitive filters don't just get muddy, they
Speaker 2: actively deceive you. As you mentioned with predictive processing, the
Speaker 2: brain abhors a vacuum. If it sees a massive dark
Speaker 2: shape and here's a canine sound, it might force those
Speaker 2: two data points into a single terrifying image just to
Speaker 2: trigger your fight or flight response.
Speaker 1: Exactly, And frankly, couldn't Ben have just walked off in
Speaker 1: hypothermic days?
Speaker 2: What do you mean?
Speaker 1: Well, we know people experiencing extreme cold suffer from paradoxical undressing,
Speaker 1: right they feel hot? That they take off their clothes,
Speaker 1: they wander aimlessly, they become profoundly confused.
Speaker 2: Yet is a well documented medical phenomenon.
Speaker 1: People vanish on flat ground and blizzards all the time
Speaker 1: without a monster being involved. Gravity doesn't need a cliff
Speaker 1: if the elements shut your brain down, that.
Speaker 2: Is the very grounded counter argument. But here is where
Speaker 2: the physical reality of the scene challenges the hypothermia theory. Okay,
Speaker 2: lean On Jackson actually had Mark take them back to
Speaker 2: the exact spot.
Speaker 1: The same exact spot from twenty eleven.
Speaker 2: Yes, Mark called it the v It's a specific natural
Speaker 2: vantage point they use to survey the area for caribou.
Speaker 2: When the investigators mapped this location, they noted that beyond
Speaker 2: that vantage point, the terrain is incredibly flat and open
Speaker 2: for a significant distance before hitting dense brush.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it's a flat expanse right.
Speaker 2: If Ben wandered off in a hypothermic state, it takes time.
Speaker 2: It is a slow, stumbling, confused process. His friends were
Speaker 2: only yards away and they responded to the howl almost immediately.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, this is the detail that completely derailed my
Speaker 1: logical timeline. I read this part of the field notes
Speaker 1: three times trying to find the missing variable.
Speaker 2: The math of the timeline just doesn't support a slow
Speaker 2: wandering disappearance.
Speaker 1: Right because of the speed.
Speaker 2: Exactly, for a human being to evaporate from flat, open
Speaker 2: ground in a matter of seconds or minutes implies one
Speaker 2: of two things. Either Ben Jones sprinted into the freezing
Speaker 2: with Olympic speed for absolutely no reason, which makes no sense,
Speaker 2: or he was subjected to a predator of shocking silent efficiency.
Speaker 1: Right because a bear attack isn't silent.
Speaker 2: A standard predator attack, even from a massive nine hundred
Speaker 2: pound grizzly, is chaotic. It is messy. There is a
Speaker 2: violent struggle, There are deep gouges in the earth, there
Speaker 2: are drag marks.
Speaker 1: Well, there was nothing.
Speaker 2: There was none of that. And when we look at
Speaker 2: Mark's specific, terrifying description of this hybrid creature, we realize
Speaker 2: he isn't the first person to describe this exact biological chimera.
Speaker 1: Oh far from it, And that brings us to the
Speaker 1: mythic context of the source material. We really need to talk.
Speaker 2: About the Amarok the demon wolf right.
Speaker 1: Also known in the region as the demon Wolf. According
Speaker 1: to Tommy, the team's expert on Alaskan law, this creature
Speaker 1: isn't just a campfire ghost story. It has been a
Speaker 1: deeply embedded fixture of Inuit mythology for centuries, and the.
Speaker 2: Physical morphology described in the indigenous folklore is remarkably, almost
Speaker 2: uncomfortably consistent with Mark's modern sighting.
Speaker 1: It's eerie how closely it matches.
Speaker 2: The amarok is historically described as having the distinct facial
Speaker 2: structure of a wolf, the massive muscular body of a bear,
Speaker 2: and standing up to nine feet tall when reared up
Speaker 2: nine feet tall. Furthermore, its behavioral profile in the lore
Speaker 2: is highly specific. It targets loane hunters at night.
Speaker 1: The investigator spoke with a local expert named Ozzie, who
Speaker 1: shared a story from the Inupiate people that really illustrates
Speaker 1: the psychological weight of this legend.
Speaker 2: Yes, that story was intense.
Speaker 1: He told them about a father mourning the death of
Speaker 1: his child, a child who is suspected to have been
Speaker 1: taken by the amarok. This grieving father, desperate for answers revenge,
Speaker 1: goes out into the freezing wild actively searching.
Speaker 2: For the beast, a dangerous decision very, and when.
Speaker 1: He finally finds it, the amarok doesn't retreat. It doesn't posture.
Speaker 1: It just kills him on the spot. Ozzie emphasized how
Speaker 1: incredibly mean, aggressive, and relentless this creature is.
Speaker 2: It doesn't behave like typical wildlife exactly.
Speaker 1: It follows its prey, usually large large game like caribou
Speaker 1: or moose, but if it decides to hunt a human,
Speaker 1: it will track you.
Speaker 2: For miles just stalking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and here's a psychological kicker, Ozzie said. The only
Speaker 1: defense if you ever find yourself face to face with
Speaker 1: an amarok is to show absolute, unflinching dominance. You cannot
Speaker 1: show a single drop of fear. You have to prove
Speaker 1: you are the apex predator or, in his exact words,
Speaker 1: good luck.
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is how this local Alaskan legend slots
Speaker 2: so perfectly into a much broader global tapestry of folklore
Speaker 2: concerning giant, terrifying canines.
Speaker 1: It really isn't just an Alaska thing.
Speaker 2: Not at all. This is not an isolated cultural phenomenon.
Speaker 2: If you look at Norse mythology, you have fen Rear,
Speaker 2: the massive wolf destined to devour the sun and the moon,
Speaker 2: effectively bringing down the cosmos.
Speaker 1: Right, Fenrare in.
Speaker 2: Western European traditions. The archetype of the big bad wolf
Speaker 2: isn't just a fairytale obstacle for children. It was historically
Speaker 2: viewed as evil incarnate, a literal monster haunting the fringes
Speaker 2: of civilisation.
Speaker 1: And it isn't just ancient metaphorical myths either. There are
Speaker 1: relatively recent historical accounts of these beasts causing actual, documented
Speaker 1: mass casualties.
Speaker 2: Precisely, look at France in the seventeen sixties with the
Speaker 2: Beast of jiavodant Oh. That case is wild. It really is.
Speaker 2: This was an exceptionally large wolf like creature, or perhaps
Speaker 2: a pair of them, that killed and partially consumed over
Speaker 2: one hundred people. It caused such widespread panic that Kingley
Speaker 2: the Fifth had to send the Royal Army to hunt
Speaker 2: it down.
Speaker 1: The literal royal army.
Speaker 2: Yes. Then you cross over to North America and you
Speaker 2: have the Wahila in Canadian lore, which operates identically to
Speaker 2: the Amorrock, a massive solitary wolf bear hybrid that hunts
Speaker 2: in the northern territories.
Speaker 1: Right next door to Alaska, exactly.
Speaker 2: Even further south in Michigan in the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: you have heavily detailed Lumberjack accounts of the Michigan dog man.
Speaker 2: The cultural through line of a giant anomalous canine is undeniable.
Speaker 1: Which forces you to ask why the fear of a
Speaker 1: giant canine is so universal across cultures that never interacted.
Speaker 2: Right, Why that specific form?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Are these stories just the ancient equivalent of a neon?
Speaker 1: Do not enter sign? You know, a cultural fable design
Speaker 1: purely to keep children from wandering into the dark woods
Speaker 1: at night.
Speaker 2: That's the anthropological theory.
Speaker 1: Sure. Or and this is the concept that is incredibly unsettling.
Speaker 1: Are they a shared biological memory.
Speaker 2: A genetic trauma?
Speaker 1: Exactly? Does humanity possess a collective subconscious trauma from an
Speaker 1: era when we were actively hunted by an apex predator
Speaker 1: that looked exactly like this?
Speaker 2: It is a deeply compelling hypothesis. Evolutionary psychology suggests that
Speaker 2: folklore often acts as a vessel for ancestral survival data.
Speaker 1: Survival data. I like that phrasing.
Speaker 2: If a specific type of hyper aggressive predator posed an
Speaker 2: existential threat to early hominids across different continents, the visceral
Speaker 2: memory of that predator would absolutely be encoded into our
Speaker 2: oral traditions and perhaps even our DNA.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: The stories might exaggerate the supernatural elements over centuries of retelling,
Speaker 2: but the core biological warning beware. The giant solitary kenine
Speaker 2: remains perfectly intact because the people who didn't fear it
Speaker 2: didn't survive to pass on their genes.
Speaker 1: So if human memory across centuries and a modern eyewitness
Speaker 1: account are pointing to a real physical creature in the
Speaker 1: Alaskan brush, we have to look at the hard science.
Speaker 2: We have to interrogate the biology exactly.
Speaker 1: What happens when we run these descriptions through the filter
Speaker 1: of modern zoology. Are we just dealing with a freakishly
Speaker 1: large normal animal.
Speaker 2: To interrogate that theory, the investigators consulted with experts in
Speaker 2: animal behavior, specifically focusing on the two halves of this
Speaker 2: supposed hybrid, the wolf and the bear.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's break that down.
Speaker 2: Ken visited a local wildlife center and sat down with
Speaker 2: two wolf experts, Stephanie and Channon. He needed to know
Speaker 2: biologically if a standard gray wolf could match the amarok's behavioral.
Speaker 1: Profile, and their answer was a pretty definitive no, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, the mechanics of wolf behavior just don't align.
Speaker 2: It all very definitive. The mechanics of wolf's survival are
Speaker 2: entirely dependent on social structures. Wolves are intensely social creatures
Speaker 2: right the pack. Their entire evolutionary strategy relies on the
Speaker 2: pack hierarchy. They hunt together to bring down prey larger
Speaker 2: than themselves. They live together, and their endochronology is literally
Speaker 2: wired for community.
Speaker 1: Their endochronology like their hormones.
Speaker 2: Yes, a wolf that is separated from its pack experiences
Speaker 2: severe spikes and cortisol, which are stress hormones. The popular
Speaker 2: idea of a badass lone wolf roaming the wilderness is
Speaker 2: mostly a misunderstanding of their biology.
Speaker 1: So a lone wolf is usually just stressed out.
Speaker 2: Exactly what a wolf is alone, It is usually a
Speaker 2: younger male leaving to distribute its genetics, and it doesn't
Speaker 2: thrive in that isolation. It actively desperately seeks out a
Speaker 2: new group.
Speaker 1: So an aggressive, massive, solitary stalker completely violates the baseline biology.
Speaker 2: Of a wolf completely. Furthermore, Stephanie and Shannon noted that
Speaker 2: wolves are naturally incredibly shy and cautious around you humans.
Speaker 2: They avoid us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they don't want anything to do with us right.
Speaker 2: The Amarok, by contrast, is described as an enormous, highly
Speaker 2: aggressive stalker that actively seeks out human targets.
Speaker 1: So an ordinary wolf is out. The behavioral mechanics don't fit.
Speaker 1: What about an ordinary bear?
Speaker 2: That was the next logical step.
Speaker 1: Jackson Tommy talked to Mike, a big game hunter with
Speaker 1: decades of extensive on the ground knowledge of bears. Now,
Speaker 1: bears actually are solitary. They are they are massive, They
Speaker 1: hunt alone, and they are incredibly aggressive. If you trigger
Speaker 1: their prey drive, like if you run, they will chase you.
Speaker 1: So far, the mechanics of a bear match the Amarok's
Speaker 1: profile much better than a wolf.
Speaker 2: It does align perfectly until you look at the forensic
Speaker 2: evidence of how they feed.
Speaker 1: Ah the feeding mechanics.
Speaker 2: According to Mike, bears are opportunistic omnivores, but when they
Speaker 2: do bring down large prey, they follow a very specific
Speaker 2: caloric prioritization pattern. Okay, and that pattern directly contradicts a
Speaker 2: terrifying piece of evidence provided by a witness named Nick,
Speaker 2: who hadn't encountered just a couple of weeks prior to
Speaker 2: the investigation team's arrival.
Speaker 1: Oh Man. Nick's story is wild, so It's two am,
Speaker 1: pitch dark, and Nick is driving down an isolated Alaskan
Speaker 1: road when he nearly hits a massive cariboo carcass, which
Speaker 1: is very dangerous. Very It's a common, highly dangerous hazard
Speaker 1: in Alaska. He pulls his truck over to call the
Speaker 1: state shoopers so they can clear the road before someone
Speaker 1: crashes into it.
Speaker 2: Responsible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But while he's sitting there on the phone, a
Speaker 1: shadow detaches from the tree line. He says, it was huge,
Speaker 1: easily the size of a large brown bear, but the
Speaker 1: silhouette had the distinct elongated snout of a wolf. Here
Speaker 1: is again, and here is where the mechanics of the
Speaker 1: event get crazy. This beast drops down on the dead caribou,
Speaker 1: violently disembowels it, but leaves the entrails, the soft organs
Speaker 1: lying in the snow.
Speaker 2: It just leaves them, leaves them.
Speaker 1: It grabs the heavy muscle mass the meat and sprints
Speaker 1: back into the woods with incredible, terrifying speed.
Speaker 2: And that specific detail leaving the entrails behind is the
Speaker 2: glaring biological red flag.
Speaker 1: Why is that so weird for a bear?
Speaker 2: As Jax pointed out during the investigation, when bears and
Speaker 2: even wolves make a fresh kill or find a fresh carcass.
Speaker 2: They go straight for the soft tissue first, the liver,
Speaker 2: the heart, the stomach. Fat.
Speaker 1: Oh, because of the calories.
Speaker 2: Because in a subzero environment, chloric density is absolutely everything.
Speaker 2: The organs are the most nutrient dense, fat rich parts
Speaker 2: of the animal. Muscle is lean protein, which actually takes
Speaker 2: more energy for a predator to digest. For a massive
Speaker 2: predator to slice open a caribou explicitly ignore the high
Speaker 2: fat organs and expend massive amounts of energy to carry
Speaker 2: the heavy, lean muscle mass into the woods at top speed. Well,
Speaker 2: that completely contradicts basic bear forwarding behavior.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting to me. If we
Speaker 1: rule out a normal wolf because of social behavior, and
Speaker 1: we rule out a normal bear because of feeding mechanics,
Speaker 1: could we be looking at a freak of nature genetic
Speaker 1: anomaly exactly. Ken started exploring the gigantism theory, and when
Speaker 1: I was looking through these notes, I was blown away
Speaker 1: by the natural precedence for this. We aren't talking about
Speaker 1: science fiction. Genetics and environment can create massive biological anomalies.
Speaker 2: They certainly can. Gigantism is a well documented physiological condition
Speaker 2: across the animal kingdom.
Speaker 1: Right. You look at hybrids like ligers, the offspring of
Speaker 1: a male lion and a female tiger in captivity because
Speaker 1: they lack certain growth inhibiting genes that normally come from
Speaker 1: a female lion, ligers just keep growing, sometimes topping one
Speaker 1: thousand pounds. Then you have environment driven gigantism. Look at
Speaker 1: the goliath frog, which grows to massive proportions because it
Speaker 1: exists in an isolated ecosystem with very few natural predators.
Speaker 2: Or deep sea gigantus, yes, where.
Speaker 1: The freezing temperatures and high pressure environment at the bottom
Speaker 1: of the ocean force invertebrates to grow incredibly large to
Speaker 1: conserve heat, creating nightmares like the Japanese spider crab. Very true,
Speaker 1: So Alaska is defined by d geographic isolation and extreme cold.
Speaker 1: Couldn't those specific environmental pressures, perhaps combine with a mutated
Speaker 1: gene or a compromised pituitary gland create an isolated, gigantic,
Speaker 1: hyperaggressive wolf.
Speaker 2: It is a highly creative theory, and biologically mutations do
Speaker 2: occur in the wild, but we have to look at
Speaker 2: the mechanical long term viability of those mutations. Okay, what
Speaker 2: do you mean if you want a metaphor. Think of
Speaker 2: gigantism like overclocking a computer processor. Okay, you can force
Speaker 2: a computer chip to run at three times its intended speed,
Speaker 2: but without a massive custom cooling system, it's going to
Speaker 2: melt its own motherboard in a week. Biological gigantism does
Speaker 2: the exact same thing to a skeletal and cardiovascular system.
Speaker 1: Oh I see.
Speaker 2: Animals that suffer from natural gigantism, usually caused by a
Speaker 2: mutated gene or an overactive pituitary gland constantly pumping out
Speaker 2: growth hormone, rarely thrive in the wild.
Speaker 1: You're just break down.
Speaker 2: They typically suffer from severe cascading health problems. Their bones
Speaker 2: and joints struggle to support the immense unintended weight, their
Speaker 2: hearts have to work twice as hard to pump blood
Speaker 2: to their extremities, leading to drastically shortened life spans. That
Speaker 2: makes sense, and crucially from an evolutionary standpoint, these genetic
Speaker 2: anomalies are very often completely sterile.
Speaker 1: Ah, so they can't pass the mutation on exactly.
Speaker 2: So, while a single mutated nine hundred pound wolf might
Speaker 2: explain one terrifying encounter for Ben Jones in the year
Speaker 2: twenty eleven, It absolutely cannot explain a consistent pattern of
Speaker 2: sightings spanning hundreds of years in Inuit folklore.
Speaker 1: Right, it's a one off.
Speaker 2: Nor can it explain multiple independent modern day sightings. A sterile,
Speaker 2: short lived mutant cannot sustain a cultural legend for centuries.
Speaker 1: That makes perfect sense. A mutant is an evolutionary dead end.
Speaker 1: But what if it's not a glitch?
Speaker 2: What do you mean?
Speaker 1: What if it is a lineage? If it is neither
Speaker 1: a standard modern predator nor a modern genetic mutant, could
Speaker 1: the answer lie buried in the Earth's ancient past the
Speaker 1: paleontology angle. Yes, this is where the deep dive. It
Speaker 1: a hard turn into paleontology, and honestly, the mechanics of
Speaker 1: this blew my mind.
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, the fossil
Speaker 2: record definitively proves that the concept of a massive, terrifying
Speaker 2: canine is not a myth at all. Right, it is
Speaker 2: a documented evolutionary fact.
Speaker 1: Enter the Direwolf. We've all heard the name and pop culture,
Speaker 1: but looking at the actual biological data in the source material,
Speaker 1: these things were absolute nightmare.
Speaker 2: They're formidable.
Speaker 1: They were the largest canine to ever walk the earth.
Speaker 1: They tipped the stales at roughly two hundred pounds, stretched
Speaker 1: over five feet in length, and possessed massive bone crushing
Speaker 1: jaws with a bite force far exceeding a modern gray wolf.
Speaker 2: Incredible power.
Speaker 1: They were so incredibly formidable that they competed toe to
Speaker 1: toe with sabertoothed tigers for ecological dominance, and they supposedly
Speaker 1: went extinct about ten thousand years ago during the Pleistocene
Speaker 1: megafauna extinction.
Speaker 2: But the direwolf is just the tip of the prehistoric iceberg. Seriously,
Speaker 2: the investigation team dug into an even older, exponentially more
Speaker 2: terrifying classification of predators, the amphicionidate the bear dogs. Precisely,
Speaker 2: for over forty four million years, these creatures operated as
Speaker 2: the apex predators of North America, Eurasia, and Africa.
Speaker 1: Forty four million years.
Speaker 2: Yes, they were among the largest terrestrial carnivores of their era,
Speaker 2: with some varieties weighing up to thirteen hundred pounds thirteen
Speaker 2: hundred that's a small car. And they literally possessed the
Speaker 2: physical morphology of both bears and wolves. The heavy, muscular,
Speaker 2: planet grade stance of a bear, combined with the elongated
Speaker 2: snout and dentition of a canine.
Speaker 1: It's exactly what marksaw now.
Speaker 2: The fossil record dictates they went extinct roughly two million
Speaker 2: years ago due to changing climates and loss of their
Speaker 2: massive prey. But the biological lineage they belonged to is
Speaker 2: where this relic theory finds its scientific legs.
Speaker 1: Yes, let's talk about that lineage, the Caniformia suborder. I
Speaker 1: was mapping this out in my head while reading the sources,
Speaker 1: and it is fascinating how evolution branches out ca Thatiformia
Speaker 1: literally translates to dog like from this one ancient evolutionary branch.
Speaker 1: Environmental adaptation gave us bears all modern canines, raccoons, badgers,
Speaker 1: and like even pinnipeds like seals and walruses.
Speaker 2: It's a very diverse suborder.
Speaker 1: Think about the mechanical divergence there. If a walrus and
Speaker 1: a raccoon share a legitimate genetic lineage with grizzly bears
Speaker 1: and wolves, is it really so crazy to hypothesize that
Speaker 1: a hidden crossbred strain of Caniformia, a surviving bear dog
Speaker 1: managed to endure in the vast, largely unexplored Alaskan wilderness.
Speaker 2: The scientific term for the phenomenon you're describing is a
Speaker 2: relict population.
Speaker 1: Relict population this.
Speaker 2: Occurs when a population of an ancient species survives in
Speaker 2: an isolated, highly stable geographic area long after it's gone
Speaker 2: extinct everywhere else on the globe. We see this verified
Speaker 2: in modern science. Oh, we do absolutely. Look at the colicant.
Speaker 2: It's a massive prehistoric lobe finfish that paleontologists insisted had
Speaker 2: been for sixty six million years, right until a live
Speaker 2: one was buled out of the ocean in nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 1: Which completely up ended marine biology.
Speaker 2: It did. However, applying that to a terrestrial mammal, the
Speaker 2: question becomes one of geographic carrying capacity.
Speaker 1: The logistics of hiding.
Speaker 2: Exactly how much physical space and caloric intake does a
Speaker 2: relic population of nine hundred pound apex predators need to
Speaker 2: survive completely undetected by modern biology A lot. I'd assume
Speaker 2: Alaska is massive, boasting tens of millions of acres of
Speaker 2: untracked wilderness, but sustaining a viable breeding population of massive
Speaker 2: carnivores requires an immense continuous food supply, and eating that
Speaker 2: much food usually leaves a massive ecological footprint. You would
Speaker 2: expect to find countless carcasses.
Speaker 1: So we have a creature that shouldn't exist biologically but
Speaker 1: fits an ancient profile perfectly. We have drunken memory theories,
Speaker 1: ancient myths, genetic gigantism, and surviving prehistoric bear dogs. But
Speaker 1: if you're Jackson Ken, you can't just debate this. In all,
Speaker 1: you have to force the environment to prove you wrong.
Speaker 2: You need physical proof.
Speaker 1: You have to put boots on the ground, bait it,
Speaker 1: and see what walks out of the trees, which.
Speaker 2: Brings us to the active field investigation. Jax, Ken and
Speaker 2: Tommy decided to actively bait and track whatever is roaming
Speaker 2: these woods a stakeout. They traveled to the exact site
Speaker 2: of Nick's two ter a m roadside siding, armed with
Speaker 2: infrared frail cameras and a heavy duty big game.
Speaker 1: Snare, and their bit of choice a dead beaver. Apparently,
Speaker 1: wolves are incredibly fond of the scent and fat content
Speaker 1: of dead beavers, and bears will scavenge basically anything with
Speaker 1: a strong odor, so it covers both biological bases. The
Speaker 1: smart choice, yeah, So they set up the snare using
Speaker 1: a sturdy, thick tree as an anchor camouflage. The scale
Speaker 1: wire with native hemlock moss and generously pour commercial wolf
Speaker 1: urine around the perimeter just to mask their own human scent.
Speaker 1: It was a meticulously crafted trap.
Speaker 2: Before they even finish setting the perimeter for the trap,
Speaker 2: they begin uncovering physical forensic evidence in the surrounding area
Speaker 2: that completely defies standard predator biology.
Speaker 1: Oh the tree.
Speaker 2: Let's look at the mechanical impossibility of the scratch marks
Speaker 2: they found on a nearby tree.
Speaker 1: Right, so, Mike the bear expert had tipped them off
Speaker 1: that bears often bite or claw trees as high as
Speaker 1: they can reach. They do this to visually and chemically
Speaker 1: mark their territory, warning other males of their size. So
Speaker 1: Tommy is scanning the tree line and finds these deep,
Speaker 1: incredibly fresh claw marks high up on a tree trunk.
Speaker 2: But the physical anatomy of the scratches is all wrong. Jax,
Speaker 2: who has tracked and seen bear markings his entire professional life,
Speaker 2: immediately points out.
Speaker 1: The anomaly he knew right away.
Speaker 2: Even the largest, most aggressive grizzly bear leads a relatively
Speaker 2: tight scratch pattern on the bark. The gouges are usually
Speaker 2: just a few inches wide, corresponding directly to the anatomical
Speaker 2: width of its paw.
Speaker 1: Right because of the bones in the foot.
Speaker 2: The scratches they found on this tree were spread out
Speaker 2: over more than a foot wide.
Speaker 1: A foot wide, I mean, if you are standing in
Speaker 1: the cold looking at a foot wide scratch mark your
Speaker 1: brain and desperately tries to tell you it was just
Speaker 1: a bear, just to keep you from.
Speaker 2: Panicking, that's hard to process.
Speaker 1: But if you look at the math to make a
Speaker 1: mark that wide, you either have an animal with a
Speaker 1: paw the physical size of a manhole cover, or you
Speaker 1: have an animal meticulously making those slashes, one single claw
Speaker 1: at a time, spacing them out deliberately.
Speaker 2: Both are alarming.
Speaker 1: Both of those options are utterly terrifying. One implies an
Speaker 1: impossible size, the other implies a terrifying intellect. But then
Speaker 1: the forensic evidence gets even worse. Not far from the tree,
Speaker 1: hidden in the brush, they find the bone cash.
Speaker 2: This is perhaps the most significant confounding piece of forensic
Speaker 2: evidence in the entire deep dive. Seriously, they stumble upon
Speaker 2: a massive, concentrated pile of animal bones. We are talking
Speaker 2: about half a pelvis of a large ungulate and full
Speaker 2: articulated leg.
Speaker 1: Joints, and it wasn't just one animal.
Speaker 2: No, it's not just the remains of one single kill.
Speaker 2: Can counts the limbs and realizes there are at least
Speaker 2: six massive legs in this pile, indicating the remains of
Speaker 2: multiple large prey animals brought to this exact spot.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? I kept asking myself
Speaker 1: on reading this section. Bears are known to cash or
Speaker 1: bury their food. Sure they do cash food, right, Mike
Speaker 1: the Hunter mentioned that a grizzly will usually drag a
Speaker 1: carcass maybe forty or fifty yards away and bury it
Speaker 1: under dirt and leaves to say, this is mine, I'm
Speaker 1: coming back for it. But this wasn't a temporary stash.
Speaker 1: This was a curated, long term home base. The logistics
Speaker 1: of this are what really messed with my head.
Speaker 2: It is the logistics of energy, expenditure and physics exactly.
Speaker 1: Jax points out that a mature grizzly can absolutely pick
Speaker 1: up a whole hind quarter of a moose and carry
Speaker 1: it a short distance. But grizzlies hibernate in the deep winter.
Speaker 1: They aren't actively hunting big game in the deep snow, right,
Speaker 1: So what animal has the sheer staggering muscular strength to
Speaker 1: carry hundreds of pounds of meat, bone and muscle to
Speaker 1: a central location without leaving massive, continuous drag marks through
Speaker 1: the forest.
Speaker 2: Furthermore, consider that was forensically missing from the bone cash.
Speaker 1: Oh this is the creepy part.
Speaker 2: As the team meticulously surveyed the remains, they realized the
Speaker 2: bones had been picked clean with almost surgical precision. But
Speaker 2: more importantly, there were no skulls anywhere in the cash none,
Speaker 2: There were no rib cages, and there were absolutely no vertebrae.
Speaker 1: Which implies that whatever killed these animals selectively butchered them
Speaker 1: in the field. It took the media's most vital parts
Speaker 1: of the body somewhere else, or consumed them entirely on
Speaker 1: the spot, and then carried only the massive leg bones
Speaker 1: and partial pelposes back to the specific site.
Speaker 2: It's systematic.
Speaker 1: It perfectly mirrors the mechanical behavior from Nick's story the
Speaker 1: beast disemboweling the caribou, ignoring the heavy organs, and running
Speaker 1: off with the dense muscle meat.
Speaker 2: It suggests an apex predator that is selectively butchering its
Speaker 2: prey and transporting immense weight with incredible ease. But as
Speaker 2: confounding as those old bones. Were they pale in comparison
Speaker 2: to what happened when the team actually tried to catch
Speaker 2: the creature in the act.
Speaker 1: This is the climax of the fe investigation, and it
Speaker 1: is honestly chilling, it really is. They are out in
Speaker 1: the freezing dark. They have their snare set up. The
Speaker 1: beaver bait is hanging there, masked in scent. Suddenly they
Speaker 1: hear a thick branch.
Speaker 2: Snap in the dark, clear sign of movement.
Speaker 1: Something heavy is moving in the brush just beyond their
Speaker 1: sight line. Jax pulls out a thermal imager. Now for context,
Speaker 1: a thermal imager maps infrared radiation, basically heat. In a
Speaker 1: subzero environment with heavy snowpack, a mammalian heat signature stands
Speaker 1: out incredibly brightly.
Speaker 2: You can't hide from it.
Speaker 1: Right. Jack scans the tree line and spots a light
Speaker 1: purple heat trail moving just ahead of them.
Speaker 2: They follow the thermal signature, expecting to find the creature
Speaker 2: circling their bait. Instead, they come across a small, shallow
Speaker 2: hole in the snow, about a foot deep, just.
Speaker 1: A little hole.
Speaker 2: It looks exactly like an animal had just started digging
Speaker 2: to stash some food, perhaps a piece of the bait,
Speaker 2: and right next to it, illuminated by their flashlights, is
Speaker 2: the beginning of a stark, fresh blood trail.
Speaker 1: They follow the blood pushing through the brush, and they
Speaker 1: walk right into a slaughter. They find a freshly killed.
Speaker 2: Moose, a thousand pound animal.
Speaker 1: The sheer chaos of the scene is staggering. The carcass
Speaker 1: is violently torn apart, heavy pieces are scattered everywhere, and
Speaker 1: the blood is bright red, steaming and fresh, steaming in
Speaker 1: the cold. The thermal imager confumes it is still radiating heat.
Speaker 1: They literally just missed whatever brought down a thousand pound
Speaker 1: moose by a matter of seconds or minutes.
Speaker 2: This raises an important question, perhaps the central scientific mystery
Speaker 2: of this entire investigation. You have a massive, violent struggle,
Speaker 2: You have a thousand pound moose torn to pieces, you
Speaker 2: have fresh blood melting the snow. But when can and
Speaker 2: Jacks drop their lights and scan the surrounding snowpack, what
Speaker 2: do they find?
Speaker 1: Nothing? Absolutely nothing. There are no animal tracks in the snow,
Speaker 1: none possible, No massive wolf prints, no giant bear, dog
Speaker 1: plant to grete prints, not even the tracks of the
Speaker 1: moose itself. Leading into the clearing. It is as if
Speaker 1: the moose was, to quote Ken's exasperated notes, magically dropped
Speaker 1: there by some mystical culprit.
Speaker 2: Scientifically, physically, it is an impossibility. Think about the kinetic
Speaker 2: energy required to kill a moose, right, it's immense. A
Speaker 2: struggle of that magnitude displaces massive amounts of snow, earth,
Speaker 2: and brush. Even for the predator was somehow impossibly light
Speaker 2: on its feet. The violent thrashing of the dying moose
Speaker 2: would have turned the ground into a chaotic circle of
Speaker 2: mud and slush.
Speaker 1: It should look like a bomb went off.
Speaker 2: To have a perfectly untouched, pristine blanket of snow surrounding
Speaker 2: a freshly butchered thousand pound animal suggests either a complete
Speaker 2: breakdown of observational logic by the investigators or something entirely
Speaker 2: outside the bounds of known physics.
Speaker 1: I mean, I aggressively tried to find a logical physical
Speaker 1: anchor for this. Could it have been a wolverine?
Speaker 2: A wolverine?
Speaker 1: Yeah, they are vicious, They attack from the trees. They
Speaker 1: are incredibly light for the ferocity, but they weigh forty pounds.
Speaker 1: They aren't carrying a moose, and they still leave. Was
Speaker 1: there some bizarre micro weather phenomenon? A sudden, incredibly intense
Speaker 1: flurry of snow that only filled in the tracks and
Speaker 1: then immediately stopped. That wouldn't work right, because the blood
Speaker 1: was still fresh and pooling on top of the snow.
Speaker 1: If it snowed hard enough to fill a deep moose track,
Speaker 1: it would have covered the blood.
Speaker 2: The complete absence of physical evidence becomes the most terrifying
Speaker 2: evidence of all, and the sequence of events only gets
Speaker 2: stranger and more confounding. After finding this impossible trackless kill site,
Speaker 2: the team realizes they have left their snare completely unattended.
Speaker 1: Oh man.
Speaker 2: They turn around and hurry back through the brush to their.
Speaker 1: Tracks, and the beer bait is completely gone.
Speaker 2: Gone, without a single trace.
Speaker 1: But the snare itself, the heavy duty steel wire trap
Speaker 1: meant to catch the neck or leg of whatever grab
Speaker 1: the bait, is completely undisturbed, not even tripped. It wasn't triggered,
Speaker 1: it wasn't snapped, it wasn't broken or chewed through. It
Speaker 1: was just hanging there in the cold air, completely untainted.
Speaker 1: And once again, when they shine their flashlights on the
Speaker 1: ground beneath the snare, there are absolutely no tracks in
Speaker 1: the snow.
Speaker 2: If we synthesize this final chaotic sequence of events, we
Speaker 2: are forced to balance two equally terrifying realities. Option one,
Speaker 2: the investigation team was dealing with a biological predator of
Speaker 2: unprecedented almost preternatural intelligence, agility, and luck. Okay, unpack that
Speaker 2: we have to assume an animal deliberately distracted the investigators
Speaker 2: by leading them to a fresh, physically impossible moose kill,
Speaker 2: purely so it could circle back silently bypass a complex
Speaker 2: camouflage wire snare and steal a frozen beaver without leaving
Speaker 2: a single footprint or triggering a hair.
Speaker 1: Trigger trap, which implies a level of tactical cunning and
Speaker 1: spatial awareness that borders on human if not exceeds it.
Speaker 2: Or option two, we are stepping out of the realm
Speaker 2: of terrestrial biology entirely and into the realm of the supernatural,
Speaker 2: the Amarok spirit. We are seeing real world physical evidence
Speaker 2: that aligns perfectly with the ancient Upi. At Legend, Tommy
Speaker 2: discussed the deeply held indigenous belief that the Amrock isn't
Speaker 2: just an animal, but a spirit creature that possesses the
Speaker 2: ability to appear and disappear instantly at will.
Speaker 1: It is the ultimate vanishing act in the landscape that
Speaker 1: is already famous for making people vanish, So where does
Speaker 1: this leave us? We started this deep dive with the tragic,
Speaker 1: very real, and very permanent disappearance of a hunter named
Speaker 1: Ben Jones in twenty eleven, A terrible loss, a man
Speaker 1: who walked into the freezing trees for a moment of
Speaker 1: privacy and never came back, leaving his deeply traumatized friends
Speaker 1: with the memory of a howling monster.
Speaker 2: We traversed the complex biological reality that massive, terrifying bear
Speaker 2: dog hybrids the emphasy on today actually did exist as
Speaker 2: apex predators in the place to scene era.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was mind blowing.
Speaker 2: We explored the incredibly slim but scientifically tantalizing possibility of
Speaker 2: a relict population surviving in the vastness of the Alaska Triangle,
Speaker 2: sustained by a massive but hidden food web.
Speaker 1: And we ended with reality bend field evidence that shatters
Speaker 1: our understanding of physics and biology, foot wide scratches that
Speaker 1: shouldn't exist, heavy bones that are moved and pick too clean,
Speaker 1: and a massive bloody kill site that exists in a pristine,
Speaker 1: untouched field of snow.
Speaker 2: It defies logic.
Speaker 1: It makes you realize the sheer unadulterated hubris of modern
Speaker 1: human life. You know, you sit in your warmhouse, You
Speaker 1: look at your smartphone with its precise GPS, you pull
Speaker 1: up satellite maps, and you think humanity has mapped and
Speaker 1: conquered every inch of the world.
Speaker 2: We feel very safe.
Speaker 1: We think we know all the biological rules. But the
Speaker 1: Alaska Triangle proves with terrifying clarity that the wilderness is
Speaker 1: still profoundly unknowable.
Speaker 2: It demands a profound kind of intellectual and scientific humility.
Speaker 1: Humility is the right word.
Speaker 2: The systems we rely on to categorize and control nature,
Speaker 2: our zoology, our track identification, our thermal cameras are steel snares.
Speaker 2: They all completely failed to capture or even comprehend whatever
Speaker 2: is operating in that freezing.
Speaker 1: Forest, which leaves you with a chilling final thought derived
Speaker 1: directly from the closing remarks of these three investigators. Think
Speaker 1: about the fundamental mechanics of.
Speaker 2: Evolution survival of the fittest.
Speaker 1: Right predators evolve over millions of years to become perfectly
Speaker 1: adapted to hunting in their specific environment. What if an
Speaker 1: apex predator has evolved specifically to erase its.
Speaker 2: Own presence, A haunting idea.
Speaker 1: What if we are dealing with an animal that has
Speaker 1: physically adapted to carry its massive kills without dragging them,
Speaker 1: an intellect that can steal beat without tripping a wire,
Speaker 1: and a physiology that leaves absolutely no tracks in the snow.
Speaker 2: If an animal has perfectly, flawlessly adapted to avoid all
Speaker 2: human detection, how could science ever prove its existence. We
Speaker 2: rely on evidence, and its primary evolutionary trait is the
Speaker 2: erasure of evidence.
Speaker 1: Exactly, I want you to mull that over tonight. Is
Speaker 1: the Amarok just a myth born from our ancestral evolutionary
Speaker 1: fear of the dark, or is it a perfectly evolved
Speaker 1: predator that, as the investigator somberly noted, only reveals itself
Speaker 1: fully to those it destroys.
Speaker 2: Because if that is the case
Speaker 1: Because if that is the case, it means the only
Speaker 1: people on earth who know for an absolute fact that
Speaker 1: the Emerck is real, well, they're the ones who never
Speaker 1: returned to tell us