9 Best Alaskan Native Hairy Man Stories

Illustrations for each of the top 9 Alaskan Native Hairy Man stories

On the west coast of Alaska the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers empty into the Bering Sea creating one of the largest river Delta's in the world. Mostly covered in Tundra it is protected as part of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. Eighty-five percent of the 25,000 residents are Alaskan Natives  both Yupik Eskimos and Athabaskan Indians.

In Alaska they have a cryptid "Hairy Man" that goes by many names. The Delta Discovery, a local publication owned by Native Alaskans has been chronically the Hairy Man stories since February 2013. We have selected our favorites and provided links to each story.

1. Plane buzzes Hairy Man people running over ice

Plane buzzes Hairy People

In May of 2012, a plane took off from Bethel and headed upriver, following the Kuskokwim River. The river was breaking up and the snow had pretty much melted, but many big lakes were still frozen over.

For the two people in the plane, the flight seemed to be much like any routine flight. However, just as they passed Tuluksak, the passenger saw something on his side of the plane. He saw two upright but dark creatures running like people on a large, frozen lake. Read More...

2. Captured by Hairy Man

Human nurses hairy Man juvenile to health

In the interior of Alaska, the Hairy Man is known as the “Bushman”. There was an elderly woman who was known as a medicine woman because of her experience as a young girl.

She was out picking berries with others near Rampart when she was kidnapped by a Bushman. She was taken into the wilderness and brought to a cave, where she saw other members of the Hairy Man’s family or group.

In that cave, there were both male and female Hairy Man people, and even young ones. They were hairy and wore no clothes, and smelled badly. But one of the babies of the Hairy Man people was very sick. Read More...

3. Bigfoot follows women during night ride

Two women see Hairy Man in the full moonlight

This lady is from Bethel. Years ago in the 1990’s, she and her younger sister were traveling by snowmachine to Bethel from one of the tundra villages. The sister was driving the snowmachine and she was riding in the back in the sled.

It was nighttime and the moon was full and bright, illuminating the frozen tundra. Stars shone in the sky and there was not a cloud in sight. One could see a long way on a night like this.

The lady riding in the sled had been wearing glasses but took them off because they kept fogging up so she tucked them away. The two women were about halfway to Bethel when suddenly her sister stopped the snowmachine and said to her, “Look!” Her sister was looking at something. Read More...

4. Hairy Man steals dried fish

Caught red handed

One evening, her baby wasn’t well, being restless and whining. That night she slept a few minutes at a time, before baby would wake again and start whining. Soon it was getting bright outside and baby whined again. The lady got up and tended to her baby. When the baby started nursing, the lady was relieved knowing that the baby was much better.

But then she noticed it was unusually quiet outside. Even the early morning birds were not chirping. Through the open door, she could see the dog, which was tied up to the left of the smokehouse door, down on its stomach, its fur very smooth and chin to the ground. She also noticed the dogs were making noises through their noses, making snorting sounds.

While she was looking at the dog, she saw a very big, furry person-like creature coming toward the smokehouse. It was looking around, turning its upper body while turning its head. It got to the smokehouse but did not go inside. Instead, it reached in and took out a dried chum. He tucked it under its arm, looked around again and left. It took long strides when he walked away. Read more...

5. A hunter is chased away by a Hairy Man

After several misses, the hunter runs

A man went hunting by boat one day up the Black River, and got close to Kusilvak Mountain. Stopping at one location, he got out and anchored his boat.

He got his rifble and went up the bank to some high ground to look around, like all other hunters do. While looking around, he spotted some kind of animal not far away.

As he looked longer, he realized it was a Hairy Man! Then the Hairy man saw him too and began to run toward him, making terrible sounds as it came.

Quickly the hunter swung his gun around and fired several times toward the charging beast. Apparently he missed, as the Hairy Man kept coming. Read More...

6. Strong-smelling creature in woods near fishcamp

Remembering a stick whizzing past her ear

“While going back, I bent down to pick a beautiful little flower. Then something went past my left ear, like wood making a ‘swoosh-swoosh-swoosh’ sound like it was flipping over and over as it went past my head.

“Just when I got up and looked, a piece of dry wood branch landed in front of me. I looked to see if anyone was around. I could see far into the woods because there was no grass or growth covering the ground inside the trees.

“I didn’t see anyone or anything. But I smelled something really strong like a wet dog, but stronger and different. I went back to fishcamp. Read More...

7. Nunivak Island Bigfoot

in the 1930's a sod house is invaded

It was during the winter when the three hunters went out on their trip to the west side of the island. As it was evening, the hunters stopped at an old fishcamp to bunk down for the night in an abandoned sod house.

Sod houses, especially those at hunting or fishing sites, were not large and had small entry ways.

The hunters were traveling by dog team. When they stopped to camp they secured their dogs to wooden posts before turning in for the night.

As they were waiting to sleep, the dogs outside began barking. The next thing they knew, someone or something was trying to break in through the door of the sod house. The terrified men got out their .30-.30 rifles in fear of the unknown. Read More..

8. Nome miner kills a Hairy Man

Bear or Bigfoot?

Jean Joiner was a miner from Nome who had a mine near Jade Mountain on Dahl Creek. The Jade Mountains are the westernmost peaks of the Brooks Range.

Mr. Joiner told his story that he had killed a Bigfoot-like animal near his mine, which he thought was a bear at first. But when he looked at the “bear” he killed, he didn’t know what it was but it resembled a human being.

He got real scared of what he had killed and believing that he would get in trouble for it, he cut it up and threw the pieces into the stream near his mine. Read More...

9. Rock throwers of the Andreafsky River

Rocks being thrown from the shore

“Miluquyuli” (the thrower) is one of the names given to the Hairy Man in many parts of the Yukon and Kuskokwim River villages.

At another time, a son (now in his 50s) of the elder remembers camping as a young boy along the same river with his family when, from far up a hill above their camp, a large rock or two were thrown and sailed over them, landing with a big splash into the Andreafsky.

The rocks were too large for humans to thrown that high and far. Read More...

Click the following link to find The Delta Discovery Hairy Man Section

Finding Bigfoot Wants Your Skamania and Klickitat County Bigfoot Stories!!!

Skamania County Postcard designed by Guy Edwards

The producers of Animal Planet's popular TV show Finding Bigfoot are planning a town hall in Washington State and they want YOUR stories! As you may know Skamania County is the first local government to acknowledge and sign laws to protect Sasquatch. Read the ordinances protecting Bigfoot. 

Now YOU can be a part of that continued history by contacting Finding Bigfoot with your own Skamania and Klickitat County encounter(s). Read the Press Release below and contact Finding Bigfoot!:

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Animal Planet’s hit show “Finding Bigfoot” is coming to Skamania and Klickitat counties! Skamania county is one of the ‘squatchiest’ places in the world and the “Finding Bigfoot” investigative team; Matt Moneymaker, Cliff Barakman, James “Bobo” Fey and Ranae Holland; are coming to listen to the  stories, examine the evidence and determine once and for all if Bigfoot really calls the Northwest home!

The team is looking for YOUR stories of encounters with Sasquatch in Skamania, Klickitat or surrounding areas. Sightings? Strange noises? Tracks? Wood knocks? We want to hear it all! Tell us your Bigfoot story and you may be invited to share it with the team at our Washington town hall on Wednesday, August 7 2013.

If you have a Sasquatch story and would like to attend our town hall meeting on August 7, email

findingbigfoot.northwest@gmail.com

Keep it squatchy everyone!

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Linquists Battle Over Bigfoot Language

Does Bigfoot have defined phonemes? Phonemes are distinct units of sound, like vowel sounds. 

"The vocalizations are an amateur impression of how a proto-language might sound if it evolved from non-human primates" -- Karen Stollznow of Scientific American on the Morehead/Berry tapes.

We are NOT big fans of lazy skeptics. Good skeptics on the other hand are healthy for our research. Ones that have held our feet to the fire are Sharon Hill of Doubtful News and a Huffington Post contributor and Brian Dunning of Skeptoid. Skeptics, in my opinion, are just like witches in OZ, there are good ones and bad ones.

We are not quite sure what category Scientific America's Karen Stollznow. Ms. Stollznow has  Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of New England and seems to be critical of Scott Nelson's credentials. To catch you up, Scott Nelson retired from the Navy after a 17-year career as a crypto-linguist, intercepting Russian communications and decoding them. While his son was listening to the Morehead and Berry Bigfoot audio recordings (a/k/a Sierra Sounds) he detected patterns and perhaps even language.

After Karen introduces the general public on types of Sasquatch evidence she dives right into the possibility of Bigfoot language and the Morehead/Berry Tapes:

A fascinating category of evidence involves claims of a Bigfoot language. Eyewitnesses report hearing howls, whoops, growls, screams, mumbles, whistles and other strange vocalizations in the wild, and attribute these to Bigfoot. Variant forms of Bigfoot are found across cultures, and the Sasquatch, Himalayan Yeti, Australian Yowie and other alleged creatures are similarly believed to produce vocalizations. Other Bigfoot communication includes the mimicry of wildlife and forest sounds, wood-knocking, rock-knocking and rock-throwing. Bigfoot is also thought to form patterns with sticks and rocks as a kind of writing system. In wilder claims about wild men, Bigfoot are believed to have the ability to communicate telepathically, and use their large feet to send infra-sound communication over long distances. Bigfoot are also claimed to speak and understand human languages, and to have their own Bigfoot language.

There is little evidence to support these claims, other than the anecdotal kind. The Sierra Sound recordings, also known as the Berry/Morehead tapes, are touted as the gold-standard of evidence for a Bigfoot language. During a number of expeditions to the Sierra Nevada Mountains between the years 1972-1975, Alan Berry, Ronald Morehead and their crew captured audio recordings of alleged Bigfoot encounters. They recorded a total of 90 minutes of Bigfoot language and vocalizations using a microphone dangled from a tree branch attached to a reel-to-reel recorder. Over the years they also found 18-inch footprints of Bigfoot, and experienced many sightings…just not during the recordings!

Morehead and Berry (until his death in 2012) staunchly deny that the recordings are a prank. However, for a number of reasons, it is highly probable that the recordings are a hoax, or that the crew were hoaxed. The expeditions were undertaken specifically to hunt for Bigfoot. “Bigfoot” was heard but never seen when the recordings were made. It is obvious that other animals made some of the sounds, such as bears. The wood knocks are easy to re-create, while the “language” itself is unconvincing. The vocalizations are an amateur impression of how a proto-language might sound if it evolved from non-human primates. This “Bigfoot” is likely human, and the Sierra Sounds a combination of hoax and misidentification, like all of the other evidence for Bigfoot.

Sounds like she has already reached a conclusion. What is unfortunate is we were hoping her critique would come more from a linguist perspective, but her conclusion, as you will read below,  is that looking into Bigfoot language is putting the cart before the horse. She thinks we should be looking for a body first. Not only is this a disappointment, because it would have been great to get another linguist's perspective, but it  also a flawed argument. If this was the prevailing logic we would have never tried to decipher the cuneiform text left on clay tablets by the Sumerians.

Here is her non-linguistic based argument:

Self –proclaimed “Bigfoot language expert” R. Scott Nelson has taken the Bigfoot language claims one-step further. As though it is the Linear B of Bigfoot language to be deciphered, Nelson has created a transcription of the Sierra Sound Recordings. He is a retired U.S. Navy Cryptologic Technician Interpreter who speaks Russian, Spanish and Persian. He also believes he can speak “Bigfoot”.

Nelson claims he has identified not only vocalizations such as whistles, grunts, and snarls, but also individual phonemes, i.e., the sounds that combine to create words. Nelson has created a pronunciation key for these phonemes, and he uses the Latin alphabet, diacritics and various other symbols to represent these sounds. He calls this the Sasquatch Phonetic Alphabet (SPA), or the Unclassified Hominid Phonetic Alphabet (UHPA). It is unclear why he doesn’t use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language.

Bilingualism (speaking two or more languages) and working as a translator doesn’t qualify someone to identify or describe undocumented languages. This is an area of anthropological linguistics, although it appears as if many cryptozoological fans confuse “crypto-linguistics” as a field that researches the language of cryptids. The Sierra Sounds are used not only to support the claim of a Bigfoot language, but also to legitimize claims of Bigfoot’s existence. As Nelson argues, “The existence of the Sasquatch Being is hereby assumed, since any creature must exist before his language.” However, there are still prior questions. Does Bigfoot exist, and if so, could Bigfoot speak?

For arguments sake, if Bigfoot did exist, the species would likely have developed its own system of communication, like chimpanzees and Vervet monkeys. Similar to the claims of the (so far mythical) Orang-Pendek, Bigfoot would probably communicate using vocalizations. However, non-human primates don’t have the physiology to produce a wide variety of speech sounds, so it is unlikely that Bigfoot would have developed language, or would be able to speak existing human languages. At any rate, this is all starting off on the wrong (Big)foot. There is no solid physical evidence to support the existence of Bigfoot. Before we establish the existence of Bigfoot language, we would need to establish the existence of Bigfoot.

You can read her full article at the Scientific American Blog