Family Witness Bigfoot in Alaska, Is it the Kushtaka?

The Kushtaka is normally found in the areas of  Kasigluk

The Alaskan news source, "The Delta Discovery" reports a story about a mother and two sons witnessing a Bigfoot. Most Bigfoot sightingings in Alaska are recorded in the southern region. This report in Kasigluk is no different, in fact this is the region where most of the Tlingit Indians have seen Kushtaka. Alaska has multiple names for Bigfoot, besides Kushtaka, The Den'aina Indians of South central have Nant'ina and the Eskimos of southwest Alaska call it "Urayuli" or "Hairy man."

Sketch of Bigfoot witnessed in Alaska.

Read the encounter reported by The Delta Discovery below:

 family out egg hunting last spring near their village of Kasigluk came upon an incredible sight – a large, dark, hairy creature walking upright was heading towards them.
They – two teenaged brothers and their mom - were on the outskirts of the village riding their 4-wheeler when they saw it. It was approximately around 3pm, and the weather was beautiful, although slightly cloudy. School was out for the summer and the date was May
29th, 2012.

Could it have been the elusive Bigfoot?
“We came across it by the lagoon here in Kasigluk,” said one the eyewitnesses. “It was back there southeast of Fox Lake.”

While they were out that day, the three family members saw other people who coming home from egg hunting. So at first they thought the creature was a person.

“After it passed, we looked at each other and thought, ‘we just saw Bigfoot’,” the eyewitness said.

The creature was very tall and dark. Its long arms hung below its knees. It was approximately 75 yards away. The family watched it for about 2 minutes.

“It was walking towards us and then once it saw us it turned and started going to the other side of the hill,” said the witness.

When it disappeared into the bushes, the family headed towards where they last saw it but it was nowhere to be seen.

They didn’t hear about anyone else seeing the mysterious creature.

The following is the firsthand account about the sighting written by the mother of the two boys, one of the eyewitnesses.

“I wanted to go egg hunting, but didn’t want to go alone so I had my two sons follow me since I didn’t want to go alone. My oldest son said he knew of a place where we could go check so off we went towards the lagoon where there is flat land to the east.

“Upon reaching the lagoon my older son got off the four wheeler and ran off to see if anybody was in that area. He ran to the edge of the hill and soon ran back saying that somebody was already there. So we decided to go check somewhere else when that “somebody” started running at an incredible amount of speed. No human person would have gone from down there by that flat land to already towards us up the hill.

“That “somebody” was all black from top to bottom, kind of hunchbacked, like it had no neck and its head was cone-shaped. Its long arms went past its knees and it was incredibly tall.

“At first we all asked each other, “Who is that?” Then after about 10 seconds as it was walking with long strides it would occasionally look towards us. The way it walked was fast and no human could cover that amount of tundra in the same amount of time.

I asked, “WHAT is that?”

“All that time we were awestruck and dumbfounded to what we were witnessing. Then as it was going to disappear from our view finally I said, “I think we just saw Bigfoot!” As it passed in our full view it had covered the whole entire hill in a matter of about a minute. It seemed to be just walking but with big strides.

“We went up to the top of the hill but we didn’t see it anywhere so we went straight home feeling kind of excited.

“That’s my account. It looked exactly like the Patterson footage of Bigfoot if you’ve ever seen it.”

Big Foot or Hairy Man sightings are not unheard of in the Yukon Kuskokwim delta region. Last summer there were reports of a number of sightings in the Johnson River area and other locations.

SRC: The Delta Discovery 

Today in Bigfoot History | JAN 24, 1999 | SF Chronicle Reports New Technology for Bigfooting

Freitas uses a huge speaker on his pick-up truck to blast recorded
 Bigfoot calls across the valley / The Chronicle Photo: MICHAEL MACOR

Over the past few years, the hunt for Bigfoot has exploded in a frenzy of high technology. New high-tech detection equipment abounds, dangling from trees all over the United States

On this day, January 24th, in 1999, The San Francisco Chronicle noted a change in the way bigfooters did their research. If today's technology trend is combining all your gadgets into a single hand held device (think iPhone), in the 90's it was all about turning any technology into something you could hold in your hand. Powerful cameras and audio devices were not only shrinking, but also becoming more affordable. Another revolution was on the World Wide Web. With the release of Windows 95 people were migrating from AOL, a "walled-off" online service, to the surfing the decentralized web through a browser.

In a world where an average article is usually 200-500 words, journalist Michael Taylor gives a rare treat of writing an epic 3000-plus words of the who's who of Bigfoot research. It starts out with the new technology of call blasting.

From the cab of his pickup truck, John Freitas takes out a camera, a tape recorder and a pair of binoculars and sets them within easy reach in the pickup's bed. Near the tailgate is a huge outdoor speaker, much like the ones you see suspended from the tiers of baseball stadiums.

Freitas fiddles with the tape deck in the truck's dashboard, and then suddenly the speaker booms forth with an eerie wail.

"Aaarrrrrgggghhhh," the voice screams for several seconds, arcing from low to high then low, a bit like an air raid siren, and then again, in a higher pitch, "Aaaaaaiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee." Freitas shuts down the tape and listens carefully, waiting for a response. Silence. More silence. We look around, video camera at the ready. Come out, come out, wherever you are.

"The theory," he says, nodding at the speaker, "is that if there's another 'Squatch in this area, this will attract him."

This is the hunt for Bigfoot -- the legendary Sasquatch, as he was known in the old Salish tribal language of British Columbia, where locals say he has been seen frequently. John Freitas may well be typical of the new breed of Bigfoot hunter that seems to be emerging in the never-ending search for the phantom ape of North America. Undaunted by the occasional snicker or rolling of eyes from his friends or co-workers, Freitas, like any good police investigator, is methodical and practical and willing to go looking for something about which precious little evidence even exists.

Over the past few years, the hunt for Bigfoot has exploded in a frenzy of high technology. New high-tech detection equipment abounds, dangling from trees all over the United States -- Starlight nightscopes, motion detectors hooked up to infrared still and video cameras, FM wireless transmitters dangling from fir trees and transmitting to tape decks up to two miles away.

In his bedroom at a cabin Freitas rents deep in the forest are a video cassette recorder, a three-foot-long telephoto lens, nightvision Starlight binoculars and a recycled siren switchbox from a patrol car, used to amplify the screams on his tapes.

And that's just the stuff in the field. At home and in offices across the country, the Internet has spawned a myriad of Web sites that have brought a sense of order and organization to a subject that for years has been disparate, fractured and, given the heated arguments over whether Bigfoot even exists, fractious in the extreme.

And there is still a smattering of oldstyle Bigfoot information: At the Bigfoot museum in Willow Creek, where Al Hodgson is the curator, nearly two dozen plaster casts of footprints seen in the Northern California wilderness are on display in glass cases. The best part of Hodgson's display is the collection of footprint casts donated by the estate of Bob Titmus, one of the most experienced Bigfoot trackers.

On the Six Rivers mountaintop with Freitas, though, all that counts is whether the elusive man-ape will answer these calls. The tapes were recorded in 1994 in a mountainous rural area of eastern Ohio by Matthew Moneymaker, a 33-year-old software engineer from Southern California who is also a longtime Bigfoot tracker. Moneymaker said there have been numerous sightings of Bigfoot-like creatures in that Appalachian area of Ohio, near Pennsylvania.

Moneymaker played the tapes for three scientists, including a zoologist who specializes in wildlife, and "they all said it was something really unusual" and could not identify the sounds. In the world of Bigfoot, that means it bore no resemblance to any identifiable mammal, and it was just what Freitas needed in the form of aural bait.

The article continues on to mention a new website that catalogs and stores Bigfoot sightings, the address is MattMoneymaker.org/BFRO. Known simply today as BRFO.net

Now, however, there is some consistency developing in the search for Bigfoot, particularly on the Internet.

For example, Moneymaker has helped create the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) and its inevitable Web site (www.moneymaker.org/BFRO/), that purports to have one of the largest geographic databases of sightings in the world.

We have only shared less than a third of the article, the rest is definitely worth reading as most journalist don't give this much time and effort to the topic of Bigfoot. The entire article is at the San Francisco Chronicle.

New Concept Art for Bigfoot Commercial

Bigfoot concept art option #5  by artist Constantine Sekeris (click to enlarge)

According to his publisher, "Constantine Sekeris has been drawing from the time he could hold a pencil. As a boy, through high school and into Art Center College of Design, he was influenced from comics to traditional master painters Alfonsa Mucha, Gustav Klimt, Bouguereau, Alma-Tedema, J.C. Lindecker, Norman Rockwell, Frank Frazetta to poster artist Drew Struzan. After graduating with a Bachelors in Illustration, he found his passion in creature design for films such as Bicentennial Man, Blade 2, League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Fantastic 4, X-Men the Last Stand, The Golden Compass, The Incredible Hulk, Hellboy, The Golden Army, Where the Wild Things Are, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Thor, Green Lantern and more to come."

"Constantine pushes himself like every artist to grow and learn his craft to the best of his ability and share his imagination with the world."

Bigfoot concept art option #6  by artist Constantine Sekeris (click to enlarge)

You can see more of Conatantine's work at his blog constantinesekerisdesign.blogspot.com. Even better, buy his book, "MetamorFX." at Amazon.com.