What’s Lurking in Prince of Wales? | Alaska

0:05 You're listening to Pig for Society, and I'm Jeremiah Byron Tonight's account is from a man who grew up in the deep woods of southeast Alaska on Prince of Wales Island, where sasquatch doesn't just live in legends, it walks the gravel bars just seventy five feet away. This is a story of Nick Blankenship and what came out of the woods that summer by Thorn Bay. So stay with us, all right, PICKFA Society. You get the privilege of talking to an individual his name is Nick Blankenship today about his experiences he's had around Thorn Bay in the Prince of Wales Island area of southeast Alaska. This area has actually come up at least once on other episodes of the show, so I'm excited to hear Nick's story today.

0:55 Nick is also a published author. He has a book about his experiences called Mythical Owl. You can find that if you you know, have links to it. It's on Amazon. But welcome to the show. Nick. It's privileged to talk to you today. Thank you, Jeremiah. You know, Nick, taking a look at your book, it sounds like you truly have experienced a lot of things that are the ordinary. But you know, I would invite you to to take us back as far as you need to, to share exactly what it is you've been experiencing over the years and how this does relate to Bigfoot in the Prince of Wales Island area.

1:38 My name is Nick Milankinship, and we moved to Fritz Will's Island, Foreign Bay, Alaska in nineteen eighty eight. My father was a Baptist minister and a logger, and so he moved us here for work and ministry. I was early teenager my eighth grade summer, and a bunch of my friends and I we went camping on a river, the Thorn River. Thorn River flows into the Thorn Bay, and the bay is one of the inlets here the mouth of the ocean, and our bay is pretty big, and then it leads out to the main to the main water the ocean. And there's plenty of bloodlines that flow into the Thorn River, but Thorn River is the major bloodline for all these games and and things that flow.

2:40 And we get all kinds of fish in there. We get wolves, black bear, all kinds of deer, and major amounts of birds, bees, everything just kind of is along the Thorn River. So, like I said, it was my eighth grade year, and it was a summertime. A bunch of us went camping, and one of my buddies came back and we were supposed to like set the tent up. A couple of us were putting sleeping bags in the tent, A couple of us were building the fire, and another guy was out just gathering little sticks of wood and stuff like that to cute the fire. Going middle of the summer, so you're talking like if it's seventy degrees here, you know it's blazing hot today. It's going to be almost seventy so it's gonna be a scorcher for southeast Alaska.

3:37 Storm Bay is probably the warmest spot on the island. We're a major inlets, so we don't stick out, so we don't get the wind and stuff like other communities and camps on our island. And so the guy came back with some sticks and he goes back out to get another load, and he comes back very early and his face is just in Hennick's shock. He looked like he'd seen the ghost. And he said, hey, guys, you got to come with me, you know, you guys got to check this out. And we're like, what, you know, we thought she maybe saw a bear or a wolf.

4:25 Is that? Don't say a word, just follow me. So we walked down the river and we're we're camping right on the Thorn River, but we're at Gravelly Craik. It's a little stream that flows into the into the Thorn River, and so he's asking to step on the bigger rocks, try not to make a lot of sound. Just come with me, and we're like, okay. So we walked down to the river with fisher jumping. Everything's, you know, just beautiful Southeast Alaska day. He couldn't get any better. We come around the bend and literally about seventy five feet away there was this reddish brown, hairy creature, but it was squatting right by the river bank. It was it would have been to our right, so we were looking at its right side of it, and all of a sudden, it just sped up like a human would stand up.

5:35 It didn't have to push off the ground like a bearwoob with its front paws. And then when a bear stands up, its front legs are kind of out sticking out in front of him like a zombie. You know, they're kind of funky when they try to walk on two legs. But this thing was squatting, you know, just like a human would squat. And it stood straight up effortless. It just boom. It stood straight up and it looked right at us, and it just walked through the river and onto the other side. And as we were standing there, we could see that it was smashing a rock on what looked like a bunch of dead fish. It was like it was beating up these fish that were on the river bank. And when it stood up to look at us, we noticed that it was female. It had breasts, and we instantly all of us have been hunters, our dads are hunters, and we were in utter fear of like, whatever this is. If it's a female, it probably has a baby. And it's weird when I describe it, even just now, I could feel the chatter in my voice of whatever that was. It really freaked us out. And it stepped through the river. The river was about five and a half six feet deep at its deepest. It's not really that wide of a river right where the

7:05 where the bend is, but when it walks through it. It was still, you know, waist high on this animal, this creature, it had dark brownish red hair, long hair, four to six inches maybe, and it had a sloping front forehead kind of like it went back to a cone. And when it turned, when when she turned, its head would only go part of the direction, part of its full direction, like you and I could turn our head back and forth. This would turn to where it almost met the shoulder, and then the whole top of the body would have to turn to look. So it didn't have as much movement as a human does. It didn't make any sound and just walked across the river and onto the other side. We all just started freaking out.

8:10 We're like, we can't believe what we just saw. No way we saw this. It's in broad daylight. It's like two thirty somewhere between there and four o'clock in the afternoon, super bright out. The sun's going to stay out till like eleven thirty and then it's back up like at three. So like we get a lot of sun here in the summertime, and it was just beaming on this creature. We left our camp, we left our tents, we left our sleeping bags, We left our feud, we left everything. A couple of us had bicycles, a couple of us had motorbikes, and I had a three wheeler, and I put as many people as I could put on my three wheeler and we petted home. Home was like three miles maybe away from our campsite, and we all made it back. We all told our parents what we had just seen. And my dad, being a logger and in an avid hunter, he just grabs his rifle and goes back out with a group of guys that used to work for us. All they could find was just some bloody fish on the fish bank and that was it.

9:20 There was no footprints nothing. He was standing or she was standing in rocks, not mud, so it wasn't like there was footprints available. And at that time a lot of the fish start dying off, you know, in the around August, so you see a lot of dead fish on the banks, or fish that have only been eaten by a bear. Maybe it's just the head gotten off and the rest of the body bear. So nothing looks too out of ordinary. Fear. I did not want to be part of a bigfoot abduction, and all of us were.

10:02 We were just freaked out for many, many weeks. It was just something that it was the first thing you thought of when we woke up. It was one of the last things we thought about when we were going to bed, and it was it was just beautiful and and more majestic seeing something that's not supposed to be there. So that was my eighth grade summer and going into my freshman year. I wrote a story about it my freshman year. When we went back to school in September, I was in my English class and I wrote what I had just saw just weeks ago. I made a replica Bigfoot replica out of mountain dew bottles and bunny fur, and I sewed it all together, and I had the big leader bottle was its body, and I had little mountain dew bottles as legs and arms, and I covered it in bunny fur. My aunt, she's a seamstress, so she had all kinds of weird beads and funky eyes and stuff like that you could sew on shirts. I sewed its eyes on there and some teeth, and it was part of my presentation. My teacher liked it so well that she kept it up on the top of the blackboard. I think two or three years after I had graduated. It was just something that resonated with the school.

11:32 It resonated with our community, several of the other kids, as parents. I mean, we just were a tight knit group here. My school at the time was only two hundred and twelve kids kindergartens through twelve, and we're all in one building. Most of the buildings here and homes were on floats. Even today, you're only going to find maybe a handful of is that actually have a foundation. We live in rural southeast Alaska, and that's basically my first real encounter with bigfoot. Since then, there has probably been about twenty years of nothing. It was just normalness, normal hunting, camping, fishing, doing the things we love to do here on our island. But it never left my back of my mind. What I saw. It's totally ingrained in there. It's burned into my memory. It's part of I think, it's part of who my DNA is and what makes what makes me. I also want to add, and I think that this goes along and I hope other people listening to it this would resonate with them.

12:56 Is when a person's that true bliss with who they are, and they are totally comfortable in their own being, and they're truly having fun with their loved ones, whether that's family members or best friends. I think that's when the paranormal steps in. I've since then, I've learned that it's not supposed to be scary, because most of the things that's happened to me has happened when I was having the most fun time of my life. Whether I'm just with one of my best friends and we're laughing and we're having fun, and then something that appears. It's never when I'm down, It's never when I'm upset. And so it took almost twenty twenty five years for me to come to that realization that usually when I'm having true fun and my heart is pure, that's when these things appear.

14:01 And so twenty twenty five years goes by. I'm out here with my sister's two kids, and we're champing, and we're at Sandy Beach, which is six miles out of Thorn Bay, so it'd be maybe nine miles away from my big Foot encounter from when I was in eighth grade. I take these kids out with my sister's kids, and we're champing. We're having a great time right on Sandy Beach, and we hear this what sounds like a woman streaming in the woods. And this is around midnight, maybe a little after midnight, and we have a small fire and it's starting to die down and we're going to retire to our tents and just chill for the night. And we've been up all day swimming and hiking and just playing and having fun and enjoying Southeast Alastet and we're about to go to bed and we hear what sounds like a woman screaming or crying in the woods. And I'm like, what was that? Did you guys hear that?

15:06 And they're like yeah, and it did it again and made this screeching almost like a baby cry, but almost like a woman crying sound. And you know, we grew up here and I've been here since nineteen eighty eight, and you don't really hear those kinds of sounds. It was just something totally different. And again, here we were just my sister's kids and I and we're having true fun and we were our hearts were right, and I honestly believed this that when you're having fun that's when they appeared. Anyways, on the back of our tent was right against the forest. The front of our tent would look out over the ocean, and we could hear the footsteps as it's coming closer into camp. And made another This time it sounded almost like a lion roar, but at the end of it you could kind of, you know, like a woman's cry, and it freaked us out. And I don't want to sound tough or nothing, but I probably would have stayed if it wasn't for my sister's kids.

16:22 They were I think one was thirteen and the other one was like maybe ten at the time, and so they were done. They were like, nah, we want to go home. And I could see my car. My car was across this little river that we had to cross. The river was a stream really, and it was like ankle deep. We again left everything there our camp and I said, you know, we'll just get it tomorrow or the next day, and we drove home. We drove all the way into town. My wife was up, you know, I had texted her own site, we're coming in. I didn't tell her why. But when we got there, the kids could not keep their mouth shut. They were freaking out.

17:03 So after they go to bed, I was telling my wife. I was like, yeah, it was something was there and it sounded like a baby crying. It sounded like a woman trying to lure us in for like she needed help, and those kinds of things. Just never leave your psyching. I live right against the woods right now my house. If I go one hundred feet in any direction, I'm in Major Tongus National for I am in the wilderness, and so you can't really get away from it. We live here, we live in our woods. We're a part of it. I'm Native American. My first nation is tat Pilaklakkan, one of the first tribes from Texas, and I honestly believe that my Native American heritage and just being in tune with who you really are and comfortable in your own skin kind of helps open these these doors for these sightings. Again, after we had gotten married and we we were having our second child, and this is where big faith and the paranormal in my life kind of starts to really come come alive, if you will excuse me.

18:38 We were in Ketchikan, Alaska, which is like I think about sixty miles off shore of this island onto another island, Ketchikan. Ketchcan has like fourteen thousand people or so, maybe a little more than that, but that's where the hospital is. We do not have any hospitals on this island. We have a few small clinics. And if your wife or whoever is going to have a baby, you have to go to Ketchikan and stay there at least two weeks before dw date, all the way up to your do gate, and if you go past the new gate, you just stay. You're not allowed to have a child here. You have to go to the hospital. So we're there, and we're there for like ten days before my second child is about to arrive. And I'm downstairs in the lobby and I'm trying to get coffee and a Coca Cola for my wife and you know, a donut or whatever they have done in the lobby, and I see this guy.

19:47 And this guy's name is doctor Robert Alli, and at the time I had no idea who he is. My parents are pretty famous around these islands for the ministry and for my dad's bluegrass band that he plays in. And my dad plays guitar, banjomandolin fiddle, the bass. I've seen him play the piano. My mom plays the accordion and she plays the guitar. My sister plays the piano. My aunt and not Gole play music. So everybody's involved in our churches here. So I see people all the time that know my parents but really don't know me. But this guy, he's going around in the wabbie talking to people about Bigfoot. And I'm sitting there listening, and I'm staring my coffee and I had my drink in my other hand, the Coca Cola, and I'm like, well, this guy's talking to all these people in the hospital who are waiting for their loved ones, whether it's they're sick or they're having babies or whatever it is. He's just chatting to anybody. I have no idea who this guy was. So finally he said, he looks right at me and he says, hey, young man, have you seen big Foo? And you know, like fourteen fifteen other people just sitting around in the lobby look at me. And I gave him that kind of half smile like yeah, bro, Like if anybody in this room has seen him, I definitely have. Then he goes, I got a tape recorder.

21:20 Can I record your story? And I'm like sure. So I sat down in front of all these people I don't know them from nothing, and his name is doctor Robert Alli. So I tell him my story. He's recording it, and he says, dude, I want to get you on one of my videos and you could watch them on anything like Netflix and stuff like that. And I was like really, and he's like yeah. So he took my information and my story and he listened to me. He asked some great questions. So I told my story to doctor Robert Alley. So I go back we have our child, and we go back home and I'm telling my father that I met this guy. And Dad's like, man, that name sounds familiar. And so mom found him on Facebook or I think it was Facebook and said, is this the deude? And I was like yeah, and she goes he plays bad pipes and we met him at the Bluegrass Festival when we were playing our bluegrass music and it was in Keetchikan, and I was like, wow, that's crazy.

22:39 He was like We're like, yeah, we know this guy. We play music with him, and so I was like, well that's cool. So years go by again, and I want to say, let's see two thousand. I don't know, it's between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty somewhere in there. I've had a few other weird encounters that weren't bigfoot encounters, but they were just weird paranormal stuff, and so I got interested in knowing more about this doctor Robert Alley. So I started looking him up and my wife and we found out that he is like this kind of world renowned bigfoot researcher that's been doing this since the seventies.

23:27 And I had no idea who he was. I just thought he was some old guy won the chat. I just thought he was a dude that played gagpipes. I had no clue that this guy was an anthropologist and a chiropractor, so he studies anatomy, studies how the body works. And I'm like, I really got to get a hold of this guy. So we're in Thorndey and my one of my good buddies and I we had left my cousin's house, and my cousin's house is literally it's about seventy feet from my parents' place, but that's just cutting through the woods. But we were walking on the road.

24:08 So it's about to you guys down south, it would be like walking two blocks. So we're walking home and I thought I saw this beer can on the back of my Mitsubishi Lancer, but it looked like a tall Boy beer can. And I don't drink alcohol. And I was like, well, you know, one of my buddies, Pybe, put that up there. What is it? You know? And so being at my dad's a minister and all those things, it's like, dude, I don't old that beverage. Get that off my car. So we're walking down the road and I know this when I think is a beer bottle on the back or a beer can on the back of my car? And my friend David was walking with me, and Dave's like, what do you think that is? And I was like did I don't know? And all you could see was one little tiny street light. And now where I live in tharn Bay at these at those times, there was only maybe three street lights in town. We don't have any red lights. There's no such thing as a stop light, not like that. These are street lights that you see, and back then we only had a handful of them. Now there might be twelve street lights in all of town, so it gets major dark here after hours. Everything is closed after five o'clock. The store closes at seven, and that is it. There's nothing open.

25:32 There's no gas stations, there's no banks, there's no malls, there's nothing. We live in the wilderness here. We had nothing after five o'clock. And so we get up to it and it's not a beer can at all. It's I don't know what it is at first. I walk right up to it, and my buddy turns a flashlight on it, and it happens to be a owl just sitting perched on the back of my fen. I'll reach out and I grabbed this owl with my bare hands and I pull him into my chest and the top of this owl's head is on the bottom of my chin, and it's just like you would do your puppy dog where you're just kind of reving your chin on it and you're like, hey, little guy, you know how you doing.

26:22 That's how this bird was to me. And I held it for about forty five seconds, and my buddy's standing there with the flashlight. David's like, I can't believe you just picked up an owl. And then as soon as we were just kind of chatting about it, it just flew straight up out of my hands and was gone. It disappeared when it got above the street light, and it was just gone. We didn't think anything about it. It was just one of those things most of my friends tell me that, you know, I have these weird gifts like that, where if anything's gonna happen, it's gonna happened to me, kind of thing. And I just kind of chalked it up as okay, cool, I just picked up a white owl, And how rare is that anyway, that it's a white owl? And how crazy it is it that it allowed me to pick it up. It didn't fight me, it didn't try to get away any weird way.

27:18 It just kind of nestled in me me for a few seconds before it flew away. So things like that had happened over and over in my life. We're living in Arizona, and uh, well, let me that track before I go to Arizona. So my same friend and I here, we were we were having a great time at my cousins, and David and I are walking home and we're chatting and we're acting like we must be the only two people on the planet. We're having loads of fun, and that's when this owl appeared. So same friend and this with be I want to say, two thousand and nine or twenty ten, I can't remember. So we went out the road and literally, from where I'm sitting right now, I can almost see the mountain that we were on, and we drove up to look for deer trails and signs of deer so that we know where we want to go hunting the next day. There's a couple spots in Thorne Bay here that if you if you get in the wrong spot, Joe b where there's a lot of wolves and so there seems to be less deer population.

28:41 And we just wanted to make sure we were on the right ridge, in the right mountain. So we went up and we were literally, I want to say, two miles out of town. So the weird thing is is this is only about a mile away from where I saw Bigfoot when I was in eighth grade. We're basically across the street, but up the hill from from the river, and we're up there and this weird light it looked like it looked like a rock on fire coming in and my Buddy goes, look at that rock up in the end in the sky, and I'm looking up and it's hitch black outside, and this is like November, maybe early December, so it's snow on the ground. It's super cold, and we see this rock kind of it looks like it's hurling through the sky, but it looks like it's on fire and there's flames and it's just weird. And all of a sudden it stops over the bay and as it stops you could see that it had a reflection on the water. Still Now it looks like there's two of them, but it's just one. And I hop out.

29:53 He hops out, and we're looking at it, and I go, do you give me your flashlight? And so I flash SOS at it, and it's a good five miles away or so from where it stopped above the water to where we were. We were way up on this ridge, I mean high up, looking down onto the ocean and looking down on the muskegs and stuff like that where all these deer should be. And after I flashed SOS at it, it was immediate response. And this light starts coming towards us, but it's moving kind of slow, about a half a minute, maybe a minute goes by, and it's right against the mountain, but it had came in too low, and all of a sudden it starts kind of going up the side of the ridge and we're looking down on this weird light. I grabbed my buddy's three O eight rifle and I looked through the scope at it, and I say this in my book, Mythical Aisle.

30:55 I said, I'm going to punch a hole in it. And my buddy is like, dude, please don't shoot that. Don't shoot that light. And I was like, dude, I'm freaking out. This thing is right here, and it was huge. As it started to come up the hill to us, we realized it's like three hundred feet round. It's just this huge weird light. As it finally gets about eye level with us, it winks out from the outside edges inward and it disappears and we're looking through the scope and I'm like where to go. He's like, I don't know, And like twenty seconds later it turns on, but up higher and to the left of us, and now it has the advantage it's looking down on us from before.

31:39 We were looking down at it from the ridge as it's making his way up the hill. We hopped in our truck. We drove down the road until we hit the pavement, and right with the pavement hits this road. If you go out of town from there, it's only a half a mile to where I saw this bigfoot. So we go towards the house and we end up over the sortyard. And what we call sortyard is it's where the loggers used to bring in all the logs and they would sort it out to the different companies. Whoever's buying lumber or shaken single or whatever, you would go and have your band of logs at this place.

32:23 So as we get to the sortyard, it's right about town and you can start to see the lights of town, and I called my wife. All of a sudden, this light comes right over top of the truck again, and we stop and we both get out. This time David gets out with us through la and he's looking straight up at it, and I could see the light go through his scope and hit him on the face. And I'm dark skin, I'm native, and so I looked kind of purplish green, and he's this white dude, and he kind of looks bluish gray killer and we're chatting the whole time, like, what is this? No sound? It's just this huge lights. It's bigger than anything we have in town.

33:10 The only thing that I had to describe how big it was was our gym, our high school gym, because we don't have malls, we don't have any big buildings here, so the biggest thing we had was our gym. And I said, dude, it's got to be about the size of the gym, right, He's like, right now, this is the same cat I was with, the same guy I was with when I found this owl on my car. So again, I only started piecing this together later in life, after I had my fourth child, and that's what made me write the book Mythical Owl. I was like, man, this is weird that these things happened to me. When I feel like I'm that true bliss in my life or I'm having just a really good time with whoever it is, it seems like even these things appeared. And so we're in we're in Arizona and we're living there.

34:05 We're out of Alaska, and we're like, okay, we're we're down here now. And I kept most of my that story to myself, my family, a couple of my friends knew about the light that we saw, and I really wasn't paying any kind of attention to it at all. And then all of a sudden, in the late two thousands, like within the last I want to say, maybe four years, maybe I've heard a lot more people say, Man, you know, I saw a bigfoot, and then in the same area, I'll see these weird lights or I saw a ufl light, and then weeks later or a year later, I see a bigfoot around that same area, and it just it just drove me mad to where I was like, man, I don't know what it is. I don't know the connection it is. I don't know if there's of vortex there or what. So in my book, I took pictures of these weird lights and weird things in the sky and I added them into my book. I took pictures of aerial view maps of where it was on the river where I saw this bigfit creature of what I would say was a female at the time, and I tried to give as much information as I could. So We're in Arizona and I tell my story and I'm looking for somebody to help me figure this out. It

35:37 got so much that, I mean I was seeing things, my kids started seeing stuff, and it was like, this is happening so often now that it's like either I don't know, I think it's like generational, like they're gonna let me see these things, and then they're gonna let my care and see these things. And it's one thing when you're a child and you see whatever, and you're a young person and a young adult and you see these encounters, But it's different when your kids starts seeing them, because then you start having these thoughts like then what if they take my child? What if my child was abducted? What if my child got hurt or killed by these weird creatures? And it starts putting things in a different perspective.

36:26 So I couldn't let it go. So I got on this page called new phone Mutual ufone network, and I started chatting with somebody I have no idea who they were, and I started telling my story about Bigfoot at Gravelly Creek Thorn River, and the person said, look, you're on mutual ufon network out of Arizona. I can't help you. You have to find a representative in Alaska. To help you, and I'm like, okay. So I get on the online again and we find the guy and he's way up north, like almost was Sila, and his name is Frank Solis.

37:21 So I get a hold of him. I have this dude as my personal friend on my phone now and we've been buddies now for like four years, but at the time, I have no idea who this cat is. So I call him up and we're talking and I said, look, dude, I'm from Prince of Belle's Island. I'm from Thorne Bay and I saw Bigfoot and I see these weird lights in the sky. He took my information down, he checked my stories down, and I had many of them that I told and I was telling him, you know, one time, we're going to have to try that. We have to meet and do this and do that. And he's like, well, actually, I'm going to Phoenix, Arizona for a UFO conference for this mutual UFO network, and I'm going to a workshop in Phoenix. How about we try to hook up and you tell me your Bigfoot story while I'm there. And I'm like, oh, that's cool. So now I have two people that are in my corner doctor Robert Ally, who is an anthropologist, bigfoot researcher. And now I have Frank Solas, who is paranormal research, a broad spectrum of that. I'm offman, UFO, anything you want to think of, he's he would be doing those things. So after he heard my story, Frank Solas, he's in Arizona and he's telling another mutual UFO network representative.

38:52 This guy's name was Dennis and he was a et R, which means an experiencer, someone that's not only heard stories, that has had their own encounters with the paranormal. That he believed that when that light was in the sky and it turned off and then it winked back on twenty seconds later, Like I said that that really wasn't that. That really didn't happen. It didn't wink off and then turned back on. That was like us passing out and then us reawakening again. So he thought we were abducted by a UFO. So now he's like totally freaking out.

39:34 He's like, dude, I got to meet this duke. So now I have three people that are seasons vet in the paranormal that are wanting to know my story. So my wife and I. We drove up into Phoenix from the east side and May say to meet with these guys. And we met with them. I told my stories, we shared information, and we tried to keep in contact with each other and and so on. So we moved back to Thorn Bay from Arizona, and we're like to oh, let's go home. Let's move back. You know, the kids, you know, we just it's better for us to live up there right now, and let's just go home. So we're on our way back. Frank Soulis has no idea that I'm moving back to Thorn Bay. I move up here, and one of my best friends says, hey, man, until you get your place, you can live with me. And I was like, dude, I got four kids in my life.

40:30 Are you sure you could take six people. He's like, dude, it's fine, man. We're homeboys, Dude, we're friends. I'm like, okay, man, I go, we're coming. So we hopped on the ferry out of Bellingham. We got to chech Acam, we got on another ferry on that island in catch cat Alaska over to Prince of Wells Island, and then we drove right on into Thorn Bay. I wasn't in Thorn Bay three days and my phone rings, cell phone back Frank. So I'm like, what does this guy want? So I'm like, hey, Frank, what's up, bro. He's like, hey man, I'm on Prince of Wells Island. I'm like what He's like, Yeah, my wife and I came down from Lostella. We just had to see where you saw this bigfoot. We had to see where you saw these lights in the sky. I got guide your count I got radiation stuff. I got you know, everything that you see on the TV shows that they use for paranormal And he's like, my wife's gonna do all the notes and she's gonna write stuff down.

41:32 We're gonna take interviews with you and whoever. So he had no idea that I was in Florm Bay. He was just traveling here and ends up here like within three days after I have arrived. That in itself, to me is almost paranormal. So I took Frank and his wife up Deborah's her name up and she was mutual UFO network also. So we went up to the hillside and I was like, look right, here's where the light came in. This is where the light was stopped over the bay. You know, this is where we think it winked off and turned back on. This is where it was when we pulled the gun out on it. The second time we pulled the gun out on it, and I said, you know, right, here's the river bank. This is where we saw Bigfoot when I was in eighth grade.

42:18 And they were totally awesome. They took pictures and they chocked their Geiger calendar or whatever you call those things and radiation stuff, and they were on top of it. And since then, Frank Solis and I have been really good friends and we've stayed in contact a lot. Most of the pictures that I have in my book, they're all daytime pictures except for I think too, but most of them are just stuff I see. I take a picture of it with my cell phone and I put it in my book. I was not going to write a book at all. I was just trying to jot down time lines and my experiences. And my wife said, look, you know, you should write this into a book of short stories and just kind of share what you've been in so as I was doing that, I started from when I was a child all the way to adulthood.

43:20 And through that I learned that my grandparents had seen stuff, and my mom and dad have seen things. Lots of my aunt and uncles have seen stuff. And I started putting it together and it's like, man, this is like generational. My mom had a bigfoot encounter on the east side I believe it was of Washington State, where she says she had a three h eight and from the end of the barrel to where the stock of the gun starts was like eighteen inches and she said the bigfoot prints in the snow were almost as big as her gun burrel. And she was like, that's wild. Stories of you know, my grandpa being freaked out thinking that there was, you know, a ghost or something or a demon trying to hold him at night. Why he slept at one of his sister's homes. My grandma swears way, and my grandma can't read or write. She's from West Virginia, and she was telling me way, way way back when I was maybe seventeen years old. And then this lady cannot read or write, she's never been around any of those kinds of things. And she said she saw the mothman.

44:34 And again, none of these things resonated with me, so I started writing my book. And when I wrote my book, I started looking up how far is it from Point Pleasant, West Virginia to where my grandma was born and raised in West Virginia, and by the birdflies, it's just a few hours away. And I was like, man, you know, and that timeline of her seeing it when she was a little kid or a young women anyway, it could have really been the same creature that people were calling mothman. And so there's just it's weird. I don't think that these creatures are in every family tree. Again, I think they're generational. I also believe that when and I've said this probably to you many times already, but when you really are having a true experience with your loved ones and you're really loving them and enjoying your time, I think that these things come through, whether it's another vortex or they just appear. And I think that's because there themselves are pure at heart. You know, maybe they don't know what it's like to have weird struggles or whatnot.

45:50 And in my book, I write things like, you know, what is it if someone gets subducted, whether it's by a bigfoot or aliens or whatever, it is. You know, sometimes people are brought back, and that's what Dennis Johnson and those guys thought that maybe we were abducted and brought back. But what about those ones that go missing for years and people just chalk it up to you know, they drowned or a wolf got them or a bear. Eighth m Yes, those things happened. But sometimes these things happen to people and they're just gone. And that's where the fear side comes in on my bet is, Man, I don't want my kids messed with. I don't want that kind of stuff. And my kids themselves see things sometimes we see them together. And in my book, I also have pictures of what they call black pillows that were floating right above our swimming pool in Arizona. And this was right before I met Vennish and Frank Soulis in Phoenix. So again, I mean when they asked, hey, man, when was the last time you had your encounter, I was like, like Tuesday, And they're like what. I'm like, yeah, dude, Like I see these things all the time, and so it just, you know, never stopped. And when I wrote my book, it literally took me about a year to finish it and I wrote it. My wife helped me with the timelines and stuff, and it was therapeutic. And

47:22 since then, there's a few places on the island that I just don't like to go. One of them is Gradley Creek, and it's on the Thorn River. Now. I live on south side of Thorn Bay now, so I have to cross over the Thorn River Bridge, and then I have to cross over Falls Creek, and then I have to pass over Graveley Creek Bridge to get to town. So if I want to check the mail, or go to the grocery store or get gas, I have to literally drive right by where I saw bitchfit every day. And on this island, I've been to the mountaintops, I've been in the valleys. I've been all over hunting, hiking, fishing, camping.

48:03 Nothing bugs me really. It just seems okay that every time I go into Graveley Creek I get creeped out. Even right now, like if I were going to go walk down Gravelly Creek, I've grabbed my gun. I don't go down there without some kind of a weapon anymore. I just don't. Ever since I was in eighth grade, every time we go down through there, I get freaked out. And my kids want to go swimming on the Thorn River all summer long. Like, when we go swimming, it's fine, but when we get close to the Gravelly Creek area, I just start getting quiet. I start getting freaked out, and I don't like it. We had a lady in our church, and this would be Craig, Alaska, which is like forty five miles away from Thorn Bay on the other side of the island. Then one day after church we were chatting and I said, hey, and I won't name her name, but I said, hey, have you ever been to Gravey And she's like, yeah, I go. Have you ever felt anything weird? And I wasn't trying to lead her into anything. I wanted her to tell me, and she said yeah, She's like, every time I go to Gravelly Creek, I feel weird. And I said, when you go down the trail from where you park at going into the river, which side of the trail freaks you out? In my mind, I know it's the left because that's where our camp was, that's where we saw this bigfoot creature. And she automatically right in front of my father, who happened to be the pastor of this church,

49:33 she says to the left, and she had no idea any of this bigfoot stuff. She had no idea that I had saw it. Sasquatch YETI Kushtika whatever you want to call them, harry Man, and I looked right out my wife like see. And this lady was a Native American, also part of the clink at Heida tribes here on our island. And so through that we started interviewing all kinds of people in sister city of Arcisisan, and there was plenty of people over there that had which is right down the street from where I saw Bigfoot, and they were telling me how they see a family of Bigfoot one time. Some lady got taken a long long time ago, and they believed that Bigfoot took her. I think as close as twenty ten, they had to shut the school down because the family of Bigfoot walked through and freak galve the kids out. And I don't remember the exact timeframe, but over in Kullak, which is another Native village on an Island, they had to shut down a giant mill for a couple of days because somebody had seen a bigfoot in there and it got so crazy and so adamant that the workers out there, the loggers and the mill workers there were like, you, we saw this bigfoot that it enticed. I forget the name

51:08 of the show, but it's a bigfit show that came up, that comes up. And they actually did a whole interview on the island about some of the guys here that had seen those things. I wasn't a part of that interview, and I was not a part of the show, but I used to work at that same meal, and I was just you know, all those things came about and make you start wondering and thinking, man, you know what is going on? And so yeah, my book was therapeutic for me. My kids loved the book. They've read it a couple of times. All their friends have read it. There's been a few people here in town that were like, dude, I can't believe you wrote a book, and they went and bought it and then they were like, dude, you know that's so cool that you see these things. And again, when you live in a small town, I think there's only like maybe three hundred fifty maybe four hundred people in Thorn Bay now today, so I would say probably more than half of those people I know personally, and we're a tight knit and so a lot of these people have heard my story growing up and maybe had just kind of forgotten about it until I wrote my book and then it brought back some of their own thoughts.

52:26 But yeah, I mean everything a Norththorn bridge, I had pulled up there one day and set out and I just clapped my hands really loud, just clop clop, clap, and I had a response. It sounded like a tree notch right around the corner, and it was just you know, it makes the hair stand up on your head or you're like, that is wild. But again, I don't think it happens to everybody. I don't really feel that you have to be Native American to experience these things, even though I do know that, you know, to the Native plan it's not myth you know, I didn't call it the theological out. It's the mythical owl. But in a lot of our native cultures, they're just they're there. They're not looked at as taboo or false. They're looked at as just what it is, and that's just part of it.

53:23 You got to watch out for them. Bigfoot is is the man of the woods, is the female of the woods, is the caretaker of the woods. So yeah, those things just resonate and through that it helped me write my book. And like I said, doctor or Frank Solis, the Mutual UFO, he got a hold of my friend David, and David told him the same things. It was like, yeah, man, my buddy topped this owl, and yeah we saw these lights and and then that entire me to go ahead and write the book. And I'm like, you know what, I got to do this And so that's basically it in a nutshell for for what I've seen. And then but uh, in my book, I describe it probably way better because I had time to actually really think about it and use more descriptive words. But but yeah.

54:21 Nick, that'sn't That whole account is incredible. The whole story is just so amazing. You know, I do have some some questions and and things to ask you here, if that's all right, sure, I would imagine do you have a picture of the Bigfoot replica in this book as well? No, I do not. I drew a picture of what I see, but I didn't I did not have a picture of the of the little Bunny thing that I had made. Okay, I did not do bottles. Do you have a picture of that at all? No?

55:01 Oh man, I can only imagine that must have looked amazing. I want to ask a little bit specifically about the sighting that you had of the female by the river. So you had said seventy five feet away, right, yeah, roughly, okay, So to put that to perspective for listeners, that is just over the length of a standard bowling alley, I believe. So we're talking very close, extremely close. Curious if you remember any details about the face at all. Do you remember how the eyes looked, if they had whites around the pupils or if they were all just one color.

55:51 Oh? On, it looked really dark, so all around the eyebrows and by the cheek bones, the eyes to be sunken in a lot, and so the browl was almost like a like a baseball cap over its eyes if you will, not that it sticks out that far. But yeah, it was super dark, and I don't remember seeing any whites in its eyes. It was really just dark, like the whole eyeball took up or the whole pupil part, the color part of the eye took up all of the whiteness, gotcha? Were there any ears visible or anything? I thought.

56:33 Ears? Let me think, yeah, maybe on the because it was too and we saw the right of it, so kind of you could kind of see an ear, But I don't remember anything sticking out like you or I. It would have been like stuck within the fur, makes sense. The chest kind of looked dark brownish black, and you could kind of see breasts on this thing. Gotcha. A lot of witnesses will say, you know, it's covered with hair, but you can see muscles under the fur. Is that kind of what we're talking about there?

57:14 Right? You could see down the side of her back. You could see where the fur was really thick and darker right down the spine, and then some of the thigh had a huge muscle difference between the front part of the thigh and the back part of the thigh. You could see that there was alignment, and that was like very descriptive, like do this thing has muscle? You know? It's wild. Did you notice any details about the nose at all? The nose was kind of turned up, It didn't stick out very far at all from the face. It kind of was pushed in and it had lots of wrinkles, went down by the mouth, kind of like when people would draw a funny cartoon of a pig back in the late eighties, you know, but major dark glistened between a reddish and brown.

58:20 At any point, did you see teeth at all? No, sir, I did not see teeth. She stood straight up from a squat in position, so feet were flat, and her booty would have been almost setting on its calfs, and it just stood straight up, shoulders to the side, arms to the side, and as it walked, it walked like you and I just arms would stride with the legs and it went straight through the river. Wow. Growing up in that school out there, did their kids have report sightings of things as well? Or was yours the only one that you really remembered.

59:08 In my school? I can't really remember anybody else except for one other guy. And he saw siding about six miles from where I saw mine. But when he reported it or was talking about it, he was young. He was maybe about nineteen, so he had just graduated. He saw it between here and Cassan, which is the native village close to us. Gotcha, which is about is about what twenty twenty five miles, I. Would say, yeah, maybe thirty would be tops. Okay, gotcha. So I remember you said your dad's reaction when you told what happened was he got some of his buddies or co workers. They ran off with weapons to try to find it.

59:53 Correct, mister, dad totally knew that I was. We were freaked out. He could see the look on our faces of all of us young men. And again, you grew up here, you hunt a lot, so you see bears. He knew that I was not looking at a bear. Absolutely. You also mentioned that your your dad was a minister as well. Yes, sir, still is what what. Was his reaction to what was being seen on this island as a minister. His reaction was, you know the Bible sites that you know, there's sights and wonders that we can't explain. And he totally bought into it. He totally believes in Bigfoot and UFO.

1:00:44 I love that. I love that dude. That's amazing, right. And again when I when I explained to him that when you're at true at heart, that these things arrive and and that again kind of goes with the biblical sense of you know, if you really are who you are, and you're fine with it. Why not invite these things? You know? I don't know how to describe it. It's weird, man. It's like it's almost like whatever these creatures are know when you're at true bliss and they just want to be a part of it. And it's almost like, oh, man, you've got are having so much fun, and I want to be a part of their party. I want to be a part of that action. But then when they're spotted, the reaction that we give them is not the response that they want.

1:01:36 Instead of hanging out with them, we get kind of worried and like, no man, and we leave. And that's almost like a biblical sense of somebody trying to have a lot of fun and saying, but I have leprosy and I can't hang out with you. Right. Wow. So it's weird. Such a such a unique way of looking at it. It's very very different than a lot of other things that I've heard on the show so far. But I mean, this topic has so so many different ways of looking at this phenomenon and what it is and why it's drawn to us. A lot of people will say it's because of traumatic events, but to hear what you've said something completely different and kind of refreshing as well. I noticed in the areas that you mentioned, which would be Thorn Bay, Cassan, Klowok, and Craig, those are really if you look at it on a map, I mean, they're pretty they're across the island, but they're not too far away from each other. I mean, Klowok and Craig are not too far in Thorn Bay and Cassan. So I guess my question is do most of the sightings and accounts of sasquatch on this island happened in that area or there are other things you've heard from like, let's say the far north of the island as well.

1:03:02 Well, that's a good question. So you would think that most people would see bigfoot in these things in the woods when they're way out hunting or camping or hiking and fishing and really, really really with the enemies. I mean, we're already in rural Alaska, but to get way out, you would think that that's when they would see them. But it's weird. It's like they almost see them within two or three miles of town, sometimes literally right in camp. The meal that they saw in Killock. It's a huge mill that's a big lumber mill, and lots of saws, lots of forklifts, lots of big machinery, lots of logging trucks coming and going. So to have one walk right through the mill yard where people are working and talking in broad daylight so much that they shut the middle down, that's just crazy. You know, It's like whoa, you know, like, if they're that comfortable to get that close to society, it's almost it's just it's kind of freaking. Oh. Absolutely.

1:04:06 And I was just thinking of the other story that you shared where it was a family that went into a school and the school was shut down. Yeah, I heard that from the chief at the time of Cassanne. So he was he had a dinner at our house. He went to church with my parents and we had a potla dinner at my house after church, and he just started telling about a bunch of those kinds of stories. And you can see in his eyes, I mean, this guy believes in the Lord. He goes to church. But also he wasn't at all fearful about saying, but look, these things happened in my village. And I think my parents were okay with that, because my mom had her encounter on eastern Washington way before I was born and way before my sister was born. But again, none of those things were really told to us till after I started talking about my experiences.

1:05:04 Absolutely, you know a question for you because well, actually I want to comment real quick, so I don't forget. First off, the show you are trying to remember the name of that's Expedition Bigfoot. So if people are wanting to, you know, look into that, just look up Expedition Bigfoot and there's a season I believe about Alaska. Also, doctor Robert Alli, I've met two times. He's an amazing individual. He's got a few books out about southeast Alaska. People should go check those out and get some copies. Amazing encounters in there as well. But I guess one of my last questions for you would be, and you have a really interesting way of looking at things because of your background. So when you think of what you saw and what's reported are you are you thinking of the individuals more as you know, some kind of ape or some kind of human or is it something completely different that we have going on here?

1:06:13 You know, I would say that it's it's it's man, it's all of those, and it's it's all of those in itself and individually. And at the same time, it's weird because you could say, yes, I do believe it's some kind of an ape. I do not believe that it's some kind of ancestry human of any kind that had been lost and has it evolved. I don't really believe that way. And again, when you see these weird lights around, it could be that it's some kind of an alien creature that gets put down to do whatever for a while and then gets taken back in a ship, or it just walks through another vortex or another dimension.

1:07:00 H that we just yet to figure out how to get into our chap into. Uh. That's why I honestly believe that when you're at true at heart, I think that's when you're the most absceptable or if you will to the good. They're mentioned being opened or your own vortexas in your own your own core spirit open instead of you know, being so segregated. That's a that's a cool way way to put it. But what a great conversation. I do want to talk to listeners for a bit. If there are people that have been listening to this episode. Uh usually the Prince of Wales Island ones really draw in new listeners. If you know about these accounts that were told, or maybe you're someone that was involved with them, please reach out.

1:07:52 I would love to talk to you and make sure that your account is documented properly to help other people as well. You can reach a Big for Society at gmail dot com. But Nick, it has been such such a privilege to have someone like yourself on the show who has a wealth of knowledge. I noticed your book is on Amazon. Is that the best way that you would prefer people to get a copy of that or is there another way? I believe that's the only way, Yes. Sir, awesome, So guys, I will I will make sure to have a link for Nick's book down in the show notes or description wherever you're listening a Mythical Owl and please check that out. You can get you know, a hard paper copy, or you can get kindled copy.

1:08:43 And yeah, just you know, I can't wait to get one myself. I purposely held off because I wanted to hear it directly from Nick first, but I can't wait to go and read it as well. But Nick, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Any other closing before we end our time together today. Jeremiah, I just want everybody out there to understand that, you know, it's not about keeping your eyes peeled in the woods and trying to find those things. I think that if you really are loving the people around you, that these things will appear to you instead of you having to try to find them. It's a whole different fishing game when you do it that way. I think that when we look for things, we miss all the other opportunities that are out there, or we miss the steps of success because we're skipping stones to try to to try to make something happen when you should just live your best life. And then these things just start adding to you as a gift. And it's really these creatures can look right into your soul. You know a lot of people say the same thing when and they see a wolf for the first time in the wild, like, wow, you know, it looked like it was looking directly into my soul. And I honestly believe that that's part of it is. It's not about trying to hunt for a bigfoot.

1:10:13 It's trying to be the best you. And then these things will arrive. Man, I love that. Such a such a great way to look at it. But you know, Nick, thank you so much for coming on the show. Definitely. If there's ever any updates, feel free to reach out. You can send me an email. But thanks so much for chatting today. Man. Thanks Jeremiah and all you Big FOOTA researchers out there, just keep up the good work. It will happen one day that we find the truth. Just wanted to take a minute to say thank you for listening to this episode of the Big for Society podcast. Nick's story sticks with you not just because of what came out of the water, but because of how it echoed through the rest of his life, from a single moment by the water to lights in the sky to a white owl waiting on the back of his car.

1:11:03 It's huge thanks to Nick for sharing those powerful and mysterious experiences from Prince of Wales Island, and for reminding us that sometimes when we're at our most joyful, that's when the veil between worlds gets the thinness. If you enjoy this conversation, please subscribe to us on YouTube hit the bell so you don't miss new episodes, and share this with someone who's into Bigfoot Alaska or just a good old mystery. If you're on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, make sure to follow the show and if you can leave us a five star positive review, it really helps more folks discover these accounts. If you've had a big foot encounter, especially in Alaska, Prince of Wales Island, or anywhere in the US, I'd love to hear anywhere in the world, I'd love to hear from you, so please email me at big for Society at gmail dot com.

1:11:52 Thanks again for being part of the Big for Society. If you haven't already, make sure you check out our new membership community www dot Bigfoot Society podcast dot com and click on the members login area. That's where you can find a special episode just for members every week, add free episodes early release episodes as well, in a way where you can connect with others that are really into the Bigfoot subject. Check it out. You'll be glad that you did. Until next time, keep your eyes open, trust your gut, and never stop asking what else might be out there And see you in the woods.