RCMP Officer Recounts 1987 Bigfoot Investigation After Hunters Vanish

So I just stumbled across something that genuinely stopped me in my tracks while scrolling through YouTube late last night, and I had to share it with you all immediately. A channel called Caso Presenciado dropped a video featuring a retired RCMP officer named Walter Pruit, and the story he tells is one of the most unsettling Sasquatch encounters I've heard in a long time. Pruit spent 26 years with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 22 of those in detachments across the Yukon and northern British Columbia. He opened and closed over 400 case files during his career, but there's exactly one he never could close. Not because the evidence was lacking, but because, as he puts it, he himself became part of the evidence. The case started in September 1987 when a guide named Earl Tanaka radioed in from a camp on the Liard Plateau, about 90 kilometers northeast of Watson Lake. Two of his clients, sport hunters from Montana, had vanished for 11 hours during an elk hunt. When they walked out of the bush on their own, neither would say where they'd been. One of them, Roy Castellan, was treated for what was logged as acute psychological shock with an undetermined cause. His hunting partner gave no statement and flew home two days early, abandoning a $4,000 hunt without a word. Now, that alone wouldn't have made it Pruit's case. What made it his file was what Tanaka found four days later, alone, with no one around to put ideas in his head. A trackway of footprints, 40 centimeters long, with a stride of nearly a meter and a half, crossing a mud flat where that kind of stride should have been physically impossible for any bipedal creature. Pruit did the plaster cast himself using dental plaster, standard procedure, but he noticed something he never put in the official report. The left print was complete, every toe, every ridge clearly marked in the mud. The right print, the very next step, simply stopped. Not blurred, not washed out by wind or water. It ended halfway through the impression, as if whatever made it had set its weight down and then, mid-step, simply ceased to exist. When he sent the photographs to a physical anthropologist in Alberta, the response came back two weeks later. The dermal ridge patterns didn't match any known fraud technique he'd ever encountered. What Pruit noticed was what the anthropologist didn't write. No bear, no moose, no snowshoe, just silence where an answer should have been. And that's just the beginning. Pruit describes his compass needle spinning in complete circles near the camp, with no iron deposits or power lines within 60 kilometers. He interviewed an elderly trapper named Earl Boss who told him about hearing something he called "a kind of speech, but wrong" near that same creek bottom, not words, not animal, something in between. A radio operator named Colín, who had 11 years on the job and never lost her composure over the air, went silent for three full seconds before telling Pruit that someone else had been on the frequency a moment ago, underneath her voice, saying his name before he did. His private notebook, the one he never told anyone existed, disappeared from his own desk. His flashlight dimmed on its own with fresh batteries. His campfire died in under 10 minutes with no wind and no rain. The birds went silent twice while he tracked fresh prints near the creek, not quiet, but waiting. Then came October 29, 1987. Pruit drove back out there alone, against procedure, carrying a department cassette recorder because he believed whatever Castellan and his companion had stumbled onto was still operating in that basin. Six kilometers up the creek, he found a black spruce nearly 60 centimeters thick, broken clean at chest height, not splintered like wind damage or a neighboring tree falling, but snapped the way you'd snap a stick over your knee if your knee happened to be about two and a half meters off the ground. He started recording at 4:51, narrating his location, time, and conditions like he was trained to do. You can hear his boots on the frost, his breathing steady. At 4:58, his wristwatch stopped, though he didn't notice until much later when he compared the time to the timestamp on the tape itself. The hands stayed frozen at 4:58 for the rest of that walk, the rest of that night, and the rest of that year, until he finally threw the watch away because he couldn't stand looking at it anymore. At 5:14, everything changes. You hear him stop mid-stride. His breathing goes shallow, high in his chest. And then for 11 seconds, there's a sound that he's had analyzed twice by two audio engineers who never spoke to each other and both reached the same dead end. One of them played it back at quarter speed and sat in silence for almost a full minute before saying anything. He'd cleaned recordings of whale songs, submarine hulls, military surveillance tape. Nothing, he told Pruit, produces that sound. Eleven seconds later, from a completely different direction, something answers. Not an echo, a reply. For the next 40 seconds, Pruit doesn't say a word. Underneath his breathing, something moves through the forest, uphill, and it doesn't move the way a deer moves, quick and nervous. It moves the way a man moves when he's already decided he doesn't need to be stealthy, slow, pausing for full seconds at a time, the way something pauses when it's deciding, not when it's traveling. Then, in a voice that doesn't sound like his own, flatter, slower, Pruit says three words: "I see it." The tape stops. The next sound on that cassette is Pruit again, breathing hard, saying, "I'm heading back to the truck." His voice in that second fragment is calm, steadier than before the gap. The voice of a man who had already made peace with something the rest of him hadn't caught up to yet. And he has absolutely no memory of what happened between those two phrases. None. Not a fragment. I genuinely don't have words for what I felt listening to this. The Liard Plateau and the surrounding wilderness in northern BC and the Yukon have long been considered some of the most active regions in North America for Sasquatch reports, and stories from RCMP officers carry a particular weight given their training in observation and evidence handling. Pruit's account of the footprints alone, with that impossible stride length and the print that simply stopped mid-impression, is the kind of detail that sticks with you. If you want to hear the full story straight from Pruit, including the parts I haven't even touched on here, do yourself a favor and go find this video. It's worth every minute.