Pilot's Log Book Reveals Bigfoot Encounter After Oregon Crash

Posted Friday, July 10, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

So there's this video that crossed my feed recently from a channel called Weekly Terror, and I have to tell you, it stopped me in my tracks. It's a deep dive into a case I'd honestly never heard of before, and after sitting with it for a while, I think it's one of those stories that deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten. The video walks through a 1991 incident out of Oregon that involves a downed Cessna 172, a pilot named Curtis Hail, and six nights alone in the timber east of the Ooko Mountains after his passenger, a geologist named Daniel Reyes, was killed in the crash. What makes this case so chilling isn't just the survival element, it's what Hail claims happened around him while he waited for rescue that never seemed to come. According to the account, which is drawn from entries Hail wrote in his aircraft logbook during those six days, the forest around his crash site went completely silent. No birds, no wind, no owls, nothing. For a man who'd flown that country for eleven years and knew its sounds intimately, that silence was the first red flag. And then came the calls. Hail describes hearing a low, deliberate sound on the first night, something he felt in his chest before his ears caught it, rolling down the slope. A second one answered from down the draw. He tried to convince himself it was rutting elk, but as he writes, elk in October don't call soft and low and then go silent. They scream. They want the whole mountain to know. Whatever he was hearing didn't want to be known. By the second day, Hail found a print at the edge of his clearing. Five toes in a line, a heel, an arch, pressed deeper into the soft dirt than his own boot. He knew it wasn't a bear. He knew it wasn't a man. And it was pointed directly at his camp. By the third day, he found more prints, and once he started seeing them, he couldn't stop. They weren't scattered randomly. They were arranged around the clearing. Now, I want to be careful here because the discussion cuts off right at that point, and I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth. But what makes this case so compelling, and what the video does a great job laying out, is how it fits into a much larger pattern of encounters in the Pacific Northwest, particularly in the dense, remote timber of Oregon and Washington. Researchers like John Green, who documented hundreds of tracks in the Bluff Creek area of Northern California back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, often noted the same thing witnesses describe here, that the forest goes quiet before anything happens. That's not a small detail. It's consistent across decades of reports. There's also the matter of the arrangement Hail describes. Multiple witnesses over the years have reported seeing tracks encircling a camp or a clearing, not approaching, just watching. The late researcher Grover Krantz, who spent years studying the available evidence, often pointed to this kind of behavior as evidence of intelligence rather than a simple animal pattern. Animals don't arrange themselves in a perimeter around a human camp and then hold position. That's a deliberate choice. What I appreciate about the video is that it doesn't sensationalize the story. It just lets Hail's words do the work. The pacing is slow, the descriptions are grounded, and there's a real sense of a man trying to be honest about what he experienced even when he doesn't have the vocabulary for it. He keeps returning to the silence, to the weight of the prints, to the way the calls stopped the moment he acknowledged them. Those are details that stick with you. If you haven't seen this one yet, I'd really encourage you to go check it out. It's the kind of case that reminds you why people keep going back into those woods, and why the question of what's out there never really goes away. There's a lot more to dig into here, and I think this is one of those stories that's going to be talked about for a while.