Pilot Spots Bigfoot Tracks Circling Camp After Oregon Plane Crash

A pilot's handwritten account from a 1991 crash site in the Oregon woods is making the rounds online, and it's the kind of story that gives you chills. The video, put together by the Midnight Terror Tales channel, walks through the entries of a man named Curtis Hail, who survived six days in the wilderness after his Cessna 172 went down in the timber east of the Ochoco Mountains. His passenger, a geologist named Daniel Reyes, didn't make it. What makes this account stand out isn't just the survival story, though. It's what Hail wrote in the margins of his aircraft logbook during those long nights alone. Hail wasn't some greenhorn. He'd flown that country for 11 years and knew the backwoods sounds the way most people know the creaks of their own house at night. So when he describes the silence that settled over the crash site, it carries weight. Dusk in that kind of timber should be alive with birds settling, squirrels scolding, jays calling. There was nothing. Just the tick of the cooling engine and his own breathing. That's the kind of detail that separates a tall tale from something that actually happened to a person who knew better. The first night, he heard it. A low sound that came up through the ground more than through the air, something you feel in your chest before your ears catch it. Not a howl, not a growl, somewhere between a moan and a call. Long and deliberate. Then another one answered from down the draw. Hail tried to talk himself into believing it was elk in rutting season, but even he couldn't quite sell himself on that. Bull elk scream. They want the whole mountain to know they're there. What he heard was quiet. It was talking low from one point to another and then choosing to stop. By the second day, his emergency beacon had died. By the afternoon, he found the first footprint. It was pressed deep into the soft dirt at the edge of the clearing, longer than his own boot, with five toes in a line like a human foot, a heel, and an arch. No claw marks. Not a bear track. Whatever made it had real weight, more than a man, and it was pointed straight at his camp. Once he started looking, he couldn't stop finding them. They were all around the clearing, and the way they were arranged suggested something he didn't want to think about. There was more than one. And they were positioned with intention. The Pacific Northwest has always been a hotspot for these kinds of reports, and the Ochoco Mountains sit right in the kind of dense, remote timber that fits the pattern. Old-growth forest, rough terrain, miles from the nearest logging road. The kind of country where something could move through without being seen for generations. Footprint evidence like what Hail describes, especially when it shows dermal ridges or five-toed structure without claws, is exactly the kind of thing that researchers pay attention to. It's not a snapshot or a blurry video. It's a physical impression left in the ground by something that was there, standing upright, watching a man who had just lost everything. The video does a solid job laying out Hail's entries in his own words, cleaned up only where the handwriting got too small to read. It's paced well, with enough atmosphere to let the weight of each entry land. If you're into firsthand accounts, especially ones that come with physical traces and weren't told to a camera but written down in the moment by a man who thought he might not make it out, this one is worth your time. The story cuts off mid-entry, which suggests there's more to come, but what's there already has that quiet, undeniable quality that makes you lean in. Go give it a watch. It's the kind of account that stays with you.