Yukon Pilot Reveals 52-Year Secret of 1973 Bigfoot Encounter

After keeping a secret for more than five decades, a veteran Yukon bush pilot is finally sharing the story of how a Sasquatch saved his life in the remote wilderness of northern Canada. Glenn Coulthard, now 78 years old, logged over 19,000 hours flying single-engine aircraft across the Yukon Territory during a 41-year career as a commercial bush pilot. On November 4, 1973, all that experience wasn't enough to save him when a sudden whiteout brought down his de Havilland Beaver on skis somewhere around 120 miles east of Whitehorse, in country where nobody had any business being in November. What happened next is the story he's kept to himself for 52 years. Coulthard had been on a routine mail and supply run to a placer mining camp on the Upper Pelly River, run by brothers Lloyd and Wesley Decker. The flight in was textbook—minus 18 Celsius on the ramp, deep cobalt sky, unlimited visibility. He delivered the cargo, shared coffee with the Deckers, accepted a slab of fresh moose meat for his wife Doris, and took off at 12:18 in the afternoon. The forecast front was still hours away. It wasn't. About 30 minutes into the return flight, Coulthard watched a thin band of cirrus to the northwest thicken and drop with a speed he'd never seen in seven years of flying the territory. Within five minutes, visibility went from unlimited to two miles. Within 90 seconds after that, the sky simply closed. He lost the horizon. He lost the ground. He lost any sense of which way was up. He was suddenly in an instrument flight situation in an airplane that wasn't equipped for it, flown by a pilot who wasn't trained for it. He hit the tops of black spruce at around 60 knots. He tried to walk out and made it less than a quarter mile before his feet stopped working. By every reasonable measure, Glenn Coulthard should have died that day in November 1973. He didn't. In a video posted to the Cryptid's Den YouTube channel, Coulthard describes being carried down off that mountain by a being that was "not a man" and "not human." He made a promise in a way that "did not involve words" that he would keep the encounter secret—and he honored that promise for over half a century before deciding the time had come to share his story. The Yukon Territory has long been considered prime Sasquatch country. The vast, roadless wilderness, the dense spruce forests that stretch unbroken for hundreds of miles, and the extreme weather have made it a place where countless encounters have been reported over the decades—particularly by people who spend extensive time in the backcountry. Trappers, miners, prospectors, and especially bush pilots have filed reports of large, bipedal figures crossing remote valleys or moving through timber in ways that suggest intelligence and purpose rather than random animal behavior. The territory's Indigenous peoples also carry longstanding oral traditions about wild people of the forest, sometimes referred to by names that translate roughly to "the ones who walk alone" or similar descriptors. What makes Coulthard's account stand out is the credibility factor. Here is a commercial pilot with nearly two decades of experience at the time of the incident—someone trained to observe, assess, and remain calm in emergencies—describing an encounter that challenged everything he understood about the natural world. He wasn't a novice. He wasn't prone to fantasy. He flew for an outfit called Northern Reach Aviation, run by a legendary bush pilot named Floyd Marston who had been flying the Yukon since the Alaska Highway was built. Coulthard knew the country, knew the aircraft, knew the weather, and knew his own limitations. And yet something carried him off that ridge and gave him 52 more years of life. The video walks through the entire flight in remarkable detail—from the pre-flight checks, to the coffee with the Decker brothers, to the moment the sky simply swallowed the Beaver whole. It's a compelling listen for anyone interested in Sasquatch encounters from credible, professional witnesses who had every reason to stay silent and chose otherwise. Definitely worth carving out some time to watch the full video over on the Cryptid's Den channel.