Veteran Wildlife Technician Films Sasquatch, Forced to Delete Footage

There's a video that surfaced recently from the Bigfoot Sightings Canada YouTube channel that stopped me in my tracks. A wildlife technician with 31 years of experience running remote camera arrays in central British Columbia came forward with what might be one of the most haunting Sasquatch encounters ever captured on film, and the story behind it is just as compelling as the footage itself. The witness, Alma Petcow, has spent her career monitoring caribou populations across the Nechako Plateau. Her remote camera array in the Fawny Range consisted of 31 stations, each one strapped to a tree at waist height with a passive infrared sensor that fires three frames whenever a warm body moves across it. Standard wildlife tech equipment, the kind used to track caribou, moose, wolves, and bears across thousands of hectares of remote British Columbia backcountry. In November, on a ridge in central BC, one of those cameras captured 86 frames of a Sasquatch walking out of a dead pine stand toward the camera in the last gray light of an afternoon. What makes this footage so extraordinary isn't just that it exists. It's what Alma describes seeing in those frames. The figure was old. Not adult, but genuinely old. Gray through the muzzle and down the throat, one eye gone milky, knuckles worn down to callus, moving with a hitch in the left hip that suggested an injury carried for many years. The final frame the camera ever captured on that ridge was a hand laid flat across the lens, filling the frame corner to corner. Two of the outside fingers ended short at the middle joint, healed over smooth and pale the way old injuries heal when nobody ever set them. Think about that for a moment. A hand reaching out to cover the lens. An intentional act. And the healed fingers, the kind of detail that would be nearly impossible to fabricate or misinterpret. What happened next is where this story takes a darker turn. Eleven weeks after pulling that memory card, Alma sat in a government office in Vanderhoof and deleted every copy she had, one at a time, while a colleague she had worked with for nine years stood behind her chair and watched her do it. The footage is gone. What remains is her testimony. The backstory she shares adds another layer entirely. Her father, Emil Petcow, ran a registered trap line on the upper Blackwater from the late 1940s until 1988. In December 1983, he came home and told Alma, then 22 and studying natural resources, that he had found barefoot tracks on a creek below his cabin bigger than his snowshoe. He had measured them against his axe handle and followed them for nearly a mile until they went up a cutbank in a way no man would climb. Alma laughed at him. She gave him the full first-year wildlife technician lecture about meltout, about how tracks spread in the sun, about how bears in a register step can create prints that look like barefoot human tracks. She was very pleased with herself. Her father listened, finished his tea, rinsed the mug, and said, "Well, you would know now." He never mentioned it again in the 23 years he had left. After Emil passed away in 2006, Alma cleaned out his shed in August 2008. On the inside of the door, nailed up flat where only someone inside with the door shut would see it, was a piece of quarter-inch plywood about 60 centimeters long. On it, traced in carpenter's pencil, was the outline of a bare foot with five toes, the big toe in line with the rest. Underneath, a date in December 1983 and nothing else. No note, no question mark, no name for what made the print. She measured it that afternoon. 38 centimeters. That board is still in her house. She says it's the only physical object from this entire account that she actually owns. The geography she describes is worth understanding too. The Nechako Plateau south of Highway 16 is one of those vast stretches of British Columbia that most people never set foot on. The Kenny Dam project in 1952 flooded roughly 80,000 hectares of forest, valley bottom, and meadow to feed an aluminum smelter at Kitimat, creating what people who work out there simply call the drowned country. Dead trunks still stand in the shallows with their tops broken off at the old high water line. The Cheslatta Carrier people were moved off their land at Cheslatta Lake with days of notice and the water came up on their houses and their graveyard. The province has since apologized for it. South and east of that reservoir sits the Fawny Range, a long gray-green spine of rounded ridges running northwest with broad saddles, open alpine on top, lodgepole pine on the flanks, and black spruce in the wet ground between. The Tweedsmuir-Entiako caribou herd uses that country, southern mountain caribou of the northern ecotype that winter low in mature pine forest and eat terrestrial lichen off the ground. The mountain pine beetle epidemic that swept through BC in the late 1990s and 2000s killed lodgepole pine across roughly 18 million hectares, and the Nechako Plateau took it as hard as anywhere. Then the salvage logging came in, then the roads, then the wolves and moose moving through country that used to be slow to travel. Alma's job, and the job of maybe a dozen other people across the middle of the province, was to watch what happened to the caribou while all of that went on. This is the kind of witness testimony that doesn't come along often. A career wildlife professional who knows exactly what a bear looks like at night, who knows every way a camera can lie to you, who has pulled close to two million photographs off memory cards in her working life, describing 86 frames of an elderly Sasquatch walking toward her camera and then reaching out to cover the lens with a hand bearing the marks of a lifetime of old injuries. The footage itself is gone. Deleted under supervision. What remains is the account of someone who spent decades dismissing the very possibility she eventually captured on film, and who carries in her house a piece of plywood her father nailed to the inside of his shed door because he knew his daughter, the wildlife technician, would never have believed him if he'd told her. This one is absolutely worth watching in full. The video runs through the entire account with detail and care, and the emotional weight of a daughter finally understanding what her father tried to show her decades ago is something that stays with you long after it ends.