When They Built the Alaska Pipeline, the Workers Saw Bigfoot in the Trees

Between 1974 and 1977, roughly seventy thousand people walked into the Alaskan wilderness to build the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. They came out the other side having finished the largest, most expensive construction project in the history of the United States. But some of them came out with something else. A story. And a lot of them would not tell that story for the next forty years. Here is the story. Out on the survey lines and the clearing crews, the men pushed deepest into country that no human being had ever walked, kept seeing the same thing. Something standing at the edge of the trees. Tall. Dark. Covered head to foot in hair, standing upright like a man, watching them work, and then gone. And you did not report something like that on a pipeline crew in 1975. Not unless you wanted to be the joke of the camp for the rest of the season. So they swallowed it. For decades.