Delta Force Veteran Recounts Bigfoot Encounter in Idaho Canyon Mission
Posted Saturday, August 01, 2026
By Squatchable.com staff
A video recently surfaced on YouTube from the channel Woodsman Tales and FrightVisionTV that's been making waves in the Sasquatch community, and honestly, it's one of the most gripping pieces of content to come across in a while. The premise alone is enough to pull you in: an elite military task force sent into a remote canyon to find missing special forces soldiers ends up encountering something that changes everything they thought they knew about the woods.
The story is told from the first-person perspective of a Delta Force operator, and it reads like a field journal from someone who genuinely doesn't know how to process what they saw. The setting is Hells Canyon, the Snake River drainage, with the Seven Devils mountains looming above. Eight men strung out along a goat trail 1,100 feet above the river, searching for an eight-man special forces element that had gone dark almost a month earlier. Their last transmission was 19 seconds long, and it ended with a staff sergeant named Puit calmly reporting movement above their position, then saying a word that got the whole file classified: Bigfoot.
What makes this video stand out isn't just the encounter itself, it's the buildup. The operator describes a canyon that's wrong in ways he can't put on paper. No birds below the rim. No marmots whistling off the talus slopes. Elk and mule deer bunched up on the skyline like the canyon itself had a fence around it. Doc Dominguez, the team's medic, is the first to notice and asks the question nobody can answer: "Where is everybody?"
Then they find the missing team's cache, tucked under a basalt overhang, rigged neat and professional. Water cans, rations, a spare radio battery still wrapped. Three weeks in wild country and nothing has touched it. No rodent sign, no coyote sign, no bear sign. The food should have been a magnet for wildlife, and instead it sits there sealed and perfect like a museum display. That's the moment the operator admits, standing still in that gorge had started to feel like a bad idea in a way he had no professional language for.
The encounter itself happens in a side drainage full of house-sized boulders. Something big comes ripping down the slope through scree that would have broken a man's legs at a walk. Brush whipping, rocks the size of duffel bags kicked loose. And then it comes through a gap between two boulders, 60 yards up, into plain daylight. Eight feet of dark hair and muscle running on two legs. The operator's brain stalls, a full second, maybe two, gone. In his line of work, that's a lifetime.
He describes the Sasquatch plainly, the same way Puit had reported it. A man's build scaled up past reason, deep-chested, arms driving, head low, taking the slope in a controlled fall that no living thing should survive. It came straight through their position, passed within 20 yards of Bell who had his weapon on it, and never turned its head. Eight armed men and it treated them like brush. The operator caught its face for half a second as it went by his rock, and what he saw wasn't rage or hunting behavior. It was flight. Pure, desperate flight.
The Sasquatch hit the bottom of the drainage, cleared a gap in the rocks that the operator would have roped up for, caught the far slope, and went up toward the rim in long pulls of its arms and legs. The elk on the skyline broke and scattered to let it through. And then it was over the rim line and gone.
But here's where the video takes a turn that has people talking. Whitaker, the team's designated marksman, had been watching from a high rock on their flank. And his voice comes over the net with a note in it the operator had never heard from him in nine years. It came out of the ground, Whitaker says. There's a cave mouth up this drainage, big one. It came out of the cave like it was on fire. Then, after a pause: something else is standing in it.
Ten seconds of silence on the net. Ten seconds is a long time for men like that to give away. Whitaker describes what's in the cave entrance: standing upright, not another Sasquatch, watching them. Taller than the thing that just ran through them. It hasn't moved at all. It's just standing in the shadow line watching them, and he doesn't like it. And this is a man who has spent nine years in Delta Force looking at dangerous things through good glass and never once editorialized. Never said the words "I don't like it."
The operator notes that it knew Whitaker could see it. 200 yards and it picked him out of the rocks. When the team collapsed by pairs onto a shelf of broken basalt, Whitaker held his position long enough to cover the movement. When he came down off his rock, the operator got his first look at his face. Whitaker had been shot at on four continents. He came down that slope gray.
His report: it stepped back into the cave while they were moving. It didn't turn around. It just went backward into the dark, smooth, like it was on rails. His hand was steady, which somehow made it worse.
The whole thing raises questions that researchers have been whispering about for years. If Sasquatch are apex predators in these remote canyons, powerful enough to clear gaps that would require ropes for a human, what are they running from? The idea that something else is out there, something taller, something that watches from cave mouths and doesn't need to move to be terrifying, isn't new to the community, but hearing it described by someone with that kind of training, in that kind of detail, hits differently.
The video is worth the time. It's narrated with the kind of restraint that makes the scary parts land harder, and the operator's honesty about what he didn't understand is what makes it feel real. Whether you take it as a firsthand account, a dramatization, or something in between, the implications are the kind of thing that keeps you up at night. Go check it out and see what you think.