Pilot Claims Bigfoot Family Saved Him During 18-Day Wilderness Ordeal

There's something about a firsthand account from a bush pilot that hits different. These are men and women who spend their lives reading the wilderness, who know every tree line and weather pattern, and whose survival often depends on noticing things other people would miss. So when one of them comes forward with a story like this, it deserves attention. A video recently surfaced on YouTube featuring the testimony of Lor Stewart, a former bush pilot from Nikina, Ontario, who claims that after his float plane crashed in September 1978, he survived 18 days in some of the most remote country in Canada, not because of luck, but because a family of Sasquatch kept him alive. Stewart, who would have been 32 at the time, was flying a de Havilland Beaver on floats, hauling fishermen and supplies across the vast network of lakes north of the Canadian National Railway line. On the afternoon of September 12th, 1978, he departed Cordingly Lake to fly north and retrieve a camp cook and the last of the perishables from a fishing camp. About 50 minutes north of town, his Pratt & Whitney radial engine threw a cylinder without warning. Oil smeared across the windscreen, the airframe shuddered, and Stewart had roughly two miles to find a place to put down. He chose a small boot-shaped lake with a rock island in the middle and a shoreline of drowned timber from an old beaver dam. The landing went wrong. A dead snag caught his left float, the nose dug in, and the Beaver flipped into the shallows. Stewart crawled out with cracked ribs, a torn-up knee, a cut above his ear, and a survival kit that was soaked through but intact. His emergency locator transmitter was dead, cracked open by the impact and filled with lake water. Nobody knew where he was. What makes this account stand out from typical survival stories is what Stewart says happened next. According to his testimony, on the third night, something found him. He describes being fed by hands the size of snowshoes, being carried when his legs gave out, and on the coldest night, when he was perhaps two hours from freezing, a large, hairy figure lay down beside him and shared its body heat. He says a whole family of them watched over him for the next 15 days until a search plane finally spotted him. Stewart kept this story to himself for 47 years. He told searchers and doctors what they needed to hear and let them write their reports. The official record would call his survival a miracle. Stewart calls it something else entirely. Now, longtime researchers will recognize why this kind of testimony matters. Bush pilots, trappers, loggers, and other wilderness professionals have consistently made up a significant portion of credible Sasquatch witnesses across North America. These are people with intimate knowledge of the wildlife in their region, people who can tell the difference between a bear standing on its hind legs and something else entirely. Stewart's description of being tended to, fed, and warmed by a family group also aligns with a pattern that has shown up in numerous Indigenous oral traditions across Canada and the northern United States, where Sasquatch are described not as threats but as guardians of the deep bush who sometimes take an interest in lost or injured travelers. The detail about the ELT being destroyed is also worth noting. Stewart was flying off his filed route to dodge a line of showers, which means even if the beacon had worked, searchers would have been looking in the wrong place. The bush has a way of swallowing people quietly, and the fact that he walked out at all is, by any measure, extraordinary. The full video runs through Stewart's entire account, including his background growing up around float planes, his mentor Orville who taught him to read the water and always file a route and fly it, his marriage to Gladdis, his son Danny who used to wait on the dock for his father's plane, and the slow, painful reality of those 18 days in the bush. It's the kind of detailed, unhurried testimony that you don't often hear anymore, and it's worth the time to sit with it. If you're interested in firsthand Sasquatch encounters from people whose livelihoods depended on knowing the wilderness, this one is a must-watch.