Army Veteran Reveals Secret Military Unit Investigating Bigfoot in Alaska
Posted Monday, August 10, 2026
By Squatchable.com staff
So there's a video making the rounds that I had to sit down and process before writing about it, because the claims being made are genuinely jaw-dropping. A man named Glenn Hartley, a 76-year-old retired Army veteran, came forward with what he says is the inside story of a classified military unit that operated in the Alaskan interior for nearly a quarter century with one specific mission: documenting and studying Sasquatch.
Hartley claims he was the third person assigned to this unit and served nineteen of its twenty-four years of operation. He's also stating he's the last living member of the original roster. If his account holds any water, this would be one of the most significant revelations in Sasquatch research history.
The story begins in the winter of 1971, during Arctic survival training exercises in the upper Tanana drainage, about sixty miles northeast of Fairbanks. A four-man survival team stumbled across footprints in the snow that were roughly twenty-two inches long, deeply impressed, with a bipedal gait and a stride length of six to eight feet per step. The impressions were punched nearly eight inches into hard-packed snowpack that a 180-pound man in full winter gear could barely dent. The team also reported hearing low-frequency vocalizations from a stand of white spruce near their camp, sounds that one team member described as patterned, like someone cycling through phrases with variations.
Now, here's where it gets really interesting. Hartley mentions that a Tanana Athabascan cultural liaison named Connie Phillips was brought in as part of the small team assembled to investigate. According to Hartley, she confirmed that the Athabascan people of that region have oral traditions going back many generations about what they call "the one who walks the ridges." This wasn't treated as mythology or a spirit being, but as a living species, a neighbor that kept mostly to the deep places but had been encountered many times over centuries by people who knew how to be quiet in the forest.
The unit's official cover designation was the Environmental Biological Survey Section, attached to the base's natural resources office. The cover story was that they were conducting baseline wildlife studies in preparation for the trans-Alaska pipeline environmental impact assessments, which was perfect because the pipeline was genuinely being planned and genuinely did require such surveys. This gave them license to be almost anywhere in the interior without raising questions.
Hartley describes the reporting chain going directly through a lieutenant colonel named Dale Sproule to a numbered file at Army Intelligence Command headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. He claims only seven people in the entire Army knew what the unit was actually doing.
The operating area was the Tanana Flats and the lower White Mountains drainage, the same region where the initial contact was made. The Tanana Flats is a broad alluvial plain south of the White Mountains, cut through by the Tanana River and its tributaries, covered in a mosaic of black spruce forest and open tundra.
What makes this account particularly compelling to anyone familiar with Sasquatch research is how it aligns with longstanding reports from the Alaska and Yukon regions. The subarctic interior has long been considered prime habitat by researchers, with its vast undisturbed wilderness, abundant food sources, and the kind of remoteness that would allow a reclusive population to persist undetected. The Athabascan oral traditions Hartley mentions are consistent with what anthropologists have documented across numerous Indigenous communities throughout the Pacific Northwest and subarctic regions, where Sasquatch-type beings appear in the traditional knowledge as real, living neighbors rather than mythological figures.
Hartley's military background adds another layer of intrigue. His Vietnam service, Purple Heart, and intelligence background give him a credibility profile that would be difficult to fabricate. The details he provides, the specific building designations, the reporting chains, the operational procedures, all have the texture of genuine military experience.
The video is worth watching in full because there's much more to the story than I can cover here, including details about the unit's operations, the environments they worked in, and what Hartley claims they found. It's one of those accounts that, whether you believe it or not, raises questions that don't have easy answers.
Check it out and see what you think.