Earlier today, I’d walked along the lakeshore and seen hoof prints, a cougar track, and coyote scat. The trees have all turned black beneath the night sky. The only light comes from the full moon creeping through clouds.
I’m deep in Washington’s Gifford National Forest and it’s so quiet I can hear my own heartbeat. No creature is giving its location away by making noise—but we certainly aren’t alone as we stand on the edge of a lake, its waters as dark as midnight. I look at the shadows between trees and wonder what’s hiding in the forest.
Beside me, Tanner Hoskins raises a thermal scope to his eye and scans the trees to look for heat signatures. He pauses as he sweeps to the far corner of the lake. For the last six years, Hoskins and a group of friends have been searching the Pacific Northwest’s wilderness for an answer to that very question: What else is out there?
And I’m tagging along for a weekend to see what happens when I go looking for evidence of the unknown. About two miles away, as the crow flies, a dispersed campsite is tucked into a grove of pine trees. On a July night in 2020, decades-long buddies Kelly Stolp and Mike Palagi sat around a fire with Stolp’s sons and Palagi’s fiancée.
Flames licked the black sky as they laughed into the night. It was a familiar scene for the friends, who met in the Army in 2005. Stolp retired to his tent while the fire was still crackling.
Deep in the night, he heard a loud, guttural howl—it sounded like a car engine trying to turn over. Slow and steady, getting closer to his tent. They seemed too loud to be human.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
