Kidnapped By Bigfoot

The Albert Ostman Story

By: Patrick McCormick

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In the summer of 1924, a thirty-one year old Swedish immigrant named Albert Ostman packed an eighty-pound kit into the mountain wilderness above Toba Inlet, British Columbia, looking for a lost gold mine. He was a practical man — a construction worker and logger with more than a decade of backcountry experience and a reputation, in the camps where he worked, for plain dealing and plain speaking. He expected three weeks of solitude and prospecting. What he got was six days of captivity in a hidden mountain valley, held by something that no field guide has ever catalogued and no scientific institution has ever formally acknowledged.

He told no one for thirty-three years.

When Ostman finally broke his silence in 1957, he did not do so casually. He signed a sworn declaration under the Canadian Evidence Act — a legal instrument that exposed him to a perjury charge if the account was fabricated. He submitted to rigorous cross-examination by a police magistrate, a coroner, and some of the most skeptical researchers in the field. A zoologist examined the biological details of his account and found them accurate in ways a man without formal scientific training had no obvious business being accurate. A physical anthropologist identified anatomical features in his description that matched known primate biology decades before such details entered public knowledge. The police magistrate who examined him found no flaw in either his story or his character and concluded he was in full possession of his mental faculties.

His story never wavered. Not once. Not across nineteen years of interviews, cross-examinations, and the sustained scrutiny of people who arrived determined to find the crack in it. He never sought money for the account. He never embellished it for a better audience. He died in 1975 with the story exactly as he had told it in 1957 — fixed and specific and unchanged, the way things are when they actually happened.

This book is the full reconstruction of what Albert Ostman experienced in those mountains — and what it cost him to carry it. It moves through the unmapped wilderness of early twentieth century British Columbia, the logging camp culture that made silence the only rational response to an impossible experience, the indigenous knowledge that had been describing these mountains and their occupants for generations before any settler thought to listen, and the painstaking investigation that followed when one quiet, stubborn, entirely credible man finally decided the world might be ready to hear what he had seen.

This is not a book that asks you to believe. It is a book that asks you to reckon — with the evidence, with the man, and with the possibility that the wilderness of coastal British Columbia has always contained something that the official record has never found a way to enter.

Some questions do not get answered. They only get more difficult to dismiss.