Posted: 30 Sep 2021 11:02 AM PDT

A USAF airman recalls his flight group being shipped out, eventually bivouacked in the Mt. St. Helens eruption zone in 1980. He recalls observing very tall & wide ‘people’ shielded in heavy clothing.

I recently received the following account:

“I was an airman in the USAF in the 1980s. I was stationed at George Air Force Base near Victorville, California from the late 70s to the early 80s. Our mission was the ‘Wild Weasels’ or Air Force F-4s that would go into a war area before it started, like the first Gulf War at low level, pop up and then light them up on the ground, to air defenses and then shoot anti-radiation missiles at the sites letting the other aircraft get in.

In 1980, we were shipped to train with the Canadian forces at Comex CFB on Vancouver Island. We took a C-141 from George AFB to Canada. Our C-141 had an in-flight emergency and we had to land at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California for repair. We were losing hydraulic fluid in one engine and I saw the crewman come back and dump several cans of hydraulic fluid into the reservoir and it just went back to zero. He had a parachute and we didn’t. Kind of made me nervous but we later got back on our way and flew over Mount St. Helens right after it blew his top.

Once we got to Comox, our officer in charge told us we would be there for longer than the two weeks due to an emergency mission that they needed help on. We were all specialized airmen trained in different specialties in aircraft maintenance and repair, but we were soldiers first and we did lots of other stuff that our country needed.

We were there for a couple days not doing anything because, as I look back, they were trying to figure out how to use us. Then we all got on the bus and we were taken to an area around the south end of Vancouver Island and were picked up on a strange Naval ferry. I was never in the Navy so I don’t know anything about boats, but our bus was tied down and delivered to the United States side and we drove off.

It was under darkness and it was typically cloudy and rainy as we continued our bus ride to the disaster area. We were given M-16s and one mag which I found fascinating because most USAF enlisted troops shoot a gun in basic and you may never see an M-16 again. We were also given ill-fitting green helmets marked “GUARD,” ill fitting plain green BDFS and told to follow the orders we were to be given in the upcoming briefing. In the briefing we were told we would regard to special areas and told to check credentials and to only allow people in who had the correct credentials. In the military tent areas that were set up, looked to be like the perimeter of an area affected by the eruption. We had no idea where we were at. There were no towns or cities around where we were and when we arrived there, we were about 30 Airmen completely and totally confused by what was going on.

We slept in a tented area that was near where we worked. We had a mess tent next to the tent where we slept and we didn’t leave that area about an acre size for a week or more. Most of us, if not all of us, were guarding areas that people moved into and out of, with what looked like victims. The tents we guarded had a foyer area and we couldn’t see what was behind the second door. It was brightly lit and you had to go through a couple of partitions to get to the main area of the tent. I assume they were there to prevent peeping into the tents by the guards.

It was very infrequent that anyone would walk in and out and we were on 12-hour shifts only at night. We were used to working 12-hour shifts because this was just after the Iranian crisis and we would go on alert every three weeks, work 12-hour shifts flying as many missions as we could, then have a day off, then another alert and three more weeks of 12-hour shifts for three more weeks.

We were told that if anyone tried to breach our area, to shoot. That never happened or came close to happening. This was funny to me because we were given one magazine and I don’t know if the bullets were real or not. We were Air Force not Marines. I knew more about a 5 iron than an M-16, but nothing ever came up. The only time anyone came up to the area I was guarding only happened after midnight and it looked to me like a doctor in a white lab coat with either a patient or victim who is wrapped in what looked like overcoats and navy blue ski caps. You could never see the person who was led into or out of the tents because they had their hands in the coats and were lead into the tent by the arm. I think I was there for eight to nine days and it was the most unusual thing I had ever experienced in the Air Force.

During the last part, out of those nights on guard, I noticed two of the people that were escorted in were very very tall. That’s the only thing I noticed were those very tall people. I was not in a position to see how tall they were, but it was obviously that they were over a whole head higher than the doctor, if that’s what they were. Only the escort talked and they only mentioned their last name and showed their badge. I don’t know if they were Army or civilian.

The other thing I noticed was that the escorted “people” were really really wide but I always assumed until now that it was the coats that they were wearing. It was very nippy and I also assumed we were at some kind of altitude. After that we were given a debrief that we had helped a lot of the people who were “victims” of the eruption. That’s all we were told. We were also told that we were not to mention this part of our tour of duty after our last shift. I don’t know how long that was, but it was longer than a week. We were allowed to sleep and the next evening we were allowed to shower. We were only allowed a basin and washcloths until then.

In another tent that was behind the latrine tent, a child tent, we were given back our original USAF uniforms and put back on the same bus we rode in and bused back to the same area under darkness. Ferried back to Vancouver Island and back to Comox CFB. We continued our tour of duty as if nothing happened. We did two more weeks of flying sorties with the Canadians, played and drank a ton of Canadian Labatts Blue and flew in our C-141s back to George Air Force Base. It was all a big mystery on what happened, until I read more about the Mt. St. Helens Bigfoot / creature stories. It seems similar. They must have really been short on personnel to use a bunch of USAF kids as guards or they thought nothing would ever happen. But that’s the only time I ever pulled guard duty outside of basic training in San Antonio.” WS

NOTE: There have been several claims related to Bigfoot after the Mt. St. Helens eruption. But the claim by the USAF Airman seems very plausible and similar to claims I have received by independent sources of the past 40 years. Lon

Phantoms & Monsters