I have been flying bush planes in Alaska for twenty-two years. I have landed on frozen lakes, on gravel bars, on mountaintop strips that were more suggestion than runway. I have flown in whiteouts. I have flown with a cracked windshield in November. I am not a man who frightens easily, and I am not a man who talks about this kind of thing. I am writing it down because I can't stop thinking about it and I need it somewhere outside my head.
This was last September. Standard cargo run, Fairbanks to a camp in the interior. I've flown that route more times than I can count. Weather was clear, winds calm. Nothing unusual.
At approximately 2:40 PM, my instruments went. Not gradually — all at once. GPS, compass, altimeter, everything. The engine continued to run normally. I could see the ground, which told me I wasn't in a spin. I knew my heading from habit and kept it. I had maybe forty minutes of fuel left and figured I would find the camp by landmark navigation.
That's when I saw it.
Below me, in a valley I know well enough to draw from memory, there was something that should not have been there. A structure — or rather, the suggestion of a structure, something vast and low and partially subsurface, the way a body might look beneath a thin cloth. The valley floor was wrong. It was too regular, too arranged. The tree line broke in patterns that were not wind patterns or terrain patterns.
I saw it for approximately ninety seconds as I crossed the valley.
My instruments came back at the far end of the crossing. All of them, simultaneously, as they had gone down. The GPS showed me exactly where I expected to be. I was on time.
I didn't land in that valley. I went around it. I filed no report. There was nothing to report — no mechanical failure, no safety incident, nothing on paper that would justify what I had seen.
I looked up the valley on satellite imagery when I got home. The images are from 2019, the most recent available. They show nothing unusual. Tree coverage. A river bend. Normal terrain.
I know what I saw. I have four thousand hours in the air over that country. I know what normal terrain looks like from a bush plane at altitude.
I talked to another pilot last month, a man who has been flying the interior longer than I have. I described the location without telling him what I had seen there. He got quiet. He said he knew the valley. He said he had taken a long route around it for fifteen years and couldn't say why, exactly. Just that something about it was wrong.
He poured himself another drink and changed the subject.
I booked a different route for the camp run this season. The camp manager asked why. I told him weather patterns. He accepted this without question.
He has never flown over that valley. I hope he never does.