Albert Ostman's claimed abduction by a Sasquatch family, Toba Inlet, British Columbia (1924)

1957. John Green, owner of the Agassiz-Harrison Advance, had just published William Roe's 1955 Sasquatch affidavit. It was also the year of the Harrison Hot Springs centennial Sasquatch hunt. Then a letter arrived from Swedish-born retired prospector Albert Ostman. He had kept quiet for 33 years, afraid of being thought crazy.

Summer 1924. An "old Indian" guide took Ostman by boat to the head of Toba Inlet. On the way he told of a prospector who went to his mine and never came back. Some people said a Sasquatch had killed him. Ostman did not believe in such "man beasts".

One night in the inland mountains, he said: "I was awakened by something picking me up." Still in his sleeping bag, he was carried off. "It felt like I was tossed on horseback." Uphill, downhill, then level ground, "going at a trot for a long time." "As near as I could guess we were about three hours travelling."

At dawn he heard chatter from four figures, all "covered with hair and no clothes on at all". A family, he said: an old man, an old lady, a boy and a girl. The old man was "near eight feet tall", with a barrel chest and eyeteeth "longer than the rest". The old lady was "over seven feet tall", with "very wide hips, and a goose-like walk", and the young male liked to balance on his rump and bounce forward. "Sometimes he made 20 feet."

Ostman had his rifle. He did not use it. They had done him no harm. They slept under blankets of woven cedar bark, packed with dry moss.

Then came the snuff. The old man grabbed Ostman's box and "emptied it in his mouth. Swallowed it in one gulp."

Soon "his eyes began to roll over in his head." He began to "squeal like a stuck pig". Ostman ran for the opening in the wall, the old lady right behind him. He fired one shot at the rock over her head, and she turned and ran inside the wall. Days later, steering by the sun and Mount Baker, he found loggers near Sechelt Inlet. "That was my last prospecting trip."

On 20 August 1957, police magistrate A. M. Naismith cross-examined Ostman. He "used every means to endeavor to find a flaw in either his personality or his story, but could find neither." Ostman also signed a solemn declaration under the Canada Evidence Act. Green believed him to the end. Albert, he wrote in 2003, "swore to his story without hesitation, and stuck to it until he died."

There is no physical evidence: no tracks, no hair, no photographs, no cedar bark blankets. Joe Nickell, in the Skeptical Inquirer, judged the story "more likely the result of imagination than of recollection". Primatologist John Napier doubted it "primarily on the grounds of the limited food resources available." Critics point to the 33-year silence and the timing, right after Roe's publicity. Loren Coleman countered in 2010 that the story "stands up"; Green noted that in 1957 the popular image was of "hairy giant Indians", not apes.

Ostman retold his story on camera in 1971 and appeared as himself in Bigfoot: Man or Beast? in 1972. He died in Fort Langley on 16 January 1975. His account remains the classic Sasquatch captivity story. He closed his statement this way: "I know that in 1924 there were four Sasquatches living, it might be only two now."