This is the story I was thinking of but for some reason I thought his disappearance was a mystery. I thought they assumed it was the bears but had no evidence of it.
Timothy Treadwell spent thirteen summers in Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Over time, he believed he was trusted by the bears, who would allow him to approach them, and sometimes even touch them. Treadwell was repeatedly warned by park officials that his interaction with the bears was unsafe to both him and to the bears. "At best he's misguided," Deb Liggett, superintendent at Katmai and Lake Clark national parks, told the Anchorage Daily News in 2001. "At worst, he's dangerous. If Timothy models unsafe behavior, that ultimately puts bears and other visitors at risk." Treadwell filmed his exploits, and used the films to raise public awareness of the problems faced by bears in North America. In 2003, at the end of his thirteenth visit, he and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were attacked, killed and eaten by a bear.
For Grizzly Man, Herzog used sequences extracted from over 100 hours of video footage shot by Treadwell during the last five years of his life, and conducted interviews with Treadwell's family and friends, as well as experts and authority figures. Herzog also narrates, and offers his own interpretations of the events. In his narration, he depicts Treadwell as a disturbed man who may have had a deathwish toward the end of his life, but also refuses to condemn him for this.
Grizzly Man premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. It was released in theaters on August 12, 2005, and was released on DVD in the United States on December 26, 2005. The Discovery Channel aired Grizzly Man on television on February 3, 2006; its 3-hour presentation of the film included a 30-minute companion special that delved deeper into Treadwell's relationship with the bears and addressed controversies surrounding the film. The DVD release of the film is missing an interview with Treadwell by David Letterman that was shown in the original theatrical release where Letterman jokes that Treadwell will eventually be eaten by a bear; however, the version televised on the Discovery Channel retains this scene.
The film refers to an audio recording of the fatal attack, captured by Treadwell's video camera, but although Herzog is shown listening to it on earphones, it is not played in the film. In fact, Herzog advises the owner of the tape, a friend of Treadwell who held onto the tape but refused to ever listen to it, to destroy it immediately.
