It's a unique kind of fishing that they've been doing recently just below Norfork Dam to get certain kinds of fish back above the dam into the lake. It's kind of like a fish electric stun gun.

On a recent beautiful moonlit night, you might have thought the light was playing tricks on your eyes. As you gazed down from atop Norfork Dam, you could see what looks like a spaceship out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

It’s the Game and Fish Commission's "Electro-Fishing Boat," which has two probes extending off the front of the craft that send an electrical current through the water. It temporarily shocks the fish, sending them floating to the surface, where they're netted, placed in a live well, and then transported to a mobile fish tank and released back-above the dam into Norfork Lake.

They’re going to all this trouble because the area below the dam is home to the largest federal trout hatchery in the country, and the quality of trout fishing here is known throughout the world. But, when the floodgates were opened at the dam during the recent overflow, anglers fishing below the dam noticed two things.

"We were catching different kinds of fish than we'd seen in the river before, but the trout fishing was not good, and every one we pulled up had bite marks and scale marks on it,” said angler Richard Hutchins.

Those different fish below the dam were ones that had passed through the floodgates from the lake above.

"The problem is these warm water species are eating the trout. And they're big time predators like walleye and striped bass,” said trout management biologist Matt Schroeder.

To preserve the trout's ecosystem, Game and Fish employees stay up late at night, when they say it's easier to catch the fish off guard, to move the warm water species back above the dam. As you watch them take in their haul, which also includes the weird-looking gar and a big-daddy catfish, you can't help but wonder if you, too, could fish this way.

"This is illegal for the general public,” said Schroeder.

But Game and Fish encourages anglers to catch and keep rather than catch and release if they catch a predator species below the dam.