THUNDERBIRDS - Giant Birds Alive Today

THUNDERBIRDS - IN QUEBEC, ILLINOIS, NEW YORK, PENNSYLVANIA, WEST VIRGINIA - BIGHOOT THE GIANT OWL

ALASKA REPORTS IN OCTOBER 2002

AN AIR DISASTER IN 1962

The recent ditching of an Airbus in the Hudson River has caused some people to comment with references to Thunderbirds. I have not been one of them until now. I have not suggested a giant bird was involved in any way. I did not discuss bird and airplane collisions in my book on Thunderbirds since I think there is a substantial case for the presence of giant birds without reference to such events.
The danger that common birds pose to airmen and aircraft is a familiar subject to many people. About fifty years ago author Frank Lane in one of his books treated the subject extensively. Airports have to be concerned about this problem all the time.
One event in 1962 was linked by author Jacques Bain Pearl (1923-1992) – aka, Jack Pearl – to a possible collision of an airliner with a giant bird. He wrote at some length about the case in his ground-breaking article on Thunderbirds in SAGA Magazine for May 1963. The episode deserves to be revisited for its own merits and for the historical fact that the incident was obviously the trigger that caused Pearl to write and offer for publication his article on Thunderbirds.

Robert Lyman of Pennsylvania had been looking into the birds in his state since the 1940s. But he did not publish his findings on Thunderbirds until ten years after Pearl. The SAGA article brought the subject into the open and exposed it to a nation-wide readership as nothing had done previously. For all of the good authorship executed by Pearl, I think he will be remembered most for having picked up this neglected thread in the field of cryptozoology.

The incident that caught Pearl’s attention took place after noon on 23 of November 1962. A United Airlines Viscount was on its approach to the International Airport outside Washington, D.C. when the plane crashed into the Maryland countryside.
In his discussion of the incident, Pearl wrote:
[quote]
On November 25, in an official statement to the press, George Van Epps, chief of safety investigation for the Civil Aeronautics Board, announced: “We have evidence of a bird strike on the (plane’s) horizontal stabilizers and associated elevators, both left and right . . . . The fact is we found both stabilizers back in the flight path which indicates in flight separation . . . .”

Both halves of the 35-foot, all-metal stabilizer were found almost a half- mile behind the crash. And on both were matted the blood, feathers and flesh of an unidentified bird.
[endquote]
With further comments from Van Epps, from Leon Tanguay (safety director at the Civil Aeronautics Board), from the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland, and from a commercial pilot and former fighter pilot, Pearl made his case for a single bird having brought down the plane.
Many years ago I was asked where Thunderbirds would be living just outside of Washington. These are not birds that have to fly only above their nests, like a Russian fighter plane that is so low on fuel that it keeps close to its own airfield. The birds are highly mobile, which is how they can migrate widely over North America as they appear to do each year.

I am not making the case here that a Thunderbird did bring down a plane in 1962. I have limited information on this event, only what Jack Pearl wrote when he made the case. I have laboriously transcribed his account of the event from a poor copy of his original article. For those who want to read it, here are Jack Pearl’s own words from his May 1963 SAGA Magazine article, “Monster Bird that Carries Off Human Beings!”

Collisions between birds and aircraft are more frequent than is commonly believed. In 1957, a goose crashed through the cockpit windshield of a DC-3 and injured the co-pilot. The plane landed without incident. In 1960, a flock of starlings was sucked into the engine intakes of an American Airlines Electra taking off from Boston’s Logan Airport, causing a tragic crash. The files of the Civil Aeronautics Board abound with reports of similar freakish accidents.

Shortly after noon on November 23, 1962, a United Airlines Viscount was making a routine approach to Washington, D.C, International Airport. It was a bright sunny day with unlimited visibility and minimum air turbulence. Radio communication between the plane and the Washington control tower was normal. There was not the slightest hint of trouble, much less total disaster. Then, abruptly, the Viscount disappeared from the tower’s radar screen.

On a farm in Ellicott City, Maryland, a boy looked up from his chores to witness a sight he had never expected to see: a huge airplane diving vertically toward the woods to the southwest of town. As he watched, paralyzed with horror, the plane crashed and exploded in the trees with an impact that caused the ground to tremble beneath his feet.

On November 25, in an official statement to the press, George Van Epps, chief of safety investigation for the Civil Aeronautics Board, announced: “We have evidence of a bird strike on the (plane’s) horizontal stabilizers and associated elevators, both left and right . . . . The fact is we found both stabilizers back in the flight path which indicates in flight separation . . . .”

Both halves of the 35-foot, all-metal stabilizer were found almost a half- mile behind the crash. And on both were matted the blood, feathers and flesh of an unidentified bird.

But what kind of bird was it that could disable a huge aircraft like the Viscount turboprop – built to endure the stress and strain of high speed, the giant force of wind and storm – disable it so badly that it would spin out of control to disaster? It is a question that air experts and ornithologists alike have been asking themselves – and each other – and so far, none of the answers has satisfied anyone.

Leon Tanguay, safety director for the CAB, declared about the bird theory: “I have never known of such a thing to happen. I’m not sure that this happened!” But neither he nor anyone else can explain the feathers, blood and flesh on that stabilizer torn off by terrible impact.

The Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland, who examined the gory remains of the creature plastered to the stabilizer, said cautiously “I’ve got a foot-square piece of the carcass. It’s white with down below the feathers – it couldn’t be anything else but a swan!” He didn’t convince the investigators from CAB and FAA. One of them said, off the record: “There’s talk that it was a swan or a goose. But only ONE bird! It doesn’t add up.”

So unconvinced were the investigators that Army helicopters were assigned to hedge-hop the fatal route the plane had followed from Baltimore to Washington “in an effort to find more carcasses or remains which might indicate this was a flock instead of a single bird,“ explained Mr. Van Epps. “They found nothing,” he added uneasily.

Among pilots, civil and military, the swan or goose theory produced outright contempt. A former World War II fighter pilot, now flying for a commercial airline, said, “That swan would have to be straight out of a science-fiction movie. Take a look at the stabilizers on a big place sometime. They’re built to take strain. They have to be. Without the stabilizer, the pilot has no control. During the war I saw big Flying Fortresses come back with their stabilizers shot to hell by machine guns and cannon shells. Nobody can tell me that a swan could tear one loose from the ship!”

Another pilot – now an aeronautical engineer – asks a more intriguing question. “What I’d like to know is how this ‘bird’ managed to get through the arc of the props and hit the tail? You look at the design of the Viscount. It would be almost impossible unless . . . . ? Unless we assume that it actually swooped in from the side, behind the wings, was able to buck the slipstream, then deliberately dove into the tail section. It’s ridiculous! What kind of a bird could do that?"

What kind of bird, indeed? A bird that could rip a section of metal off the tail assembly, a slab of metal 35 feet long and 238 square yards in area, rip it off like a slice of balsawood off a child’s toy plane?

The answer seems obvious. A bird big enough to carry off a sheep or a calf or a man. A Thunderbird.

AUTHOR INTERVIEWS

"Swooping Thunderbirds" artwork On Coast to Coast AM 20 July 2006 Coast to Coast AM on 30 June 2006 COAST TO COAST AM on 15 November 2005 The author of THUNDERBIRDS, Mark A. Hall, was interviewed by Dr. Bob Hieronimus in Baltimore on Sunday, February 20, 2005. You can visit Hieronimus & Company on the Internet at 21st Century Radio.com where there is a lot to see.

Buy THUNDERBIRDS at Amazon To the THUNDERBIRDS page at Paraview Press

The nesting sites of the Thunderbirds were once more numerous. Oiseau Rock on the Ottawa River in Quebec is one location associated with these birds. Charles M. Skinner recorded this legend about it in 1899.

"There was an eagle of portentous size that preyed on human beings when it lacked fawns and bear-cubs. They [the Indians] will show you, beside the deepest reach of the Ottawa, a cliff falling for hundreds of feet into the river, with no beach at its foot. It is Oiseau Rock, and to its top this eagle flew with a papoose, the frantic mother climbing after it and bringing the child away in safety. This, by the bye, is a legend that is common the world over."

Oiseau Rock is fully described at the following link. The story of the Thunderbirds is remembered there, though once again the eagles get the blame for the acts of other portentous birds.
All about Oiseau Rock NOW AVAILABLE

The only book on the mysterious giant birds of prey reported in modern times To buy THUNDERBIRDS at Amazon-USA at Amazon in JAPAN at Amazon in CANADA at Amazon in the UK at Amazon in Germany at Amazon in France American Indian legends tell of giant birds that carry off people and large animals. They called them Thunderbirds. Newspaper headlines in the twenty-first century also tell of such birds.

IT BEGAN ON 25 JULY 1977

LAWNDALE

LAKE SHELBYVILLE

A copy of this famous film can be purchased directly from Chief AJ. Go to this link for details.

ODIN

Reprint from Elizabethtown Post

Pennsylvania is the center of Thunderbird reports in the East. The birds have been reported there for over a century. Robert Lyman Sr. began the modern era of Thunderbird research by collecting those accounts. John D. Rasmussen, the Jersey Shore editor for the Lock Haven EXPRESS, spotlighted many reports in his columns. The frights reported there from drivers of automobiles were genuine, but the idea of being attacked was probably mistaken. The giant birds were using the draft of the automobiles to assist them in getting aloft.

In the early months of 1895 the skies were watched cautiously by the people of Webster County in West Virginia. A giant bird was seen to carry off a fawn. A sheep was carried off. One hunter was attacked from the sky. And a young girl disappeared on her way to a neighbor's home. Her tracks were found in the snow where she had turned around and around before the trail of footprints simply stopped.

A large bird was seen to have taken up residence on the inaccessible height of Snaggle Tooth Knob. That was not the first time according to one West Virginian.

"Pap" Tammen, one of the oldest mountaineers in Webster, says that he remembers many years ago, when the county was invaded by two just such birds as the one that is now in Webster, and that they had their den on Snaggle Tooth Knob just as this one has.

He says that the creatures committed all kinds of depredations on the live stock of the people in the county and that they remained in the haunts until the winter was over, when they disappeared and were never heard of again.

Even more mysterious are the Giant Owls that the American Indians also knew. They have made news in modern times as "Mothman" in Ohio and West Virginia. Learn more about Bighoot the Giant Owl in THUNDERBIRDS: AMERICA'S LIVING LEGENDS OF GIANT BIRDS by Mark A. Hall from Paraview Press.

Bighoot has not had the attention given to Thunderbirds. A rare period of notoriety took place in the 1960s. The nighttime activity of giant owls was reported as appearances of "Mothman." Today's Bighoot is a nocturnal creature that does not normally disturb humans. The "Mothman" episode served to define one region along the Ohio River as "Bighoot Country."
To buy THUNDERBIRDS at Amazon

CAMOUFLAGE

Owls are known to conceal their presence by blending into their environment. Long eared owls assume a still posture and mimic the appearance of tree branches to go undetected. The result, as described by Lewis Wayne Walker, is that the body of the bird appears like a stick while the tufts of its feathers add the look of a broken end of a branch.

The giant owls, the likely descendants of Ornimegalonyx oteroi, are so big that they must mimic the appearance of an entire tree. They have been seen to rise from the ground where they would have looked like a log. Also, they have been seen to stand among living trees giving the appearance of a dead tree.

The body of Bighoot might raise the animal to a height of around five feet. With its wings furled above the head additional height is added. The look of a broken and dead tree is imparted at the top by the ends of feathers.

In this manner the giant owls are able to hide in plain sight. They can be detected but one has to have the suspicion that they might be around. The very idea of surviving giant owls is so new that people have not been looking for them.

A word of caution is necessary for anyone who wishes to look for Bighoot. These birds are formidable predators so care should be taken not to molest them. If annoyed the birds are capable of protecting themselves and doing harm to people. If left in peace the birds have shown in modern times that they are no threat to humans.

CHAWAH

Dominica is the largest and most northerly of the Windward Islands in the Caribbean. A. Hyatt Verrill lived for a time on Dominica and learned from his hosts their particular beliefs about the inhabitants of the jungle on Morne Macaque, five thousand feet above the sea.

They told him of the Chawah:

EVEN MORE AWESOME THAN LE BUK WAS THE DEMON CALLED "CHAWAH" WHO TOOK THE SHAPE OF AN OWL AND PERCHED BY THE WAYSIDE AWAITING HIS HUMAN VICTIM.

INSTANTLY AT HIS APPROACH, CHAWAH WOULD SWELL TO ENORMOUS SIZE AND SEIZING THE UNFORTUNATE ONE WOULD CARRY HIM OFF TO SOME SECRET LAIR WHERE HE COULD BE DEVOURED AT LEISURE.

From MY JUNGLE TRAILS by A. Hyatt Verrill, (Boston: Page & Co., 1937), p. 122.

VULTURES STRAY INTO THE UK

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