5th Update: Thunderbird Sightings

Flying Behemoths

On Monday, July 25, 1977, Ruth Lowe of Lawndale, Illinois, was cleaning the family camper in the front yard when she heard her 10–year-old son, Marlon, screaming from behind the house. She dropped what she was doing, dashed to the backyard and saw a gigantic black bird with a wingspan exceeding 8 feet that had grasped her 56-pound son by the shoulders and was attempting to fly off with him.  According to Mrs. Lowe, the bird came very close to succeeding. It had managed to lift the violently struggling boy off the ground and was slowly flapping its way across the yard. However, either the child was too heavy or the bird was startled by the frantic cries of mother and son and dropped its prey. The bird soared skyward and, joined by an equally-large companion, flew away.

Alerted by the bloodcurdling screams from the backyard, Jake Lowe and next-door neighbors James and Betty Daniels came running, arriving in time to witness the bizarre incident. Later, Daniels told a UPI reporter: “If I had just had a can or beer earlier, then I could have said I imagined it. But I didn’t have any beer that day.” Once the predators were out of sight, the Lowes measured the distance and determined the bird had carried Marlon a distance of approximately 35 feet. The witnesses described the flying behemoth as follows:

“It had a white ring around it’s half foot long neck. The rest of the body was very black. The bird’s bill was six inches in length and hooked at the end. The claws on the feet were arranged with three front, one in the back. Each wing, less the body, was four feet at the very least. The entire length of the bird’s body, from beak to tail feather, was approximately four and one-half feet.”

Officials were quick to discredit the family’s version of events. According to experts – are there any “big bird” experts? – gigantic, child-snatching black birds aren’t exactly a common sight in the skies over Illinois, or anywhere else in the western hemisphere, for that matter. Perhaps, it was suggested, the birds were turkey vultures or king vultures. However, neither of these species, which weigh around 50 pounds, are big and powerful enough to grab a struggling boy. Also, vultures prefer to dine on carrion – rancid, dead flesh – and are unlikely to attack a living creature. The consensus, at least among many, was that the Lowes perhaps embellished the details of the encounter. And yet, to this day, Marlon Lowe sticks to his family’s version of events.

It’s easy to scoff at and dismiss a single encounter, but the Lowes and their neighbors weren’t the only ones who saw the gigantic birds. On the evening of July 28 – three days later – a woman driving not far from Lawndale reported being “buzzed” by a giant bird. And a couple hours later, a group of model airplane afficionados were approached by a bird with an estimated 10-foot wingspan. The following day, a mail carrier, James Majors, reported seeing two large birds flying about above a pig farm. Suddenly, one of them dropped from the sky, attacked what he estimated to be a 50-pound pig and hauled the squealing swine into the air. Shortly thereafter, it landed with its prize at which time it was joined by its companion and the two dined on the catch of the day.

Suburban Illinois isn’t the only place to report encounters with giant airborne predators. In 1967, a monster bird with a reported 15- to 20-foot wingspan flew over Middletown Ohio. In the 1970s, there was a spate of Texas sightings, including a January 1976 encounter in which two San Benito police officers, Arturo Padillo and Homero Galvan, reportedly saw an enormous bird gliding over a canal. And Pennsylvania seems to be a hotbed for freakish flyers, with eyewitness accounts dating to the 19th century.

Perhaps these were examples of a winged beast American Indians dubbed the Thunderbird – a gigantic, supposedly mythical creature that was said to cause thunder and lighting.

Though sightings of gigantic birds continue, one has never been reported by any of the country’s tens of thousands of ornithologists – at least not by one who reported the incident. Some consider it significant that people with the ability to differentiate between two closely-related species of finch at great distances have never spotted an avian predator the size of a small airplane. Also, doubters ask: what exactly do such giant birds eat? Perhaps the cattle mutilations people should get together with the Thunderbird enthusiasts and compare notes.

The Lowe family and other witnesses who reported big bird sightings in the 1970s were ridiculed which would have deterred others who may have seen the flying giants. As recently as June 2012, a cryptzoologist received an email from an unidentified source, who claimed to have seen the pair of birds that attempted to snatch Marlon Lowe, the day before the attack:

“I saw the two thunderbirds in Springfield IL the day before Marlon Lowe was attacked, in Lawndale, Il. This is no joke! I told my father and family and they all laughed. But in the next day or two when it hit the local news they changed their tune!

“Several friends of mine and I went on a hike following Spring Creek from Washington Park due Southwest about as far as we could until we reached a muskrat dam. We decided to hike back from there. Along the way back, the big birds flew due north directly over our heads as we stumbled along the small trail alongside the creek! And when I say directly over our heads; that means ten feet in the air above us! I have never diclosed [sic] this story publicly, but I feel it should be known after seeing the countless shows on the TV and the ridicule endured by Marlon and his family.”

In Unsolved Mysteries of the Old West, author W. C. Jameson tells the curious tale of the Thunderbird Cave in Utah. In 1738, a band of treasure-seeking Spaniards, who were overloaded with silver ingots, were attacked and killed by Indians angry over the continual trespassing on their hunting lands. Two survivors however, while in hiding, watched as the Indians took the burros of the dead Spaniards into a cave that had a petroglyph of a large strange bird over its entrance. The Indians killed and hacked-up the bodies of the burros, even copping off their hooves. In the 1980s an unnamed treasure hunter went into the cave looking for the silver ingots in the famed Thunderbird Cave. After an extended search, he finally found a cave with a petroglyph of a large unusual looking bird with a long, reptile-like tail, over its entrance. While digging, he unearthed burro hooves and the large stem of a feather measuring 18 inches in length. Ornithologists determined it to be a wing feather, but from what sort of bird, no one can say. Were the burros a sacrifice to the Thunderbirds?

Sources: Suburban Legends: True Tales of Murder, Mayhem and Minivans by Sam Stall; Phantoms & Monsters; and Mysterious World.

My granddad said that he had an encounter with something like that in the Adirondacks in Upstate New York when he was a kid in the 40's. He and another boy were fishing at a stream and a bird bigger than any they'd ever seen before swooshed down at them. He said the thing was so big that it cast a shadow from one side of the stream to the other and the stream was about 25 to 30 feet wide. They were so scared they ran into the woods and kept running until they got to his friend's house. The boy's older brother thought they were crazy and went with them back to the stream. They found their poles where they had dropped them, but the fish they'd caught were gone. Everybody told them it was just an osprey or eagle that looked bigger than it was against the sun and it was just after the fish they'd caught, but my granddad grew up in the area and had seen ospreys and eagles all his life and he said that what they saw was much bigger than an osprey or eagle. Did your grandmother say whether the bird they saw had feathers or bat-like wings? The one my granddad saw had feathers.