Thunderbirds in Texas

 

Giant black birds with wing spans greater than ten feet and sometimes well in excess of that, seen today in Texas. Fact or fiction? Some residents of the Lone Star State say fact. Here's an excerpt from a sighting in McAllen in 2008:

We had visited for a few minutes when I noticed two large indiscriminate black objects in the distance, and I asked out loud “What the hell are those?”. I pointed them out to my brother, who acknowledged he saw them… but he couldn’t identify what he was seeing. As I stood up and took a few steps on the patio towards the back yard, I was thinking to myself… UFOs?… hang gliders?… neither fit with what I was looking at.

Just then, a commercial airliner that was apparently coming in for a landing (or possibly a departure) at McAllen Int’l Airport had swung around in an arc behind the objects…and for a long moment I could see the two indiscriminate black objects superimposed upon the body of the airliner, and I immediately blurted out excitedly, “It’s those G** D*** Big Birds from the History Channel… Holy S***!” (and then a few other words… expletives)… I told my brother to get his wife so she could see what we were seeing.

As I walked all the way out into the yard from underneath the patio, I glanced back to the southeast in the direction the birds had come from. Much to my surprise, there was an entire line of giant birds that stretched a good half mile to three quarters of a mile in the sky- in a straight line. 

 

Again, from the same year but this time near Boerne in the Hill Country:

Coming in low, just over the trees behind me to the south, and passing directly over the tree next to me, was a huge black bird. It passed only 30 to 40 feet from me, flying just above the treetop adjacent to my garage and deck. It passed to my east, so that I was located between it and the western sun. The low sun behind me illuminated it clearly. I got a very good look.

My first impression – besides its huge size – was of its wings. They were hunched and articulated into sections of different angles, like those of a bat or pterodactyl. They were not outspread and flat like those of a vulture or hawk. Its shoulders were showing, in other words. It seemed to fly sort of hunched up. The wings were messily pointy at the ends, not rounded.

This was not a vulture or turkey vulture. Vultures float and swoop constantly where we live and I am familiar with them. This was much larger than a vulture – bigger than the surprisingly long wingspan of a vulture when you see one up close. I estimate this creature’s wingspan to have been 10 or maybe 12 feet. It was easily double or perhaps triple the size of a vulture. Ditto for its head and beak [yellow] compared to the size of a vulture’s head...

Startlingly huge. Completely black. Yellow stubby but pointed beak. White eye. Oddly ruffled small feathers. Hunched or boney a bit at the shoulder. Articulated sectional wings. Grim looking. Definitely not a vulture because it was very much bigger and had an all-black head and no grey wing colorations.

 

There's many more sightings, especially in the San Antonio area, and cryptozoologist Ken Gerhard believes the massive birds, if real, have their base somewhere remote and relatively unexplored, such as the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico. But granted their existence, what are they?

Some speculate they're Teratorns, a giant American bird of prey thought to have gone extinct with other megafauna around 10,000 years ago, well within humanity's presence on the continent and possibly remembered by Red Indians as mythic Thunderbirds. 

If Teratorns exist in Texas today they're most definitely living fossils and that's not beyond the bounds of possibilty, such things do exist, see Coelacanth. And what remarkable fossils have been found. Discovered in 1980, Argentavis Magnificens had a wingspan of 8 meters and stood 3.5 meters from tip of tail to end of beak, the largest bird known to date which flew.

Could a colony of these tremendous birds have survived the Quaternary extinction event (no, they weren't hunted to death with flints you idiotic boffins but maybe a series of meteor strikes, 'bolides', had something to do with it) and lived on into the present day? Eyewitnesses say something very much like that may well be the case. An expedition to the Sierra Madre is clearly in order.

Far more exciting, don't you think, than hunting for living fossils inside, say, the Beltway. Feel free to share your sightings of mysterious creatures, avian or otherwise.

Best,

LSP