Thunderbird in South Greensburg PA - 8/26/10

reply to post by Dogdish


I live a stone throws away from Catawissa...I have seen some big birds in the mountain regions of shamokin....Usually thses huge birds are turkey vultures...they, for some reason, seem to grow larger than usual in these areas...Im not saying that this is what ppl are seeing in PA but it could be a possible explanation.

reply to post by logicalthinking


My wife is telling me what to write, she says:

She knows Catawissa and the rocks and mountains, and Shamokin, as well. Her grandmother lived there, and she did too, for a while.
Her sighting happened at the campgrounds in New Media.

There were about twenty five people present.

It (the pond) is a man-made pond more than 50 yards wide, so you can imagine how big the bird was! (see my other posts)

Like a pterodactyl, except that the beak and claws were a different color. It looked like it had stretched black spandex for skin. That is about the best way to describe it.
That, and it had a really long, hooked at the end, beak, and big claws, but way big, too, as if one of them could grab your head, (really long, think Freddie Krueger, nails.)

It was one color, black, and the claws and beak were both the same dark yellow/brown color.

It screeched, everybody ran.

It circled the pond twice, dove down, then came through the campground, but everybody was hiding, so it flew away. It kept on screeching throughout the ordeal.

The police were called, and they got there to try to calm the hysteria. They checked the trees, the campgrounds, and yes, the cemetery!
It would have been the New Media police, and it would have probably been 1978. (if you could do a check on that, that would be interesting.)

reply to post by Dogdish


Wow!

Thank you, and thank your wife for me.

The pterodactyl aspect, the stretched skin...that is fantastic and so interesting...and I think relatively unusual in these sightings.

Stuff like your report is why I would want to start a thread like this...

You rock!

It's very possible this bird is some bigger species from another continent. When I was younger my father and I where driving in western North Carolina when a bird swooped down in front of our truck and flew in front of us for several yards. It's wing span was about 4-5 feet and it had a weird growth on its beak. When we got home I looked it up and found that it was a Rhinoceros Hornbill that is indigenous to places like Malaysia or Thailand. What it was doing in the mountains of North Carolina I will never know. Zoo escape? Maybe.

There is a lot of land that hasn't been explored by foot out there. The odds of something living out there that has yet to be documented is very likely.

The Panda was a myth once. A black and white vegetarian bear? No way. You're crazy.

reply to post by TheLieWeLive


Totally agree.

Not to make fun, but what continent would the bird my wife described come from? ...Atlantis?
I guess it could have ventured out from the hollow earth, on some kind of migratory flight, or out of a giant black triangle, but where would it hide in the other months of the year?

I guess that seems like I'm making fun, but that's the big conundrum. Where do these things hide in the off-season?

My own sighting of Bigfoot along with numerous UFO sightings, shows that I can't completely discount that this may be with us year-round and hidden, or that it is or may be other-worldly, even to the extent of inter-dimensional. Maybe time travelers are just messing with us.

I really hope someone who has better access can find the police reports from my wife's sighting, (see post above) as it would be interesting to see the other witnesses' descriptions and impressions. Anybody?

[edit on 5-9-2010 by Dogdish]

reply to post by Dogdish


If you say you've seen it I won't doubt it. I know there is way more than we know still unaccounted for.

Most people who have also seen this bird probably are in denial or just don't want to be ridiculed.

Is there a lot of missing animals in your area? Dogs, cats, goats, etc. This thing has to be eating something to sustain its size.

Imagine seeing this thing eating a carcass in the road as you approach in a car or carrying off the neighbors dog.

This species of bird might even be nocturnal like an owl. That maybe why many do not see it during the day.

I can tell you what this was in three words...

Great blue heron

They are massive at least 4ft high with 10+ feet wing spans. I saw one of these Thunderbirds" later I found out it isn't quite so mythical

reply to post by ISHAMAGI


Yeah, now imagine you're walking alone through the deep woods and you hear this thing call before you see it!
If you've never had that experience, you owe it to yourself. It'll give you an even bigger thrill, and for a minute you'll think it IS something mythical.

Problem is, my wife and her family lived IN the woods in those days. Lake Glory, owned by Knoebels Grove, now. Long before Knoebels turned it into a campground.


BTW, I just went in and tested her, to see if she knew what a heron sounded like when it wails. She nailed it. WheeOoo in a loud in the middle, sort of way.

"Spooky, Scary!" - Count Floyd



[edit on 8-9-2010 by Dogdish]

Originally posted by ISHAMAGI
I can tell you what this was in three words...

Great blue heron

They are massive at least 4ft high with 10+ feet wing spans. I saw one of these Thunderbirds" later I found out it isn't quite so mythical

I myself don't think the great blue heron is very scary...Obviously, since humans produce a whole distributed spectrum of responses, someone somewhere at some time must have been scared by some bad heron, but I bet it happens only rarely...

In my experience, the heron doesn't like the humans, and he's already putting on his coat and leaving by the time the humans notice the heron in their area... the heron is alert and canny...he is not going to let the human get real close, and then respond by popping-up and flying away all big and in-your-face, which would be scarier...the heron sneaks off pre-emptively like someone who doesn't want to be recognized because he owes you money...

I mean, it's not like I'm Steve Irwin (peace be upon him), so I should probably use my studio-audience lifeline on this one...Have any of y'all ever been been strafed or startled by surprising, close-up, low-altitude great blue herons?

Nunca en la vida, is what I would say to that one...

New show on SyFy: Beast Legends.

Here's their show on Bird Monster

I would want to say here that these sort of accounts are doubtful
as there would be more evidence and yet, something tells me there
may be more to it.
I know that most of the threads here deal with unknown creatures
that have either have been assumed to be extinct or have no living
or extinct relative.
The accounts in these threads deal with 'will o' the wisp'-type creatures
that only are seen in glimpses and usually at night.

But this 'Thunderbird' seems more a 'blood & guts' creature, a large
bird... (nothing strange there)... that is wary of man... (usual behaviour)
and preys on animals of an appropriate size... (typical animal behaviour).

This hurts me to say it... I'm a dye-in-the-wool sceptic, I think this creature
exists.

reply to post by nine-eyed-eel


Personally saw a HUGE buzzard some years back. When I was in HS, was on a trip with the family, and we were in South Texas, on some smaller road or another. Don't recall where, exactly, as we drove a lot that vacation, hitting the beaches in Galveston and CC, and also going places like Alamo Village. In any case, we had to stop the car at one point, because a group of buzzards were on the road, blocking it. Some road kill or other dead animal was off to the side a little. One of the birds, that looked just like the rest save his size, was pretty close to the middle of the road, and at one point spread his wings. The ends of the winds went over the road edges by several inches on both sides! Estimate the spam we saw to be a good 15 feet, and the wings were not fully extended. Today, I could kick myself for not taking a picture, but then, we just wrote it off as a "things are bigger in Texas" deal, and none of us realized that bird was WAY bigger than they are supposed to get. Wasn't until years later, reading about thunderbird sightings on the internet, that I realized what we had seen was not supposed to be possible. Wasn't internet back then, for the record.

So, I think these sightings are probably known birds (though I won't write off the possibility of an unknown species or two) of larger than accepted size.

Originally posted by nine-eyed-eel
reply to post by djjohn

 

I would say 15 or 20 feet would be a common wingspan given in witness accounts (I myself haven't seen one, or I would tell you flatly how big mine was, hee-hee)...Wikipedia on Thunderbird does not really give many reports, or weigh in heavily on the wingspan question, though it does say:

Some skeptics have claimed such a large bird could never have flown, but several flying creatures with huge wingspans are indeed known. The prehistoric vulture-like Argentavis magnificens had a wingspan of around 7 m (23 ft) and was capable of flight. The massive Cretaceous-era pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus northropi (or perhaps Hatzegopteryx thambema) was the largest known flying creature in history, with a wingspan of around 12 m (40 ft). However, the Thunderbird's identity as a pterosaur is unlikely because the Thunderbird is invariably shown having feathers. A pterosaur's wings were made of a membrane of skin stretched over a bony finger, similar to a bat's wings.

[edit on 2-9-2010 by nine-eyed-eel]

Ah, but if a pterosaur that big could fly, then so could a bird! The skeptics, of course, hate such logic.

reply to post by hhcore


That is a model of a very real "prehistoric" bird. The size is amazing!

reply to post by Dogdish


She ought to see about contacting Ken Gerhard, a crypto fellow that is writing a book about such things. I actually spoke to him about something very odd, BIG, flying, and threatening, that my brother and I saw one night in Texas. Did she mention a real fear, other than from the sheer size? What we saw was menacing. Beyond it's size, strange shape (NO bird or bat I have ever seen), behavior, and that it was late night.

I really love all this Crypto stuff and I always try to keep things in a reality sort of plane. While there are probably lots of things swimming in our oceans and large lakes that we had a hard time seeing I have to think that a bird of the sizes that is being discussed here would have to be seen and/or photographed at some point. It has to hunt to eat, it has to roost somewhere and mate. There has to be more than one of these things floating around out there. I live in Indiana and we have Turkey Vultures which I've seen, very scary and ugly birds, also very large ( probably 2-3 feet tall). The last one I saw happened to be perched on top of a tombstone in a small country cemetery of all things.

Stan Gordon: Recent Giant Bird Sighting - South Greensburg, PA

More "Big bird" sightings. What to make of it? I remember while in the Santa Ana mountains, near Saddle Back Mountain, Me and a freind were hiking and had a hugh shadow pass over us. It was hugh! We both look at the shadow pass quickly and said something, and looked up. There was nothing! It must have been going fast and up over a near by ridge. It was strange to say the least.

On the afternoon of January 1, 2013, two women and a young boy decided to take a walk through a wooded area near South Greensburg to enjoy the beautiful scenery. It was about 32 degrees and clear visibility in the area. The area had a cover of snow from a previous storm. Around 3 PM the three people advanced into the woods and were looking at a tree that still had a lot of leaves on it.

January 1, 2013 - 3 PM

South Greensburg, PA


More here source Phantoms and Monsters naturalplane.blogspot.com... Feed%3A+PhantomsAndMonstersAPersonalJourney+%28Phantoms+and+Monsters%29

I see Great Blue Herons quite frequently. Because of their long legs, they pull their legs together and stretch them out during flight. When soaring like that they look just like I imagine a pterodactyl would with the legs looking like a pointed tail.

I'm not saying that anyone would actually mistake it for a pterodactyl though.

reply to post by thumper76


Check one of my posts above yours. People DO see them. A few have been photographed or filmed. The one I saw, we didn't take a picture of, not realizing that it was so much larger than it should have been. As I stated, we wrote it off to "things really are bigger in Texas". That turkey vulture, though, was HUGE. Wings that, not fully spread,hung over the road edges? He was on the ground - no mistaking the size there!

Does anyone have any video link of a bird large enough to not be explained and to have something to show scale in the video. I've searched the internet and I haven't found any.