I was driving on rt 11 in Factoryville, pa today around 2:45 pm ,It was sunny out almost 50 degrees (41.56951, -75.79923) heading west ,
I looked to the south west in the sky, about 1/2 to 3/4 of a mile away,(if you look on google maps it would be to the lower left were there is a good track of woods and 3 pole lines running through the woods)
I notice something in the sky, I thought it was a hand glider,
It was shaped strange like a "v" flying backwards, and it had like a head and a neck sticking out ,
Then I saw it turning really tight and was thinking how cool it looked, then it started flapping it's wings and it freaked me out,
I never saw a bird look that big especially from that distance before.
I was trying to slow down but there were cars behind me and I would
have to go down the road and turn around and really was no where to pull over to see it again.
The shape while it was gliding was very strange, it seemed the wings tapered all the way down to nothing,
not to a tail. I'm 46 yrs old and lived and hunted in pa my whole life and saw turkey vultures, turkeys, great horned owls, cranes, and eagles. this seemed much bigger than any of them.It really sank in how big it was as I drove down the road,there some crows flying about 75 yds away,they looked like a spec compaired to the other one,at that was at least(probably farther) 800 yds .

Hey, thanks for the interesting account.

How big would you say the bird was?

Perhaps you spotted the famed "Thunderbird"

Cheers

A few years ago I witnessed a very large bird like the one you describe.
I was in Edmond, Ok a rapidly growing suburb of Oklahoma City.
I saw it about 9pm and I believe it was in December.
As I made a left hand turn the bird passed in front of my car.
It was massive, I'd say at least 30ft wingspan maybe as big as 50ft.
When it passed by me I heard a whoosh sound that was just unbelievable.
Now I can't fully rectify what I saw with any logic about the bird.
How could this huge beast exist in a populated area and go undetected for so long?
The best I can come up with is there must be very few of them maybe just the one.
It must have a huge hunting territory maybe the greater part of the continent.
It would have to be active mostly at night and have some kind of technique to remain unseen during the day.
I don't know. It really freaked me out at the time and still makes no sense to me.

Also from Pennsylvania and also spent many a year hunting and or fishing. Never saw a bird like that though.

Not doubting you for a second either. I saw a black panther in a field while driving home one night. Now if you ask PA State Game officials, there haven't been any cougars in these parts for quite a few decades now.. let alone a black panther. Not saying it was some kind of otherworldly event. But coupled with some weirder stuff I've seen. out in the wilderness.. not ruling it out either. And if you report such things you always get the same answer... somebody's exotic pet got loose. You hear that line enough and "exotic pet" starts to sound an awful lot like "swamp gas".

My mom claims to have seen a huge bird similar to what you described. She has also seen large predatory birds in her hometown and she had never seen something very big. According to her, she saw this bird like creature come from one the houses next door to us. Then it landed on this very big tree by our house. The first thing that caught her attention was the fact that all of a sudden all these birds around the immediate neighborhood started going crazy. They were scared of something and they were all leaving the area. She stepped outside to take a closer look at this bird and thats when she realized that it wasnt a normal looking bird. It looked at her and then flew over her head and landed in another tree about 100 ft away. After that, she lost sight of the bird.

The crazy thing is this, according to some neighbor that lived a few houses away, there was this woman that they claimed was a witch and that she was a shapeshifter. My mom thinks it could have possibly been her.

The thunderbird stories are interesting. The only major problem is, like with many cryptozoolgical creatures, no bones and no feathers have ever been found. A bird with 30' wings would surely have some truly enormous wing feathers, like the reconstruction of that 2 million year old extinct bird. I suppose they could just be enormously rare and near extinction, but it's still hard to imagine no parts of one has ever been found on the ground.

It's clearly possible a bird that big COULD exist, between that extinct bird and pterosaurs, which were basically just really big birds 65 million+ years ago, such a thing is possible and capable of flight.

Originally posted by Resinveins
I saw a black panther in a field while driving home one night. Now if you ask PA State Game officials, there haven't been any cougars in these parts for quite a few decades now.. let alone a black panther. Not saying it was some kind of otherworldly event.

Black panthers are highly possible, it could well have been someone's escaped exotic pet. A lot of people keep illegal exotic animals and would never report it if it got out for fear of prosecution. Look at the problems they are having now in the Everglades with all of the enormous pythons that are taking over the ecosystem there -- those started out as escaped or released exotic pets.

Very interesting...

I'm a fair distance away from your area but, after reading your excellent account, I'm going to have to keep an eye out. Love to get a glimpse of something like you've seen.

I too would like to add to this thread as I saw a large bird in PA.

I'm in SE PA, I'm 40 years old, most everything in PA woods has been in my sights one time or another.

My tale is similar, I was on the barn to where I board my horse, it was June 24th '08, it was warm, windows were down and I had my tunes cranking loud. I catch sight that there is a bird along the road, left hand side, standing between two trees and it is big. Well, as I pull driver in my Nissan Titan the large bird takes to flight, it wings thunder in over my blaring stereo and its span is Cyclopean, easily longer than the 6'+ bed of my pickup!

Its initial first few moments of flight are laborious, but it builds speed and disappears over head behind the canopy.

Karen, my significant other exclaim, 'that was a HUGE bird!'

Honestly, I'd say that on the ground the bird was easliy 3.5 to 4' tall and in the air it was enormous. We have bald eagles in our area, but when on the ground it stood/looked like the largest of vulture on the planet. There was a dead bald eagle on the one highway this spring, and it was smaller compared to what I saw that day.

Derek