Watch the Skies! Here Comes Birdzilla!

[Richard]

from cryptomundo.com

More sightings of a huge flying creature, originally reported by KENS, have prompted an investigation to determine if it is a monster or myth.

“Even though it was dark, the thing itself was black. The blackest I’d ever seen,” said Frank Ramirez.

Years ago, Ramirez thought he was after a prowler in the back of his mother’s Southwest Side home. But what greeted him on the garage rooftop still gives him goosebumps now.

“That’s when the thing up there turned to me, and it was in a perched state, and it started to turn,” he said. “It started to move its arms and this giant blackness was just coming out. At that point, I dropped the stick and I ran.”

Ramirez sketched a drawing of the large, bird-like creature. The image is disturbing, and similar to dozens of sightings across San Antonio and South Texas.

“If you were to take a man’s face and pull his chin down, just like a stretched face,” said Ramirez.

“I was just terrified and as I was running. I just thought it was going to carry me off or something.”

An earlier KENS story about a large, prehistoric-like bird drew more than 100,000 hits on MySanAntonio.com. More than a few people in San Antonio came forward to say they’d seen the creature, too.

One woman contacted KENS by e-mail, saying that because of our story, she now knows she’s not crazy.

KENS caught up with cryptozoologist Ken Gerhard at the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge.

Gerhard recently wrote a book, called “Modern Sightings of Flying Monsters” on the large, dark birds.

“When investigating mystery animals, it’s important to point out that there are vast areas of land, even here in South Texas, that remain uninhabited,” said Gerhard. “If an animal like big bird does exist, it certainly needs some habitat, somewhere to hide.”

The Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge has 88,000 acres, and the marshes and prairies are home to 413 species of birds, but no flying pterodactyls.

“Raptors of all kinds, from hawks to falcons, come throughout. Our most common is the Harris Hawk, ” said Park Ranger Stacy Sanchez.

But even Sanchez admits that blogs spiked with reports this summer of something.

“People were posting about a very large, raptor-like bird, and they were talking about an 18-to-20-foot wingspan. I don’t know … It’s kind of a myth,” said Sanchez.

Critics say where’s the proof? Eyewitness testimony without a feather or other body of evidence leaves these stories as they are - just stories.

“We know that it’s rare, and we know that this area’s been pretty popular hangout in the past,” said Gerhard.

Gerhard has been installing cameras in Harlingen, where Guadalupe Cantu wants his big bird sighting documented and validated.

Back in San Antonio, Ramirez has mounted an outdoor light to keep the creature at bay.

“I know what I saw. It took me more than a week to step out of this house. I wouldn’t step foot out of this house,” said Ramirez. “It had this very, very horrible demeanor-look on its face. Like I was lunch,” he said.

On Nov. 21, Gerhard will be featured in a History Channel documentary called “Birdzilla.” ~ Joe Conger, “I-Team: Expert trying to identify mysterious bird flying around S. Texas,” KENS 5 Eyewitness News, San Antonio, Texas, November 16, 2007.

To watch the KENS-5 video (while the link is still live), click here for it to upload.

If you would like to read the earlier story, from July 30, 2007, this is it:

Sightings of mysterious giant bird in San Antonio

Is it a bird? A plane? An ancient flying reptile, having survived the millenia, hidden in desert canyons and caves until now? No one knows…

Loch Ness has its monster. Does San Antonio have one, too?

Strange sightings of a huge flying creature have been reported as recently as six months ago. Is it a monster or myth?

Guadalupe Cantu III was busy working his newspaper route, but he says the big news of that day 10 years ago flew right over his car. He says he’s seen what most have not — an unidentified flying object, one that still scares him.

“We were afraid that it would come at us. So we stayed in the car till it passed this way,” witness Guadalupe Cantu III said. “This thing’s all feathers, all black. Much bigger than me. It looked at us. It had very stooped-up shoulders.” The beast has been spotted from the Rio Grande Valley to the mountains of New Mexico.

“(It) looked like what was possibly two people standing on top of a mountain up there,” said David Zander, who saw the monster in New Mexico. “Something that big … I guess it kinda makes you feel like it could come over and carry you off if it wanted to.”

San Antonio’s Ken Gerhard has written a book on these dark birds as big as planes, with wingspans from 15 to 20 feet.

Native Americans called them thunderbirds: depicted in their art, their flapping wings were said to cause explosive noises.

“What’s interesting is that the reports of these giant, raptor-like birds do continue into modern times,” said Gerhard, a cryptozoologist. Cryptozoology is the study of and search for legendary animals to prove their existence.

He says there’s solid evidence something is overhead.

“I believe there’s a good chance that a lot of large, prehistoric animals, if you will, remain undiscovered by modern science,” he said.

So what could the giant birds be? Some witness sketches eerily resemble prehistoric creatures, like the pteronadon of 160 million years ago.

However, Gerhard theorizes it could be a creature that’s a little less extinct — if that’s possible — a pteratorn.

“These are the surviving ancestors of modern condors and vultures. They lived up until 6,000 years ago, we know for sure, in parts of North America,” Gerhard said. “In fact, over 100 specimens have been recovered from the La Brea tar pits in California.”

But critics have another take: human error.

“Was it really as big as he thought it was?” asks Ben Radford, editor of “Skeptical Inquirer” magazine. “When there’s enough information to come to a determination, I’ve always found an explanation for it.”

Radford says the eye can be deceived.

“Eyewitness testimony is very unreliable. And so it’s hard for a person to tell — even experts to tell — ‘Is that thing I’m seeing out there, is it small and nearby? Or is it huge and farther away?’ ” Radford said.

But in one sighting in San Antonio, three people gave similar accounts, witnessing the same fly-by of a huge, winged creature. A trio of South Side teachers traveling a deserted road had their cars “buzzed” by the monsters, and it made the papers in February 1976.

In fact, for decades papers throughout South Texas have chronicled the flying creatures. In the age of the Internet, the reports continue, like this one from a recent sighting near Huebner and Babcock roads.

“The creature was large, at least 6 feet,” the report reads. “I don’t know if I ever want to see another one.”

“If I were outside there walking, it would’ve gone after me,” witness Cantu said.

Cantu believes most sightings go unreported because people are afraid of the ridicule they could face.

However, he says a face-to-face encounter with the creature would be much worse.

“I think if you do see it, then you might wind up missing,” Cantu said. ~ by Joe Conger, KENS 5 Eyewitness News, July 30, 2007.

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/birdzilla-mq/

[Mercy Now]

I recall people reporting sightings such a this in the mid-1980's when I lived in Texas. "Thunderbird" sightings have been relatively frequent for a few centuries.

[Sily]

There is a movie called The In-Laws w/Peter Falk as a CIA agent.  The movie is a comedy and very silly but within all the fun is Peter Falk telling a story of huge flies with beaks picking up children and flying off with them into the sunset.  Hmm.. maybe a bit of truth was hidden within all the comedy in this film.

[Richard]

MN, you’re right about Texas, they just had an interesting story about it on the news. The drawings look freaky. I think all my hair would stand on end if I seen something like that. icon_eek 

More Mystery Huge Flying 'Birds' Seen Over Texas


Here’s a story for you Sily, it goes along with your huge flies story.

Scientists find fossil of enormous bug

By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer

This was a bug you couldn't swat and definitely couldn't step on. British scientists have stumbled across a fossilized claw, part of an ancient sea scorpion, that is of such large proportion it would make the entire creature the biggest bug ever.

How big? Bigger than you, and at 8 feet long as big as some Smart cars.

The discovery in 390-million-year-old rocks suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were far larger in the past than previously thought, said Simon Braddy, a University of Bristol paleontologist and one of the study's three authors.

"This is an amazing discovery," he said Tuesday.

"We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies. But we never realized until now just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were," he said.

The research found a type of sea scorpion that was almost half a yard longer than previous estimates and the largest one ever to have evolved.

The study, published online Tuesday in the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters, means that before this sea scorpion became extinct it was much longer than today's average man is tall.

Prof. Jeorg W. Schneider, a paleontologist at Freiberg Mining Academy in southeastern Germany, said the study provides valuable new information about "the last of the giant scorpions."

Schneider, who was not involved in the study, said these scorpions "were dominant for millions of years because they didn't have natural enemies. Eventually they were wiped out by large fish with jaws and teeth."

Braddy's partner paleontologist Markus Poschmann found the claw fossil several years ago in a quarry near Prum, Germany, that probably had once been an ancient estuary or swamp.

"I was loosening pieces of rock with a hammer and chisel when I suddenly realized there was a dark patch of organic matter on a freshly removed slab. After some cleaning I could identify this as a small part of a large claw," said Poschmann, another author of the study.

"Although I did not know if it was more complete or not, I decided to try and get it out. The pieces had to be cleaned separately, dried, and then glued back together. It was then put into a white plaster jacket to stabilize it," he said.

Eurypterids, or ancient sea scorpions, are believed to be the extinct aquatic ancestors of today's scorpions and possibly all arachnids, a class of joint-legged, invertebrate animals, including spiders, scorpions, mites and ticks.

Braddy said the fossil was from a Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae, a kind of scorpion that lived only in Germany for about 10 million years, about 400 million years ago.

He said some geologists believe that gigantic sea scorpions evolved due to higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere in the past. Others suspect they evolved in an "arms race" alongside their likely prey, fish that had armor on their outer bodies.

Braddy said the sea scorpions also were cannibals that fought and ate one other, so it helped to be as big as they could be.

"The competition between this scorpion and its prey was probably like a nuclear standoff, an effort to have the biggest weapon," he said. "Hundreds of millions of years ago, these sea scorpions had the upper hand over vertebrates — backboned animals like ourselves."

That competition ended long ago.

But the next time you swat a fly, or squish a spider at home, Braddy said, try to "think about the insects that lived long ago. You wouldn't want to swat one of those."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071121/ap_o...n38fMDW7oF

[Richard]

WHAT DOES "SCORPION'S GATE" MEAN?

Posted By: H2OTLC

This has been "bugging" me all day (no pun intended).....but what does a Scorpion fossil larger than a man being found on the day when the moon transits out of Scorpio and into the 13th constellation mean symbolically? When I saw the recent picture of the semi-circlular 'claw' imprint it reminded me of the map in the front of Richard A. Clark's "fictional" book "The Scorpion's Gate". There the claw takes in the crescent of Bahrain (also believed to be Edens location? or Sumerian labs?)

Men's Adventure Synopsis:
"In this geopolitical thriller, Clarke takes readers just five years into the future, when forces in the Middle East and the United States are at work to launch a war that could be nuclear and spread to Asia and beyond."

"It's 2010, and the newly established Republic of Islamyah — the former Saudi Arabia — is trying to destabilize Bahrain: the Diplomat Hotel has been bombed, and, as the first chapter of this intense debut thriller closes, the Crowne Plaza is 'pancaking.' Meanwhile, the deposed House of Saud is holed up in Houston; the Chinese are providing arms and training to Islamyah; the Iranians have the bomb. Secretary of Defense Henry Conrad thinks the time is ripe to invade Islamyah and seize its oil, for which the U.S. is locked in deadly competition with China. Cooler heads in the U.S. (and British) hierarchies are very, very alarmed. Sound familiar? Clarke's Against All Enemies delivered an apostate critique of the Bush administration's counterterrorism efforts, along with a vision of the future very much like today. The writing's nothing special; what is special is Clarke's passionate and deftly detailed version of the present, albeit one told in terms of its consequences. It's a brilliant conceit, and though it's sometimes drowned out by the din of various axes being ground ('It''s 68 degrees [in Washington]on January 28 and the White House still claims that global warming isn't a problem?'), the story is crowded with terrific double crosses, defections and deceptions. They're icing, though: Clarke's dramatic micro explanations of how things 'really' work — from a hand who served Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes — are the true story. This is the first novel to shift all the way from Clancy's Cold War to the present war on terror. " Publishers Weekly

Hmmmmm....sounds familiar?

Also interesting that the Scorpion is supposedly chasing Orion around the Universe after he tried to rape Artemis (the Earth).

Just thinking out loud- H2OTLC

http://www.surfingtheapocalypse.net/cgi-...ead=194161

[Sily]

...an ancient sea scorpion, that is of such large proportion it would make the entire creature the biggest bug ever...The discovery in 390-million-year-old rocks suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were far larger in the past than previously thought...

Neat Richard[size="-1"]! [/size]  ...the Land of the Giants[size="-1"]!  :nod:
[/size]

[crystalsun]

There are strange creatures all over the planet. For instance, some years ago in the Northern Territory here in Australia, two men were exploring a remote region, when they were suddenly confronted by a lizard of enormous size. They claimed it was six feet at the shoulder!

After both men emptied their rifles into the giant reptile. They checked carefully that it was in fact dead, and having no camera, decided to fetch a wildlife ranger to prove their discovery. A two day trip out and two days back with the ranger.

The giant lizard was gone, but there were drag marks....

What the hell drags away a dead giant lizard?

[William]

Great story Cryst.!  

[crystalsun]

Yes William, it came from an Australian book called "Mysterious Australia" by Rex Gilroy.

Another episode he related, although from around a century ago, was from up in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney.

A group of men on a hunting trip, probably for deer or wild pigs, were sitting around the campfire one evening when a huge animal burst through the bushes and grabbed one of them in its mouth.

He was dragged screaming into the forest before anyone could react. In darkness, the men had no chance of tracking the animal to their friend and had to nervously wait until daylight to go out searching.

They found what was left of their friend in the scrub almost a mile away. Each man swore the animal was in fact a giant cat-like creature.

Australia did have a marsupial lion thousands of years ago, could this giant have been part of a remnant population in the inaccessible wilds of the Blue Mountains?

[William]

  Crystalsun, I just love those stories which I believe are true.   I would love to sit around a camp fire listening to these stories!

  I should look up old newspapers in a town I once lived in long ago and see if i can find the time where a Warewolf was reported in the town.   It makes me wonder if that was a real shapeshifter running around.    Anybody else have or remember of shapeshifters reported in your local newspaper where you lived?