The Legendary Ancient Thunderbird Was Real And It May Actually Exist Even These Days..

The most celebrated Thunderbird encounter took place in 1890, on the desert sands of what was then the Arizona Territory. Two cowboys had a bizarre confrontation which has varied widely in the telling, but the gist of the story is this: they saw a giant flying bird, shot and killed it with their rifles, and carried its spectacular carcass into town.

A report in the April 26, 1890, Tombstone Epigraph listed the creature’s wingspan as an alarming 160 feet, and noted that the bird was about 92 feet long, about 50 inches around at the middle, and had a head about eight feet long. The beast was said to have no feathers, but a smooth skin and wingflaps “composed of a thick and nearly transparent membrane… easily penetrated by a bullet.” Perhaps the hardest part of this story to swallow is that two horses could manage to haul a dead behemoth like this for any distance.

Sounds like a typical tall tale of the Wild West and that’s probably what it is. But it apparently does contain a kernel of truth. In 1970, Harry McClure claimed that as a boy he knew the two cowboys from the story later in their lives, and they had told him a different version of the events. McClure said the giant bird they saw in the desert actually had a wingspan of more like 20 to 30 feet – much more reasonable than 160, but still enormous. The two riders shot at the creature, but it was out of range. Their spooked horses refused to chase it, so the men rode into town empty-handed, carrying only news of the one that got away.

The Tombstone newspaper printed its highly embroidered version of the cowboy’s sighting, which was spared from fading into obscurity by its inclusion in a 1930 book on the Old West. In 1963, the story came to the attention of writer Jack Pearl, who revived the tale for an article in a pulpy men’s adventure magazine called Saga. As if the Epigraph report hadn’t spiced up the facts enough already, Pearl liberally embellished the encounter into a dramatic rip-snorter entitled “Monster Bird That Carries Off Human Beings!”