More Big Birds in Texas
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on July 29th, 2007
More news coverage of the Big Bird sightings in Texas.
Click on the link here to watch the video.
Sightings of mysterious giant bird continue in San Antonio
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.Joe Conger
KENS 5 Eyewitness News
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
Very good new article from Texas. The skeptic guy says “Eyewitness testimony is very unreliable.” Wow, maybe he should be a defense lawyer. A lot of people in prison probably think the same exact thing.
I guess it is to easy to just say anything could be possible.
Oh man. Imagine my surprise when I hit the site today and see a story about big birds in Texas! Excellent! I’m in Texas! In fact, I’m in San Antonio! Cool! In fact, I live just a few miles from Huebner and Babcock roads.
Not so damm cool any more!
I can see it though. This area is north west of San Antonio, RIGHT as the hill country of Texas starts. Literally, you drive for 15 minutes north or west, and while there is civilization, it’s pretty much empty Texas Hill country.
Maybe that empty Texas hill country isn’t so empty after all.
We often forget in a world overrun by people, all linked by the touch of a few buttons, that there is still a lot of wilderness out there where few people venture. Who knows what may live in these places?
Right on the edge of the hill country? Suitable for catching thermals? Hmm.
Human error is most likely the case in most instances, I would think, but you cannot prove a negative, and you never know.
I wonder if the Guadalupe Cantu mentioned here is the one I met in the fall of 1975, when I was in the Rio Grande Valley gathering material on the Big Bird scare. As I recall, he was in his mid- to latter teens at the time. He directed me to Spanish-speaking witnesses and informants in San Benito, where he lived, after the local police gave me the brush-off.
Cantu sent me some letters subsequently, passing on local rumors and folklore. I recall that he thought he had found Big Bird scat on a rooftop, but the substance proved to have a prosaic (feline) origin. At the time Cantu claimed no sightings of his own, if memory serves.
Jerome,
It is indeed the same Guadalupe. He does claim to have finally had his own Big Bird sighting about a decade ago, while working an early morning paper route near Rangerville. The location is just a few miles west of the La Palma Colonia in San Benito, where he still resides and investigates the apparently ongoing sightings by the residents there.
I saw dinosaur looking birds when I lived in Austin back in the 80’s but my parents pretty much made it clear that I wouldn’t tell anyone anything.
They didn’t want others to think I was crazy.
My cousin and I knew where in the woods it lived part of the time. I say that because it wasn’t there all the time. But we would go up a hill and catch our breath and then run as fast as we could toward it. We never saw it up close but you could hear these wings flapping so loud from over a hundred yards away. I have had bald eagle fly pretty close to me while hiking and eagle wings don’t even compare to the noise we heard. We sometimes would see big branches hitting the ground as we ran up that broke off when we startled the bird.
Just to clarify. I saw it flying over our house a few time but my cousin who wanted to see it never saw it.
My next door neighbor never saw it fly over the house but he did see it a few miles away but it was walking toward him with its wings covering its face so only its eye showed but not its face.
That is all I’m going to say about that.