Air Disaster in 1962

Mark A. Hall’s Thunderbirds: America’s Living Legends of Giant Birds is the first modern book to tackle the long misunderstood topic of the traditions, folklore, and sightings of large birds in the skies of North America and elsewhere.

Hall rarely speaks publicly any longer, or communicates his thoughts. Therefore, I am happy to report he has stepped forward to comment on the recent Hudson River incident.

Below, please find a guest blog from Mark A. Hall.

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The recent ditching of an Airbus in the Hudson River has caused some people to comment with references to Thunderbirds. I have not been one of them until now. I have not suggested a giant bird was involved in any way. I did not discuss bird and airplane collisions in my book on Thunderbirds since I think there is a substantial case for the presence of giant birds without reference to such events.

The danger that common birds pose to airmen and aircraft is a familiar subject to many people. About fifty years ago author Frank Lane in one of his books treated the subject extensively. Airports have to be concerned about this problem all the time.

One event in 1962 was linked by author Jacques Bain Pearl (1923-1992) – aka, Jack Pearl – to a possible collision of an airliner with a giant bird. He wrote at some length about the case in his ground-breaking article on Thunderbirds in Saga Magazine for May 1963. The episode deserves to be revisited for its own merits and for the historical fact that the incident was obviously the trigger that caused Pearl to write and offer for publication his article on Thunderbirds.

Robert Lyman of Pennsylvania had been looking into the birds in his state since the 1940s. But he did not publish his findings on Thunderbirds until ten years after Pearl. The Saga article brought the subject into the open and exposed it to a nation-wide readership as nothing had done previously. For all of the good authorship executed by Pearl, I think he will be remembered most for having picked up this neglected thread in the field of cryptozoology.

The incident that caught Pearl’s attention took place after noon on 23 of November 1962. A United Airlines Viscount was on its approach to the International Airport outside Washington, D.C. when the plane crashed into the Maryland countryside.

In his discussion of the incident, Pearl wrote:

On November 25, in an official statement to the press, George Van Epps, chief of safety investigation for the Civil Aeronautics Board, announced: “We have evidence of a bird strike on the (plane’s) horizontal stabilizers and associated elevators, both left and right . . . . The fact is we found both stabilizers back in the flight path which indicates in flight separation . . . .”

Both halves of the 35-foot, all-metal stabilizer were found almost a half- mile behind the crash. And on both were matted the blood, feathers and flesh of an unidentified bird.

With further comments from Van Epps, from Leon Tanguay (safety director at the Civil Aeronautics Board), from the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland, and from a commercial pilot and former fighter pilot, Pearl made his case for a single bird having brought down the plane.

Many years ago I was asked where Thunderbirds would be living just outside of Washington. These are not birds that have to fly only above their nests, like a Russian fighter plane that is so low on fuel that it keeps close to its own airfield. The birds are highly mobile, which is how they can migrate widely over North America as they appear to do each year.

I am not making the case here that a Thunderbird did bring down a plane in 1962. I have limited information on this event, only what Jack Pearl wrote when he made the case. I have laboriously transcribed his account of the event from a poor copy of his original article. For those who want to read it, here are Jack Pearl’s own words from his May 1963 SAGA Magazine article, “Monster Bird that Carries Off Human Beings!”

Collisions between birds and aircraft are more frequent than is commonly believed. In 1957, a goose crashed through the cockpit windshield of a DC-3 and injured the co-pilot. The plane landed without incident. In 1960, a flock of starlings was sucked into the engine intakes of an American Airlines Electra taking off from Boston’s Logan Airport, causing a tragic crash. The files of the Civil Aeronautics Board abound with reports of similar freakish accidents.

Shortly after noon on November 23, 1962, a United Airlines Viscount was making a routine approach to Washington, D.C, International Airport. It was a bright sunny day with unlimited visibility and minimum air turbulence. Radio communication between the plane and the Washington control tower was normal. There was not the slightest hint of trouble, much less total disaster. Then, abruptly, the Viscount disappeared from the tower’s radar screen.

On a farm in Ellicott City, Maryland, a boy looked up from his chores to witness a sight he had never expected to see: a huge airplane diving vertically toward the woods to the southwest of town. As he watched, paralyzed with horror, the plane crashed and exploded in the trees with an impact that caused the ground to tremble beneath his feet.

Both halves of the 35-foot, all-metal stabilizer were found almost a half- mile behind the crash. And on both were matted the blood, feathers and flesh of an unidentified bird.

But what kind of bird was it that could disable a huge aircraft like the Viscount turboprop – built to endure the stress and strain of high speed, the giant force of wind and storm – disable it so badly that it would spin out of control to disaster? It is a question that air experts and ornithologists alike have been asking themselves – and each other – and so far, none of the answers has satisfied anyone.

Leon Tanguay, safety director for the CAB, declared about the bird theory: “I have never known of such a thing to happen. I’m not sure that this happened!” But neither he nor anyone else can explain the feathers, blood and flesh on that stabilizer torn off by terrible impact.

The Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland, who examined the gory remains of the creature plastered to the stabilizer, said cautiously “I’ve got a foot-square piece of the carcass. It’s white with down below the feathers – it couldn’t be anything else but a swan!” He didn’t convince the investigators from CAB and FAA. One of them said, off the record: “There’s talk that it was a swan or a goose. But only ONE bird! It doesn’t add up.”

So unconvinced were the investigators that Army helicopters were assigned to hedge-hop the fatal route the plane had followed from Baltimore to Washington “in an effort to find more carcasses or remains which might indicate this was a flock instead of a single bird,“ explained Mr. Van Epps. “They found nothing,” he added uneasily.

Among pilots, civil and military, the swan or goose theory produced outright contempt. A former World War II fighter pilot, now flying for a commercial airline, said, “That swan would have to be straight out of a science-fiction movie. Take a look at the stabilizers on a big place sometime. They’re built to take strain. They have to be. Without the stabilizer, the pilot has no control. During the war I saw big Flying Fortresses come back with their stabilizers shot to hell by machine guns and cannon shells. Nobody can tell me that a swan could tear one loose from the ship!”

Another pilot – now an aeronautical engineer – asks a more intriguing question. “What I’d like to know is how this ‘bird’ managed to get through the arc of the props and hit the tail? You look at the design of the Viscount. It would be almost impossible unless . . . . ? Unless we assume that it actually swooped in from the side, behind the wings, was able to buck the slipstream, then deliberately dove into the tail section. It’s ridiculous! What kind of a bird could do that?”

What kind of bird, indeed? A bird that could rip a section of metal off the tail assembly, a slab of metal 35 feet long and 238 square yards in area, rip it off like a slice of balsawood off a child’s toy plane?

The answer seems obvious. A bird big enough to carry off a sheep or a calf or a man. A Thunderbird.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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