Giant bird like creature Pennsylvania

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.

Here's an article I found on the worlds largest bird of prey, as far as science can tell it's been extinct for 2 million years, but we've rediscovered live creatures that we thought were extinct far longer than that.

Worlds largest bird

an interesting aspect of this bird is they don't think it would have been able to take off from flat ground or to even keep itself aloft for very long period of time without updrafts or thermals, so it would have been found around hilly and arid (thermal) regions or mountainous regions... do either of you live in such an area?

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".

reply to post by zigoapex


Explanation: S&F!

Could it have been the Mothman [wiki] ???

Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman claims that sightings of Mothman continue, and told USA Today he re-interviewed witnesses described in Keel's book who said Mothman was "a huge creature about 7 feet tall with huge wings and red eyes" and that "they could see the creature flapping right behind them" as they fled from it.

But ...

Wildlife biologist Dr. Robert L. Smith at West Virginia University told reporters that descriptions and sightings all fit the Sandhill Crane, a large American crane almost as high as a man with a seven foot wingspan featuring circles of reddish coloring around the eyes, and that the bird may have wandered out of its migration route.

Personal Disclosure: Could it be either of those two?

reply to post by zigoapex
Off the bat, I'll have to support FoxMulder91's suggestion. I listen to the Mysterious Universe podcast, and apparently there is a decent history of 'Thunderbird' sightings in Pennsylvania as they recount such stories every so often.

Could it have been something else? Sure, but as soon as I saw Pennsylvania, I started thinking thunderbird.

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.

reply to post by FoxMulder91


If I didn't see the wings flap i would have passed it off as a hand glider or one of those giant kites.
a hand glider is around 30 ft across,so i'd say about that size.
it looked like a hand glider flying backwards.
if you ever spooked a turkey out of its roost and you watched glide to a landing,they just look so big
when there flying.this thing looked big and it was at least a 1/2 mile away.and when it was flapping
it just didn't look like a normal bird would flap its wings.

"Slanter"
hilly and arid (thermal) regions or mountainous regions... do either of you live in such an area?
yes, Appalachians

OmegaLogos
"Personal Disclosure: Could it be either of those two?"
I watched a video of the cane,the wings are to narrow,as far as moth man it look similar to some pictures i saw.

reply to post by zigoapex


It is the time of year blue herrings are migrating....they look like a pteradactel."in flight".sp? and have a wing span of 5+ feet....just a thought...

reply to post by Doc Holiday


way to small,and the wing shape wasn't same.it was pretty high in the sky,mostly gliding.
saw wing flap about 5 seconds before it was out of sight.
Not bragging but I have extremely good eye sight, 15/20. my friends are always saying
I cant believe how good you can see.they like golfing with me because they don't
loose that many balls.

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.

reply to post by OmegaLogos


If a bridge collapses in PA near this site then maybe we have our answer!
I would also check the local news in PA for any other tragedies as well.

On a more skeptical note, is it at all possibe that the OP simply misjudged the distance to the object. By his own admission he was driving and there was some traffic around him preventing him from slwing down to take a better look.

In my opinion, that is probably what happened.

reply to post by youdidntseeme


Actually, I thought I was off with the distance and went on Google map and used the distance drawing tool,I was pretty close , It's a little over a 1/2 mile .and I watched for 35 to 40 seconds(had to glance at the road in front of me a couple times).I slowed down to about 40 mph while i was looking at it.
I know the area well, It's in route to where I hunt and I drive by there a couple times a week this time of year . Again,if I didn't see the wings flap,I would have written it off as a hand glider or one of those giant kites.
It was smaller than a plane but much bigger than a turkey vulture. The wing shape is what really caught my eye,the wing tips were farther ahead of it's head and it was gliding and it didn't taper down to a tail,it went to almost a point.If you took a hand glider,turned the person around so there feet would be pointing towards the tip and they were flying it backwards,all black,it would be a close match.
I don't know if the wings kept that shape as they were flapping, It was flying away from me when i seen them flap..It seemed that the flaps were slow and long, on the bottom of the stoke it seemed to go farther towards the ground.

Something like this is not completely unheard of.

The liger is the largest known cat in the world.[1] Imprinted genes may be a factor contributing to huge liger size.[4] These are genes that may or may not be expressed on the parent they are inherited from, and that occasionally play a role in issues of hybrid growth. For example, in some dog breed crosses, genes that are expressed only when maternally-inherited cause the young to grow larger than is typical for either parent breed. This growth is not seen in the paternal breeds, as such genes are normally "counteracted" by genes inherited from the female of the appropriate breed.[5]

source

What that means is, the growth determining gene can sometimes be lost among inter species breeding. Any offspring will grow out of control and never stop growing. In the case of lions, that gene has to come from the mother. If a female tiger gives birth after being impregnated by a male lion, the gene is absent. Birds could do this as well, probably. Given the abundance of bird species, I am surprised it's not more common. PA is probably an overlapping range of two birds that can do this.

I question the purpose of a leash. Does he really think he can hold it back?

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