The latest on the giant bird. I like the "Unknown/suppressed island" theory and the brave mother in Illinois snatching her child from a beak of one ofthe monsters.
Tale of big bird catches some air
SOUTHWEST: Letterman, radio stations have some fun with Alaska sighting.
Southwest Alaskans see bird they say is Super Cub-sized
Steller's sea eagle
By Peter Porco
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: October 18, 2002)
A newspaper story this week about the sightings of a large bird in Southwest Alaska turned out to have wings.
The tale of villagers seeing an eaglelike bird with a wingspan as long as a Dodge van brought dozens of e-mails from readers in Alaska and the Lower 48 and one from the Netherlands.
The online newsmagazine Drudge Report posted links. The San Diego FM radio program "Smooth Jazz" talked it up. And David Letterman joked about it.
John Bouker, the Dillingham pilot who saw the bird while flying into Manokotak recently and who was mentioned in the story, said he was getting "bummed out" from all the calls he received from news organizations.
"They're calling from all over the world," Bouker said Thursday. "The London Telegraph, a Los Angeles radio station, Seattle TV -- I could go on and on and on."
Some people have written to the paper to say they know what the folks in Manokotak and Togiak have really seen around the hills and valleys west of Dillingham in recent weeks.
"I believe this is a possible Dragon Sighting," wrote "Anonoumous." "I believe that it is a Northern Ice Dragon."
People who, like Bouker, have actually seen the bird have said it is like an eagle but enormous, with a wingspan of up to 14 feet. Even people who say the bird is more modestly sized still say it is huge.
Scientists were somewhat skeptical. They said the bird could be a Steller's sea eagle, one of the largest eagles, a creature native to northeast Asia and sometimes seen in Alaska but whose wingspan is not known to exceed 8 feet.
But to some e-mailers, what do the biologists know?
"There was a recent sighting of a giant raptor in the Coastal Bend region" of Texas, writes a woman from the Houston-Galveston area. "Don't let the scientists blow this off. It could be the biological discovery of the century."
"There's a theory that these are relict (sic) teratorns, the giant scavenger bird that is found widespread in Pleistocene deposits," one man wrote. "Obviously, biologists don't like the idea of a large bird they don't know about."
On Wednesday night's show, David Letterman flapped his arms during his monologue and said Alaska has nothing to compare with New York. The TV screen then showed the image of a giant winged rat over Manhattan's Central Park.
A writer from Palmer said a large bird showed up early last week.
"As I was driving to work on Bodenburg Loop in Palmer I saw a huge object in the sky looking like it was coming in for a landing," the person wrote. "As I got closer and it came across the river and got lower, I realized that it was not a plane but a very, very large bird."
Similar sightings have taken place apparently in Illinois, where a mother had to smack the giant bird so it would drop her child from its beak; Erie, Pa.; and Evanston, Wyo. A North Carolina author and other people said the bird could be the famed Thunderbird of Native American legend.
Another author said his book "Hollow Planets" advances "the theory of an unknown/suppressed island in the Arctic" and implied the bird may originate from there.
A man remembers an astonishing sight as he crossed the equator on a troop transport in 1944.
"It was not a sea bird in any form," he writes. "I did some research just a few years ago to try to determine what I had seen. I came onto some information on a flying animal called a Pteradon, which is of the Pteradactyl family. These animals are thought to be extict over 150,000 years ago."
Despite the skepticism of some people, Bouker, the Dillingham pilot, said he knows what he has seen and agrees with some scientists that it's likely a Steller's sea eagle.
"People in Alaska can appreciate this stuff," Bouker said, adding that those in the Lower 48 cannot understand Great Land dimensions. "In Alaska, we see big birds, big moose, big fish, things you don't see down south."
