Giant Bird!

[Dru]

A super-sized bird in Alaska

By PETER PORCO

Anchorage Daily News

October 15, 2002

 

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A giant winged creature, like something out of Jurassic Park, has reportedly been sighted several times in Southwest Alaska in recent weeks.

 

Villagers in Togiak and Manokotak say they have seen a huge bird that's much bigger than anything they have seen before.

 

A pilot says he spotted the creature while flying passengers to Manokotak last week. He calculated that its wingspan matched the length of a wing on his Cessna 207. That's about 14 feet.

 

Other people have put the wingspan in a similar range.

 

Scientists aren't sure what to make of the reports. No one doubts that people in the region west of Dillingham have seen a very large rapto-like bird. But biologists and other people familiar with big Alaska birds say they're skeptical it's that big.

 

A recent sighting of the mystery bird occurred Oct. 10 when Moses Coupchiak, a 43-year-old heavy equipment operator from Togiak, 40 miles west of Manokotak, saw the bird flying toward him from about two miles away as he worked his tractor.

 

"At first I thought it was one of those old-time Otter planes," Coupchiak said. "Instead of continuing toward me, it banked to the left, and that's when I noticed it wasn't a plane."

 

The bird was "something huge," he said. "The wing looks a little wider than the Otter's, maybe as long as the Otter plane."

 

The bird flew behind a hill and disappeared. Coupchiak got on the radio and warned people in Togiak to tell their children to stay away.

 

Pilot John Bouker said he was highly skeptical of reports of "this great big eagle" that is two or three times the size of a bald eagle. "I didn't put any thought into it."

 

But early this week while flying into Manokotak, Bouker, owner of Bristol Bay Air Service, looked out his left window and 1,000 feet away, "there's this big ... . bird," he said.

 

"The people in the plane all saw him," Bouker said. "He's huge, he's huge, he's really, really big. You wouldn't want to have your children out."

 

Nicolai Alakayak, a freight and passenger driver from Manokotak who was flying with Bouker, said the creature looked like an eagle and was as large as "a little Super Cub."

 

Comparison to an eagle, certainly. Super Cub? Probably not, scientists said.

 

"I'm certainly not aware of anything with a 14-foot wingspan that's been alive for the last 100,000 years," said federal raptor specialist Phil Schemf in Juneau.

 

Schemf, other biologists, a village police officer and teachers at the Manokotak School said the sightings could be of a Steller's sea eagle, a species native to northeast Asia and one of the world's largest eagles. It's about 50 percent bigger than a bald eagle.

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com.)

[Terminal_Gravity]

Maybe the snafflehounds we all know and love is the larval stage of these monsters.

 

I bet after the hounds reach a certain age they migrate to Alaska, cocoon up in a glacier and sprout wings.

 

That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

[thelawgoddess]

mabye it was an archeopteryx.

[Dru]

It was Anna flying a camouflaged stealth plane.

[Dr_Flash_Amazing]

The FAA recently got to the bottom of this strange event. It seems that a certain Public Television star has gotten a little too big for his britches, and has taken to terrorizing innocent Alaskans while playing at being an "eagle."

 

Here is a picture of the perpetrator in the planning phase of his missions:

 

And again at the launch of the first sortie in downtown New York City, accompanied by various PBS officials and the Bird's adoring throng:

 

Big Bird issued a statement early today expressing some contrition for his actions, but was unavailable for further comment.

[Dru]

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."

[iain]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Dru:

The latest on the giant bird.

 

pages of stuff follow...

 

---

Thank god I was waiting for this update.

[Cpt.Caveman]

Imagine the size of the shit that would fly out of the sky onto your windshield. I wonder if it could break it.