Alternate Perceptions Magazine, November 2024
UFOs and the Thunderbird Mythos
by: Dennis Stamey
If paranormal phenomena such as cryptids have their origins in folklore, what about UFOs? As we’ve discussed, strange aerial phenomena reach way back into the past. The question is, what could have spawned aerial anomalies? Are they connected with the belief in gods that live in the heavens? Consider that every culture and civilization that has ever existed has mythologies about sky deities. For example, the Blackfoot talk about The Above People or Sky Beings who were the first creations of the supreme god Apistotoke. The first Sky Being he created was the Sun, Natoshi, who is highly venerated by the Blackfoot people. After all, the sun is the source of all life. Other Sky Beings include the moon goddess, Komorkis, the immortal hero Morning Star, and all the stars in the sky. The Above People are said to have their land and their society above the clouds.
But what is equally relevant are stories about winged creatures, especially the Thunderbird. The Thunderbird is a recurring theme in Native American mythology, particularly among Midwestern, Plains, and Northwest Coast tribes. A Thunderbird is an enormous bird and according to many Northwestern tribes, big enough to carry a killer whale in its talons. It is responsible for the sound of thunder and in some cases lightning. Traditions regarding the Thunderbird vary with tribes, Some Thunderbirds were considered sacred forces of nature, while in others, they were treated as powerful but otherwise ordinary members of the animal kingdom.
The lanuwa of Maine’s Penobscot tribe are portrayed as giant birds of prey with impenetrable metal feathers. Pomola was an evil bird spirit that lived on Mt. Katahdin, Maine’s highest mountain, and was associated with night wind, storms, and snow. According to some legends it had the head of a moose.
Binesi is a giant mythological thunderbird common to the northern and western tribes of America. The beating of its immense wings caused thunder. However, they rarely bothered humans and were treated with reverence by the Ojibwe who knew it as Animiki, a name that translates into "thunderer.”.The Potawatomi knew it as Cigwe meaning "thunder.”
Wuchowsen is a gigantic immortal bird spirit found in the traditions of several New England tribes like the Abenaki. Though Wuchowsen is monstrous in size and the winds he creates with his wings can be deadly, he is not characterized as a monster, but rather as a natural force of the world that must be respected. In most legends, a mortal hero attempts to stop Wuchowsen's wings from flapping, only to find that the world cannot survive without wind; Wuchowsen is restored to power but is either persuaded to moderate the wind he creates or forced to do so by having one of his wings tied or broken.
Avian deities are universal. There are the angels of Abrahamic religion, the griffins from the Middle East, the Garuda of Hinduism, the Valkyries of Norse legend, the Kurangaituku of Maori tradition, the Firebird from Slavic lore, the Kinnari of Southeast Asia, and the Annemoi of Greek mythology. The list could go on. Overall, they seem to represent storms, wind, and other atmospheric disturbances. In ancient Greek myth, the Anemoi were wind gods who were each ascribed a cardinal direction from which their respective winds came. Also in Greek legend, some harpies seem to have been originally wind spirits or personifications of the destructive nature of the wind.
Is there a direct lineage between these winged beings of folklore and the winged humanoids of today like the Mothman? We believe so, but we further believe that there’s a direct lineage between these wind deities and UFOs. As we’ll see later, UFOs and winged creatures may be part of the same phenomenon.
In our analysis of UFOs past and present, we’ve determined three types of aerial phenomena. 1) celestial prodigies or fantastical visions in the sky such as shields, crosses, angels, or other phantasmagoria, 2.) unexplained lights, and 3.) flying machines.
Celestial prodigies are described in many ancient and medieval texts. Livy records that in Rome in the winter of 218 B.C., “a spectacle of ships gleamed in the sky.” Were these possibly bizarre cloud formations? It’s rather doubtful since the ancients were keen observers of the sky both day and night and could easily recognize natural phenomena. He also notes that in 217 B.C. “round shields were seen in the sky” at Arpi and that in 212 B.C. “a huge stone was seen flying about.” There were many other strange occurrences during this time and Livy wondered if they weren’t a product of the fear Romans had about the war with Carthage.
Livy’s monumental History of Rome mentions numerous other incredible aberrations in the sky. At Capena in 217 B.C., “two moons rose in the daytime.” In 154 B.C., “weapons appeared flying in the sky” over Compsa. At Rome 100 B.C., “a round shield, burning and emitting sparks, ran across the sky from east to west, at sunset.” The most astonishing event he recorded had to be a legion of chariots and “armed battalions’ that hurtled through the air above Judea in the spring of A.D. 65.
The granddaddy of all prodigies happened in Nuremberg, Germany, on April 4, 1561. According to the Nuremberg Gazette, a "dreadful apparition" filled the morning sky with "cylindrical shapes from which emerged black, red, orange and blue-white spheres that darted about." Between these spheres, there were "crosses with the color of blood." This "frightful spectacle" was witnessed by "numerous men and women." Afterward, a "black, spear-like object" materialized. The author of the Gazette warned that "the God-fearing will by no means discard these signs, but will take it to heart as a warning of their merciful Father in heaven, will mend their lives and faithfully beg God, that he avert His wrath, including the well-deserved punishment, on us, so that we may, temporarily here and perpetually there, live as His children." In the same year, a Lutheran clergyman in Nuremberg recorded: “God the Almighty has ... placed in the heavens many horrible and hitherto unheard of signs... We have seen far more signs now than in any other year. The sun and the moon have been darkened on a number of occasions. A crucifix in the sky was seen, as were biers and coffins with black men beside them. Further, rods and whips and many other signs were seen in a multitude of places... and scarcely a year has passed of late without an eclipse of the sun or moon..."
What was going on in Germany that year to trigger these events? We do know that the country was in the throes of the Reformation, a movement that challenged the rigid authority of the Catholic Church. This was undoubtedly causing a lot of psychic upheaval among the populace who were having to break away from the only faith they had ever known.
A lot of Ufologists have argued that disk-shaped and elliptical objects were being seen in ancient and medieval times but this is open to question. There were a lot of configurations manifesting in the olden sky and some of them did have tubular shapes similar to those over Nuremberg. However, by tweaking the wording in these moldering manuscripts and dairies, somebody could easily describe a modern-day UFO. We’ve perused UFO reports of the early modern period from the 1600s up through the mid-1800s but never uncovered anything that suggests a UFO as we know it today, nothing but stories about errant meteors, visions, dazzling lights, and peculiar cloud formations.
Many UFO buffs like to point out an entry in the diary of James Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, dated March 1, 1639, which they say records the first UFO seen in America. Winthrop writes that three men were rowing a boat in the Muddy River when they spied a strange light overhead. “When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square,” the entry reads, “when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine.”
The light “ran as swift as an arrow” zooming back and forth between them and the village of Charlestown two miles away. “Diverse other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place,” the governor added.
Five years later on January 18, 1644, Winthrop recorded another marvel: “About midnight, three men, coming in a boat to Boston, saw two lights arise out of the water near the north point of the town cove, in form like a man, and went at a small distance to the town, and so to the south point, and there vanished away.”
The week following, another unexplained celestial event occurred over Boston Harbor. Winthrop wrote: “A light like a moon arose about the N.E. point in Boston, and met the former at Nottles Island, and there they closed in one, and then parted, and closed and parted diverse times, and so went over the hill in the island and vanished. Sometimes they shot out flames and sometimes sparkles. This was about eight of the clock in the evening, and was seen by many." He went on to relate: “About the same time, a voice was heard upon the water between Boston and Dorchester, calling out in a most dreadful manner, ‘Boy! Boy! Come away! Come away!’; and it suddenly shifted from one place to another a great distance, about 20 times. It was heard by diverse godly persons. About 14 days after, the same voice in the same dreadful manner was heard by others on the other side of the town towards Nottles Island.”
Hardly sounds like UFO sightings, which of course they weren’t.
These wonders in the heavens continued up through the 19th century and Fort in his book New Lands chronicled many accounts of fabulous cities or huge armies in the sky during that period. Rains of blood or other matter even accompanied a few of these spectacles. This reminds us of what Calphurnia, Caesar’s wife, told the Emperor in Act 2, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar concerning omens of impending doom:: “Caesar, I never stood on ceremonies,/Yet now they fright me./There is one within,/Besides the things that we have heard and seen,/Recounts most horrid sights seen by the watch./A lioness hath whelpèd in the streets,/And graves have yawned and yielded up their dead./Fierce fiery warriors ⌜fought⌝ upon the clouds/In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,/Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol./The noise of battle hurtled in the air,/Horses did neigh and dying men did groan,/And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets./O Caesar, these things are beyond all use,/And I do fear them.”
Blood drizzling upon the Capitol. Rains of blood and tissue as well as other organic matter such as snails, fish, and frogs, were documented as late as 1884 when that May a red rain spattered the ground in the township of New Hope, Missouri, at midday, coming down from a cloudless sky.
On August 3, 1869, around noon there was a shower of meat, blood, and hair at Los Nitos, California that “lasted three minutes.” On one farm, liver, intestines, “and other meat” covered two acres (we’re referencing the Vallejo Weekly Chronicle for August 7, 1869).
The Solano-Napa News Chronicle (Vallejo, California) of August 24, 1870, states that on August 15 in Tulare County there was an unexpected “whirlwind” that left “large clots of blood” everywhere. Once humankind became more scientifically minded, however, these prodigies gradually ceased. Our collective consciousness, becoming unshackled from superstition and irrationality, wasn’t creating them as before. The gods were dying. Signs in the sky and skyfalls are still reported off and on but primarily in remote corners of the world where ignorance holds sway.
One of the most remarkable celestial spectacles of recent times was the so-called “miracle of the sun.” In 1917, three children in Fátima, Portugal, claimed they had encountered an apparition of the Virgin Mary while returning home from tending sheep. Mary told them that she would reappear on the 13th day of every month for six months. Word of this miracle leaked out, and visitors started showing up in the town. But Mary would only appear to Lucia, the eldest of the children, who would have to describe the vision she was seeing to others. Mary promised that on her final visit, October 13, 1917, she would produce a miracle for everyone to see.
Word got around, and an estimated crowd of about 30,000 to 40,000 (some accounts say 100,000) came to witness the event. As the throng gazed skyward, they saw the sun acting erratically such as hurtling towards Earth before returning to its original position, whirling around on its axis, or producing flashes of colored light.
José Maria de Almeida Garrett, a science professor who was there that day recounted:
“Looking at the sun, I noticed that everything was becoming darkened. I looked first at the nearest objects and then extended my glance further afield as far as the horizon. I saw everything had assumed an amethyst color. Objects around me, the sky and the atmosphere, were of the same color. Everything both near and far had changed, taking on the color of old yellow damask,"
Skeptics say the crowd was fooled by a sundog or that they suffered retinal damage from staring at the sun too long. Those theories, though plausible, seem a bit of a stretch. People were seeing something unusual but it might have been filtered through their frame of reference.
So what caused these wonders to occur in the first place? You must understand that gazing up at the night sky or even the urge to look up is as old as our species. After all, the firmament was the realm of the gods and during times of distress, it was instinctual for humans to search the heavens for answers or plead for supplication. Shakespeare alludes to portents in the sky in many of his other plays like Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, the implication being that there is a relation between order in the heavens and order in political life, that the harmony or disharmony of one is reflected in the other. We’re not sure how Shakespeare knew about celestial prodigies but since they were still being reported in the 16th century, he would undoubtedly have heard about them. Also, he might have read histories documenting these incidents.
By the late 1800s when inventors were experimenting with balloons and gliders and there was growing excitement over manned flight, a new aerial anomaly came into play, the flying machine. Possibly the first report of a machine (or a bona fide UFO) transpired in March of 1873 near Zanesville, Ohio. According to the Zanesville Herald for April 5, farmer Thomas Inman and his son were walking home from Taylorsville two weeks prior when they noticed a light resembling a “burning brush pile” in the sky descending rapidly “with a loud roaring noise.” Once the light landed, it flickered out. That’s when a man “dressed in a complete suit of black and carrying a lantern” emerged (an early MIB?). The stranger climbed onto a buggy with no horse attached and suddenly took off ‘noiselessly but with great velocity, along the highway ... when buggy, man, and lantern suddenly disappeared as mysteriously as they came." The horseless carriage wouldn’t be invented until 1893. Unfortunately, there’s a typo in one sentence and we’re unable to determine if Inman and his son noticed the buggy before or after they saw the light.
Zanesville historian and journalist William Alexander Taylor sifted through the genealogical records and discovered that Inman and his son did live in Zanesville during that time. Perhaps it's relevant to note that the years 1870 through 1873 were fruitful as far as advancements in aviation. From September 1970 to January 1871, balloons are used by the French to transport letters and passengers out of besieged Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Between September. There was a total of 66 flights which carried 110 passengers and up to three million letters out of the city. On August 18, 1871, French pioneer Alphonse Penaud was up in the air for 13 seconds with his model glider. On February 2, 1872, French navy engineer Henri Dupuy de Lome flew one of the first navigable balloons at a speed of 9 to 11 knots and on December 13 of that same year, Paul Haenlein flew in a semi-rigid-frame dirigible powered by an internal combustion engine. On October 6, 1873, three Americans attempted an unsuccessful trans-Atlantic flight in a balloon. Also in 1873, French engineer Clément Ader was testing a tethered glider covered in goose feathers.
There were still stories about incredible pageants in the sky since the collective psyche couldn’t completely let them go, but they were waning fast. In July of 1878 says the New York Times of July 8, 1878, at about seven in the evening, several men were out in a field near Parkersburg, West Virginia, when they happened to see in a cloudless sky, about half a mile away to the west something resembling “a white horse, with head, neck, limbs, and tail clearly defined, swimming in the clear atmosphere.”
On a few occasions in America during the mid-1800s, serpents were seen slithering through the sky. Were they holdovers from the phantasmagoria phase like showers of blood or other marvels or were they a variant of the flying machines? Winged serpents are mentioned frequently in ancient Greek, European, and Mesoamerican lore.
There were sightings of dragons in England during the medieval period, the first occurring in A.D. 774 when Henry, Archdeacon of Huntington, wrote in his Historia Anglorum, “red signs appeared in the sky after sunset, and horrid serpents were seen in Sudsexe, with great amazement,” The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that in A.D. 793: “These were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air, and soon followed a great famine.” In April 1388 a “flying dragon was seen … in many places,” according to the Leicester Chronicle written by Henry Knightom in the fourteenth century.
There are references to dragons in the Old and New Testaments, a dragon being another term for Satan. In Scandinavian mythology, the dragon is associated with death and embodies doom and destruction. The years 774, 793, and 1368 weren’t good ones for Britain so maybe it's not surprising the populace was bedeviled by dragons, In 774, King Ahredl of Northumbria was expelled while King Offa of Mercia put the kingdoms of Kent and Wessex under his bootheel. 793 saw the first Viking invasion of England. In 1368, the Hundred Years War was raging and a French raiding party burned the town of Winchelsea. The dragons in 793 seemed to have been harbingers of death.
While these flying monsters of merry ol; England were decidedly dragons, the ones seen in America looked more like airborne snakes. The first sighting of an American flying serpent came from Nebraska right before the Civil War. Mari Sandoz, the Nebraska novelist and historian wrote in one of her books, “Back in the hard times of 1857–58 there were stories of a flying serpent that hovered over a Missouri River steamboat slowing for a landing.”
There was a frontier ballad about this flying serpent and the lyrics refer to it as a “flyin’ engine/ Without no wing or wheel/ It came a-roarin’ in the sky/ With lights along the side/ And scales like a serpent’s hide.” Does that mean people described it as half-engine and half-snake, some kind of bizarre aerial ship? Sandoz never elaborates.
In June of 1873 farmers near Bonham, Texas, swears the Bohham Enterprise, beheld an “enormous serpent” in a cloud, “It seemed to be as large and as long as a telegraph pole, was of a yellow striped color, and seemed to float along without any effort, “ the paper remarked. They could see it coil itself up, turn over, and thrust forward its huge head as if striking at something, displaying the maneuvers of a genuine snake. The cloud and serpent moved in an easterly direction, and were seen by persons a few miles this side of Honey Grove.”
The paper wasn’t aware that a few days earlier on June 27, the Fort Scott Monitor (Fort Scott, Kansas) related: “A strange and remarkable phenomenon was observed at sunrise yesterday morning… When the disc of the sun was about halfway above the horizon, the form of a huge serpent, apparently perfect in form, was plainly seen encircling it and was visible for some moments.”
There’s an article from the Gridley Herald (Gridley, California), which unfortunately we can’t find a date for, that reports on 10 March 1882 at about 4 p.m., two lumberjacks were startled by the sound of wings flapping in the air while cutting wood five miles northeast of Hurleton. Looking up, they discerned a creature about 40 feet above the treetops “ that looked something like a crocodile.” One of the men fired a shotgun round and the pellets” rattled as if they had struck sheet iron.” The being uttered a “cry similar to that of a calf and bear combined but gave no sign of being inconvenienced or injured”. Some Chinese workers in the area also saw the dragon.
A correspondent to the Frederick News (Frederick, Maryland), who only identified himself as “R. B.” attested in a letter published on November 29, 1883, that one morning close to 6:30, he had been standing on a hilltop when he saw, over Catoctin Mountain, a “monstrous dragon with glaring eye-balls, and mouth wide open displaying a tongue, which hung like a flame of fire from its jaws, reared and plunged.” Was it a dragon or was F.B. exaggerating?
As best as we can determine, the last flying serpent sighting occurred in May 1888 when, according to a thumbnail article in the New York Times for May 27, 1888, three sisters in Darlington County, South Carolina, were walking through the woods when they saw a hissing 15-foot serpent sailing above the treetop. The serpent was flying at the same speed as a hawk or buzzard. The Times noted that other residents in that county had seen the same phenomenon earlier in the day.
What’s interesting is that in several modern encounters with UFO occupants, the witnesses told of seeing emblems with winged serpents on the humanoids’ uniforms. This included the testimonies of Nebraska police officer Herbert Schirmer who was taken aboard a UFO on December 3, 1967, Bill Herman who was abducted by aliens in North Charleston on March 18, 1978, and Bill and Rose Shelhart who were invited aboard a saucer on April 22, 1994, that landed in the New Mexican desert. The Shelhart’s experiences were ongoing and even involved the Oz factor where at one point the desert terrain transformed into mountains with lush vegetation. In all three cases, the ufonauts differ in appearance, Herman’s abductors loosely resembling those described by Barney and Betty Hill. Amidst the new age of airships, heavenly splendors reappeared during the First World War, the greatest cataclysm in history up to that time. On September 27, residents of Delphos, Ohio, rose before dawn to see two rainbows on the western horizon. The air also “bore a strange yellowish appearance, such as might be caused by fumes from a sulfur fire.”In the middle of the rainbows was “a vari-colored cross.”
The Green County (Ohio) Record for August 4, 1898, reported that sometime that previous July, several citizens had seen “the lovely profile found on the American silver dollar” in the clouds. The dollar remained visible for almost ten minutes until “the cloud assumed another fantastic shape.” The Spanish-American War was in full gear at that time.
With the 1870s came flying machines and right after that winged men. We’ll see this repeated during the start of the flying saucer era.
The New York Times for September 12, 1880, printed this item: “One day last week a marvelous apparition was seen near Coney Island. At the height of at least 1000 feet in the air a strange object was in the act of flying toward the New Jersey coast. It was apparently a man in bat’s wings and improved frog’s legs. The face of the man could be distinctly seen, and he wore a cruel and determined expression. The movements made by the object closely resembled those of a frog in the act of swimming with his hind legs and flying with his front legs…. When we add that this monster waved his wings in answer to the whistle of a locomotive and was of a deep black color, the alarming nature of the apparition can be imagined. The object was seen by many reputable persons, and they all agree that it was a man engaged in flying toward New Jersey.”
The Louisville Courier-Journal of July 29, 1880, ran a lengthy story about another strange aeronaut. Part of it reads: “Between 6 and 7 o’clock last evening while Messers. C. A. Youngman and Ben Flexner were standing at a side window of Haddart’s drug store, at Second and Chestnut Streets, looking skyward, they discovered an object high up in the air, apparently immediately above the Ohio River bridge, which they at first thought was the wreck of a toy balloon. As it got nearer they observed that it had the appearance of a man surrounded by machinery, which he seemed to be working with his feet and hands. He worked his feet as though he was running a treadle, and his arms seemed to be swinging to and fro above his head, though the latter movement sometimes appeared to be executed with wings or fans. The gazers became considerably worked up by the apparition and inspected it very closely. They could see the delicate outlines of machinery, but the object was too high up to make out its exact construction. At times it would seem to be descending, and then the man appeared to exert himself considerably and ran the machine faster when it would ascend and assume a horizontal position. It did not travel as fast as a paper balloon, and its course seemed to be entirely under the control of the aeronaut. At first, it was traveling in a southeastward direction, but when it reached a point just over the city, and it turned and went due south until it had passed nearly over the city, when it tacked to the southwest, in which direction it was going when it passed out of sight in the twilight of the evening.”
In 1905, citizens of Van Meter, Iowa, reported encountering a half-human, half-animal with enormous, smooth bat wings. The fast-moving, smelly creature supposedly shot a blinding light out of its horned head.
Some of the airships of that era also sprouted wings. There’s an illustration in the Dallas Morning News of an airship seen over Weatherford. Texas, which depicts it as having huge butterfly wings. The airship that buzzed San Francisco in November of 1896 also had wings and there’s a sketch of it in the San Francisco Call for November 20. On April 17, 1897, in Stephenville, Texas (which would be visited by UFOs a century later) over 25 prominent witnesses including Sam Houston’s nephew and the town’s mayor claimed to have met the pilots of an airship after their vessel had to make a landing for emergency repairs. The airship was described as “a cigar-shaped body about sixty feet in length” with immense wings, and upright rotors fore and aft “like a metallic windmill” powered by storage batteries, The two-man crew identified themselves as “Tilman and Dolbear” and revealed they were “making an experimental trip to comply with a contract with certain capitalists of New York.” During New Zealand’s 1909 airship wave, a couple of people living on South Island noticed a bright light in the air moving toward the Blue Mountains around 11:30 p.m. on September 30. The light was emanating from a solid body “which had two large fans.” The airship showed up a couple of more times during the early morning hours (we’re referencing the Wanganui Herald for August 2, 1909). An item in the Washington, D.C., Evening Star for October 28, 1913, said that residents of the Brightwood and Takoma Park section of the capitol spotted something in the sky “between the hours of 7:30 and 9 o’clock” that looked either like “a huge bird” or a monoplane. Whatever it was, it didn’t make any sound. The monoplanes were the first heavier-than-air machines but few were built after 1913 because the single pair of wings didn’t provide enough lift.
A year after the flying saucers made their debut, there were more sightings of winged oddities. The Chadron Record of September 17, 1948, mentions that Jim Blundell, a rancher in Dawes County, Nebraska, saw two large birds hovering around his barn on the night of the 16th. The rancher claimed they had “a luminous yellow covering.” He and his wife watched the birds for about 15 minutes. At about 3 p.m. on March 31, 1948, some residents in Longview, Washington, saw three men buzzing through the air almost 250 feet above them. The trio wore grey uniforms but didn’t appear to have wings. Although the news article from the Longview Daily News didn’t elaborate, it's possible the aviators had their arms outstretched. After flying around for a few minutes, the group headed toward Seattle.
On May 22, a woman in Utica, Michigan, observed a “man-sized bat-like thing, flapping its weeks and going south.” On the 27th, a man sighted another bat-like creature soaring over Livernois Avenue in downtown Detroit. The witness, Bruce Falls, estimated that the bat was about 2400 feet in the air. He said it was “too big for a hawk” and moved faster than any bird he had ever seen. Falls never noticed it flapping its wings. Nor did it make any noise (we’re referencing the Detroit Times, May 30, 1948).
We remember listening to a call-in radio show many years ago with UFOs as the topic. One caller who had worked in a control tower at an Air Force base (we forgot where) alleged that in the early fifties, he saw a strange craft taxi onto the runway one night The object was soundless, carried no landing lights, and was shaped much like the “bat plane.” He also said that it never appeared on radar. The caller said he was never able to learn what the mystery plane was.
Around 2:30 am on June 18, 1953, in the Houston Heights, Hilda Walker, a 23-year-old housewife, and two of her neighbors were sitting on their front porch, when they suddenly noticed a large shadow moving across the lawn "It appeared to be a very tall man or manlike figure standing about six and a half feet tall but with bat-like wings attached to his back," one of the men told the Houston Chronicle. "It also seemed to be encased in a halo of glowing light." The mysterious figure lingered for almost 30 seconds then the light began to fade and the figure vanished. We can’t find any other cases of winged humanoids after 1953 but that’s not to say there weren’t any. If so, they were few and far between.
On the night of November 16, 1963, four teenage boys were walking home from a party near Maidstone, Kent when they spotted a large luminous object hovering over a field adjacent to their path. The object was oval or egg-shaped and several feet in diameter. The glowing orb descended below the treeline and the youths crept over to where it had landed. They heard twigs snapping and rustling of leaves and soon they saw something waddling toward them. The beastie was around five feet tall, had a pair of huge, leathery wings and its body was covered with fur. Most disturbing of all was that the oversized bat didn’t have a head. Others in that vicinity would later allege they encountered a similar monstrosity. A similar man-bat also lacking a head would turn up practically ten years to the day in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, during a UFO ‘flap.”
There was a spate of winged cryptids during the 1970s. In 1976, a varmint with huge bat wings was swooping down on folks in small Texas towns. On April 17, 1976, two girls saw a large "feathered bird-man" circling a church in Mawnan, Cornwall. There were supposed sightings of the bird man over this same church in 1978, 1979, 1989, and 1995 (for a detailed study of these reports we suggest reading Janet Board’s Alien Animals: A Worldwide Investigation).
Our last category, which we’ll touch upon very briefly, the unexplained lights, have been seen all over the world since the outset of civilization. We’re not talking about ghost lights or orbs associated with hauntings but aerial phenomena. They were also prevalent during the airship waves of the 1890s and the early 1900s. In his book Operation Trojan Horse, Keel states that sightings of “soft” luminous objects comprise the majority of UFOs while solid metallic objects have always been “quite rare” (a debatable contention). He argued that since these “soft” sightings are far more numerous, meaning they were the “real phenomenon,” they deserved the closest scrutiny.
In our view, it should be the opposite. Any ostensibly solid preternatural manifestation, be it a Sasaquatch, a woman in white, or a flying disk, is an expression of the collective consciousness. By studying these manifestations, we can connect them to cultural traditions, psychology, history, and even literature to obtain a better perspective of what we are confronting. Mysterious lights are only globs of energy and can tell us nothing.
Let’s offer a fast evaluation of everything we’ve presented. Whether rare or not the solid variety of UFOs or machines has nothing to do with any wonders or signs in the heavens, nothing to do with flying shields, flaming crosses, or ghostly armies, and nothing to do with what the ancients observed. Celestial prodigies and flying machines stem from two different mythologies as well as two different worldviews, one based on superstition and absurdity and the other on science and reason. Flying apparatuses made their premiere in the 1870s (unless we count the half-organic, half-mechanical apparition that was cruising over the Missouri River ten years earlier) and are more active now than ever.
To create this last and no doubt final category of atmospheric phenomena, the collective psyche or Trickster drew upon the Thunderbird/flying serpent/winged humanoid mythos and then put these objects in guises to match the prevailing zeitgeist. The winged cryptids are likewise part of this conjuring act and are by-products of the UFO. Their forms also changed with the times, going from winged men to winged beasts. The flying serpents, totally out of place by the end of the 19th century, vanished altogether only to reappear decades afterward as insignias on patches worn by UFO pilots. The facade put on by these flying saucers has led to confusion about their true nature, with the majority of researchers in the field assuming they are extraterrestrial. On the surface, that’s a logical premise, but as Keel lamented, evidence that contradicts this is either ignored or discarded by the UFO community, thus ensuring that the alien thesis will always prevail.
