A flying feathered reptile? Hogwash, think the skeptics. How do the agnostics explain the following tales and facts?
In February 1856, a crew of French railway tunnelers unearthed a large limestone rock on the St. Dizzier-Nancy line. The boulder cracked open, a Pterodactyl was found encased inside the rock’s cavity. The Thunderbird fluttered its wings, made some croaking noises and died. There are limestone cliffs near Alton, Illinois. Did something similar happen but the Midwest creature lived? Did a landslide crack open a rock cavity that contained a beastie? Could this theory explain the Piasa’s existence?
In 1890 according to Wild West lore, cowboys near Tombstone, Arizona, shot down a Thunderbird. A purported faded photograph of the dead monster made the rounds through many media publications decades ago. The image is now thought to be a fake. Legend is usually based on some truth.
The most believable account of the Tombstone incident had two cowboys shoot at a Thunderbird. The flying dinosaur was out of range of the horsemen’s fusillades and flew away. The reptile was estimated to have a wingspan of twenty to thirty feet, which would be the size of a small Cessna airplane.
While exploring the Southwest during the 1500s and 1600s, Spanish Conquistadors were told by the Indians, how their ancestors had become the sustenance of a desert Thunderbird. After suffering great losses of life, the Pima tribe went from prey to predator.
The high cave lair of the dinosaur was found. A pyre was built and ignited at the mouth of the monster’s cave. The flames kept the reptile in its den, the smoke from the bonfire asphyxiated the monster.
A debunker reading these accounts would think the bull is off an antique American Buffalo Nickel; or show me proof, not fanciful tales.
During the summer of 1977, two large, black birds with long necks and curved beaks were seen flying over Illinois and Indiana. On July 25,1977, in Lawndale, Illinois, at 8:30 PM, one of these giant birds swooped into the backyard of Jake and Ruth Lowe. The predator with a fifteen-foot wingspan attacked ten-year-old Marlon Lowe and his playmates.
Marlon’s friend Travis Goodwin jumped into the backyard’s swimming pool to avoid the bird’s talons. The creature went after Marlon who weighed seventy pounds. The bird grabbed hold of Marlon and carried the screaming kicking boy thirty to forty yards. Marlon managed to strike the bird repeatedly as he was carried to a height of ten feet. With torn clothes and scratches, Marlon was released from the creature’s claws. With a thud the bloodied youngster hit the ground.
Was this attacking bird a Condor or a small Piasa? In theory, a bird of prey can pick up half of its weight. Do Condors or Turkey Vultures grow to weigh one hundred and forty pounds? Not according to ornithologists. What ever it was, the creature and its mate were not seen again.
Perhaps in 1889 Indiana, on a wintry night, a Thunderbird fancied the taste of human flesh and spotted Oliver Larch on his way to the well. If a Piasa did not seize young Larch, then what did carry off the eleven-year-old? (1)
12 O’CLOCK HIGH
(UFO ENEMY UNKNOWN)
On January 7, 1948, a military communiqué announced, Captain Thomas Mantel had lost his life while chasing an unidentified flying object. After an Air Force inquest the obituary’s cause of death was changed, it was now stated Mantel had lost his life due to pilot error. UFO-ologists disagree and claim the courageous fighter pilot was shot down by the flying saucer he pursued.
Mantel who is sometimes erroneously referred to as “Dutch” was a capable airman. The veteran pilot had over two thousand eight hundred hours of flight time. Mantel was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, for his exploits over Normandy during World War II.
On the day of his death, Mantel was in command of a group of four National Guard Mustang fighters. These piston-powered planes were being ferried from Georgia to Kentucky. That afternoon, civilians and military personnel saw a large white saucer with a red light on its hull hovering near Fort Knox, Kentucky. At 2:45 PM, Mantel and his echelon were vectored by radio to the vicinity of the cruising UFO, which was described as being one-fourth the size of the moon.
One of the squadron’s planes turned back due to problems with its oxygen tank. Near Fort Knox, Mantel sighted the UFO and ordered his two wingmen to land at the nearest base and be readied for combat. Mantel did not have “Hot Guns”, he was unarmed but continued to close on the climbing UFO.
Mantel described the spaceship as being two hundred and fifty feet to three hundred feet in diameter; his last message to the control tower is sensational and disputed. Mantel’s last words were, “My God, I can see people in the thing!” Then voices and radar contact was lost.
Around 5 PM, Mantel’s wrecked plane was found in a field near Franklin, Kentucky. The Air Force team investigating the crash came to a quick conclusion. At an altitude of twenty five thousand to thirty thousand feet, Mantel blacked out due to oxygen starvation. With the pilot unconscious, the fighter plane went into a death roll and crashed into the ground. The Air Force concluded there was no UFO; Mantel had been chasing a high altitude weather balloon or the planet Venus.
Glen Mays, who witnessed the event from the ground said, “Mantel’s Mustang seemed to come apart in the air as if it exploded.” Intentionally or unintentionally, the fighter plane was shot down.
The crash scene did not make sense; the Mustang was not borrowed into a smoking crater. Crippled planes nose into the ground due to the engine weight at the front of the craft. The Mustang’s wings and tail section were broken off, but the fighter’s plane‘s fuselage was intact.
The plane had belly flopped onto the ground, the trees around the crash area were not sheered. One of the Mustang’s propeller blades was stuck into the ground, as if it had been driven into the Earth. Mantel’s corpse was found in the cockpit. The impact of the crash had impaled the control stick into Mantel’s chest; his watch had stopped at 3:18 PM. Some UFO-ologists deduce the UFO had tried to bring the crippled fighter plane to Earth, without injuring the pilot.
Thomas Mantel is buried in Louisville, Kentucky, at the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery. How could a proficient pilot who survived flak and Luftwaffe perils, be killed at altitude by misidentifying a weather balloon or the planet Venus? Is the military’s version of how and why Mantel died, pure fabrication? Would a 1948 fighter plane, not be equipped with oxygen for its pilot?
Similar sightings of this UFO were reported on January 8, in Clinton, North Carolina, and on February 1, in Circleville, Ohio. I wonder what Mantel saw; it sure wasn’t a meteorological balloon.
Most UFO abductions are laughed off as imaginative yarns with no foundation of truth. This Michigan UFO-fighter jet encounter, is a mind bender, it is a verified true tale!
On the night of November 23, 1953, First Lieutenant Felix Eugene Moncla and Second Lieutenant Robert L. Wilson vanished in a snowstorm while in pursuit of a UFO. Moncla of Moreauville, Louisiana, and Wilson of Ponca City, Oklahoma, were scrambled to investigate a UFO over the Soo Locks no fly zone. The waterway is a strategic choke point. The locks enable cargo ships to enter into the lower Great Lakes from Lake Superior.
Moncla’s all weather F-89 Scorpion interceptor had problems with its radar. At a speed of five hundred miles per hour, the fighter was vectored to the UFO’s location by ground control. Base technicians saw on their radar screens the interceptor and UFO close on each other. Moncla’s last words were, “I am going in for a closer look.”
Suddenly the two craft merged, the UFO had swallowed the F89. Seconds later the alien radar blip left the screen, the UFO’s speed was unimaginable.
Moncla’s