Cryptozoology or
mass hysteria? The
monstrous creature known as Big Bird terrorized parts of south central
Texas in the mid-
1970s.
It all started in
1976 when two
San Benito policemen,
Arturo Padilla and
Homer Galvan, reported seeing strange black
bird-like shapes flying in the early morning skies. A resident of
Brownsville, Texas,
Alverico Guajardo, later reported hearing a
thumping noise outside his
mobile home one night -- he looked out to discover a
gigantic bird standing in his
front yard. "It's like a bird, but it's not a bird," he later said. "That animal is
not from this world."
As
sightings of the giant bird grew, a
radio station offered a
reward for the creature's capture, a
TV station broadcast a picture of a
12-inch-long bird
track, and the
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, fearful that
drunken monster hunters would start
shooting every bird they saw, released a statement reminding people that most birds were
protected by various state and federal laws. In February, several
schoolteachers driving to work saw a creature with a twelve-foot
wingspan which
buzzed their cars; one of the
teachers identified it as a
prehistoric gliding dinosaur called a
pterosaur.
Coincidentally (wink wink, nudge nudge), just a few years earlier, in 1974,
paleontologists made a big, high profile find -- the largest known pterosaur, discovered in
Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas. Dubbed
Quetzalcoatlus by
scientists and the
Texas Pterosaur by everyone else, it had an incredible 50-foot wingspan, making it the largest
flying animal ever. Unlike most other pterosaurs, it lived
inland and probably scraped by as a
scavenger.
While some people believed that the Big Bird was a
living fossil -- a dinosaur which somehow survived to the
present day -- most other people suspected that the
publicity over the Texas Pterosaur encouraged
misidentifications,
hallucinations, and outright
hoaxes. At any rate, long before the middle of that
bicentennial year, sightings of the
monster dwindled and finally
disappeared as the Big Bird faded back into the shadows.