A Menagerie of Mysterious Beasts by Ken Gerhard

Author:Ken Gerhard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ken gerhard, cryptozoology, menagery of mysterious beasts, menagerie of beasts, menagery of beasts, humanoids, ufos, aliens, paranormal, parapsychology
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2016-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

A modern pictograph of the Piasa Bird at Alton, Illinois.

Nevertheless, Illinois boasts at least twenty-three Thunderbird reports since 1948. Without a doubt, the most famous incident occurred in the central town of Lawndale on July 25, 1977, when a young boy named Marlon Lowe was temporarily plucked from the ground by one of two enormous birds flying just overhead. This notable event was verified by a handful of witnesses, including Lowe’s parents. Five days later and eighty miles to the south, controversial footage of what appears to be two outsized birds was shot at Lake Shelbyville.

Further verification that something exceptional was flying over the Prairie State during the 1970s came via resident Walter Bednarik, who reached out to me in order to relate the following account.

In the summer of 1976, I was walking on a trail along the banks of Salt Creek in Brookfield (a suburb of Chicago), Illinois, in the forest preserve, when I heard some noise behind me. I was maybe ten feet from the edge of the water. As I turned toward the creek, I saw a large black bird, flying slowly, gliding down the length of the creek. It flew by level with my head, about eight feet above the water.

The bird was dark, all black, with a large wingspan of fifteen to twenty feet, which is the width of the creek in that area, bank to bank. The head was large, same color as the body; its neck was also black, not long like a condor or vulture, but more like an eagle. The wings appeared to be fully extended, and the wing tips had clearly visible individual feathers, just like an eagle. And just as quickly, it flew around the bend in the creek and was gone.

Later that day, I ran into one of the senior bird keepers at Brookfield Zoo that I knew and related my experience. He listened, and his first response was I saw a golden eagle. I reminded him of the wingspan, overall size, and color; then he said maybe a condor. He showed me one of the eagles in captivity and a picture of a condor, but neither matched the color, wingspan, or size of what I saw.

There seems to have been a bit of a lull in sightings over the next dozen years or so, with things getting interesting again in 1990. At least according to eyewitness Jeff Beyers, who claims to have had a sighting in late November a mere three miles south of his hometown of Pana. Driving swiftly down Route 51 on a clear, starry night, Beyers spotted what he at first took to be a man wearing a trench coat standing in the road. Imagine his surprise when the figure unfurled wings around fifteen feet across, flapped them once and then disappeared into the darkness. In that instant, he realized that the subject’s head was clearly that of a great, gray, feathered bird. During an interview, Beyers admitted that the thing had been “scary big.

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