🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº9045 ACTIVE

Thunderbird

In April 1948 four people in Illinois told United Press they had seen a bird bigger than an airplane.

Where and when was Thunderbird sighted?

Location: Illinois, United States
Date sighted: 1948-04-04
Coordinates: 38.891, -90.184
Last updated: 2026-10-10

LOCATION

What is Thunderbird?

The best-known of them, Col. W. F. Siegmund, watched it on Sunday 4 April while riding four miles north of Alton; the wire story that made the case national came from Belvidere, where the farmer Robert Price and the truck driver Veryl Babb had reported one on 9 April. The flap was over in three weeks, and it ended the way almost no retelling admits: Bill Gesell of Belvidere said the thing was an airplane towing a glider, Babb agreed, and Siegmund himself concluded it had been an albatross or a condor. The 1948 press tells the case differently from the legend, and two stories have been welded onto it — the Lawndale incident of 1977, in which a bird was said to have lifted a ten-year-old boy, which happened twenty-nine years later and 164 km away, and the Lakota Wakinyan, which is not a bird at all.

What is the history of Thunderbird?

A farmer, a truck driver and a wire service. The Illinois file opens on 9 April 1948, when United Press moved a dispatch out of Belvidere under the headline "Prehistoric Bird Latest Sky Spot". It quoted Robert Price, who said he had seen the thing while working near his barn on his farm at Caledonia, in Boone County, and Veryl Babb, a truck driver from Freeport who reported something similar the same day at another place. Price described "a long neck and what I suppose were its feet trailing behind it", and said that he and his wife both watched it flap off to the north-east — she is in the dispatch and has been dropped from nearly every retelling since. Babb explained why he had kept quiet: "I saw the bird but at first I didn't say anything because I thought people would laugh at me. When I read that Price had seen it I decided to report all about it." His own comparison was not a thunderbird: "It was bigger than an airplane and reminded me of one of those prehistoric monsters I learned about when I was in school." The colonel. Two days later the story acquired the witness that made it national. Col. W. F. Siegmund, former commandant of the Army air base at Kearns, Utah, and by then sales manager for the Western Cartridge Company at Alton, told United Press he had watched the creature at about 11.30 a.m. on the previous Sunday — 4 April 1948 — while horseback riding four miles north of Alton. He put it at the size of a small pursuit plane, flying north-east at 4,000 to 5,000 feet. "At first I thought there was something wrong with my eyesight," he said. "But it was definitely a bird, and not a glider or jet plane." Two details of his account are almost never quoted. He was not alone: his companion was Col. Ralph Jackson, head of Western Military Academy, who was talking to a farmer at the time and saw nothing — "and I didn't mention it to him because it looked too incredible". And Siegmund, like twelve-year-old James Trares of Glendale, Missouri, who came forward at the same time, had said nothing until he read the Belvidere dispatch. Trares's sighting had happened about three months earlier, which places it in the winter, not in the April wave at all. How the wave was manufactured. Compare two printings of the same story. The full United Press text keeps Trares's "about three months ago", Siegmund's companion, his employer and his hesitation. The version that country weeklies ran seven weeks later — a Western Newspaper Union page feature printed in the Tabor City Tribune of North Carolina on 28 May 1948 and in at least three Florida weeklies — cuts all of it, and carries the headline "Three Illinois Men See 'Monster Bird'". There were four named witnesses plus Price's wife; one of them was a child; and the child lived in Missouri. That headline is the shape in which most of the country met the story, and it is the shape the legend kept. The last sighting of the flap. Around 24 April E. M. Coleman, a former salesman, and his five-year-old son James saw a shadow cross their house on Alton's northern outskirts. Coleman called it "an enormous, incredible thing with a body that looked like a naval torpedo", flying at about 500 feet and casting "a shadow the same as that of a Piper Cub at the same height". He said he first took it for a glider, "then I saw it flap its wings". Alton already had a winged monster, and it took three centuries to grow the wings. In 1673 Jacques Marquette, passing the bluffs above the site of Alton, recorded "two painted monsters" on the rock — "as large as a calf; they have horns on their heads like those of deer, a horrible look, red eyes, a beard like a tiger's, a face somewhat like a man's, a body covered with scales, and so long a tail that it winds all around the body". No wings. The Illinois State Museum dates the earliest known sketch to William Dennis in 1825, who called it a "Flying Dragon", and records that in 1836 John Russell of Bluffdale published the article that named the figure the Piasa Bird and invented much of the legend attached to it; in 1847 the Swiss artist Rudolf Friederick Kurz described it as "a colossal eagle". The original rock was quarried away for lime. So the cliff four miles from Siegmund's ride had carried a giant flying creature for a century before anything flew over it in 1948. One thing the 1948 press did not call it: a thunderbird. In every printing of the story I have been able to read, the words are "monster bird", "giant bird", "enormous bird". The Thunderbird label was fastened on afterwards by cryptozoological writers, and it borrows a word that does not mean what the label implies. In the Oglala theology recorded by James R. Walker at Pine Ridge and published by the American Museum of Natural History in 1917 — largely from the shaman Sword, interpreted by Burt Means — Wakinyan is "a material God whose substance is visible only when He so wills"; "he is shapeless, but has wings with four joints each; he has no feet, yet he has huge talons; he has no head, yet has a huge beak with rows of teeth in it, like the teeth of the wolf; his voice is the thunder clap". Anyone who sees his substance is thereby made a heyoka and must speak and act contrarily for the rest of his life. That is a being of religion, tied to a ceremonial obligation and to a living people; it is not a large bird waiting to be identified, and it belongs to a nation whose homeland is not Illinois.

Timeline: the documented record of Thunderbird

1673 Jacques Marquette, descending the Mississippi past the bluffs above the site of Alton, records "two painted monsters" on the rock: as large as a calf, horned like deer, red-eyed, scaled, with a tail that winds around the body and ends in a fish's tail. The description contains no wings. This is the oldest dated account of a monster in the sky over this stretch of Illinois, and it is not a bird.
1836 John Russell of Bluffdale, Illinois, publishes the article that names the Alton bluff figure the Piasa Bird and supplies it with a legend — a man-eating flying monster killed by Chief Ouatoga and twenty warriors — most of which, the Illinois State Museum states, he created himself. Eleven years before, William Dennis had sketched the same figure and called it a "Flying Dragon"; by 1847 Rudolf Friederick Kurz was calling it "a colossal eagle".
26 April 1890 The Tombstone Epitaph prints "Found on the Desert: A Strange Winged Monster Discovered and Killed on the Huachuca Desert", the story from which the famous "thunderbird photograph" is descended. Two ranchers are said to have shot a featherless creature ninety-two feet long with membranous wings and a toothed beak, "last Sunday" — 20 April. There is no photograph in the article and no barn.
Sunday 4 April 1948, c. 11.30 a.m. Col. W. F. Siegmund, riding four miles north of Alton with Col. Ralph Jackson of Western Military Academy, sees what he later describes to United Press as a bird the size of a small pursuit plane at 4,000-5,000 feet. Jackson, talking to a farmer beside him, sees nothing, and Siegmund says nothing to him "because it looked too incredible". This is the earliest dated sighting of the Illinois flap.
9 April 1948 United Press moves a dispatch from Belvidere, Illinois — "Prehistoric Bird Latest Sky Spot" — quoting the farmer Robert Price of Caledonia, who watched the thing with his wife, and the Freeport truck driver Veryl Babb. It is this dispatch, not any sighting, that starts the wave: Siegmund and twelve-year-old James Trares of Glendale, Missouri, both come forward only after reading it, and Trares's own sighting had been about three months earlier.
17-18 April 1948 Bill Gesell of Belvidere states publicly that the object was an airplane towing a glider — "I saw it myself" — and Veryl Babb, whose report had launched the wire story, agrees. United Press carries the retraction; the Charleston Daily Mail prints it on 18 April. Nine days after the first dispatch, the Boone County half of the case has been withdrawn by its own witnesses. Almost no later account mentions this.
Late April 1948 E. M. Coleman and his five-year-old son James report an "enormous, incredible thing with a body that looked like a naval torpedo" over Alton's northern outskirts, casting "a shadow the same as that of a Piper Cub". In the same United Press story Siegmund, having read up on large birds, says it was an albatross or a condor; S. B. Heckler of the St Louis Audubon Society says a big pelican.
28 May 1948 A Western Newspaper Union page feature reaches the country weeklies under the headline "Three Illinois Men See 'Monster Bird'". It is the version most of the United States read, and it is wrong in the count and in the geography: there were four named witnesses plus Price's wife, one of them a twelve-year-old boy, and the boy lived in Missouri. The cuts also remove the fact that his sighting was months old.
25 July 1977 At Lawndale, Logan County, Illinois — 164 km from Alton and twenty-nine years after the flap — ten-year-old Marlon Lowe is said to have been lifted briefly by a large bird in front of several witnesses, among them his mother Ruth. Jerry D. Coleman interviewed the family within hours. This, and not anything in 1948, is the incident routinely folded into accounts of the 1948 birds.
2 July 1993 Karl Shuker writes to Mark Chorvinsky of Strange Magazine proposing that the "thunderbird photograph" people remember is a widely reproduced picture of hunters with a marabou stork. Chorvinsky's own search, across several issues of the magazine, never produced a copy of the alleged photograph, and he was still working on the case when he died in 2005.

Is there a rational explanation for Thunderbird?

The flap was retracted, and almost nobody repeats the retraction. On Saturday 17 April 1948 Bill Gesell of Belvidere, another of those who had seen the thing, said flatly that it was an airplane towing a glider — "I saw it myself" — and Veryl Babb, the Freeport truck driver whose report had started the wire story, said he had to agree. United Press moved that too; the Charleston Daily Mail carried it on 18 April. Nine days after the first dispatch, the Belvidere half of the case had been withdrawn by its own witnesses. The star witness changed his mind as well. By the end of April, Siegmund told United Press he had been reading up on large birds and had concluded that what he saw was an albatross or a condor blown far from home. S. B. Heckler of the St Louis Audubon Society thought it was a big pelican. The St Louis Star-Times summed up the state of the evidence in an editorial on 1 May 1948, listing what the creature had by then been "positively identified" as: "an enemy projectile, an eagle, a small plane, a condor, a magnetometer towed by aircraft, the last surviving member of the great auk family and a blue heron", and noting that the witnesses agreed it "flaps its wings, doesn't flap it(s) wings, is very large, just a little bigger than a duck… has feathers and is as naked as a billiard ball". The Air Force reached the same place with less work. The Project Sign file on the case — Incident #123, docketed as "Alton, Illinois, 11 April 1948" — consists of a single newspaper clipping. J. Allen Hynek, reviewing it for Project Grudge, wrote that "if one considers Colonel Siegmund's statements apart from the considerably less reliable ones of the other observers, it would seem that the object may really have been a bird", and the case was downgraded from unidentified to "bird". No one appears to have interviewed anybody. The arithmetic of carrying a child. The 1948 file contains no attempt to carry anyone off; that belongs to the Lawndale case of 25 July 1977, twenty-nine years later and 164 km (102 miles) away, in which a bird was said to have lifted ten-year-old Marlon Lowe briefly by his shirt straps. Loren Coleman, whose brother Jerry D. Coleman interviewed the family within hours, gives the boy's weight as about 65 lb (29 kg). Put that against the candidates. The Animal Diversity Web gives the turkey vulture at 0.85–2.0 kg with a wingspan of 1.70–1.83 m; the golden eagle at 3.0–6.1 kg and 1.85–2.20 m; the Andean condor, the largest flying land bird, at 7.7–15 kg with a 3.2 m span. To lift 29 kg, a golden eagle would have to carry roughly five times its entire body mass, a condor nearly three times its own — and the same source notes that a condor's feet "are much less powerful with shorter blunted talons compared to those of other birds of prey", because it walks to its food and does not carry it. No living bird does this. That is not a matter of opinion, and it needs no adjective. The photograph nobody has. The story that a nineteenth-century newspaper printed a picture of a giant bird nailed to a barn wall goes back to the Tombstone Epitaph of 26 April 1890 and its item "Found on the Desert: A Strange Winged Monster Discovered and Killed on the Huachuca Desert". I have read that article in full in the Library of Congress scan. It describes a creature ninety-two feet long with a 160-foot wingspan, two feet, a beak full of teeth and wings "composed of a thick and nearly transparent membrane… devoid of feathers or hair" — a pterosaur, not a bird — and it mentions no photograph and no barn. The control is on the same page: the word "photograph" appears four times in that issue, all of them in a different item, where the Epitaph thanks H. Buehman, the photographer of Tucson, for mailing in a cabinet print. The paper mentioned photographs when it had one. Mark Chorvinsky spent years and three issues of Strange Magazine looking for the image; as Karl Shuker records, no copy has ever been produced, and Shuker's own suggestion — put to Chorvinsky in a letter of 2 July 1993 — is that what people remember is a widely reproduced photograph of hunters with a marabou stork.

Can you visit Thunderbird?

The people named in the 1948 reports were private citizens, and the places they described are private land: the field four miles north of Alton where Colonel W. F. Siegmund said he was riding, and Robert Price's farm at Caledonia, in Boone County. The Lowe family home near Kickapoo Creek, outside Lawndale in Logan County, is also a private house. Loren Coleman, whose brother Jerry interviewed the family within hours of the incident of 25 July 1977, records that dead birds were later left on the Lowes' doorstep and that the boy was tormented at school. The monster that can be seen from a public road is the older one. The Illinois State Museum describes the Piasa Bird on the bluffs today as a painted recreation, based on sketches by Alton citizens, on a cliff along the Great River Road (Illinois Route 100) near Alton; the rock face Marquette described in 1673 was quarried away for limestone in the nineteenth century. The local tourism office is the Great Rivers & Routes Tourism Bureau, 200 Piasa Street, Alton, Illinois 62002, telephone +1 618-465-6676. Alton lies about 29 km (18 miles) north of downtown St Louis in a straight line. The airfield closest to the town, St. Louis Regional Airport at Bethalto, describes itself as a general aviation reliever airport, so the nearest airport with airline service is St Louis Lambert. Part of the newspaper record of 1948 is free to read. The Library of Congress holds the Western Newspaper Union page headed "Three Illinois Men See 'Monster Bird'" in its Chronicling America collection, as page 2 of the Tabor City Tribune for 28 May 1948, with page image and OCR text; the same collection has the Tombstone Epitaph of 26 April 1890. The Project Blue Book records, including the Project Sign handling of Incident #123, are held by the US National Archives. The northern Illinois papers are behind other doors. Newspapers.com lists the Belvidere Daily Republican from 1900 to 1978 in its subscription archive, and the Freeport Public Library lists its microfilm of the Freeport Journal-Standard as running from 1 October 1913; both listings were checked on 24 September 2026.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-14 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Prensa de 1948 + fuentes primarias

Thunderbird

Where and when was Thunderbird sighted?

What is Thunderbird?

What is the history of Thunderbird?

Timeline: the documented record of Thunderbird

Is there a rational explanation for Thunderbird?

Can you visit Thunderbird?

Sources consulted

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Thunderbird

Where and when was Thunderbird sighted?

What is Thunderbird?

What is the history of Thunderbird?

Timeline: the documented record of Thunderbird

Is there a rational explanation for Thunderbird?

Can you visit Thunderbird?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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