Remembering Visions Of The Thunderbird

By James Donahue

December 2005

A recent columnist recalled a strange story spreading across Midwest America in the late 1970s about giant birds attempting to pluck children from their back yards.

A reader from Peoria, Illinois told of hearing the story about large condors sweeping down out of the sky and carrying children away. The reader said children were afraid to go outside.

How strange that I recall similar stories during my own childhood in Michigan that preceded the 70s by a few decades. I remember seeing a very large bird flying high overhead, and a neighbor boy, the kind that always seems to know everything, said that was a “California condor.”

Those were the war years when few traveled across the country like we do today, Yet I marveled that a bird, even as large as that condor appeared to be, could wander so far from its native habitat.

I watched this bird in awe, rather than any thought of fear. Others have obviously feared it.

The condor, like the vulture, is a beautiful bird to watch in flight. Looking at one up close, however, reveals that it is not as pretty. They stand gaunt like skinny the skinny scavengers they are. They have strange bright red heads and beaks designed to tear and shred at the flesh of dead and decaying creatures.

The California condor is, in truth, a very large bird. This nearly extinct species holds the distinction of being the largest bird living in North America, with a wingspan up to nine and a half feet. When standing on the ground they can measure up to 55 inches in height. These birds can weigh up to 25 pounds

I sometimes wonder if the condor isn’t the source of the native mythology that exists even today throughout the suburbs of America, concerning the Thunderbird.

Most Native Americans talk of the Thunderbird. There is a myth that this bird, like the Phoenix, is associated with the fires of the end times. The stories told of a giant bird that could shoot lightning from its eyes and its wings were so huge they created peals of thunder when they flapped.

People have told stories for years about seeing giant flying birds with wingspans estimated at 15 feet or more passing overhead. The reports of giant birds attempting to carry off small children, dogs and other pets have, indeed, made newspaper headlines across the Midwest. There was a rash of these stories around 1977.

Then there were the stories passed down from early North American settlers who told of seeing giant flying creatures shot out of the sky by ranchers and cowboys. One story in the April 26, 1890 edition of the Tombstone Epigraph told of one such monster dragged behind horses into town as proof. The story said the wingspan measured 190 feet and the body was 92 feet long, with an almost transparent membrane.

Were they describing an ancient flying dinosaur, or was this just a slice of old-west fiction like so many of the other tales that drifted into the media in those days.

Even today there are stories about Mothman, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster that continue to circulate, even getting into the movie industry.

We are living in a strange time, near the end of history, when demonic and angelic forces wage warfare around us. And the recent revelation by Psychic Aaron C. Donahue that all of the “spiritual” entities are real and living beings from alien worlds, battling over the future of our planet and consequently the future of the human race, make such stories even more feasible.

Are we talking about real visions, mental images from the collective, or holographic projections from alien ships? If we could only evolve to a point where the veil can be completely torn, we might one-day see the truth before we are gone.