In October 2002, Alaskan villagers in Togiak and Manokotak reported seeing a huge bird larger than anything they had seen before. Pilot John Bouker, owner of Bristol Bay Air Service, said that while flying to Manokotak he and his passengers sighted a large “raptorlike” bird with a wingspan that matched the length of his Cessna 207, about 14 feet. When Moses Coupchiak, a heavy equipment operator from Togiak, spotted the monster bird flying toward him, he said that he thought it was a small airplane until it banked to the left and flew away.

Biologists in the region said that they believed the witnesses sighted a bird known as the Steller’s sea eagle, a species native to northeast Asia, that occasionally shows up on the Aleutian islands and on Kodiak, Alaska. The Steller’s sea eagle can have a wingspan of eight feet and is about three times as large as a bald eagle.

Many scholars over the centuries have attributed the Native American tribal myths of the Thunderbird to their reverence for the eagle, the largest of indigenous birds in North America. The Thunderbird figures prominently in the tribal traditions of many Native American tribes. For some, it is the flapping of the Thunderbird’s great wings that one hears during rainstorms rumbling in the skies and it is the Thunderbird’s eyes and beak that flash the lightning. To the Lakota of the prairie, the Thunderbird is an embodiment of the Great Mystery, the Supreme Being, that created all things on earth. For the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy of the northeast, Hino, the Thunderbird, guardian of the skies and the spirit of thunder, could assume the form of a human when it suited its purpose. The cosmology of many of the western tribes establish a Thunderbird in each of the four corners of the world as guardians and protectors, fighting always to keep away evil spirits.

In addition to the ancient Native American legends of the Thunderbird, there are certain old pioneer records that support the existence of giant birdlike creature in the skies of North America. From the mouth of the Illinois River at Grafton to Alton (Illinois), a distance of twenty miles, the Mississippi River runs from west to east, and its north bank (the Illinois side) is a high bluff. When the first white men explored the area, they found that some unknown muralist from some forgotten tribal culture had engraved and painted hideous depictions of two gigantic, winged monsters. The petroglyphs were each about thirty feet in length and twelve feet in height.

Father Marquette, the celebrated Jesuit priest-explorer, wrote in his journals of discoveries of the Mississippi, published in Paris in 1681. In a small volume published in 1698, Father Hennepin, another early explorer of the wilds of the west, had also described the two enormously large petroglyphs.

Order Worlds Before Our Own

In my book Worlds Before Our Own (Anomalist Books, 2007), I tell of how I was gifted with the loan of a leather-bound 48-page booklet, The Piasa or The Devil Among the Indians (Morris, Ill., 1887) written by P. A. Armstrong . This venerable text described the creatures as having “the wings of a bat, but of the shape of an eagle's. . . . They also had four legs, each supplied with eagle-shaped talons. The combination and blending together of the master species of the earth, sea, and air . . . so as to present the leading and most terrific characteristics of the various species thus graphically arranged, is an absolute wonder and seems to show a vastly superior knowledge of animal, fowl, reptile, and fish nature than has been accorded to the Indian."

Whatever the petroglyphs truly represented, all the native tribes of what then constituted the Northwest Territory experienced dreadful encounters with with the creatures they called the Piasa (or Piusa). Some of the stories of the native people state that the Piasa was fond of bathing in the Mississippi and was a very rapid swimmer. When it was splashing about in the Father of Waters, it raised such a commotion as to force great waves over the banks. Other ancient traditions state that when the Piasa was angry it thrashed the ground with its tail until the whole earth shook and trembled. The Piasa was generally feared because of its propensity for snatching tribespeople and making off with them.

Click on the 'NEXT' arrow for page 3

Share this article with:

More of Brad Steiger's Articles:
• Ancient Secret Societies, UFOs, and the New World Order - Part II
• Ancient Secret Societies, UFOs, and the New World Order - Part I
• Found: The Footprints of Adam and Eve from a World Before Our Own
• Numerous evidence of Pre-Historic Nuclear War exists
• The Spirit Teacher Who Brought the Divine Fire
• How UFOs Lost Their Innocence at the Movies
• Worlds Before Our Own