Original subtitles

(birds chirping)

(static crackling)

(eerie music)

(birds chirping)

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] Why does it begin, this quest

to understand the unexplainable?

For some it's later in life

long after the wide-eyed optimism of youth

has left them and they believe the answers

to all life's mysteries are easily found in the mundane.

(bird hooting)

Maybe something happens to challenge

their earth-bound assumptions

and they're compelled to discover what really happened.

(rooster crowing)

(pig snorting)

But some fall into the mysterious at a young age

and truly believe they can seek out

new discoveries, new frontiers.

(bird hooting)

(distant people shouting)

(chickens clucking)

Some no longer question

whether these boundaries even exist

or new revelations wait to be uncovered.

They know that the universe still keeps some secrets.

They know because they've heard the eyewitness stories,

the accounts from good, honest people of things

that defy explanation.

(train whistle tooting)

(crickets chirping)

(wings flapping)

Or maybe they simply know because in their search

for legends, they've seen one for themselves.

(wings flapping)

(moving to dramatic music)

(bird hooting)

(thunder cracking)

(woman vocalizing)

- [Woman] We see this blood smear on the road.

There was just a tremendous amount of blood.

We see off in the distance this shadow,

large, black, sorta hunched over figure.

The thing turns and we realize

it's not a person. - Over the weekend

- It's this bird. - out by this ranch

in the middle of nowhere.

A large bird flying in circles like the size

of a single engine airplane.

- [Woman] Driving and all of a sudden

they said, "Oh my God." - Came into my bed.

- And he immediately woke up - I looked over and there was

- and catched - and there was

- a glimpse of this - a huge bird there,

- giant black bird. - so massive it could

take up the whole window.

(bird screeching)

- [Woman] Largest bird I've ever seen

in my entire life. (wings flapping)

(dramatic music)

(woman vocalizing)

(bird roaring)

(gentle music)

(water lapping) (siren blaring)

(tense music)

- [News Announcer] In the news today,

yet another sighting of the infamous Chicago Mothman.

The Tribune is covering this latest what they're calling

flap about sightings of this giant winged demonic thing

people are seeing right here in downtown Chicaco.

A woman walking her dog claimed she encountered

a creature standing in the park.

"I saw a large man probably seven feet or taller

"standing on the ground," according to the account

published by Strickler.

"It was solid black."

- [Narrator] In 2017, sightings

of a giant flying creature begin taking place

around the city of Chicago.

While the being seen by many Chicagoans was said to be

simply an abnormally large bird,

the media soon dubbed it the Chicago Mothman

in reference to a similar phantom seen in the skies

above Point Pleasant, West Virginia,

in 1966 and 1967.

- [News Announcer] But what really stood out

were the large, and I do mean large,

pair of wings. - While the Chicago sightings

drew the attention of local and national media,

unusual occurrences were nothing new

to paranormal researchers familiar with the Prairie State.

- [News Announcer] We'll keep following this story

in the days ahead no doubt so keep it tuned right here

to 97.1, The Lake. (birds chirping)

(tense music)

(somber music)

- I began in cryptozoology in the late '50s

and one of the first things that I investigated

was a report of a black panther.

And I went out with a game warden

and I musta been 12 years old.

They found tracks, they interviewed the individual

who said they saw a panther-like creature,

got back in the truck with the game warden

and he said, "They just saw a beaver."

And that kind of made me know what I was getting into

that most people don't believe these things,

they don't really listen to witnesses.

They go in with a pre-conceived notion

and I wanted to be more open-minded

and that's what I started doing.

(birds chirping and cawing)

(gentle music)

- My name is Troy Taylor

and I was born and raised in Illinois.

I have lived all over the state of Illinois.

Currently I live in Jacksonville, Illinois.

My sole interest beginning in anything that wasn't ghosts

was because I read Loren Coleman's book Mysterious America

when I was in high school.

The thing I loved about it the most is that so many

of his stories were based in Illinois

and I didn't know why till I saw an article about him

in our local paper and realized he was from Decatur, too.

You know, it was Loren who put me on the path

of well, you know, there's a lotta cool stuff in Illinois.

I rarely meet people who don't either know someone

or have a family member who had some sort of encounter

in their life, in their entire lifetime.

Even if they don't believe in this kinda stuff,

these things tend to happen or are drawn to people.

And I think that that seems to make Illinois more haunted

than other states but I don't think that's the case.

I think they're all very haunted

or all drawn to the paranormal.

It's just somebody's gotta write this stuff down.

Somebody's gotta collect it.

- I grew up in Illinois. (somber music)

I lived in Illinois most of my life

from 1947 through 1975.

And I really saw Illinois as a little United States.

- The state of Illinois is a lot bigger than people think.

You try to drive tip to tip in Illinois,

it's about an eight-hour drive.

- You have the urban area in Chicago,

then the river area in the northern part of the state.

- You've got Chicago, you've got a big metropolitan area.

In Northern Illinois, (computer beeping)

you have the Illinois River

and all the bluffs and the wooded areas and the canyons.

And then you get into the middle of the state

where everything's flat.

There just isn't a lot geographically

across the middle of the state that's unusual.

(moving to dynamic music)

- To me there's nothing more beautiful

than driving across that flat land

and seeing a thunderstorm come toward you.

- But when you travel further south,

then you get into a whole different area.

Once you get to the southern part of the state,

you will swear you have left Illinois.

- And then southern Illinois, Little Egypt,

is a whole different country.

It's like a little swampy land, there's rolling hills.

- This is the edge of the Ozarks

and there are mountains (birds chirping)

and hills and canyons and rivers and it's a wild region.

And you find that a lot

of these strange anomalous animal sightings

all seem to come to the southern part of the state.

And then along the western edge,

you have the Mississippi River

which is completely different again.

(gentle music)

(water lapping) (birds chirping)

(computer beeping)

- [Narrator] The town of Alton, Illinois, sits on the banks

of the Mississippi at the confluence

of the Illinois, the Mississippi, and the Missouri Rivers.

Situated in the furthest reaches of the state,

it's an often overlooked destination with a rich history

that defines it as one of the most important pieces

of a century-old puzzle.

Alton was founded in 1818

and, despite its considerably smaller size,

was conceived as a sister city to St. Louis.

The region was once home

to Native Americans (people chanting)

who had called southern Illinois home for centuries

prior to the arrival of European settlers.

Naturally, the incursion into the Midwest

caused a number of skirmishes

between the local natives (men shouting)

and the outsiders. (guns firing)

(horse whinnying)

Over time, Alton became (gentle music)

incredibly important to Illinois' economy

as it grew into an industrial hub

thanks to its location along the river.

- This was the start of a town that's had a lot

of odd things drawn to it over the years.

It's a town that's plagued by stories of ghosts

and hauntings and strange creatures

and that dates back to really the beginning.

It's a place where there's been a lotta death,

there's been diseases, there's been flooding.

There was a Civil War prison located there.

And it's become known

as one of the most haunted small towns in America

because of all the history that's taken place there.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] Alton's geographical location

places it in a historically significant region

known as the Gateway to the West.

As Lewis and Clark began their journey

across the United States in 1804,

the current location of Alton would've been an area

they traveled through during the early days

of the western expansion.

While Alton has a noteworthy role in history,

it hasn't always been a positive one.

At the Confederate prison located in Alton,

the Union Army kept as many as 12,000 soldiers captive

in horrifying conditions that led to disease and death.

In the years to follow,

the mighty Mississippi would overflow its banks

on multiple occasions (film clacking)

resulting in catastrophic flooding.

For followers of the strange and unusual,

these aspects of the town's history

might ring strangely familiar.

- So I find a lot of connections

between Alton as a river community

and other river communities across the country

like Point Pleasant in West Virginia.

It's got the same type of history in that you've got

Native Americans, you've got bloodshed,

you've got diseases, and you've got this great history.

Point Pleasant is also one of those towns

that, not only has a haunted history,

but also has, of course, the Mothman legend

connected to it.

So you've go the Piasa Bird in one place,

you've got the Mothman in the other,

and all of this energy drawn to these towns

with all this water.

And I think any time you have a river community

you're gonna have more stories.

You're gonna have more ghost stories,

you're gonna have more weird encounters,

you're gonna have more strange legends.

(loud thudding) (bird roaring)

(eerie drumming music) (birds chirping)

- For many years people have been discussing something

known as the Piasa

which allegedly is (tense music)

an Illinois Native American Thunderbird creature.

There's a long history and story behind this creature.

It first appears (somber music)

in the work of a Jesuit missionary name Jacques Marquette.

And in 1673 he was exploring (bird hooting)

the Mississippi River and he saw these giant pictographs,

these rock paintings on the side of cliffs.

- [Troy] Dating even further back than before the city

actually started was when Marquette and Joliet

came down the Mississippi River in 1673

and claimed the entire region for France.

They'd already been primed for weird things in Illinois.

Well, they come around a curve in the river

near what's now Alton and painted on the side of the bluff

is two renditions of this monster.

(creature growling) (moving to drumming music)

- The Illini Indians used the word Piasa

as the bird that would devour humans.

(tense music)

And the whole story was that the Piasa Bird

would come down and eat people (animal screaming)

or that some of the tribal groups

had to, in some ways, give a sacrifice

of young people (person screaming)

to the Piasa Birds.

One of the major chiefs decided enough was enough.

I don't wanna do this anymore. (bird screeching)

I'm losing a lot of my people

so he actually went on one of the cliffs

where the sacrifice was given

(moving to dramatic drumming music)

and when the Piasa Bird came down,

(bird screeching)

he had 11 warriors come out and kill it.

(wings flapping)

(arrows thudding)

(bird screaming)

That story's really come down as the creation story,

so to speak, of the Piasa Bird.

- There's always been a question

as to whether or not (gentle drumming music)

the Piasa Bird was a true story or not.

Of course the Native Americans claimed it was.

And after they painted that mural,

as they passed it on the Mississippi River,

they would fire arrows at it,

they would fire rifles at it,

they would blow tobacco smoke at it,

all in tribute to its ferocity.

- In the 1830s, a professor at Shurtleff College

in Alton, Illinois, wrote an article

about the Piasa.

And he claimed (tense music)

that the Illini people told him

that these creatures were actually giant birds

and that the name literally meant

the bird that devours men.

- And in 1836, (bird hooting)

he went looking for what he had heard

was a cave that was connected to the Piasa Bird

in some way.

He hired a young man to take him up into the bluffs.

They spent the entire day hunting for this cave.

And after climbing up the sheer face

of one of the cliffs, they entered a cave.

And as they walked inside, he said he could hear

the sound of something (footsteps crunching)

crunching under his feet.

And when he lit a torch to see what it was,

he discovered that he was in a cave

completely filled with human bones.

This was allegedly the Piasa cave.

This is where the bird was taking its victims,

and eating them, and leaving its bones behind.

The problem is is that no one else has ever found this cave.

(gentle suspenseful music)

- Researchers have uncovered the fact

that this article was probably highly fictionalized

and that he took a lot of physical embellishment

because the original Piasa creatures,

the pictographs did not display wings at all.

- There were some people who even criticized the fact

that it had wings and Marquette and Joliet

didn't make a note of that.

Well, it turns out that there really were wings

but they were usually only visible when the bluffs were wet.

- [Narrator] The original Piasa Bird mural

was eventually destroyed in the mid-1800s

but was recreated again

in the 1870s (suspenseful music)

by Professor William McAdams.

This recreation was based on descriptions

of the lost mural by local settlers.

The supposed cave containing the bones

of the Piasa Bird victims was never found.

And whether or not the Piasa Bird was even

a winged cryptid, (gentle music)

remains a debate among historians and researchers.

One thing is sure, however,

Alton, Illinois, was a town (birds chirping)

that seemed to be a magnet for the unusual.

(wings flapping)

(dynamic rhythmic music)

(birds chirping)

- Really from the 1700s, (upbeat music)

there started to be

documentation in this record

that certain people who were explorers,

who were colonists, who were native peoples

were seeing large birds.

And they would often see them on the top of mountains,

on bald mountains, in caves, in different things like that.

They didn't wanna get too close to them

but they certainly knew they had to deal with these things.

- Accounts of giant monstrous birds

actually date back decades.

Even into the 19th century

you have accounts as old (bird squawking)

as the 1860s. (gentle suspenseful music)

- In 1868 in Missouri, there was a group of children

out playing at school.

The school teacher came out and saw this huge bird

swoop down, grab ahold (bird squawking)

of a boy and literally (boy shouting)

carry him away and disappear. (child screaming)

Apparently it was well-documented

and it probably happened.

- And these sightings tend to occur in flaps,

that is clusters, many clusters of sightings

in a concentrated area.

- There was a big, what they call, a flap

around the Alton area in the 1940s.

And people were seeing these large birds in the skies

and didn't really know what they were.

People were calling them Thunderbirds

because, of course, that's the Native American name for 'em

and what they traditionally called.

(tense music)

- But in the 1940s around Alton

and spreading out even into Springfield

and up to the northern state of Wisconsin,

people were seeing these giant bird-like creatures.

And you can actually follow some of the paths

of these creatures by following

the newspaper accounts (birds chirping)

that each town the night after would report

people seeing these.

(film clacking) (lighthearted music)

(bird screeching)

(lively music)

- [News Announcer] In the small town of Alton,

strange flying creatures are making a merry mess

of the panicked masses

as more and more reports flood in.

(bird screeching)

Where do these bizarre beaked bearers of bad luck originate?

Are they giant birds or mere mass hysteria?

You be the judge. (boat whistle tooting)

- In early April of 1948, there began

to be sightings around Alto

of some sort of giant bird. (gentle music)

And everyone described it about the same.

It was gray.

I find with all these sightings the wingspans

seemed to kind of vary a little but not much.

The fact that they were all so close

I thought was impressive. (computer beeping)

- When I was a very young boy and getting into this,

I discovered that microfiche and microfilm

in libraries, you could look through old records.

And found all of these stories from 1948

that nobody had discovered.

And I found one story in April

when the whole big flap (film clacking)

in 1948 began.

- I found probably (suspenseful music)

the most convincing of all of those sightings

were a couple of retired military guys

one of which was the head of the Western Military Academy

which was in Alton at the time.

- And the first that we're familiar with

goes back to April of 1948.

And the first may in fact have been a army colonel

name Walter Sigmund who was standing at an airbase

talking to another colonel and a farmer

and he claimed he looked up and saw this,

what he thought at first was an airplane flying overhead

until he saw this thing flap its wings.

And at that point he realized that this thing

was an airplane-sized bird literally.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] In April of 1948, the St. Louis Dispatch

ran an eyewitness account told to a mother and father

by their young son.

The boy had spied what he claimed to be

a giant grayish-green bird over their home in Overland

just 25 miles south of Alton in January of the same year.

The family was initially hesitant to come forward

with their story.

However, as the Sigmund account found its way

into area newspapers, suddenly other witnesses

who had seen giant birds felt compelled

to add their own reports to the public record.

Alongside the Walter Sigmund sighting was another one

from April 9th, 1948.

In this case, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Price

of Caledonia, Illinois, describe seeing

a monstrous bird bigger than an airplane.

They reported seeing enormous wings

and what they took to be massive legs and feet beneath it.

On April 10th, the winged monstrosity appeared again

in the sky above Overland, observed by a couple

and their acquaintance as it soared over their home.

Their initial assumption was that they were witnessing

an airplane maneuvering through the sky.

- There was a truck driver named Verle Babb

who was driving one morning and claimed

that he saw this thing, a giant bird

swooping down trying to pick up a small piglet

at a pig farm.

There's a famous account (film clacking)

from a lady doctor in Alton, Illinois,

who claims she looked out her window

and saw a Thunderbird flying by.

- She said that it looked like a Piper Cub.

A bird, no, a airplane.

She thought it was that huge.

And people started saying maybe we should pay attention.

- And there was also a sighting of a farmer and his wife,

a man named Charles Pierce who claimed

that they saw this monster-sized bird.

Now, most of the descriptions were very similar

and people were describing literally an airplane-sized bird

with a wingspan perhaps 20 feet, 25 feet across.

- And this went on for a few weeks

until around the end of the month.

It also showed up across the river in St. Louis.

(suspenseful music) (bird howling)

- [Narrator] Sightings on the Missouri side

of the Mississippi River were covered with greater intensity

than the Alton sightings given their closer proximity

to the bustling city of St. Louis.

(film clacking)

The St. Louis Dispatch recounted sightings

of an airplane-sized gray-black bird

seen all over the region during the two-week span.

One of the most memorable giant bird sightings

took place on April 26th.

This involved a group of flight instructors

at the Mississippi School of Aeronautics in St. Louis

who spotted an abnormally large bird flying

at nearly 1200 above the airstrip.

On April 27th, salesman Harry Bradford was driving

down the Red Feather Highway in the late afternoon

when he spotted something huge flying above him.

He pulled to the side of the road and shined a spotlight

into the sky.

(bird screeching)

Using the light,

he could positively identify (eerie music)

it as a strangely massive bird.

In the days to follow, (wings flapping)

he would claim to have three more sightings

of the very same creature.

(suspenseful music)

Things took an even stranger turn

when three St. Louis locals saw what they described

as a Piper Cub-sized bird in the night sky

around 10 p.m.

They recalled seeing it flap its wings

and move unusually fast through the darkness

at an altitude of perhaps 3000 feet.

Most unusual was the fact that the creature seemed

to be illuminated by a dull glow emanating

from within its body.

The hysteria surrounding the bird sightings

reached a feverish pitch when the Civil Air Patrol

offered to make aerial searches for the bird

which was now making national news.

(tense music)

- One of the most entertaining parts

of this flap of sightings

was that the mayor of Alton (gentle music)

kept getting all these letters from people

demanding that he do something about this bird

because for all they knew it was gonna eat people

like the Piasa Bird.

And so he put his assistant in charge

of trying to track down this creature and trap it.

- Then the mayor got involved and a heron was caught

and tracks were found on the mud bank.

It kinda got to be a media event

and became what we call nine day wonder

because it really was in the newspaper nine days.

But in those nine days, people talked

about several months of reports.

- But it seemed as soon as public interest in it peaked,

it just stopped.

Wherever this thing went it moved on somewhere else.

- It moved on, the people forgot about it,

and they went back to living.

- So what was it (gentle music)

that people saw in 1948 and does it have

any historical precedents?

While there are occasional accounts of large bird sightings

around the Prairie State, they aren't exactly common

and when they do come, it's in waves.

It would be odd for some sort of natural animal

to only occasionally travel to a geographical region.

Perhaps the answers as to what people were seeing in Alton

in those days dwells within the pages of history.

- One of the most (tense drumming music)

compelling lines of evidence

with regard to quote unquote Thunderbirds

is that you have so many widespread Native American legends

that refer to these monstrous eagles

or Thunderbirds, giant birds.

These Native American Thunderbird accounts

range from the Pacific Northwest to the Southwest,

the Great Plains, New England, and so on and so forth.

So isn't it interesting that we have

all of these widespread different cultures

that refer to identical animals.

- Many saw this as, again, bad luck,

an omen, that these creatures (bird groaning)

would show up and you did not want to see them.

Many cultures are even hesitant to say the name

of these creatures with the belief that even mentioning them

is enough to put you on their radar.

- One of the things that Thunderbirds

are often depicted doing is shooting lightning

from their beaks or their eyes or their head.

They're very closely associated,

almost in an elemental aspect, with thunder and storms.

- These giant birds are associated with storm fronts

that the beating of their wings sounds like thunder.

I know there may be

a scientific reason (thunder cracking)

behind this if we consider that large birds

could take advantage of the thermal updrafts

that are at the forefront of storms

and that perhaps (wings flapping)

it helps them fly and so forth.

(tense music)

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] It's difficult to define

just where central Illinois begins but for many

the flat endless acres of corn, wheat, and soybean fields

define the Prairie State.

(woman vocalizing)

Here among the ruins of the once-vibrant homes

and businesses, small pockets of civilization

have managed to survive among the decline

of agriculture and industry.

(birds chirping)

(woman vocalizing)

Imagine a Midwest once alive and booming.

These small towns situated along old highways

which today are shells

of their former glory (horns honking)

were once micro-cities.

(people chattering)

Dance halls, grocery stores, bars, and nightlife

were just around every corner.

Lawndale was no different.

(woman vocalizing)

(gentle music)

- Lawndale, Illinois, is a quiet town

in Logan County, Central Illinois.

Nothing much ever happens there.

(birds chirping)

(computer beeping)

- Lawndale, Illinois, is located actually

right off Interstate 55.

It is a little north of Lincoln.

It's not easy to find on a map

because it's a very small town.

I believe the population is less than a thousand.

It's just a ordinary little community

on the side of the road.

I can't give you anything famous about it

because as far as I'm concerned the only really famous thing

that ever happened there

was the July 25th, 1977, attack by a Thunderbird.

- [Narrator] Nearly 30 years had passed

since the Thunderbird wave (film clacking)

had swept across southern Illinois in 1948.

While occasional sightings of large birds in Illinois

were still reported, giant, winged cryptids

had long since been forgotten.

Despite the tales of small children being carried away

by Thunderbirds in Missouri, kids were free to play outside

at all hours of the day and rarely looked to the sky

with any sense of fear.

All that would change for one Lawndale family

on July 25th, 1977. (moving to tense music)

- At 8:00 in the evening (gentle music)

of July 25th, 1977,

in Lawndale, Logan County, Illinois,

a young 10-year-old boy named Marlon Lowe

was playing hide-and-seek with two of his buddies,

Travis Goodwin and Michael Thompson.

They were in his backyard while his mother,

his parents, and some of their family friends

were cleaning out a trailer on their property.

- The trailer that had little black eagles on it.

And these three boys were kinda playing hide-and-seek

around the front yard.

And right behind them (boys chattering)

is Kickapoo Creek.

And all of a sudden flying

down Kickapoo Creek (ominous music)

was two giant birds swooping down.

- These two huge birds (tense drumming music)

fly down over the yard, try to pick up one of the boys

who dives to safety - Look out!

- [Troy] into a plastic wading pool

and narrowly misses becoming infamous

like Marlon Lowe became.

- [Ken] Marlon began to run away.

He weighed about 56 pounds at the time.

He was kind of a small boy. (bird chattering)

But according to all the witnesses that were present

one of these two birds (woman gasping)

swooped down.

(boy shouting)

- [Loren] He gets caught by the talons of one of the birds.

(Marlon panting)

It was two birds but only one of them got him.

Picks him up, (bird moaning)

carries him about 50 feet across the yard.

- The bird turns, grabs ahold of this kid

by the back of the shirt and picks him up

off the ground. (bird cawing)

Well, as these boys are screaming,

Marlon's mother Ruth runs to the back of the house

to see what's going on and sees this bird

pick her son up three feet off the ground

and carry him about 10 yards

across the backyard (Marlon screaming)

of their house.

- Oh help!

- [Ken] As Marlon was kicking and fighting

until the bird finally just dropped him

and let him go.

And then the two birds kind of took off

flew underneath - Oh honey, are you okay?

Are you okay? - a electric wire

right over the trailer home. - Are you okay, honey?

- Attempted to roost in a large tree in their property

but according to the witnesses they were having trouble

roosting in this tree 'cause they were too big

and then they took off

towards Kickapoo Creek (ominous music)

to the north.

- [Troy] Saw these birds fly away off toward a wooded area

at the edge of town.

They called the police.

- They needed some kind of validation.

And they also thought if this can happen to one kid,

it can happen to other kids.

And there had been stories (rain pattering)

about around that time of dog disappearing,

of certain little lambs and other livestock.

So there was becoming a hint

that something sinister was happening.

- When I was a kid, I'd never heard

of anything like this before.

And suddenly these people had had an encounter

with something that you couldn't even wrap your head around.

I don't think anybody could. (woman vocalizing)

- Other things started happening,

other things that were psychological

that happened to that family

because they weren't ready for what impact

this was gonna have on their lives.

- [Troy] Again, it's one of those things

why would you make a story like this up?

It makes no sense as to why you would invent

something like this.

- [Loren] It affected the family so much that for many years

they wouldn't talk to anybody.

- Marlon, according to his mother,

didn't sleep for nights afterward.

They were being teased and harassed by neighbors

and people from anywhere that would show up

at their house, leave dead birds on their sidewalk.

They started calling Marlon the Bird Boy.

But it made the papers and people talked about it,

people laughed about it, (woman vocalizing)

but the Lowes swore it was true.

They swore that it happened.

- Wasn't until a couple years later

that I went out (gentle music)

to Illinois to interview the family all over again.

And what struck me was

how Marlo Lowe (woman vocalizing)

really was affected by this.

Kids had started calling him the Bird Boy.

They started killing birds and leaving dead birds

on their porch.

And he had bright red hair when he was littler,

when he was 10 years old, and here he was

two years later, gray hair.

(film clacking)

- The Lowes described (suspenseful music)

these two birds as looking very much like Andean condors.

They said that they were all black,

that they had a hooked beak, but they actually had

a white waft of feathers around their neck.

- Then beyond that, you've got all of these other people

then for the next several months seeing one or two birds

exactly like the Lowes described.

- The Lawndale incident was such big news that it really put

the Thunderbirds back into the headlines.

It was essentially the first sighting of that time period

although there may have been a couple of,

like a week before that (film clacking)

a woman nearby in Lincoln, Illinois, claimed

that she had also seen these Thunderbirds.

So as often happens in these cases,

there's that one big incident that really gets

all the publicity and that creates an environment

where other eyewitnesses feel a little bit more comfortable

coming out of the shadows and saying you know what,

I saw those things, too.

I just didn't wanna talk about it.

- They talked about a trailer court

couple communities over.

A big, giant bird landed on the trailer

and then took off.

Someplace else in the county somebody else was seeing it.

And you started hearing these reports

very casually at first (bird squawking)

then in the media.

Then the Chicago media got involved,

then the television media, and it became a traditional flap.

(roof clattering)

- [Narrator] In the days

following the Lowe incident, (bird cawing)

the giant birds were seen repeatedly

many times as a pair

occasionally glimpsed alone. (roof clattering)

On July 28th, the Thompsons spotted a massive bird

flying above their farm in McLean County

just to the north of Lawndale.

(ominous music)

The creature had a wingspan of at least 10 feet

and the couple and their visiting friends

would soon recount their sighting to local police.

(film clacking)

Later the same day, a mail carrier spotted two birds

matching the same description (wings flapping)

as those in the Lowe incident in Bloomington, Illinois,

just 25 miles north of Lawndale.

(bird cawing)

He witnessed one of the birds soar

into a nearby field (birds chattering)

where it snatched up a pig and flew off

as the poor animal struggled in its massive talons.

The incident left the man shaken

and convinced that what he'd seen was a huge condor.

Also on the 28th, Lisa Montgomery was washing her car

when she spied a lone bird in the sky above Tremont.

She described the wingspan as being 10 feet or more.

Two more sightings drew national media attention

on July 30th. (film clacking)

The first of these occurred when Denise Turner

of Downs, Illinois, and two friends saw a huge bird

perched on a telephone pole alongside an intersection.

(bird cawing)

The witness described seeing the creature's talons

unfurl and drop something to the ground

which was later identified by local police

as a footlong rat.

At 2 p.m. that same day multiple residents

of Waynesville, Illinois, reported seeing

a massive bird soar overhead.

- In the midst of all

of the Lawndale reports (suspenseful music)

and the other reports from around central Illinois,

a gentleman showed up calling himself Texas John.

And in Shelbyville, which is a little bit further

to the west of Lawndale,

Texas John said, (film clacking)

"I shot some footage of Thunderbirds."

And he went to Champaign, Illinois, TV station,

showed 'em the footage, they showed it to me,

and everybody was interested in it.

- And he had heard about these Thunderbird sightings

and he has a Cherokee lineage

so he certainly believed in the Thunderbird.

And he was in his boat on the north side of the lake

when he suddenly saw these two enormous birds

perched in a tree.

And he knew that these birds were extraordinary.

So what he did was he blew the horn on his boat

in order to scare them to get them

to take off on these trees and then he began to film

as they flew off.

- To me and to a lot (tense music)

of researchers it looked like turkey vultures

sitting in a tree and then taking off.

- A number of wildlife experts have looked at it

and dismissed these two birds as simply turkey vultures

which are very common in Illinois.

- Turkey vultures can be extremely large-looking.

- But I've looked at the film quite a bit through the years,

analyzed it, and at least in my own mind,

one of the two birds is much, much larger

than any turkey vulture and really appears to have

the proportions of a bird like a condor

with a wingspan perhaps nine feet across.

(gentle music)

- In December of 1977, there was a report,

and it mostly showed up in news reports,

we never get to the bottom of it,

a group of men (birds chirping)

were going along a road and they saw a giant bird.

They shot it.

They got very scared and they burned the body.

And they felt that they'd done something wrong and illegal.

And that often happens in those kind of shooting stories

'cause you never see the bodies.

People burn them.

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] In the weeks that followed,

occasional reports of abnormally large birds

continued to trickle in around central Illinois.

However, like the Alton Thunderbird wave of 1948,

eventually the reports simply stopped.

The birds had disappeared yet sightings continued

of strange things in the skies.

Loren Coleman and his brother Jerry would investigate

numerous winged cryptid sightings in the years that followed

the Lawndale incidents, not all of them mere birds.

- When I'm involved (somber music)

in investigating cryptozoology,

I usually try to categorize the branches

that I'm going down.

And one large branch is what I call winged weirdies.

And in that file of winged weirdies,

there's flying humans, there's big owls,

there's big birds, there's pterodactyls,

there's all kinds of different reports.

And you have to look at them as best you can

just make them all kind of go together.

- When investigating (suspenseful music)

giant winged cryptids, it all becomes very confusing.

There's a lot of gray area.

And in my research, which has spanned decades,

I typically get three types of reports or accounts.

But for example, we have the sightings of the giant birds,

the Thunderbirds, which people always describe

as having feathers.

I get a second type of people (creature screeching)

describing something more quote unquote prehistoric.

- [Chad] And then you get people that report

more the flying dinosaurs,

the pterodactyls, something (wings flapping)

out of prehistoric times.

- [Ken] And then you also have many accounts

of what we call flying humanoids,

creatures that are composites or anthropomorphic creatures

with human-like characteristics, bodies, sturdy legs,

arms, heads, but also wings attached to their body.

(tense music)

- It was still cold out and it was late

and I was possibly driving

slightly faster than I should be.

As I came up Route 51 where this turnoff is

to go to the lake there's a sign

and like a light, pole light.

So as I'm coming down, you know, it's pretty late,

but I notice a man standing along the road.

It looked like a man in a trench coat.

And I'm pretty sure that there's so much road kill

around there it was eating something alongside the road.

(bird squawking)

As I came up on it, it was,

I thought it was a man

because it was man height.

It was, you know, five plus feet, six foot tall.

Very dark, with headlights on it it looked dark gray.

I bet it was black. (tense music)

As it opened up and I saw, you could see

the wings, feathers, you could see what it was.

There was a little bit of light, like my headlights

were showing a little bit lighter color than that.

It was the size of a man.

And I saw the wings come up (bird chattering)

and take off and he was standing on the white line

on the edge of the road.

And when it went like this, the wing broke

center line of the road which was just like

what the heck?

And I kinda, as it went up, I kinda went under.

(wings flapping)

It was very startling

(bird chattering)

because it was, I thought it was a guy.

And when it took off, (bird squawking)

it was almost exciting.

I think I turned around and went back to my house

and woke my brother up and told him.

Shortly after that, (tense music)

around two weeks, 15 minutes from my house

in a small town called Herrick,

there was another sighting that was very similar

to I what I seen.

So it kinda helped me,

you know, you always get that, did that happen?

Or as with everything you try to rationalize what was it?

Was it too close or too,

you know, but having (somber music)

that same description, same size, that close to home

that soon after, was kinda like yeah

there was something around there at that point.

(eerie music)

(moving to gentle music)

- It was a mid-December day.

It was in the '90s, I think '94.

My friend and I were going out pheasant hunting

and it was a real cold, windy, blustery winter day.

We'd stopped at the guy's place where we were going hunting.

We asked if we could go and we were hunting a ditch

out in Caybury, Illinois.

That's where we were at.

Our dogs, we had German Shorthaired Pointer dogs

and we were watching them hunt.

So the dogs were down in the ditch.

My friend yelled, "Look!"

And I looked over at him,

he was to my left. - Look!

- And I saw him pointing above me.

I'd never saw it.

And I looked up and there was a massive bird

right over the top of our dogs.

(bird hooting)

He later said that he thought that that bird

was coming after our dogs and that made sense to me

because it was right above us.

It was black and it was probably, a good guess

is the wingspan was 20 feet. (bird squawking)

I noticed that the wings were really long

and they had one bend in the middle.

I distinctly saw that.

And its head, it had a very long beak

and had kind of a long head, (bird screeching)

a very big head, long beak,

and like it seemed like almost like its head

went back behind it, too.

The bird, as soon as he yelled, "Look,"

and it heard us and saw us,

it took a couple flaps and went up

and got up into the sky

and that wind just, and it was just gone.

It was gone outta sight in a minute,

not even a minute.

We both walked over to each other and we're like

what did you just see?

And we both have talked about it a lot since.

I'm a lifelong outdoorsman,

I've spent my life out in the outdoors.

I've never seen anything like this.

(lively music)

My boss used to say, you know,

"Danhausen, tell that crazy bird story of yours."

It was kinda something we told as it was funny to people.

And it wasn't for years that I actually figured out

or later discovered that other people had seen these birds.

It's been a source of laughter for people

for quite some time.

(suspenseful music)

- [Narrator] Thunderbirds, winged humanoids,

prehistoric remnants, is there any reason

why rational, skeptical people

would believe these things exist?

The Teratorn was a massive bird

that, as strange as it sounds, (animals growling)

does match descriptions given by many of the witnesses

particularly when it pertains to wingspan

and the white plumage around the creature's neck.

The skeletal remains of Teratorns

with wingspans up to 20 feet have been discovered

in much of the United States.

Yet science claims that these creatures went extinct

millions of years ago.

- The Thunderbirds, which are (bird screeching)

all over the West and a little bit in the Midwest,

look like Teratorns.

They seem to be giant ancient condors.

- And they were catharaforms.

They were essentially the ancestors

of modern condors and vultures.

- A lot of people believe that these giant birds

that are seen that don't really match

the description of known birds might be

some kind of prehistoric winged creature, winged bird.

I don't know.

I mean, I would think we would see them more often

if they were just living out there roosting somewhere.

I think we'd see them more often than we do.

- Is there something paranormal about these things?

Are they sort of projections from the past perhaps

of extinct species (bird squawking)

or time slips or something?

And then you hear of reports of other even stranger things

like lights emitting from these creatures,

which of course, a normal bird can't do.

- I've always wondered (somber music)

if there might be some sort of at least a paranormal thing

behind winged creatures.

I mean, I think there might be some sort

of dimensional question there.

- A lot of sightings people

will think it's just (thunder rumbling)

a gigantic bird, something flesh and blood

that you could hunt, you could kill

if you had to. (tense music)

But then there are other accounts

whether it's UFO-related or other phenomenon

where people believe

the creature's exhibiting supernatural abilities.

- But yes, there is a notion (ethereal music)

that any of these winged creatures could represent

tragic or catastrophic events to come,

that they could be omens, warnings, of dire events.

Course we have the connection between the famous Mothman

and the tragedy of the Silver Bridge collapse.

Many people connect those two things

in their minds. (gentle music)

There is certainly a notion

that these winged cryptids, creatures,

whatever you wanna call them (film clacking)

are essentially very negative things

that you do not want to encounter.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] Northern Illinois is defined

by the state's largest metropolitan area,

the city of Chicago.

Yet, outside the sprawl (sirens blaring)

of Chicagoland, lies large pockets of forest,

vast rolling fields, and the Illinois River.

In addition to miles of undeveloped prairie,

this stretch of the state is also home

to two other large cities and acres and acres

of swamps and farmland.

It's a remarkable Midwestern mix of uninhabited expanses

and densely populated areas.

- The city of Chicago was built on a swamp essentially.

The beginning of its history began with bloodshed.

This was a place (sirens blaring)

where settlers were massacred

by the local Native American tribes

at the beginning of the War of 1812.

And so it already was off to a bad start.

It took almost 20 years (film clacking)

to really develop after that massacre took place.

But Chicago, thanks to all of the people

and the energy there, its history

has created it's ghosts. (train clattering)

I don't think that it's the location of Chicago

that makes it so strange.

I think it's all of the things that have happened there

over the years.

Because you have had

the great fire in 1871. (film clacking)

You've had millions of people come through

what's essentially downtown Chicago

in the last, oh not even quite 200 years.

I mean, you name it, it's had

all of this very violent history

and it think that's really left a mark behind.

(eerie music) (wings flapping)

(crickets chirping) (gentle music)

- My name is Tobias Wayland and I am the head writer

and editor for the Singular Fortean Society.

I began my career investigating the breadth

of paranormal phenomena

in the true Fortean fashion

of not leaving anything uninvestigated.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] In August of 2016,

the winged cryptid phenomenon returned to Illinois.

This time to the city of Chicago.

As reported to Lon Strickler,

a woman was wandering down Roosevelt Road

in the suburb of Cicero when she noticed

a flash of movement between two buildings.

Upon straining to see what it was

that had caught her attention,

she noticed a large humanoid figure perched

on top of a streetlight.

(creature shouting)

The thing shot into the air and disappeared into the night.

In February of 2017, the flying, manlike creature

was spotted again by a motorist traveling

down 294 south outside of Chicago.

The driver recalled seeing

a manlike shape (tires screeching)

running beside the road

before suddenly unfurling two wings

and taking to the skies over the city.

The man was shaken (tires screeching)

as he recalled observing (chaotic music)

what he described as the biggest bird

he had ever seen.

(wings flapping)

In March, a third sighting (tense music)

took place in Tinley Park.

This time a man and his dog encountered a being

matching the same description (thunder cracking)

as the previous two sightings.

It peered at him from a nearby roof.

The man attempted to get a better view of the creature

by approaching it but it took to the sky

and disappeared before he could capture a photo.

The initial reports of the Chicago Mothman

or Chicago Phantom were reported

to the paranormal websites Phantoms & Monsters

operated by investigator and author, Lon Strickler,

and UFO Clearinghouse operated by Manuel Navarette.

- In early May of 2017, I had seen three reports

come through the MUFON database.

And they each described a bat or bird-like being.

And you know, as a paranormal researcher, journalist,

investigator, it piqued my interest

and so I wrote a short article about it for our site.

I was following it.

I noticed that more reports kept coming in.

- In 2017, I became aware that there was

seemingly a flap of flying humanoid sightings

coming out of Chicago and I was like

what is happening.

I was familiar, of course, with John Keel

and with the Mothman sightings

in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, from 1966 to 1967.

So I was like, could it be

that Mothman is now (tense music)

pretty much in my neighborhood?

- More sightings kept coming in.

Almost immediately after in late April

and early May you had two sightings

near the Little Calument River.

And so both of those were men out fishing

with their sons.

In the first instance, (wings flapping)

on April 27th, the witness said

that he heard a sound like train brakes

as a train slows down (bird screeching)

like the sound of its brakes.

Just after that he saw what he described

as a giant bat fly overhead.

The second sighting was very, very similar

in that area.

I don't believe (wings flapping)

that he mentioned the same shrill noise.

Saw a giant bat.

But in both cases they described it as being very large,

you know, seven to eight-foot wingspan.

- The Chicago Mothman case is really interesting.

It started about a year, year and a half ago

and there was a huge rash of sightings.

I think upwards of 70 to 80 sightings by now.

- Right now, according to internet sources,

there have been 71 sightings.

2011, 2017 was the bulk of them

and then a few in 2018.

Lon Strickler who published the very first accounts,

knowing that I had an interest in the specific subject

was gracious enough to funnel me each individual sighting

or account for me to review.

And I did review and go through the eyewitness testimonies.

And initially the descriptions seemed very similar

to other flying humanoids that have been documented

in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and other places.

A creature with quote unquote bat-like wings

and other human-like features.

- I have several criticisms (tense music)

of the Chicago phenomena.

For one thing, to call it Mothman,

I thought was pure and simple the copycat phenomena.

People were seeing things in the sky

or things near the Earth that were above them.

Some of them looked like kites.

Some of them looked like balloons,

winged creatures, ravens.

And somebody decided to label those Mothman.

And I think the problem started then.

- And it was all still very much up in the air.

You know, obviously, there was people

comparing it to Mothman.

There were people who thought it could be

a Halloween costume on a drone.

Some people thought that we're dealing

with a skydiver in a wing suit.

- So I've been investigating accounts

of flying humanoids like the Mothman

for many, many years.

And, like the Thunderbirds,

there seem to be (gentle music)

specific areas where they're reported more than others.

I will say that the Chicago cases do follow

the basic pattern of, again, flying humanoid flaps

where you have a short period of time

and on a high concentration (horns honking)

of these flying humanoid creatures

being reported or encountered.

- [Narrator] Sightings of the Chicago Mothman

begin to draw local media attention

and soon the creature was being written about

in publications such as the Chicago Post.

The articles were picked up by the Associated Press

and ran in newspapers around the United States

and soon a media sensation was born.

Just as it had in 1948 and 1977,

a winged creature flap was drawing national attention.

And just as it had in the previous waves,

the brighter the spotlight,

the more the witnesses that came forward.

- And this happens (tense music)

with a lot of cases that there are originally

very credible stories behind it

and then the media descends, monster hunters descend,

and all hell breaks loose.

And now the reports (drumming music)

get stranger and stranger.

So I think the original reports are what should be looked at

and have a lot of credibility to them

but some of the later reports,

just like every other crypto out there,

have to be looked at with a little more,

I think a little more of a critical eye.

- And the closer you get to the actual eyewitnesses,

it becomes clear that everybody's seeing different things,

that there's different levels of credibility

in the eyewitnesses.

And if there was 50 sightings in Chicago,

Chicago is an urban area, all you would have to do

is involve the law enforcement branch

of the city of Chicago

and there's CCTV cameras all over.

- Yeah, I'm familiar with Chicago but I wasn't familiar

with each of the sighting locations.

And then upon going there, my question was

why haven't more people reported the Mothman

if he, or it, is indeed appearing

in these tremendously crowded locations

where when I went there at all times of day and night,

I was constantly under foot.

- I've spoken quite a bit (eerie music)

in the Chicago metro area

on monsters and legends and I have yet to encounter

anyone who not only has seen this,

but that has a personal story from a friend.

- I have spoken to witnesses personally.

I've worked very closely with every investigator

who has spoken to witnesses personally.

And if they think that any of the investigators

are making it up, they're mistaken.

- [Narrator] In the months following the intiial outbreak

of reports, the Mothman moniker stuck and reports

began expanding outside of the city.

Suddenly, people were seeing a similar creature

over cities and suburbs all along the Great Lakes

particularly in the town of Gary, Indiana,

only 37 minutes to the south.

The wave of sightings swept across Chicago

and continued into 2018.

While investigators and researchers

continued to argue over the possible cause of the flap,

witnesses were still seeing something in the skies overhead.

But what was it?

- The other explanation could possibly be

what if something extraordinary did happen

in the Illinois Chicagoland area?

What if there was a UFO

or even a Thunderbird sighting

and someone knew about it that didn't want other people

to believe it? (film clicking)

And so they, upon seeing that this account

would be released, flood the information channels

with bogus accounts?

- We've talked to a number of people in Chicago.

I think there probably were some credible sightings

but I think a lot of it might have been exaggerated.

In a big city, you're gonna have an active sky.

You're always gonna have things moving overhead.

'Cause of course now we live in the age of drones

that come in all kinds of shapes including fixed wing

that are bat-like shapes. (suspenseful music)

You also have tall buildings so there's the potential

that there coulda been thrill seekers doing base jumping

with wing suits.

So there's all kinds of possibilities you have

when you've got a city versus, you know,

a corn field out in the middle of nowhere.

You know, people may tend to think of these things

as flesh and blood animals

and why would something like that be near a big city?

If we consider

that these flying humanoids - Okay!

- [Ken] may not fit neatly

into the natural world - Okay, man.

- so to speak, that they may be something

more spectral or supernatural (owl hooting)

in nature, then that would create

no geographic delineations.

These things could appear at the time and place

of their choosing.

- [Allison] Maybe there's misidentification.

Some of the researchers on the case like Tobias Wayland

from Singular Fortean think that, you know,

perhaps global warming is causing

some migrational birds into areas

where you normally wouldn't see them.

- When it comes to the Chicago sightings,

I think that there are two disparate

but concurrent phenomena.

And so the first is misidentifications

of large migratory birds.

People started seeing these birds,

they started going online to try to figure out

what they had seen.

They find websites like Phantoms & Monsters

and UFO Clearinghouse and us and they start reporting them.

So even though a lot of those turned out to be

Great Blue Herons or something similar,

it's actually led to a lot

of potentially paranormal sightings.

- While accounts, encounters with Thunderbirds,

flying humanoids, any of these weird flying creatures

are considered omens, warnings, harbingers

of tragic events, we must consider

that the word monster comes from a Latin word

that means warning.

So in a way, all of our monsters are harbingers.

(gentle music)

(birds chirping)

- [Narrator] Illinois is a state defined by its legends.

Like the changing terrain that one finds

when they travel north to south, the Prairie State

is awash in stories that capture the imagination.

Perhaps no town within the state has embraced those legends

more than Alton.

Here you will find a town that celebrates tales

of giant men, mythical musicians, ghosts,

and winged cryptids all mingling together

just like the waters of the three rivers

on whose banks it sits.

Centuries tend to carry away lies

but a legend is something else entirely,

a tale told to bolster or frighten,

to invigorate or encourage.

Perhaps lost in the passage of time

is the fact that the tellers were every bit

as important to the story (woman vocalizing)

as the characters or creatures that populated it.

But where did it begin?

With discovery.

Discovery of a truth, discovery of an experience

that must be related to others.

Discovery of a story (birds chirping)

that, like the mighty Mississippi itself,

can live forever.

Discovery of a legend still living right here

amongst the vanishing Midwest.

(birds hooting)

- The reason a lot of people (gentle music)

are interested in cryptozoology in general

is because people are interested in animals

and they're interested in mysteries.

Why should people be interested in,

for instance, Thunderbirds?

Because Thunderbirds could tell

us a lot. (woman vocalizing)

They could tell us a lot about climate,

about the terrain, about their reactions to people

to unknown animals.

Why are people afraid of animals

that are always above them?

And that is a key.

These animals terrify because they could come

out of nowhere. (dog barking)

They could kill you, they can take your children,

they could take your pets.

They don't have a clue about Thunderbirds

and that scares the bejeebas outta people.

(woman vocalizing)

- Regardless of the objective truth

behind some of these stories,

they have a huge effect on people's lives

and they have a huge effect on people's outlook.

And I think that it teaches us a lot about humanity

and I think that it's sort of our ethical duty

as human beings to help each other

through our experiences. (birds chirping)

- For me personally, collecting this kind of stuff

over the years is something that, historically speaking,

I find it to be very important because these are stories

that would be lost otherwise (bird hooting)

if someone wasn't writing them down.

And I think that, culturally speaking,

this is important to us because this is,

some day this will be the folklore of our generation.

I think that gathering tales of ghosts and monsters

and giant birds and whatever

is important to American history,

American culture, and it is something

that future generations are gonna need

to understand what we were doing

in the 20th century and the 21st century.

(emotional music)

(birds warbling)

(woman vocalizing)

(suspenseful music)

(woman vocalizing) (gentle music)