Boogeymen: The Thunderbird

[Ninurta]

This is an article with photos of a "giant bird" taken 30 miles west of Chicago, IL, in 2018. The photos are very blurry and grainy, and I can't tell whether that's actually legs trailing the bird as stated, or a thin tail. If it's legs, it might be a wading bird of some sort, like a stork or heron, and if not, it may be some kind of buzzard, or...

https://www.singularfortean.com/news/201...of-chicago

"...This thing was flying over our heads at about 900 to 1000 feet up.

I have spent 13 years in the aviation business and it's a habit to identify planes by nature.
For the business that Bill and myself do for a living, we both have a great sense of movement
and judgement for distance...'

That's a bit high for herons and storks, isn't it? Up there you're benefitting from the thermals for carrion and not the nearest
stretch of water. INMHO.

I couldn't say for sure. That's the flatlands, and they may behave differently there. Here, I rarely ever see them flying more than 40 or 50 feet above a water course, looking for good spots to alight and catch a few fish or crawdads. Generally, they are lower, only 10 or 12 feet above a creek. I think the highest I've ever seen one fly might be about 300 feet. But here, the land is varied up and down, and thermals are created as a natural result of the landscape - so, in the flatlands, they may have to fly higher to achieve the same results.

The blurriness of the images does argue, in my mind, in favor of a greater height along the magnitude that he reports.

I think it would be good to have the original images with the EXIF information embedded, to get an idea of the focal length and the pixel resolution to make a rough size estimate.



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