Illinois Thunderbird

On the evening of July 25, 1977, the Lowe family of Lawndale, Illinois, had just finished dinner outside and the kids were still playing in the yard. Around 8:10 p.m. (8:30 in another account), according to Ruth Lowe’s account as written by Jerry D. Coleman, two massive black birds flying in tight wingtip-to-wingtip formation began chasing her ten-year-old son, Marlon, pecking and clawing at his shoulders. Ruth was cleaning up in the kitchen where she couldn’t see the children. When she ran outside, the larger bird had sunk its claws into Marlon’s shirt and lifted him off the ground. Ruth’s statement puts Marlon at 56 pounds, while The Courier quoted her at the time saying 65. She kept attacking the bird until it dropped him. Accounts differ on how far it carried him: 35 feet by the family’s own measurement, about forty feet in another retelling, and only a few feet in a third. Marlon was scratched and badly frightened but not seriously injured.

Ruth Lowe described the birds in detail to anyone who would listen: a white ring around a half-foot-long neck, very black body, a six-inch hooked bill, claws arranged with three in front and one in back, wings at least four feet long excluding the body, and total body length of approximately four and one-half feet from beak to tail feather.

Four other adults arrived within seconds. They described the birds as black with white bands around their necks, long curved beaks, and wingspans of at least ten feet. Seven witnesses saw the entire incident.

The Lowes’ report drew swift local ridicule. When they went to the police, they were laughed out of the precinct, though three state police officers did later walk around the Kickapoo Creek area. The family’s Saint Bernard, which barked at everything, had not made a sound during the attack. That silence unsettled Ruth. As the story circulated in the local press, Marlon became known to his schoolmates as “bird boy,” and dead pigeons were tossed onto the Lowe family’s porch.

The incident made national news.

What began as a single backyard encounter became a wave of sightings stretching across central Illinois. Three days after the Lawndale attack, a McLean County farmer reported seeing a similarly sized bird over his farm near radio-controlled airplanes. Near Bloomington, mail truck driver James Majors observed two such birds along the highway; one dropped into a field and snatched up a small animal. In Tremont on July 28, Lisa Montgomery glanced up from washing her car and saw a giant bird pass overhead. At approximately 2:00 a.m. on July 30 in Downs, Dennis Turner and friends reported a monstrous bird perched on a telephone pole. Reports kept coming from Bloomington and north central Illinois, then further south, from Decatur to Macon and Sullivan.

On July 30, five days after the Lawndale attack, “Texas” John Huffer of Tuscola was at Lake Shelbyville with his son when they spotted two large birds roosting in a tree in an inlet of the lake. Huffer fired his boat horn to startle them and captured over one hundred feet of color film as the birds took flight. He estimated the largest bird’s wingspan at more than twelve feet. A still frame appeared in the Tuscola Journal on August 2, 1977, and portions of the footage were sold to a Champaign television station for broadcast.

Officials from the Department of Conservation said the birds were merely turkey vultures, and wildlife experts and cryptozoologists answered that no turkey vulture was the size witnesses reported. Sources disagree on the California condor’s wingspan, up to 9 feet in one passage and 10 feet in another, and that species is endangered and endemic to the West Coast. The Lowes said the bird most closely resembled an Andean condor, which reaches 10.5 feet. Some researchers, Loren Coleman among them, believe the thunderbirds may be teratorns, supposedly extinct birds whose largest members had wingspans over 20 feet.

Legends of giant predatory birds run deep in Illinois. The Cahokia tribe called them thunderbirds for the thunderous sound of their wing flaps. The most famous is the Piasa Bird, a drawing etched into the limestone cliffs outside Alton, first described in 1673 by the Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette. As Marquette recorded it, the Piasa was a terrible creature that preyed on the local Indians. Twenty-nine years before the Lawndale incident, in April 1948, a former Army colonel named Walter F. Siegmund said he saw a gigantic bird above Alton. “I thought there was something wrong with my eyesight,” he said. On April 24 many people saw the birds over Alton, and flight instructors at the local airport said the largest cast a shadow “as big as a Piper Cub from 500 feet up.” Sightings moved on to the St. Louis area, and then, just as public excitement peaked, they stopped.

Instead of profiting from their story, the Lowes were ostracized in their community, which Atlas Obscura takes as a sign it probably wasn’t a planned hoax.