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I haven't seen this photo before

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plusky

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
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Nov 27, 2009
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18
Sorry if this photo has been discussed before - looking thru the thread it looks like quite a few links have got broke over the years.

Presumably this one is a mock-up - it looks far too "fresh" to be genuinely old and the pteranodon looks like a fake - but at least it tries to include elements of a barn in the background.

My own memory of the Thunderbird photo is of:
1)the creature being a huge bird not a pteranodon
2)it is nailed to a barn
3)six cowboys types standing in front of it - one of them wearing a top hat
and I remember it being in either "Time" or "Life" magazine c. 1957



http://www.genesis6giants.com/index.php?s=316
 
Hi Plusky,

Are you saying that you've seen the famous lost thunderbird photo?
 
plusky said:
Presumably this one is a mock-up - it looks far too "fresh" to be genuinely old and the pteranodon looks like a fake - but at least it tries to include elements of a barn in the background.
Click to expand...

According to Frontiers of Zoology it is modern fake...quite a few thunderbird pictures with guys standing beside/under/above the thunderbird..but not the one we all seem to recall.
 
The thing I love about the Thunderbird photo is that not only has everybody seen it, but quite a few people remember exactly where they saw it - and it's not there.

My very favorite story was, I think, included in Mark Chorvinsky's masterful roundup of the evidence, a first-person testimony by someone who saw the photo, not once, but many times, in a book in his home town library. Like many of us library haunters, as a kid he had sections he went to over and over and books he looked into repeatedly, without checking them out for one reason or another (often, they're adult books in a library that won't check books out to children; or you don't want to read the book, but you want to own it, so you can look at the attractive feature whenever you want). He remembered the shelf it was on, the size and shape and color of the book, the other books around it, the picture on the facing page, even (IIRC) the title. When he heard about the Thunderbird photo he was convinced he could find it again.

He even found the book again. He found the picture on the facing page. He did not find the Thunderbird photo.

(Of course, I might have distorted the story in memory. And so might the witness.)
 
PeniG said:
The thing I love about the Thunderbird photo is that not only has everybody seen it, but quite a few people remember exactly where they saw it - and it's not there.

...

He even found the book again. He found the picture on the facing page. He did not find the Thunderbird photo.
Click to expand...
Clearly, some time traveller has been visiting all the libraries and carefully cutting out all the thunderbird pictures.

That way, his secret (whatever it is) will be safe, because fallible human memories will never remember all the details correctly. :twisted:
 
rynner2 said:
PeniG said:
The thing I love about the Thunderbird photo is that not only has everybody seen it, but quite a few people remember exactly where they saw it - and it's not there.

...

He even found the book again. He found the picture on the facing page. He did not find the Thunderbird photo.
Click to expand...
Clearly, some time traveller has been visiting all the libraries and carefully cutting out all the thunderbird pictures.

That way, his secret (whatever it is) will be safe, because fallible human memories will never remember all the details correctly. :twisted:
Click to expand...
100th monkey theory, once it was removed from enough books, it was removed from all of them. :shock:
 
The thing has the wing structure of a bat. Whoever made it has no knowlahe of pterosaur wings.
 
lordmongrove said:
The thing has the wing structure of a bat. Whoever made it has no knowlahe of pterosaur wings.
Click to expand...

It could be a previously undiscovered batosaur.
 
I've seen the photo on the internet, probably in the late 90s or early 00s.
 
tbirdphoto.jpg


52ytye.jpg
 
Yes, I remember it like it was yesterday. I rode my bicycle down to the store and bought a magazine. Old West, Fall 1969. Inside was an article called "Our Country's Mysterious Monsters." The first account in the article was about cowboys seeing a huge, fantastic flying creature in the Arizona desert and shooting it down. Then I turned to the next page of the article, and you know what I saw??!!

Nothing. There were no illustrations.

I seem to be the only person who never saw anything remotely like the Thunderbird photo, and I dug through every fortrean/paranormal book and magazine I could get my grubby hands on in the 60s and 70s. What gets me is, a photo of ANYTHING fortean/paranormal/cryptozoological is so rare, I'm sure I would have paraded the Thunderbird picture through the streets, shoving it in the face of all and sundry. Everyone else apparently shrugged their shoulders and said, "Eh," and moved on.

. . . Yet I recall reading that Ivan Sanderson took the photo on a talk show and displayed it for all America to see. Guess ya can't win.

Moonstone Comics printed -- of all things -- a Kolchak: the Night Stalker/Sherlock Holmes 3-part crossover comic a few years back (and now it exists in novel form). It was about the Thunderbird photo. They give an explanation for the photo disappearing from all publications, and strangely enough (considering Kolchak always runs into supernatural horrors), the explanation is NOT paranormal or supernatural. (Saying more than that would be a spoiler :) ).
 
It seems a extra Fortean cherry on top that, despite many many people remembering seeing the picture(s), nobody has been able to track (any of) them down.

Tulpa photograph, maybe?
 
lordmongrove said:
The thing has the wing structure of a bat. Whoever made it has no knowlahe of pterosaur wings.
Click to expand...

A giant bat ?
 
I was just wasting some time mooching about in the weirder outer reaches of YouTube, as you do, and I stumbled across this:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD_bmpCxZ6A

At 1.51 is a photograph of a man in Western clothing holding something that looks like the common conception of a pterosaur, only smaller. I've never seen it before, but I thought it might be of interest on this thread.
 
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