American Thunderbird: Cryptozoology Lost Media

'Frank… You’re not going to the Belgian Congo. You’re just driving to upstate Pennsylvania! You don’t have to take all this equipment with you and camping stuff. You can get a motel up there and just talk to people and come back!'

So said cryptozoology pioneer and TV naturalist Ivan T Sanderson to his two proteges, Jay Blick and Frank Graves, as they prepared for a road trip into deepest, darkest PA to hunt for the American Thunderbird. 

First off, I'd like to thank Blake and Karen of Monster Talk for their recent excellent episode about the Thunderbird, which reignited my interest in this well-known cryptozoology mystery. 

The episode also pointed me towards the work of Kevin J. Guhl, who has written extensively on the subject. This is a monster of an article, full of details about the Thunderbird saga which I didn't know. I read most of it while waiting for a haircut in Waterford city recently. Guhl's article went down very well here at the Explorer's Club, where we like to think that cryptozoology in its original form was an outgrowth of lost world genre literature.

If you're not aware, there is a long-running belief among many cryptozoology fans that they have seen an old photo, maybe in a book or maybe on a tv show, showing a bunch of old timey gents (sometimes cowboys, sometimes civil war soldiers) standing in a line in front of a giant pterosaur-like creature (or sometimes a giant feathered bird). Often, but not always, they are reported as standing in front of a barn. Many people claim to possess such a memory, but nobody has ever identified the original photo, though many, many fakes have cropped up over the years.It's basically a cryptozoology version of the Mandela effect.

Guhl's article revealed the place that Scotsman Ivan T Sanderson (perhaps best known for his 1960s book Abominable Snowman: Legend Come to Life) played in creating this particular legend. At various points, Sanderson claimed to have seen to picture, to have had a copy of the picture - most prominently on a tv show, which is perhaps what most people who originally thought they remembered seeing it are actually thinking of.

Anyway, the article is great, and very much worth your time. I really enjoyed the idea of Blick and Graves preparing for a trip into the heavily-forested Pennsylvanian hinterland, believing it to be a lost world where Thunderbirds wheel around in the skies. The man they were going to visit, ageing folklore enthusiast Hiran Cranmer, seemed to be a one-man Thunderbird lore factory. He reported multiple sightings of giant birds over the years, claimed various missing persons as having been carried off by Thunderbirds, and was probably responsible for provoking the 1963 Jack Pearl article in men's magazine Saga which brought the mystery bird to the mainstream. 

This version of the infamous 'lost thunderbird photo' is the one from the Freakylinks tv show

Reading Guhl's article carefully, there's a hint - but just a hint - of the joyful possibility that outside Cranmer's fantasising (he also believed King Arthur was buried in the woods near his home), there was a real backwoods lore consisting of sightings of unknown monster birds, with reports coming from folks other than Cranmer.

I'd like to think so.