posted 10-16-2002 10:28 AM               

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A giant winged creature, like something out of Jurassic Park, has reportedly been sighted several times in Southwest Alaska in recent weeks.

Villagers in Togiak and Manokotak say they have seen a huge bird that's much bigger than anything they have seen before.

A pilot says he spotted the creature while flying passengers to Manokotak last week. He calculated that its wingspan matched the length of a wing on his Cessna 207. That's about 14 feet.

Other people have put the wingspan in a similar range.

Scientists aren't sure what to make of the reports. No one doubts that people in the region west of Dillingham have seen a very large rapto-like bird. But biologists and other people familiar with big Alaska birds say they're skeptical it's that big.

A recent sighting of the mystery bird occurred Oct. 10 when Moses Coupchiak, a 43-year-old heavy equipment operator from Togiak, 40 miles west of Manokotak, saw the bird flying toward him from about two miles away as he worked his tractor.

"At first I thought it was one of those old-time Otter planes," Coupchiak said. "Instead of continuing toward me, it banked to the left, and that's when I noticed it wasn't a plane."

The bird was "something huge," he said. "The wing looks a little wider than the Otter's, maybe as long as the Otter plane."

The bird flew behind a hill and disappeared. Coupchiak got on the radio and warned people in Togiak to tell their children to stay away.

Pilot John Bouker said he was highly skeptical of reports of "this great big eagle" that is two or three times the size of a bald eagle. "I didn't put any thought into it."

But early this week while flying into Manokotak, Bouker, owner of Bristol Bay Air Service, looked out his left window and 1,000 feet away, "there's this big ... . bird," he said.

"The people in the plane all saw him," Bouker said. "He's huge, he's huge, he's really, really big. You wouldn't want to have your children out."

Nicolai Alakayak, a freight and passenger driver from Manokotak who was flying with Bouker, said the creature looked like an eagle and was as large as "a little Super Cub."

Comparison to an eagle, certainly. Super Cub? Probably not, scientists said.

"I'm certainly not aware of anything with a 14-foot wingspan that's been alive for the last 100,000 years," said federal raptor specialist Phil Schemf in Juneau.

Schemf, other biologists, a village police officer and teachers at the Manokotak School said the sightings could be of a Steller's sea eagle, a species native to northeast Asia and one of the world's largest eagles. It's about 50 percent bigger than a bald eagle.


Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service http://www.shns.com

posted 10-16-2002 01:01 PM            

That summer there was a lot of forest fires and smoke. I asked him if there were any stories or prophecies of fires. While he told me that there was talk of more and bigger fires near the end times, he also mentioned that during this time the large animals would start coming back.

Then he told me of an aligator or crocodile sighting in another part of the same lake, and another spotted a lion even farther north than we were.

We do know that a symptom of climate change is the movement of plant and animal species into areas not known to exist before. For eg. I talked with an Inuit man this spring that told me of a hunter from Igloolik (sp?)
that shot a moose last fall. He had no idea what it was when he killed it, they had never had moose there before. (at least in the several thousand year oral knowledge and history)

Also new to parts of the north are white tailed dear, cougar, robins and likely many others. In northern Ontario there has been sightings of black panthers, or jaguars.

Of course we all remember the recent beachings of 'strange' beasts. Like some kind of prehistoric fish?

As for the chemicals concentrating in the north, yes that is definately happening. well documented. Some believe we have been seeing the effects of that for many years now. The north has also had the fallout from numerous atmospheric nuclear tests, reactor meltdowns, plutonium from processing and reprocessing, uranium mine tailings and crashed space vehicles.

Maybe it is also possible that increased CO2 has an effect on the growth of living things.

Or maybe it is the gender bending hormone like behaving chemicals that persist in the environment, bio-accumulating up the food chain. And because of global wind and water patterns, become concentrated in the north, often 'leap-frogging' many times and for thousands of miles. The 'DEW' sites across the arctic have themselves become a point source for gender bending and bio-accumulating PCB's.

Or it could be some kind of genetic engineering experiment/program?

emfx13- where did you see it?

rainheart