On January 1, 1976, Tracey Lawson, 11, and her cousin Jackie Davies, 14, were playing in Tracey's backyard five miles
south of Harlingen in the Texas Rio Grande Valley. As they looked out on a plowed field beyond the yard, they noticed an
unusual object standing some 100 yards away, near a borrow pit bordering an irrigation canal. Tracey went inside her
house to get field glasses, through which she observed a "horrible-looking" black bird of extraordinary size: over five feet
tall. Its wings were folded around its body, and the bird was staring at the girls through large, dark red eyes attacked to a
gray "gorilla-like" face. Its head was bald, and it had a beak at least six inches long: it made a loud, shrill eeeeee sound.

The bird, or whatever it was, was lost to view for a few moments, reappearing on the northeast corner of the property, its
head poking above a small clump of trees. The girls fled inside and told Tracey's mother and father, who did not believe
them.

But the next day Jackie's stepfather Tom Waldon found strange tracks: three-toed, eight inches across, square at the
head, pressed an inch and a half into the hard ground. Tracey's father Stan Lawson, who weighed 170 pounds, found
that he could not dent the ground with his own foot however hard he pressed down. He also noticed how oddly the family
dog was behaving. It cowered inside the doghouse all day, leaving it only at suppertime, when it bolted into the house
and had to be dragged out. That night Lawson thought he heard large wings scraping across the bedroom window, but
whatever caused the sound, it left no trace of its passing.

An encounter with the same creature reportedly occurred on the evening of January 7, in nearby Brownsville, when
Alverico Guajardo heard something hit his house trailer. Unnerved, he sneaked outside, got into his station wagon, and
drove around to the south end of the trailer. His headlight caught "something from another planet." It was a huge bird four
feet tall, with black feathers, a long beak, and bat-like wings. It had been lying on the ground when the lights hit it, but rose
immediately. Its blazing red eyes, the size of silver dollars, focused on Guajardo, whom for the next two or three minutes
was literally paralyzed with fear. All the while a "horrible-sounding noise" emanated from its throat. Eventually the creature
backed away and was lost in the darkness.

Exactly one week and two hours later, in the valley town of Raymondville, Armando Grimaldo sat smoking a cigareet in
his mother-in-law's backyard when he said he hear a "sound like the flapping of batlike wings and a funny kind of
whistling." As he got up to investigate, "I felt something grab me, somehting with big claws. I looked back and saw it and
started running." "It" was a creature with a monkeylike face and leathery skin. It had large bright red eyes but no beak.
Dashing for safety under a tree, he felt his pants, coat, and shirt being torn. The creature, breathing heavily, then flew off
into the night.

These sightings, which the press humorously attributed to "Big Bird," after the Sesame Street character, were reported
in valley and even national newspapers. As early as the previous November, however, rumors had circulated through Rio
Grande City of the presence of a "man-bird" four feet tall, with a bird's body and a man's head. In San Benito, a small
valley town inhabited almost entirely by Mexican Americans, residents had long believed in the existence of a large evil
bird. Another lady, she's dead now, saw it often through her window. Another woman said it has a cat face and no beak,
The face is a foot in diameter, and it has a thick, foot-long neck. It has big eyes." One woman claimed to have been
attacked from behind by a flying creature with enormous wings, black feathers, and no bill.

Theorists who sought conventional explanations pointed to great blue herons and pelicans as the likely cause of the
scare, and some of the less impressive accounts were unquestionably of these familiar species. Nevertheless, if the
witnesses to the better cases were telling the truth and, moreover, providing accurate descriptions of what they saw, the
real Big Bird remains a mystery.

Bibliography: Clark, Jerome. (1993). Unexplained!. Washington, D.C.: Visible Ink Press.

Big Bird