Urban Legend - The Fabulous Thunderbird!

There have been a few reports of a giant birdlike creature in the skies over Arizona. The most celebrated encounter reportedly took place in 1890, on the desert sands of what was then the Arizona Territory. 

Two cowboys reported a bizarre confrontation which has varied widely in the telling. 

An article in the April 26, 1890 edition of the Tombstone Epitaph reported their discovery of a "strange winged monster" said to resemble the Thunderbird of native legend.

 It was summarized by the newspaper as resembling a "huge alligator with an extremely elongated tail and an immense pair of wings."

The men who saw it said they men hunted the bird via horseback for several miles and eventually killed it with their Winchester rifles. They claimed they measured the creature, determining it to be 160 feet in length and fifty inches in diameter. Its head was around eight feet long, with its thick wings about 78 feet each in length.

As I said, the details varied with the telling.  Was it a pterodactyl like creature,  or something more like a giant crow?

Despite many today people claiming to have seen a photo, its existence has never been proven.  In fact, a photo was not even mentioned until a reporter for Saga mentioned it in an article in 1963!

That's when it was reported the beast was killed by ranchers, who then proceeded to take a photograph with its corpse nailed onto a barn. 

The internet has a few pictures pretending to be this mysterious photograph.  Not one of them tried to make a creature 160 long though.

Could there still be an ancient winged monster soaring the skies of the Arizona desert?