The Harlingen Ambulance Pterodactyl: James Thompson on Highway 100 (1983)

The lower Rio Grande Valley had heard this kind of story before. In 1975 and 1976, San Benito police reported a "Big Bird," a huge feathered creature that glides along the earth. In Brownsville, a witness spoke of "eyes like silver dollars, wings like a bird and a face like a bat." Seven years later, the Valley had a new witness. A paramedic on duty.

September 14, 1983. James Thompson, a technician with the Harlingen Emergency Medical Service, was driving an ambulance on State Highway 100, returning from South Padre Island. Some 4 miles east of Los Fresnos, something came gliding through the air in front of him. In the account later published by Karl Shuker, it crossed the road about 50 m ahead with distinct flapping wingbeats. Thompson stopped the ambulance and got out for a better look.

"A black or grayish rough texture," he said. "It wasn't feathers. I'm quite sure it was a hide-type covering." The wingspan was 5 to 6 feet. There was almost no neck at all, and a hump on the back of its head like a Brahma bull's. Near its throat was a small pouch, "something like a pelican's pouch." Shuker's version adds a thin body 2.5 to 3 metres long and a long tail that ended in a fin.

Thompson told the Valley Morning Star that "he flapped his wings enough to get him off the grass." It had come in low. Then it lifted away.

On November 16, 1983, a UPI wire story by Mack Sisk put the sighting on the wire. Thompson called the animal "a pterodactyl-like bird." By then his fellow paramedics were calling him the "bird man," and calls had come from as far away as Hawaii. He was unmoved. "I take it in stride. I know what I saw."

No formal investigation followed. Al Schriver, assistant manager of the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge, said he and other biologists "have kinda kicked around" the Valley reports. He suggested white pelicans, which like to glide a lot and have wingspans up to 90 inches, or ultralight aircraft. Biologists also noted that golden eagles had been seen as far south as the Valley and could startle a person who had never seen one. Thompson himself had compared the pouch to a pelican's, and the highway runs only a few miles from Laguna Atascosa.

Karl Shuker rejected both pelicans and ultralights. "The only creature living or extinct that resembles it," he wrote, "is a rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur, known to have possessed a long tail terminating in a fin."

Shuker told the story in In Search of Prehistoric Survivors in 1995. Ken Gerhard later read that account to Richard Guzman, a Houston witness whose own sketch showed a bony crest and a finned tail. Many later write-ups date the sighting to 1982, but the contemporary reports point to 1983. The finned tail appears only in Shuker's telling. There are no photographs, no film, no traces on the roadside. One man. One road. One statement, from a man who knew what he saw.