The Illinois and Missouri Giant Bird Wave of 1948

Spring 1948. The flying saucer wave of 1947 was still fresh, and the Air Force's Project Sign was collecting reports from its home base at Dayton, Ohio. Then the sky over Illinois offered something different. Not a disc. A bird.

The first hint came about three months before the headlines. At sunset, 12-year-old James Trares of Glendale, Missouri, saw a gray-green bird fly over his home. About the size of an airplane, he said.

On 9 April a United Press dispatch from Belvidere told of two more. Near Caledonia, farmer Robert Price was working by his barn when a huge bird with a long neck went over, with "what I suppose were its feet trailing behind it." His wife watched it too. Near Freeport, truck driver Veryl Babb saw it coasting. It was "bigger than an airplane and reminded me of one of those prehistoric monsters" he had learned about in school.

Then Alton. About 11:30 on a Sunday morning, Col. W. F. Siegmund was riding horseback four miles north of town. He was a retired Air Force colonel and sales manager for Western Cartridge Co. "At first I thought there was something wrong with my eyesight," he said. It was the size of a small pursuit plane, heading northeast at 4,000 to 5,000 feet. He saw no wing flapping. "But it was definitely a bird, and not a glider or jet plane." His companion, Col. Ralph Jackson, was talking to a farmer and saw nothing. Siegmund kept quiet. It looked too incredible.

Later in April, shortly before noon, E. M. Coleman and his 5-year-old son James saw it on the outskirts of Alton. It flew at about 500 feet and "cast a shadow the same as that of a Piper Cub at the same height." Coleman called it an "enormous, incredible thing with a body that looked like a naval torpedo." Grey and black. No engine sound. It flapped, soared, and seemed to land about half a mile west of their house.

The Dayton Daily News ran the story as "Companion to Flying Saucer," and Project Sign filed a United Press clipping without investigating. Project Grudge later logged the Alton report as Incident #123, dated 11 April 1948. Its astronomy consultant, J. Allen Hynek, found nothing astronomical. Relying mainly on Siegmund's statement, Hynek wrote that it "may have been a bird." He said nothing about the size. When Project Blue Book closed in 1969, that was the official answer. Brad Sparks later listed the case in his catalogue of Blue Book unknowns.

Other answers came quickly. The Charleston Daily Mail reported on 18 April that Bill Gesell of Belvidere and Babb identified the object as an "airplane-towed glider." S. B. Heckler of the St. Louis Audubon Society suggested a huge pelican. Siegmund himself wondered about an albatross or a condor far from home.

On 24 April, three great birds were seen over St. Louis. The next day, ornithologist T. E. Musselman and two colleagues watched three brown pelicans flying low about 30 miles south of Quincy, Illinois. Writing in The Auk in 1950, he judged them probably the same three birds. The species was rare in Illinois, with only four earlier records.

Alton already had a giant bird in its legends, the Piasa. Later books, among them Loren Coleman's Curious Encounters, carried the wave into thunderbird lore, and some retellings turned the Colemans' sighting into an attack. The United Press text describes only a sighting. In 1977, at Lawndale, Illinois, Ruth Lowe said a bird lifted her 10-year-old son. But the 1948 wave remains the one that put a giant bird into the Air Force's official UFO record.