The Chehalis Birdman: Bernice Zaikowski's flying man

Chehalis already had a reputation. On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold had taken off from Chehalis airport on his famous flight. Because of it, the press called the town the "Saucer District." Barely half a year later, its sky offered something stranger than a saucer.

Tuesday, January 6, 1948. About 3:00 p.m. At her home in Chehalis, Lewis County, Mrs. Bernice Zaikowski, 61, heard a "sizzing and whizzing" sound. She looked up. A man was flying over her barn, "just 200 feet above" it.

He had "big, silver wings fastened over his shoulders with straps." He flew upright and "appeared to be manipulating controls strapped to his chest." He went "flipping around the roof of her barn." As he climbed, the wings drew in close to his body. When he hovered, banked or flew level, they spread again. They "neither flapped nor rotated." She saw no propeller.

She was not alone. "There were a lot of small children coming home from school," she said. "They saw the man, too, and asked me if they could go into my back yard so that they could watch him longer as he flew toward the south end of the city." At least five other Chehalis people later told her they had seen the man as well.

The story reached the wires around January 21. Two weeks had passed. United Press noted that "Only Mrs. Zaikowski is positive." She knew how it sounded. "I know most people don't believe me," she said.

Chief of Police Thomas Murry refused to investigate. One wire service said he refused "with a chuckle." At McChord Field, army authorities were skeptical. An air force officer said it "sounded like one of those saucers deals." No Project Sign or Blue Book file has been found. Later retellings mention a soldier who claimed the army had been testing such devices. That claim has never been traced to a 1948 newspaper.

October 30, 1976. The Centralia Daily Chronicle ran "Beware! The mothman cometh," by sports editor Chuck Wilfong. It reported that "The Zaikowskis learned later that the apparition was a man in a 'parakite,' forerunner to the present day hang glider."

Not everyone was convinced. In UFO Digest, Peter Hassall noted that Barry Palmer's first foot-launched hang glider flight came only in August 1961. Those early flights were far lower and shorter than what Zaikowski described. Lyle Zapato found the parakite idea convincing for the figure itself, yet pointed out that no known device had "the retractable wings or chest controls described by Zaikowski." The witnesses heard a motor. They saw no propeller. Zapato's last word: "The mystery of the Cascadian Birdman remains." No one has ever accused Zaikowski of a hoax.

The case entered HUMCAT, the humanoid catalogue of David F. Webb and Ted Bloecher, as case 1948-05. John A. Keel cited it in Operation Trojan Horse. Hans Holzer cited it in The UFOnauts. Albert Rosales listed it among his humanoid encounters. Three months later, on April 7, 1948, three flying men in "dark drab flight suits" were reported over Longview, Washington, and the press linked the two cases. Today the Chehalis birdman is often set beside Mothman of Point Pleasant, a case it predates by nearly two decades.