A Canadian spiritualist ghostbusting actor walks into a bar wearing New Age crystals and a crystal skull around his neck, goes up to the bartender, and orders a vodka. . . . No, this weird mashup is not the setup to a joke (certainly not a funny one) but instead more or less describes one of the strangest intersections of Hollywood, New Age paranormal belief, ghost hunting, and alcohol.

This story involves crystal skulls. There are many skulls in the world carved out of quartz crystal of varying sizes and designs. I’ve seen them in a lot of places, especially in South and Central America, where they are sold as tourist trinkets. The ones you can buy for a few dollars are rather plain, but the big ones (life-size or so) are steeped in myth and romance. There are only a handful of the life-size skulls in existence, and they have inspired awe for generations. They are said to be hundreds of years old and possibly of Mayan or Aztec origin.

Figure 2. A rare crystal skull on display at the British Museum in London, England. Photo by Benjamin Radford.

I examined a glowing crystal skull in the British Museum (see Figures 1 and 2), and the skulls are indeed a sight to behold. Of course I’m not the only one interested in them. Many people have been enchanted by the world’s crystal skulls. Screenwriter George Lucas has said in interviews that he has been interested in crystal skulls for many years. He even wrote a script about them, which finally became the 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls (See Figure 3). While there is little evidence for the reality of most of the artifacts that Indy chased in his earlier films (such as the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail), crystal skulls are quite real. The crystal skulls are said to have no tool marks that show when or how they were made. Beyond the artistry of carved crystal, many believe the skulls have special abilities, such as aiding psychic abilities, healing the sick—or even power over death.

Figure 3. A “crystal skull” (actually plastic resin), sold in conjunction with the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, displayed at Disneyland. From the author’s collection, photo by Benjamin Radford.

Another person interested in crystal skulls is Dan Aykroyd. He’s famous, in skeptical circles anyway, for enthusiastically endorsing all manner of paranormal phenomena and producing a plethora of mystery-mongering TV shows. His website refers to him as “a well-known actor, musician, entrepreneur and spiritualist; a believer in what he calls the ‘invisible world’ where otherworldly presences are a ‘form of reality as valid as our normal reality.’” His father, Peter, is a Canadian author and historian who wrote a book on ghosts titled A History of Ghosts.

Dan Aykroyd was so taken with the skulls, in fact, that he cofounded a Canadian company called Crystal Head Vodka, which launched in 2008 with the bottling of its crystal-filtered libation in novelty glass skulls (Figure 4). The vodka’s packaging states,

A controversial archaeological mystery, 13 crystal heads have been found in regions around the world, from the American southwest to Tibet. They’re dated between 5,000 and 35,000 years old, and were supposedly polished into shape from solid quartz chunks over a period of several hundred years. Although according to Hewlett Packard engineers, they bear no tool marks to tell us exactly how they were made. The heads are thought to offer spiritual power and enlightenment to those who possess them, and as such stand not as symbols of death, but of life.

In a video introduction on the vodka’s website Aykroyd states:

I have always been an avid researcher of the subject of the legendary thirteen crystal heads which have been unearthed at numerous locations and at various times on our planet. The story goes that thirteen crystal heads have been found in places varying from the Yucatan peninsula in Central America to the American South­west in New Mexico and also in Tibet. There are now seven heads known to be in mankind’s custody . . . and one is currently owned by a woman in the South­west who claims that she had to finally put it in a closet after he (or she) began speaking to her. Scientists estimate that it took between 300 and 500 years to carve one of these heads from a single piece of quartz. However, in tests conducted on the Mitchell-Hedges head by Hewlett-Packard labs in the 1960s [sic], they could find no discernable tool marks on the head to show how it was carved. Equally fascinating is that according to both physicists and jewelers these heads should not exist but should have shattered in the course of making them. . . . The Navajo believe that [the skulls] were bestowed on their people as a gift from higher beings not of this Earth as a means of cataloguing sacred cultural knowledge from the past, assessing the present, and foretelling the future. Contrary to the common perception of a skull as representing death, the people from these cultures—the Aztec, Mayan, and North American First Nations, for whom these artifacts possess sacred and mystical properties—associate the crystal heads with a life-affirming symbology. In ancient tellings, the heads are living and sentient sources of knowledge, insight, and power. (Aykroyd 2008)

Figure 4. A bottle of Crystal Head vodka: filled to the brim with vodka and pseudoscience. From the author’s collection; photo and consumption by Benjamin Radford.

Perhaps Aykroyd was sampling some of his own product, because very little of what he said is accurate. Tool marks have indeed been found on several of the crystal skulls (see Sax et al. 2008); the Hewlett-Packard report says nothing of the sort (Hewlett Packard 1971); and in any event Aykroyd seems unaware that one of the crystal skulls he highlights, the New Mexico “crystal skull,” is in fact not crystal at all but instead made of blown glass (Smith 2008; see Figure 5) and therefore would not have “shattered in the course of making” it, as he claimed. As for the most famous crystal skull in the world, researchers such as Joe Nickell (2006) and Daniel Loxton (2008) note that the Mitchell-Hedges skull was not in fact found in the Yucatan peninsula but was instead bought at auction, and its reputed history is thoroughly fraudulent.

Crystal Diamonds

Figure 5. A “crystal” skull (actually made of glass) identical to one found in northern New Mexico. From the author’s collection; photo by Benjamin Radford.

Not only is the vodka made from pure New­found­land water and bottled in a replica (glass) crystal skull, but Aykroyd (2008) would not stop there in his quest to imbue his vodka with New Age woo—if not better flavor: “A quadruple-distillation process made Crystal Head as pure as vodka can be, but the quest for an almost mystical purity continued. As a final stage, the liquid was filtered through 500-million-year-old crystals known as Herkimer diamonds. These quartz crystals are found in very few places in the world, including Herkimer, New York and regions in Tibet and Afghan­istan. Perhaps because they share the raw material from which the original crystal heads were carved, they are thought to have similar spiritual qualities.”

The Herkimer “diamonds” through which the vodka is filtered have another interesting connection to the paranormal, as Joe Nickell noted in his book Real-Life X-Files (2001). They were used as so-called “crystal tears” by a woman named Katie who was reputed to be a physical medium and who could miraculously produce apports from the Great Beyond, including the tears.

From a distilling point of view, it’s not clear why “filtering” a vodka through crystals would improve its flavor or purity any more than filtering it over rocks or glass marbles. Of course, truth never stands in the way of a good story—and certainly not a good advertising campaign. Crystal Head vodka can be found at the intersection of New Age woo, pop culture, and mystery-mongering pseudoscience.

References

Aykroyd, Dan. 2008. Promotional video for Crystal Head Vodka, accessed on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKqjIv91Zx8.

Hewlett Packard. 1971. History or hokum? Measure February: 9–10.

Loxton, Daniel. 2008. Crystal skulls. Junior Skeptic (Skeptic magazine) 14(2): 96–89.

Nickell, Joe. 2006. Riddle of the crystal skulls. Skeptical Inquirer July/August: 15–16.

Sax, Margaret, Jane Walsh, Ian Freestone, et al. 2008. The origin of two purportedly pre-Columbian Mexican crystal skulls. Journal of Archaeological Science (May 18).

Smith, Mike. 2008. The San Luis Valley crystal skull. Skeptical Briefs (December): 3–5.

The term ape-man is used in two major ways: scientifically, it designates any extinct primate having structural characteristics that are intermediate between man and ape (Webster’s 1980); popularly, the term also describes any of the various legendary hairy creatures that are characterized as “human-like apes or apelike humans”—the North American Sasquatch/Bigfoot, for example (Clark and Pear 1997, 207, 467). As CFI’s visiting scholar in China during October 2010 (in an exchange program with the China Research Institute for Science Popu­larization [CRISP]), I encountered—so to speak—an example of each of these two types of ape man, which some believe are related. As we shall see, each has proved elusive in its own way.

Extinct Primates

One of my excursions out of Beijing was into the cave-pocked mountainous countryside at Zhoukoudian (Figure 1), site of a major twentieth-century paleontological find. As a boy I had been fascinated by the fossils of ape-men. These included a species discovered at this site in the 1920s, which I perused in a book given to me by my geologist uncle, Charles Cunard, titled Historical Geology (Dunbar 1949). My interest was renewed during my stay in China, and I visited the Beijing Museum of Natural History with my colleague and friend, Hu Junping. Although the “Peking Man” exhibit was closed at the time, we were able to gain ac­cess to it, and I resolved to then make a pilgrimage to Zhoukoudian.

Subsequently, at that World Heritage Site, I climbed the steep trails to the caves where Homo erectus pekinensis once lived (Figure 2), possibly making fire and using tools of chipped flint. As his name indicates, this primitive man walked erect, although his low forehead and heavy brow ridges, as well as his protruding jaws and receding chin, show his apelike character (Figure 3).

Figure 2. Caves like this at Zhoukoudian provided shelter to the primitive Homo erectus pekinensis.

In the museum at the site I gazed at the famous fossils of Peking Man—actually copies; the loss of the originals represents one of the unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century. The story begins during World War II when, for safekeeping, numerous bones and teeth and five skulls were packed in wooden crates and entrusted to the U.S. Marine Corps. They were intended to be transported to the United States, but when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the fossil treasure disappeared. According to National Geographic Traveler: Beijing (Mooney 2008),

The fate of Peking Man has been the subject of much speculation. According to one theory, the boxes went to a sea grave when the Awa Maru was sunk by the Americans in the Taiwan Strait. An underwater search of the site found nothing. Then, in 1966, a Japanese soldier “admitted” on his deathbed that he buried the bones under a tree in Ritan Park . . . at the end of the war, but they were not found there either. In 2005 the Chinese government announced a new investigation. It seems that the beguiling mystery of Peking Man continues.

(For more on Peking Man, see Feder 1996, 129, 149–150.)

Figure 3. Heavy brow ridges are among the apelike features of Peking Man. (Photos by Joe Nickell)

While Peking Man stood only about five feet tall, another early resident of what is now China (as well as India and Vietnam) was comparatively huge: an extinct genus whose name means “giant ape,” Giganto­pithecus. The species Gigantopithecus blacki represents the largest primate of all time—a Bigfoot-sized creature, perhaps, weighing over a quarter ton. The first fossilized teeth were found in a Chinese apothecary shop in 1935; further remains—mandibles and teeth—were found at Chinese excavation sites, including cave deposits. Unfortu­nately, given the absence of pelvic and leg bones, the ape’s size is only an estimate, and its mode of locomotion is disputed—although the dominant scientific view is that it walked on all fours (Napier 1973, 173–92; Daegling 2004, 13–16; Feder 1996, 71).

Yeti, et al.

Some cryptozoologists (those who study hidden or unknown animals) believe that fossil ape-men may not be extinct after all and indeed may be the source for reports of Bigfoot-like creatures. Such hairy man-beasts are found across Asia—if sightings, footprints, and other traces are to be be­lieved. They include the Siberian Mirygdy (and its eastern, often-clothed relative, the Chuchunaa), the Mongolian Alma, the Vietnamese Nguoi rung, the Malaysian Sakai, the Nepalese Teh-lma, and others (Coleman and Huyghe 1999, 110–139).

Some of these, such as the Chuchunaa, have been supposed to be Neanderthals (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, extinct humans who lived in Eurasia from about 250,000 to 45,000 years ago). This, even though the legendary creature’s reported height of some six feet six inches is a foot greater than that of the average Neanderthal (Coleman and Huyghe 1999, 116). Homo erectus—as represented by Peking Man and the related Java Man—has also been considered a hypothetical living fossil (Krantz 1992, 186; Napier 1972, 183, 192). Still larger reported ape-men have invited comparison with Gigantopithecus (Heuvelmans 1972, 107; Krantz 1992, 188–93).

China’s best-known man-beasts are the Yeren and the Yeti. The Yeti is the legendary wild man of the Sherpa tribespeople of the Himalayan Mountains, which includes Tibet, an autonomous region of southwestern China. Also known to western explorers and mountaineers as the Abominable Snowman, the Yeti reportedly ranges from the height of a normal man to eight feet tall. Covered with hair, it is also described as having a conical head and large feet. It is known largely through dubious sightings and photographs of its alleged footprints in snow, which fail to constitute credible evidence (Nickell 1995, 224–226).

Bernard Heuvelmans, known as the “father of cryptozoology” and author of the cryptozoological classic On the Track of Unknown Animals, suggested that Yetis might be a surviving Gigantopithecus population. Under attack from man and unable to live any longer in trees, the giant apes could have sought a safe and suitable habitat in the Himalayas, Heuvelmans hypothesized (1972, 97). Others, including anthropologist Grover Krantz (1992, 191–192), postulated that Gigantopithecus subsequently extended its range and evolved into the North American Sasquatch/Bigfoot. How­ever, there are many arguments against either possibility, including an absence of fossil record in each case and the fact that paleontologists have concluded that Gigan­topithecus became extinct about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago (Napier 1973, 178–80; Daegling 2004, 15).

The Yeren

As to the Yeren, it has existed in some version or other in the folklore of southern and central China since ancient times. Its name means “wild man,” but it has also been characterized as a “manbear,” “mountain monster,” “monkeylike” creature, “red-haired mountain man”—even a mountain “ghost” (Coleman and Clark 1999, 260; Poirier et al. 1983, 31). Perhaps the earliest reference to such a creature, dating over 2,000 years ago, is found in the poetry of Qu Yuan, which frequently mentions the Shangui (or “mountain ogres”). A Tang Dynasty (CE 618–907) historian, Li Yanshow, described a group of Hubei wild men, and a Ming Dynasty (CE 1368–1644) pharmacologist, Li Shizhen, reported on several types of wild men in his voluminous Compendium of Materia Medica. Eighteenth-century poet Yuan Mei described an entity that was “monkeylike, but not a monkey” in Shanxi Province (Topping 1981).

Searches for the Yeren have been carried out since at least the 1970s, but the adventurers and filmmakers involved have failed to see the fabled creature. Sightings by others, as well as the usual doubtful footprints and hair and fecal specimens, make up the bulk of the inconclusive evidence for the existence of the alleged creature. Neverthe­less, during my stay in China, the newspaper China Daily (Guo 2010) reported, “Search for elusive ape man continues against the odds.” The article told of a planned expedition by the newly con­stituted Wild Man Research Association, founded in Hubei and focusing on that province’s remote, mountainous area known as the Shennongjia Nature Reserve. The re­port prompted a response from an ornithologist who has long studied fauna in Shen­nongjia. He labels the search nonsense, explaining: “That location is not consistent with that of ape man. There’s a basic standard for judging whether it exists, for example, the species grouping and area of distribution. There’s no area for Wild Man’s activity in Shennongjia.” He concluded by pointing to the failed expeditions of the 1970s and 1980s (Guo 2010).

Descriptions of the Yeren are exceedingly varied. The creature is reported to range in height from as little as three feet to over nine feet. It is usually said to be covered in hair, but that varies in color from grayish-brown to brown, dark-brown to brown-red, red, and even “purple-red wavy hair,” as well as white (Clark and Pear 1997, 262; Poirier et al. 1983, 31–32). Its footprints allegedly range from very small to twenty-one inches or more, and some prints suggest claws (a nonprimate feature). The creature is thought to walk upright or upon all fours, be carnivorous or vegetarian, make bamboo nests or inhabit caves, and so on (Clark and Pear 1997, 260–265; Poirier et al. 1983).

Clearly, if the Yeren is not entirely imaginary—functioning as a sort of folkloric boogeyman—it does not have a single, simple explanation. Sightings may simply be caused by any of such animals as bears, including albino bears, and macaque monkeys, not to mention wolves, wild goats, and numerous other wildlife. Indeed, in 1980 two supposed Yeren shot by a hunter turned out to be the rare and endangered golden monkey, while bears have been suggested as the explanation for certain “manbear” re­ports, just as albino bears (a high incidence of albinism is known in Hubei province) have been put forward for “mountain ghosts.” Mange can give a mysterious ap­pearance to an ordinary creature. For example, an “Oriental Yeti” was apparently a mangy Himalayan weasel, and a Bigfoot whose story my wife and I pursued in northern Pennsylvania was most likely a black bear with mange (Nickell 2011, 61–62).

Some have suggested that the wild man is some human throwback—neither Giganto­pithecus nor Peking Man surely but possibly some oddity like those sometimes exhibited in carnival sideshows (Nickell 2005, 150–58, 202–208). A “monkey baby,” for instance, that lived in Xhin Xhan County of Hubei Province, was simply an unfortunate individual with genetic deficiencies who “walked with a shuffling gait, had a slouched back, had a low misshapen forehead, could only make sounds with no articulate speech, and grinned constantly” (Poirier et al. 1983, 30). Yeren researcher Frank E. Poirier—only a normally hairy westerner who is about five feet eleven inches tall—frightened some local children who “ran away horrified at their encounter with what they screamed to others was the Wildman in their midst” (Poirier et al. 1983, 37–38).

Of course, some Yeren sightings and other evidence may even be due to hoaxing—the work of those seeking notoriety, enjoying pranking, or hoping to boost local tourism. In any event, until a specimen is actually captured or killed, the elusive Yeren—like its nearby and western counterparts, the Yeti and Sasquatch/Bigfoot, re­spectively—will remain in the realm of myth, not in the scientific canon like Homo erectus and Gigantopithecus.

References

Clark, Jerome, and Nancy Pear. 1997. Strange and Unexplained Phenomena. New York: Visible Ink.

Coleman, Loren, and Jerome Clark. 1999. Crypto­zoology: A to Z. The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature. New York: Fireside.

Coleman, Loren, and Patrick Huyghe. 1999. The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide. New York: Avon Books.

Daegling, David J. 2004. Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthro­pologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Dunbar, Carl O. 1949. Historical Geology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 507–509.

Feder, Kenneth L. 1996. The Past in Perspective: An Introduction to Human Prehistory. London: May­field Publishing Co.

Guo Rui. 2010. Search for elusive ape man continues against the odds. China Daily (October 12).

Heuvelmans, Bernard. 1972. On the Track of Unknown Animals. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Krantz, Grover S. 1992. Big Footprints: A Scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch. Boulder, Colorado: Johnson Books.

Mooney, Paul. 2008. National Geographic Traveler: Beijing. Washington, DC: National Geographic.

Napier, John. 1973. Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.

Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, New York: Prome­theus Books.

———. 2011. Tracking the Man-Beasts. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

Poirier, Frank E., Hu Hongxing, and Chung-Min Chen. 1983. The evidence for Wildman in Hubei province, People’s Republic of China. Cryptozoology 2 (Winter): 25–39.

Topping, Audrey. 1981. Wild men of China: Scientists stalk hairy aborigines. Science Digest (August); cited in Poirier et al. 1983, 28.

Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (2nd ed.). 1980. N.p.: William Collins Publishers, s.v. “ape-man.”

Various civilizations have used culturally relevant stories to teach their people the importance of community and respecting the power of nature. Nearly every culture speaks of the common notion of the changes that life often brings. The Native American Thunderbird, who brings changes to the people, serves as a reminder that change is inevitable. Traditionally, tribal elders teach younger generations how to navigate through the emotional struggles of life by giving some explanation or insight into the purpose of fear and their struggles with change. The Thun­derbird is seen as an agent of change that helps determine be­havior within the dynamics of both family and community. Thunder­bird stories are a way of relating the people to the natural world by using metaphorical depictions of things that the people have always understood, such as birds that can fly or live in the sky (i.e., the heavens).

The tale of “Wakinyan Tanka,” the great Thunderbird, originates from one of the seven Western Sioux tribes known as the Brule Sioux. This group, which received its name from the French word brule (meaning “burned”), presently occupies the Rosebud reservation located in the southwestern region of South Dakota. A Sioux medicine man, John “Fire” Lame Deer, recalls the story of the Great Thunderbird:

Wakinyan Tanka, the great Thunderbird, lives in his tipi on top of a mountain in the sacred Paha Sapa, the Black Hills. The whites call it Harney Peak, but I don’t think he lives there anymore since the wasichu, the whites, have made these hills into a vast Disneyland. No, I think the thunder beings have retreated to the farthest end of the earth, where the sun goes down, where there are no tourists or hot dog stands. The Wakinyan hates all that is dirty. He loves what is clean and pure. His voice is the great thunderclap, and the smaller rolling thunders that follow his booming shouts are the cries of his children, the little thunderbirds. (Lame Deer 1969)

Lame Deer goes on to describe the nature of these beings:

There are four large, old Thunderbirds. The Great Wakinyan of the West is the first and foremost among them. He is clothed in clouds. His body has no form, but he has giant, four-jointed wings. He has no feet, but enormous claws. He has no head, but a huge, sharp beak with rows of big, pointed teeth. His color is black. The second Wakinyan of the North is red. The third Thunderbird of the East is yellow. The fourth thunderbird of the South is white, though there are some who say that its colors are blue. That one has no eyes or ears, yet he can see and hear. How that can be is a mystery. From time to time a holy man catches a glimpse of a Wakinyan in his dreams, but always only a part of it. No one ever sees the Thunderbird whole, not even in a vision, so the way we think a Thunderbird looks is pieced together from many dreams and visions. (Lame Deer 1969)

Some modern sightings and cryptozoological accounts tell of terrifying encounters of giant bird-like creatures carrying people off and building nests out of their bones. However, according to the Brule Sioux, these “Thunder Beings” are painted with a much different tone, as Lame Deer notes:

Thunderbirds stand for rain, and fire, and the truth, and as I said before, they like to help the people. In contrast, Unktehi, the great water monster, did not like human beings from the time they were put on this earth. Unktehi was shaped like a giant scaley snake with feet. She had a huge horn coming out on top of her head, and she filled the whole of the Missouri River from end to end. The little water monster, who lived in smaller streams and lakes, likewise had no use for humans. (Lame Deer 1969)

The Great Unktehi and her offspring were said to have been the source of many floods when they “puffed” up their bodies, causing lakes, streams, and even the whole Missouri river to overflow. The Thunderbirds protected humans from these “water monsters” in an epic battle to make the world a safer place for people to live, and in doing so gained the water power by taking it from Unktehi.

A sand painting tapestry from Navajo medicine man and artist, Hasteen Klah, depicting each of the Thunderbirds of the Four Directions (North, South, East, West). Located in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Heard Museum’s Navajo Textile Exhibit: 100+ Years of Weaving. (Photo by Noah Nez)

Some attempt to correlate the various stories from different tribes of indigenous people into modern Thunderbird sightings. However, when one looks a little more critically at these legends, it is clear they serve a much different purpose.

The Yaqui tribe also has its own legend describing a giant mythical bird. In the tale of the “Otam Kawi,” it is said that “a great bird lived on a hill of Otam Kawi. Every morning he would fly out in search of food. He caught men, women, and little children and carried them back to Otam Kawi to eat. In those days the people always were watchful. They couldn’t have fiestas because when they had pascolas [ceremonial dances], always two or three of the people were carried away by the big bird. The Yaquis lived in hu’ukis, little houses made of mud and branches that looked like the house of a pack-rat, because they were afraid of the giant bird” (Giddings 1959).

Rather than describing a Thunderbird, this account more closely resembles a creation story. The following quote provides some insight into the intention of this particular account: “There were cows in those days, but no animals of the claw” (Giddings 1959). Upon closer review, this particular story sounds much like the Navajo’s “Mon­ster Slayer” legend, an alternate creation story. The story follows the life of a boy whose parents were taken by the giant bird during the time when the earth was still unsafe for people. The grandfather makes the boy a set of arrows and a bow and as time goes by, the boy becomes a better hunter and grows stronger as he ages. One day he ventures off to avenge his parents’ killer, seeking out the big bird. The story describes the giant birds: “He saw everything; the size, the colors of the feathers, the big eyes, and all.” When the boy returns back to his village to speak to his grandfather about the things he saw while hiding in a hole near the giant bird’s mesquite tree, he gives another similar description: “I saw him. I saw all of his colored feathers and his big eyes.” When the other villagers catch word of what the young boy has seen, they all go to visit him to ask if he has really seen the legendary giant bird. The boy gives the following response: “Yes, I saw it. It has feathers of many colors, a big body, and long claws”¹ (Giddings 1959).

Often the legends of Native American folklore include the common theme of a giant bird-like creature nesting in a “pile of bones.” For example, in this story, the young boy declares his intent to kill the terrorizing bird to the dismay and doubt of the elders. After being equipped with a new set of arrows and a stronger bow, the boy sets off on his journey to Otam Kawi. Along the way he encounters an older man who lived near the mountain who tells him, “Wait for this bird near Otam Kawi. He lives there. He only goes away to catch the people. He always comes back there. You will see there a great pile of bones.” The story continues:

He pulled out a handful of feathers and threw them into the air and the feathers become owls. With another handful of feathers he made smaller owls. With four handfuls of feathers, he made four classes of owls. In the same way, with other handfuls of feathers, he made birds of every kind, crows, and roadrunners. He threw the feathers and they became birds of different colors. When he had finished all of the feathers, he cut off a piece of meat from a dead bird. He threw this and it became a mountain lion. He cut another piece and made another kind of lion, which is a little braver. With another he made the topol, and with another, a spotted cat. Thus, the boy made four classes of big cats. After that he made four smaller kinds of cats. “I killed the big bird. Now you may walk about the world.” Upon returning to the village, the boy encounters some elders, stopping to ask if he has indeed killed the giant bird. “Yes, sirs. I made many little animals out of the feathers and the meat. I made owls of four kinds. I made four kinds of coyotes, four kinds of small cats, four kinds of lions, all animals of the claw.” The boy described some of the other animals made from the remains of the big bird: “These little birds don’t do any harm to us. But those animals I made from the meat of the big bird, you must take care about those. From today on they are not going to be gentle. We no longer have danger from above. Now we must take care from below. These animals aren’t much good for food, only for clothing. The birds are valuable only for their pretty feathers.”

This is clearly part of the creation story of the Yaqui, which is not to be taken literally. Those who offer the Yaqui legend of Otam Kawi as historic evidence for the existence of the Native American Thunderbird are misrepresenting the actual accounts of these vastly diverse groups of people and their different tribal beliefs.

Thunderbirds and Cryptozoology

Mark A. Hall, a leading cryptozoologist and self-proclaimed Thunderbird expert, has been investigating historical records and the eyewitness testimonies of cryptozoological phenomena for over fifty years. He is the author of Thunderbirds: America’s Living Legends of Giant Birds and is quoted on the Cryptomundo blog as being “an old fashioned patriot who allows himself to question the scientific establishment with every breath he takes” (Coleman 2010). Hall offers the following description of Thunderbirds:

The bird is distinguished by its size and lifting capabilities exceeding those of any known bird living today anywhere in the world. Wingspan estimates are necessarily all guesswork. But observers sometimes have the benefit of a measurable object for comparison or the benefit of time to ob­serve a resting bird. The results most often provide sizes of 15 to 20 feet. The bird at rest or on the ground appears to be four to eight feet tall. Typically the coloring of the birds overall is dark. (qtd. in Heinselman 2011)

However, Thunderbirds are unlike any extinct, prehistoric, or living species of birds presented by many cryptozoologists and monster enthusiasts because they are mythical creatures inspired by animals familiar to the groups of people living at the time these stories originated; they are intended as a way to explain the natural world.

As part of the city’s public-art program, this mural runs along the Thunderbird exit of the I-17 freeway located in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo by Noah Nez)

Craig Heinselman has contributed to cryptozoology with works such as Elemen­tum Bestia, which chronicles various subjects such as “elusive” prehistoric dino­saurs. In his article on Thunderbirds featured on Cryptozoology.com, he writes, “The evidence thus far for the existence of a large predatory bird in North America is based on historical and modern sightings and legends with no physical evidence, there is however two images of the Thunderbird, or at least a large bird” (Heinselman 2011).

Claims of modern Thunderbird sightings are not even supported by Native Amer­ican stories. No person has ever seen a Thun­derbird, even in dreams or in the “visions” of medicine men. According to the Native Amer­ican mythologies, Thunder­birds have no actual physical form. Most accounts resemble any other modern citing of a large bird-like shape with the potential of being misjudged in size and distance, which is notoriously common in eyewitness accounts. Some stories and reports offer various bones, possibly fossils, of large birds as physical evidence of Thunderbirds, but they are not necessarily the same creatures mentioned in these “sightings” from all around the world.

The majority of the “evidence” proposed for this mythic bird-like creature is given as literal interpretations of Native American folklore, which as we have seen are erroneous. Any eyewitness sightings (and certainly those by non-Natives) by definition cannot be Thunderbirds. In fact, it may even be considered disrespectful to suggest that a person could see, or has seen, a Thunderbird. Some may have looked to the Thunderbird legend to help rationalize these various strange encounters that people experience, but in doing so they bastardize these legends, misinform their readers, and do a disservice to the people and their tribal culture. If any part of the story should be taken out of the legend of Wakinyan Tanka, it should be that Thunderbirds are a link between the supernatural and natural worlds. They do not exist, but they are very real in the hearts and minds of Native American people.

Note

1. A major difference between this Yaqui story of the Otam Kawi and the Thunderbird legend is in the detailed descriptions given by these respective tribes. While the Thunderbird has “no body form, no eyes or feet,” the giant bird of the Otam Kawi is described in the story as having “colorful feathers with a big body and big eyes.” ↩

References

Coleman, Loren. 2010. Men in cryptozoology (blog post). Cryptomundo (June 14). Available online at www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/mencz-hall/.

Lame Deer, John. Wankanyan Tanka, the Great Thunderbird. In American Indian Myths and Legends, selected and edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, (New York: Pantheon, 1984): 218–222.

Giddings, Ruth W. 1959. Yaqui myths and legends. Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona 2: 78–83.

Heinselman, Craig. N.d. Thunderbird. Available on­line at www.cryptozoology.com/cryptids/thunderbird.php.