Perhaps not fiction, Horatio?

we have to pay <g>.
It's kinda like politics: you spend 65 million dollars to get yourself elected to a boring job that pays 150 thou a year for 6 years and half the counry hates you.

and not rumor or hype, it may simply be another recently discovered animal.
Or a very large type of an existing species.
It wasn't very long ago that the Platypus was considered a fraud. The manatee was thought to be a mermaid, and therefore considered a fraud.
We are discovering new species of fish and birds in out-of-the-way places all the time. New animals have been discovered living in hot springs at the bottom of the ocean, in or around the Arctic icebergs and in other odd places. Only time will tell if this is a hoax or not. People can and do see imaginary things all the time and actually believe it to be real.
I would like to believe that there are Yetis, these huge birds and other such strange creatures hiding from we humans and poking fun at our disbelief.
After all, there were dinosaurs on earth, as eerie and strange as it may seem.
And there were flying monsters too. Could any have survived?
Frogs lay eggs in pools in the desert. They dry up and lay dormant for years and years. One day it rains and they all hatch, mate and die. Cicadas lay eggs in the ground and 17 years later they hatch and crawl out for a brief lifespan. Again, they mate, lay eggs and die. The cycle repeats. Could these large birds be of similar breeding? Who knows?
Life is very weird by some standards. I love it!!!

By the way what is a super cub?

GJM

Guillermo Marcia

NATIONAL
A super-sized bird in Alaska
By PETER PORCO
Anchorage Daily News
October 15, 2002

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A giant winged creature, like something out of Jurassic Park, has reportedly been sighted several times in Southwest Alaska in recent weeks.

Villagers in Togiak and Manokotak say they have seen a huge bird that's much bigger than anything they have seen before.

A pilot says he spotted the creature while flying passengers to Manokotak last week. He calculated that its wingspan matched the length of a wing on his Cessna 207. That's about 14 feet.

Other people have put the wingspan in a similar range.

Scientists aren't sure what to make of the reports. No one doubts that people in the region west of Dillingham have seen a very large rapto-like bird. But biologists and other people familiar with big Alaska birds say they're skeptical it's that big.

A recent sighting of the mystery bird occurred Oct. 10 when Moses Coupchiak, a 43-year-old heavy equipment operator from Togiak, 40 miles west of Manokotak, saw the bird flying toward him from about two miles away as he worked his tractor.

"At first I thought it was one of those old-time Otter planes," Coupchiak said. "Instead of continuing toward me, it banked to the left, and that's when I noticed it wasn't a plane."

The bird was "something huge," he said. "The wing looks a little wider than the Otter's, maybe as long as the Otter plane."

The bird flew behind a hill and disappeared. Coupchiak got on the radio and warned people in Togiak to tell their children to stay away.

Pilot John Bouker said he was highly skeptical of reports of "this great big eagle" that is two or three times the size of a bald eagle. "I didn't put any thought into it."

But early this week while flying into Manokotak, Bouker, owner of Bristol Bay Air Service, looked out his left window and 1,000 feet away, "there's this big ... . bird," he said.

"The people in the plane all saw him," Bouker said. "He's huge, he's huge, he's really, really big. You wouldn't want to have your children out."

Nicolai Alakayak, a freight and passenger driver from Manokotak who was flying with Bouker, said the creature looked like an eagle and was as large as "a little Super Cub."

Comparison to an eagle, certainly. Super Cub? Probably not, scientists said.

"I'm certainly not aware of anything with a 14-foot wingspan that's been alive for the last 100,000 years," said federal raptor specialist Phil Schemf in Juneau.

Schemf, other biologists, a village police officer and teachers at the Manokotak School said the sightings could be of a Steller's sea eagle, a species native to northeast Asia and one of the world's largest eagles. It's about 50 percent bigger than a bald eagle.





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(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com.)