In the first two months of 1976, something strange and terrible happened to visit the Rio Grande Valley. The first to meet this unusual Joe Suarez, a rancher in Raymondville (USA), who one day discovered that someone tore sheep to pieces in his shed behind the house.
There were no footprints around the scene, and the police investigating them could not understand how the animals were killed. Even worse, the only clue was completely absurd. On the night of the attack, Joe Suarez was awakened by a strange noise - flapping of wings over the very house.
He was convinced that whoever made this noise was much larger than any of the local buzzards. And the police, according to the description of the ranchero, had the impression that the creature must have had truly gigantic dimensions. It is quite understandable that the law enforcement officials considered the slain sheep to be enough sacrifice for one day and simply assured Mr. Suarez that no matter what flapped its wings at night, it would never return.
But it came back and avenged such disrespect for itself. A few days later, on January 14, when another local, Armando Grimaldo, was sitting with a cigarette in the backyard of his mother-in-law's house in Raymondville, something that he later described as a "hellish thing" suddenly flew down from the sky.
A flying creature with a wingspan of 3-3.5 m, with black-brown skin, a beak with long teeth and eerie red eyes, clutched at Grimaldo with claws, trying to lift him into the air. When the people who were in the house and alarmed by the heartbreaking screams ran outside, they just caught the moment when the creature was retiring into the darkness of the night. The wounded and shocked ranchero was admitted to the local Wallacey County hospital.
Like many people who met the unexplained, Armando Grimaldo and his family became the target of ridicule from most Texans, who simply could not believe the whole story. But time passed, and strange incidents continued - on January 31, something huge crashed into Alverico Guaardé's trailer near Brownsville.
As he climbed out of the cockpit to figure out what had happened, he encountered a creature he later described as something from another planet. The creature with a long beak and wings without feathers, like a bat, danced menacingly on the ground and moved towards it, making terrible, croaking throat sounds. Guayardo rushed back into the car and saw through the window as the creature rose into the air and departed into the darkness.
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For most of the next month, nothing like this happened, but on February 24, three school teachers traveling to work in San Antonio witnessed the slow flight of a giant reptile with a wingspan of 4.5 to 6 m.
Subsequently, telling about the incident, one of the teachers, Patricia Bryant, said that she could make out the bones of the wings covered with one skin, and that the creature used them as hover planes rather than as ordinary flywheels, as is the case with birds. After the scene described, the teachers carefully studied the images of dinosaurs in the encyclopedia and identified the monster as a pterodon, a flying lizard, which, according to paleontologists, has not existed for 150 million years.
But the three ladies weren't the only Texas residents to see the strange creatures on February 24th. Several motorists also reported something similar, specifying that when the dinosaur flew low over the cars, its shadow obscured the entire road.
Elsewhere, rangers claimed to have seen a similar monster circling over a herd of cattle from afar. The funny thing is that as soon as the story began to gain some public trust, the visits to the winged monsters stopped.
The creatures were not seen for six years, until September 14, 1982, when ambulance driver James Thompson saw one of them fly very close to him, over Highway 100 off Los Frenson, Texas, near the Mexican border.
Describing what he saw to reporters from the local Welleigh Morning Star newspaper, Thompson said that the animal's skin resembled some kind of grayish rough material and was completely devoid of feathers. The body length was about 3 m, the wingspan was from 4.5 to 4.8 m, a bulge protruded from the back of the head, there was almost no neck at all, and there was a goiter on the throat. In his story, Thompson definitely attributed the creature he saw to pterodactyls.
Should we take all these stories seriously? It would be logical, of course, to answer in the negative, but then we will not make progress in resolving the question: why does such evidence continue to accumulate from year to year?
Having gone into all the details of the descriptions, hardly anyone dares to explain these stories by a simple confusion with an airplane or a bird, much larger than usual. It is no easier to imagine why, in fact, these people might need to compose such stories.
But if flying dinosaurs do live in the north of the American continent, why don't they appear more often? The oppressive side of riddles of this kind is that as soon as someone encounters them, they simultaneously encounter a whole bunch of inexplicable contradictions.
In 1977, following the first wave of reports of the appearance of pterodactyls in the sky of Texas, the International Society of Cryptozoologists (an organization that studies and collects information about unknown or recognized as extinct animals) announced that such creatures may well have survived and remained undetected in the highlands of the Sierra Madre. -Oriental - Mexican territory 300 km north of the Rio Grande Valley, one of the least explored in North America.
Indeed, once upon a time, giant creatures such as flying lizards really lived there. Not so long ago, namely in 1972, the bones of a huge pterodactyl with a wingspan of 5 m were removed from a rock in Big Bend National Park.
But, even with such evidence of their existence in the past in this area, it is still difficult to imagine that some of the lizards could remain undetected - with the exception of two dozen meetings that have taken place over the past 20 years.
And without a doubt, this is one of those mysteries that skeptics can dismiss with peace of mind. And until the day comes when the flying lizard is shot in the sky or is alive in the aviary, we are sure that everything will remain so.