WERE YOU AWARE OF IT?

On 26 April 1890, the most widely-circulated periodical in a small Arizona mining town, the Tombstone "Epitaph", published a story that told the tale of some rancher who stumbled upon "a winged monster, resembling a huge alligator with an extremely elongated tail and an immense pair of wings" stumbling exhausted around the desert. Like true American heroes, they promptly shot and killed it. The creature's carcass mysteriously disappeared, but before this happened, the legend says that a photograph was taken.

This infamous photograph was rediscovered in the early 1960s, at the height of the "craze" for cryptozoology and the paranormal. As one of the most spectacular pieces of evidence of a hidden world, it was widely republished, in venues as varied as "Gentlemen's Magazines" and slick coffee-table books. If you have any interest in such topics, or are merely widely read, you have almost certainly seen it: a fuzzy monochrome photograph of a group of men in Western garb of the period, holding guns, to give scale to an enormous bird, hanging vertically with its wings fully outstretched. If you have not seen it, ask among your more inquisitive acquaintances, and I promise you, at least one of them has.

Whether this poor creature was one of the true Thunderbirds of Hohoq, or merely one of their small servant-pets, or perhaps among the degenerate troglodyte pterodactyls secretly bred by the mole-men in their deepest caverns, is unknown. And irrelevant, as the photograph never existed.