The Tombstone Thunderbird and the "Lost" 1890 Photograph

Briefing

In April 1890 the Tombstone Epitaph, of Arizona Territory, printed a news item claiming that two ranchers had shot and killed a giant winged, alligator-like creature on the desert between the Huachuca and Whetstone mountains [1]. No photograph accompanied that article; the paper of that era could not print photographs at all [3][4]. Yet since a 1963 magazine retelling, a great many people — including the cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson and the author John Keel — have insisted they remember seeing a photograph of the bird nailed to a wall with men posed beneath it [2]. No such photograph has ever been produced. The file is admitted not as a zoological record but as a documented case of collective misremembering, of a piece with the archive’s other Mandela effect material.

Sequence of events

April 1890 — the original article

• The Epitaph runs a piece headlined “Found in the Desert — A Strange Winged Monster Discovered and Killed on the Huachuca Desert” [1].
• Per the article, two ranchers returning from the Huachuca Mountains find an exhausted creature “resembling a huge alligator with an extremely elongated tail and an immense pair of wings” [1].
• They chase it several miles on horseback, open fire with Winchester rifles, and after “a few well directed shots” it “partly rolled over and remained motionless” [1].
• The measurements given: about ninety-two feet long, a body diameter of some fifty inches, a head roughly eight feet long with strong sharp teeth, eyes “as large as a dinner plate”, and one wing measured at seventy-eight feet — implying a tip-to-tip span of about a hundred and sixty feet. The skin is described as smooth, featherless and hairless; the wings as a thick transparent membrane [1].
• The men reportedly cut off a small portion of one wing tip and take it with them, one riding into town for supplies and help skinning the creature, intending to send the hide east for examination by eminent scientists [1]. No record has been located of any hide, wing tip, or specimen reaching a scientist [1][4].
• The article carries no photograph [3][4].

May 1963 — the photograph enters the record

• In the May 1963 issue of Saga magazine, the writer Jack Pearl describes a photograph of the Thunderbird nailed to a barn or wall, wings spread wide, with men posed beneath it for scale — and dates the encounter, mistakenly, to 1886 [3][4][2].
• In Fate magazine of September 1963, the correspondent H. M. Cranmer states that the photograph existed and had “appeared in newspapers all over America” [2]. No such newspaper instance has been traced by any researcher consulted [2].

1960–1966 — the searches

• Researchers and Epitaph staff search the paper’s archives — the search is variously reported as taking place in 1960 and in 1966 — and find no photograph. None had been printed with the original article, and no follow-up article was published [3][4].

Later recollections

• Ivan T. Sanderson, cryptozoologist, says he once possessed a photostat copy of the photograph, showing the bird nailed to a wall with cowboys beneath it, and that he loaned it to two researchers who lost it [2].
• John Keel, author, insists in the late 1990s: “I know I saw it!” — placing it in a men’s magazine, Saga or True, and describing a “long and pointed beak like a Pteranodon” [2].
• W. Ritchie Benedict recalls Sanderson displaying a photostat of the photograph on “The Pierre Berton Show” on Canadian television [2].

Documentary record

The primary document is the April 1890 Tombstone Epitaph news item itself. Its text is widely reproduced online; the version consulted here reproduces the “Found in the Desert” article and attributes it to the issue of the twenty-sixth of April 1890 [1]. The underlying 1890 text is public domain; the licence of the reproducing page is unverified. The Library of Congress is cited secondhand as holding that issue, said to contain no images, though the archive could not independently retrieve a digitised page from a primary repository during this research [3].

Everything after that is secondary and, in the matter of the photograph, wholly unsupported. Jack Pearl’s 1963 Saga article is the earliest located source for the wall-mounted photograph and for the erroneous 1886 date [4][2]. The recollections of Sanderson, Keel, Cranmer and Benedict are witness testimony to having seen an image, not evidence that the image existed [2]. The modern “six men and a pterodactyl” picture that circulates online is a deliberate fake by the British digital artist Chris Smith — a recent fabrication, and not the “lost” photograph the old-timers describe [4].

Two counter-accounts are on record. Paul Brown cites a 1970 letter from Harry McClure claiming the creature’s wingspan was in fact only some thirty feet, not a hundred and sixty, and that it escaped alive — which contradicts the killed- and-retrieved version outright [4]. Dale Drinnon argues that the remembered photograph may derive from an early-twentieth-century novelty or hoax montage, possibly built on an 1893 photograph of the outlaw John Sontag’s death [2]. Both are proposed explanations, not established findings.

Open questions

1. Which exact issue carried the article? Sources conflict: the twenty-sixth of April 1890 [1][3] against “Saturday, the twenty-seventh of April 1890” [4]. Daily and weekly Epitaph editions may account for the discrepancy, but the archive could not verify this against a digitised original scan.
2. Was any physical evidence — wing tip, hide — ever produced or examined by scientists? No source records it [1][4].
3. Did a photograph of the described wall-mounted creature exist in any era? The primary record shows none accompanied the 1890 article [3][4]. Whether some later, unrelated image seeded the memory remains open [2].
4. Who were the two ranchers? Unnamed in the surviving text, with no primary trace [1].
5. H. M. Cranmer’s assertion that the photograph “appeared in newspapers all over America” is unsupported: no traceable newspaper instance of any such photograph has been located by any researcher consulted [2].
6. Jack Pearl’s asserted 1886 Epitaph publication of the photograph: no such issue or image has been found, and it appears to be an error or an invention [4][3].

Status

This file is CONFIDENTIAL — admitted not as a creature report but as a documented failure of collective memory. The 1890 article is a real newspaper item and can be cited as such; every claim within it remains reported, never corroborated, and no physical evidence, named witness, or follow-up record has ever surfaced [1][4]. Paul Brown’s conclusion — that the story was a tall tale which grew in the retelling, and that no authentic photograph ever existed — is the reading this archive finds best supported by the record, though it is his opinion and is stated as such [4].

The photograph is the case. Multiple commentators frame the persistent “I saw it” recollections as a false-memory phenomenon [3][2], which places this file with the archive’s other reality-anomaly material rather than with its cryptid reports. Updates pending retrieval of a digitised original of the April 1890 issue from a primary repository.

References

1. “Found in the Desert — A Strange Winged Monster Discovered and Killed on the Huachuca Desert” — transcription of the article from the Tombstone Epitaph, 26th April 1890. CreationTales. Accessed 12th July 2026. The underlying 1890 text is public domain; the reproducing page’s licence is unverified.
2. Drinnon, Dale. “That Thunderbird Photo”. Frontiers of Zoology, May 2011. Collects the Sanderson, Keel, Cranmer and Benedict recollections and proposes the montage hypothesis. Accessed 12th July 2026.
3. “The Tombstone Thunderbird Photograph and the Mandela Effect”. Curious Archive. On the absence of any photograph in the 1890 article and the false-memory framing. Accessed 12th July 2026.
4. Brown, Paul. “The Tombstone Pterodactyl”. Singular Discoveries. On the 1963 Saga origin of the photograph claim, the McClure letter, and the Chris Smith fabrication. Accessed 12th July 2026.