I recently received the following account:
Hi Lon,
For the last 20 or more years I have been waiting to see if other people saw what my male companion and my two neighbors saw hovering in the sky above our backyard. The illustration in your article matches exactly what we saw hovering a few hundred feet in the sky. This was in the fall of 1996, also in a very densely populated area in Southern California. We lived in Canoga Park at the time, in a commercial flight path to Burbank and LAX and just 5 miles from Van Nuys airport, one of the busiest small aircraft airports in the country. So the air space above our neighborhood was always busy.
I was in the shower when my companion came into the house yelling...'come out in the backyard! You gotta see this!' I got out of the shower and could hear our dog and our neighbor's dogs barking excessively. I got dressed and went out into the back yard...our neighbors were in our yard looking up. Our dog was looking up towards this thing and barking like crazy. My first thought was someone's flying a kite...but it was a cloudy, dark night with no wind. The moon cast a glow behind the clouds and this thing looked black as pitch and just hung there in the sky. I could not see any head or face with red eyes because of the height it was at. It didn't make any sound that we could hear but the dogs could hear something...and dogs aren't prone to looking up into the sky and barking at things. My boyfriend decided to run into the house to get a more powerful flashlight and while he was in the house, this thing slowly opened its wings out completely, banked to the left and slowly glided away in a westerly direction towards the coastline. It then looked like one long wing, tattered edges and all. This whole incident took about 15 to 20 minutes and during that time there wasn't a single airplane, jet or helicopter in the sky.
We called the local news station KTLA to report what we saw and they said no calls had come in as of yet, that they would not air it on the local news unless more reports came in. Needless to say, that never happened. I watched news reports, went online for years looking for similar reports and the only information I could find that came close was about the Mothman. At the time I had never heard of the Mothman. I just hope I get a chance to encounter this creature again. I now reside in Kentucky. I still remember every little detail about this event that happened over 20 years ago...like it happened yesterday. Thank you for taking the time to read my story. RG
I contacted RG for further details and received the following:
Yes, when we first observed it, the wings were drawn more up like a "U" shape. Very tattered looking, blacker than the night, and it looked much larger than the 6-7 ft creature people reported seeing. When it opened up its wings to glide away, from the height it was at, the wing span looked to be more like 10-15 feet across. There were never any other reports that night or the days following about this thing being sighted. Another unusual aspect of this thing was how very slow it glided away...no aircraft could have been able to move that slowly and without any noise. RG
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