Excerpts from Midwestern newspapers, April 1948:

BELVIDERE, Ill. – (UP) – A farmer and a truck driver reported today that they had seen a bird ‘bigger than an airplane.’ … The giant bird was reported by Robert Price and Veryl Babb. Price said he saw it while working near his barn on his farm near Caledonia, Ill. … He said it had a long neck and ‘what I suppose were its feet trailing behind it.’ … Babb, a Freeport, Ill., truck driver, reported seeing the bird at a different location on the same day. … ‘When I spotted the thing it was coasting. It was bigger than an airplane and reminded me of one of those prehistoric monsters I learned about when I was in school.’

ST. LOUIS – (UP) – A retired Air Force colonel and a 12 year-old boy last night backed up the report by two Belvidere, Ill., residents of spotting a ‘monster bird.’ … ‘At first I thought there was something wrong with my eyesight,’ [Col. W.F.] Siegmund said. ‘But it was definitely a bird, and not a glider or jet plane.’ He described the creature as about the size of a small pursuit plane and said it was flying northeast at an altitude of between 4,000 and 5,000 feet. … The Trares boy said he spotted the bird in the air one evening at sunset and ran yelling into his house to tell his mother. He said it was gray-green in color and about the size of an airplane.

ALTON, Ill. – (UP) – An ‘enormous’ bird, first reported sighted two weeks ago, was seen flying over the outskirts of Alton shortly before noon yesterday. E.M. Coleman, a former salesman, and his 5 year-old son, James, said the bird was flying at about 500 feet and ‘cast a shadow the same as that of a Piper Cub at the same height.’ Coleman said it was an ‘enormous, incredible thing with a body that looked like a naval torpedo.’

Curiously, flying monsters have been reported in that area for more than 300 years.

On April 17, 1805, artist Charles Gough set out to walk over Helvellyn, a mountain in England’s Lake District, with his dog, Foxie. He never returned. Three months later, on July 27, a shepherd heard barking high on the mountain’s flank, at about 2,300 feet, and discovered Foxie beside her master’s body.

It appeared that Gough had fallen to his death, and the dog had remained by his side for three months. How she had survived up there remains a mystery — she had even borne a puppy, which was found dead in a burrow dug into the mountainside. The episode captured the Romantic imagination, and Wordsworth, Edwin Landseer, and Walter Scott all paid tribute to Foxie’s loyalty:

How long did’st thou think that his silence was slumber!
When the wind waved his garment how oft did’st thou start!

But I can find no record of what became of her.

Bonus dog-loyalty-overtime stories: New Mexico, Montana, Tokyo.

No one knows what causes the “morning glory” clouds of northern Australia, but they’re striking — long rolling tubes that can stretch for hundreds of kilometers across the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Glider pilots converge on tiny Burketown in Far North Queensland each fall, hoping to “surf the glory,” riding the unique air currents that accompany the clouds.

Dr. Boehmen, of Wittenberg, described a man who on one occasion ate a raw sheep, a sucking-pig, and by way of dessert sixty pounds of prunes without ejecting the stones; and on another devoured two bushels of cherries, several earthen vessels, and chips from a furnace. He also ate at the same time, some pieces of glass, pebbles, a shepherd’s bagpipe, rats, birds with their feathers, and an incredible number of caterpillars, finishing his astonishing meal by swallowing a pewter inkstand, with its pens, pen-knife, and sand-box. The doctor also informs us that during this miraculous deglutition he was generally under the influence of brandy, but appeared to relish his strange food, and was a man of extraordinary muscular strength, who died in his seventy-ninth year!

— The World of Wonders, 1883