A 38-year-old woman in Maricopa County says she saw a bird believed to have become extinct 3 million years ago.

The eyewitness, an avid birdwatcher who provided a full name and location information but asked to remain anonymous, told Cryptozoology News on Saturday that she was driving home when she spotted the purported bird on Friday at around noon.

“I was driving north on a six-lane road, (location omitted for privacy reasons). I was coming from the grocery store,” she said.

“I saw a extremely large bird flying very low. It was on the same side of the road, but going in the opposite direction of traffic, heading south. The wingspan took up three lanes of the traffic.”

The woman described the bird as having a wingspan of over 20 feet.

“The bird was a brownish grey color. It was light colored. I am a bird lover and often go into nature with my binoculars to explore birds. I love birds and I know what cranes, eagles and hawks look like. This resembled a crane, longer neck, but the wings were massive. It was flying so low I was concerned it could fly into a car but it just kept soaring,” she explained.

She added that she didn’t have enough time to grab her phone to take pictures and that she couldn’t just stop in the middle of the lane.

“In retrospective though, I wish I had done a U-turn followed it. I regret not thinking that at the time.”

The Arizona resident said that the bird definitely looked out of place and that after looking it up online, it looked very much like the Oligocene dinosaur Paligonris Sandersi.

“It looked and felt like it was prehistoric. When I found the illustrations of that bird it looked almost exactly like that.”

8 months ago, a woman in Pennsylvania claimed seeing a similar bird.

In July 2015, two people in Nevada reported seeing a creature that reminded them of a pterosaur, a flying reptile believed to have gone extinct about 65 million years ago.

Two weeks later, a minister and her daughter claimed to have seen an unidentified flying creature that looked like it was “straight out of Jurassic Park”.

Journal reference

https://www.pnas.org/content/111/29/10624