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“In the spring of 2017, I was living in Arlington, TX, near AT&T Stadium. I have a sleep disorder and often wake up between 2 and 4 a.m. One morning, unable to sleep, I went outside to the backyard to smoke a cigarette, since we don’t smoke inside. We had a little table and chair set up to relax out back.
As I sat there facing north, smoking, I suddenly heard a loud crash behind me near the fence line—a mess of breaking tree branches. Startled, I jumped to my feet. But what happened next is something I can’t shake from my memory.
For context, I grew up around birds—my mother bred and raised different species, so I’m pretty familiar with bird sounds. But the noise I heard that night was unlike anything I’d ever experienced: the loudest wing flap I have ever heard in my life. It was massive, like a bird far bigger than anything I knew of.
The crash and the wing flapping scared me so much that I ran back inside, slammed the door, and locked it behind me. I’ve spent a lot of time hiking off-grid, encountering wildlife, and even walking through the woods at night in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. But I’ve never found anything that could explain what I heard that night.” -Jeffry R.
