Fandors, giant passenger birds (last died ~30,000 years ago) = Thunderbird, giant supernatural bird

Stand in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, in the paleontological storage area, and you can examine the fossilized bones of Argentavis magnificens, the largest flying bird that ever lived. Wingspan estimates run from twenty to twenty-three feet. Body weight perhaps one hundred fifty to one hundred eighty pounds. The Argentavis lived in what is now Argentina from about nine to six million years ago, but its smaller North American cousins, the Teratornithidae, persisted into the late Pleistocene. Teratornis merriami was a fourteen-foot-wingspan condor-like bird whose remains have been recovered from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, dated to as recently as twelve thousand years ago. The U.S. National Park Service confirms that these northern teratorns encountered humans at the end of the Pleistocene, roughly eleven thousand years ago, and the Park Service explicitly notes that teratorns probably influenced the various Thunderbird myths of the Native Americans.

The Urantia Book at 66:5.6 records that during the Dalamatian period, Bon's group (the council on the conquest of predatory animals) successfully trained the great fandors as passenger birds. The fandors were used on long journeys for sending messages and calls for help. The UB notes that the fandors became extinct more than thirty thousand years ago. The dating is significant: the red race entered the Americas across the Bering land bridge well before the fandor extinction, and if fandors were still alive during or near the migration period, memories of them could have been carried into the Americas and preserved in oral tradition for tens of thousands of years.

The Thunderbird tradition is one of the most widespread mythological motifs in Indigenous American religious life. Versions appear from the Pacific Northwest (where the Kwakwaka'wakw and Tlingit traditions feature thunderbirds prominently in totem-pole iconography) through the Plains (where Lakota tradition includes Wakinyan, the thunder beings) and Eastern Woodlands (where Algonquian and Iroquoian traditions include thunderbird figures) to the Southeast (where Cherokee and Creek traditions include similar figures). The thunderbirds are typically described as enormous birds capable of producing thunder by flapping their wings and lightning by flashing their eyes. They are usually associated with storms, with high mountains, and with sacred mediating power between the celestial and terrestrial realms.

The structural fit with the UB account is precise on multiple levels. First, real giant birds existed in the Americas during the period of human habitation. The teratorns are the largest flying birds known to have coexisted with humans anywhere in the world. Second, the temporal overlap is documented. Humans and teratorns were both present in the Americas during the late Pleistocene, with the teratorns persisting until roughly eleven thousand years ago. Third, the U.S. National Park Service explicitly attributes Thunderbird mythology to the human encounter with these real giant birds. The mythological tradition has a real biological referent.

The UB account adds a layer to this picture. The fandors were not just any large birds; they were specifically the trained passenger birds of the Dalamatian civilization, used for transcontinental communication and travel. If the red race carried memories of the fandors westward across Asia and across the Bering land bridge, and if those memories were combined with direct encounters with the surviving teratorns in the Americas, the resulting mythological tradition would be exactly what the Thunderbird actually is: a giant bird with sacred mediating power, associated with high places and storms, remembered as both real biological presence and as supernatural figure.

A striking confirmation appears at Gobekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. Pillar 43 of the earliest layer (carbon dated to approximately 9600 BCE) prominently features a large bird figure holding a disc, one of humanity's oldest monumental carvings, predating Sumerian civilization by approximately five thousand years. The giant bird with sacred mediating power is one of the deepest motifs in human religious iconography, surfacing across continents in cultures that had no contact with one another. The UB account explains the cross-cultural distribution: humans had really seen giant birds (real teratorns and Argentavis-type birds in the Americas, real fandors used as passenger birds in the Dalamatian period across multiple regions), and the memory persisted as mythology across millennia.

The strongest counterargument is that mythological giant birds are a common cultural pattern that does not require a real biological referent to explain, with similar figures appearing in cultures with no large-bird presence. This is a fair point. The reply is that where giant birds did exist (the Americas with teratorns, parts of Eurasia and Africa potentially with even larger now-extinct birds), the mythological figures are particularly elaborated, and the UB account provides a specific mechanism (the trained Dalamatian fandors) that explains the cross-cultural distribution including in regions where local giant birds may not have been present.

What the parallel implies is that the contemporary scientific recovery of the Pleistocene megafauna, including the teratorns and other giant flying birds, provides empirical confirmation of mythological traditions that materialist scholarship has typically treated as primitive imagination. The traditions are not primitive imagination. They are real memory of real biological presences, sometimes elaborated into supernatural figures over millennia of oral transmission, but anchored in actual encounters with real giant birds. The Thunderbird is not a fantasy. The Thunderbird is the cultural memory of real giant flying creatures that humans really saw, with the additional layer of remembered fandors from the broader Dalamatian inheritance. For contemporary Indigenous American religious practitioners, this offers external scientific validation of the antiquity and reality of the traditional knowledge. For paleontologists and mythologists, it offers a unified framework that takes both the biological evidence and the cultural memory seriously as complementary sources of historical truth.