Following closely after his six-part series On The Trail Of Bigfoot, Seth Breedlove returns to his standard hour-long format with Terror In The Skies. A “spiritual sequel” to 2017’s The Mothman of Point Pleasant, this deals with strange creatures seen in the sky.
Starting with the first explorers venturing into the area that is now Illinois and seeing drawings and hearing tales of The Piasa Bird in the area of what is now Alton Illinois. We get a brief history of giant bird sightings including the 1868 case where one allegedly carried off a schoolboy.
Terror In The Skies concentrates on three main events. A group of sightings around Alton in the 1940s. Another in 1977 centered around Lawndale Illinois that began with one of the birds attempting to carry off a young boy. And the “Chicago Mothman” sightings of 2016.
Unlike many of his previous films, there aren’t a lot of eyewitness interviews in Terror In The Skies. The dates of many of the incidents involved would obviously be a reason for that. But I still missed these interviews, they were frequently the highlight of his previous films. What we do get is a lot of expert opinion from Loren Coleman, Tobias Wayland, Troy Taylor, and several others.
They discuss the history of so-called Thunderbird sightings, and possible explanations, both in terms of living creatures be they displaced species such as the Andean Condor. Or prehistoric creatures that have survived into the present such as a Pteranodon. There’s also discussion of why, if they are living creatures, they aren’t seen more often.
Terror In the Skies has the usual recreations of various sightings, rendered in several different styles of animation this time. There’s also footage of what is claimed to be a Thunderbird shot near Champagne Illinois. Disappointingly there’s no mention of the elusive Thunderbird photograph written about by John Keel and others. It allegedly showed a giant bird shot in old western times and pegged up in front of a saloon. It was supposed to have been reprinted in an issue of The Police Gazette or Argosy though a copy has never surfaced. The odd thing is, I could swear I saw it in one of my father or my uncle’s magazines. That photo, or its urban legend, deserves its own film.
While not the film I hoped it would be, Terror In The Skies is still a fun watch. It lacks some of the sensational aspects of cases like the ones he examined in Invasion On Chestnut Ridge and The Flatwoods Monster: A Legacy Of Fear, but it still held my interest.
Terror In The Skies is another fun release from Seth Breedlove and Small Town Monsters. It will be available on VOD and DVD on June 7th.