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Bioluminescent Barn Owls ???

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    Bioluminescent Barn Owls ???

    I wanted to document this somewhere, and this seems like the place!

    In Feb 2023, I was at our place in Blanco County. We have a very large 30+ acre field, partially planted in wheat and oats the previous October.

    I had some trail cams around the field and noticed some coyotes coming and going on the trail cams. So I went out at night with my thermal-scoped suppressed AR and a Foxpro electronic call to try to get some.

    After maybe ten minutes of calling, and no coyotes, I noticed some hogs in the thermal scope a few hundred yards away in the field. I walked toward them with the tripod-mounted rifle. At about 100 yards, I started shooting. I knew I hit at least one, but they scattered, and some were coming toward me. I got a bit disoriented, alone in the dark, looking through the scope, unsure where they all were. I did not see any down. I walked around and looked a bit. But I didn't want to go beyond the field and look into the bushes in the dark with an unwieldy rifle, given the potential of a wounded boar. I was alone in the dark, miles from the nearest people.

    I scanned back toward the truck on the thermal to make sure I wasn't likely to run across any hogs. And then I started walking back across the field towards the truck in the dark.

    Then I saw something very strange!

    Something glowing was flying along the treetops at the north edge of the field. I'd guess it was 80 yards away. It looked and moved like a big glowing bird. I asked myself, "A lightning bug? Drone? Plane? Satellite? Aliens? Could it be any of those?"

    No. This definitely looked like a large bird with the underside chest and/or wings glowing.

    I thought of 2 possibilities:

    1. Perhaps it was a vulture that was scavenging after a party somewhere and got tangled with a glowstick.

    2. Perhaps it was a bird that somehow got some kind of bioluminescent plant or fungus rubbed on it.

    I did not think much about it until recently, with all of the crazy UFO news.

    Upon research, I discovered that there have been reports of bioluminescent barn owls for a long time. This is definitely consistent with what I saw. And this is an area where I've seen barn owls before. In fact, this is exactly where I'd expect to find barn owls, on the edge of a field, directly between separate barn structures a couple of hundred yards in each direction.

    Apparently, barn owls are incredibly reflective and can stun prey by reflecting moonlight at them. Perhaps what I saw was a reflection of the moon - a known phenomenon with barn owls? However, I remember it being a dark night.

    A bioluminescent owl strikes me as a perfect description of what I saw.

    Here is a good link exploring this alleged phenomenon:

    Bioluminscent Barn Owls?

    Some suspect that this could be possible if owls are nesting in trees with bioluminescent fungus. But others suggest that they might actually be capable of glowing.

    Apparently, they also exhibit strange glowing colors under black lights.

    Recently, I've read that this is a proposed solution to the Marfa Lights (as well as other mysterious lights.) Most sightings of Marfa Lights are just headlights. But the strange claims involve "dancing" lights that appear intelligent.

    Who knows?

    In any case, I wish I had recorded the date, time, etc. And then I just remembered! I saw vultures on a trail cam the day after and then found a dead boar as a result.

    So I checked that trail cam and first saw the vultures the morning of Feb 20. 2023. And then I remembered, I should have captured my truck driving onto the field on other trailcams.

    Sure enough, I captured my truck on 3:

    Feb 19, 2023:

    Entered field at 6:55 PM. 58 degrees, 56 degrees, 56 degrees.
    Exited field at 8:07 PM. 54 degrees, 48 degrees, 48 degrees.

    This suggests that the sighting was probably around 7:50 PM on 2/19/23 with a temp of 50 degrees. Light wind of 4 mph from the WNW. It would have been flying into the wind.

    The moon that night was a waning crescent, making it extremely unlikely that what I saw was a barn owl reflecting the moon. It was dark as I remembered, but not so dark that I couldn't distinguish the treeline. There were no other lights that could explain it as a reflection.

    Anyone else ever see something like this?

    #2
    Riflebowpistol, is that you?


    To answer your question, Interesting but never heard of it.

    Comment


      #3
      You were using a thermal scope, right? Well, the owls are warm-blooded creatures so its body heat was picked up by the scope. No mystery to me. I see turkeys in the pecan trees often.

      Comment


        #4
        You drinking ? And…..was it Bud Lite ? I hear that it does strange things to men …..

        Seriously, I’ve never heard of a bioluminescent anything, much less an owl. Learn something new every day I guess.

        Comment


          #5
          Originally posted by Gerald G View Post
          Riflebowpistol, is that you?


          To answer your question, Interesting but never heard of it.

          No bone head.

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by RifleBowPistol View Post
            No bone head.
            I do believe we have a record for the shortest answer ever left by riflebowpistol. 😁

            Comment


              #7
              Originally posted by RifleBowPistol View Post
              No bone head.
              Don’t get your panties in a bunch! I don’t have anything against your long winded posting. At least you take the time to explain things.

              It’s lazy/abbreviated typers that that I don’t care for.

              Comment


                #8
                I have never encountered or heard of such. We do have a big barn owl on some property that we call Hootie,(original I know) . I will have to go check on him at night sometime. Never around that barn at night.

                Sent from my SM-A716V using Tapatalk

                Comment


                  #9
                  Maybe whatever it was decided to eat himself a Chem light and throw a rave party lol. But no in all seriousness I've never heard of such a thing nor seen one.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Fascinating, if true. Either way, your story had me on the edge of my seat. Very well written, sir.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Hope it all works out, sorry I can’t read that much

                      Comment


                        #12
                        To clarify: I saw this glowing, flying bird thing with my naked eyes - not through the thermal. I had not been drinking. In fact, I quit drinking at New Years and hadn’t had a drink in over 6 weeks.

                        I do not believe in aliens.

                        I do not believe in Bigfoot.

                        But this is the second time in my life I have seen something very unusual in the woods.

                        The first time was in the late ‘80s in Hughes County, Oklahoma. Two buddies and I were spotlighting on some bottom land near the Canadian river. Back then we didn’t have trailcams, and so we would use spotlight to survey.

                        A huge winged animal jumped up in the headlights and flew off.

                        We were freaked out. “WTF was that?”

                        It looked like a…

                        Like a pterodactyl !!!

                        I was in the backseat, so I didn’t see it as clearly. But we still talk about it to this day. We even tell our kids about it. We joke that we saw a mothman.

                        I’ve always assumed over the years that it must have been a crane.

                        Anyways…

                        Yesterday I was freaked out because the trailcams proved that the glowing, flying creature could not have been a reflection of the moon. The creature was very bright. Nothing subtle about it. I was way too bright for a barely-visible moon reflection.

                        I emailed a raptor specialist about it. He was very interested. He confirmed that bioluminescent owls have been widely reported in the world, but not so much in Texas.

                        He suggested to try to find a source of bioluminescent spores in the water nearby. Because owls do drink at ponds. And he suggested it could be another bird like an egret.

                        In the previous post, I linked to an Australian guy (RIP) named Silcock who has studied the glowing barn owl hypothesis in depth.

                        He makes some really good points about why it seems like natural bioluminescence makes more sense than glowing fungus picked up.

                        Reports suggest the owls can turn the glow on and off. And it is too bright to be a fungus (my experience also.) And why is it always there breast area that is reported to glow, and never their back or wing tips? And why always barn owls and not other animals? And he points to bioluminescent fish that rarely use the capability, even though they have it.

                        As serendipity would have it, I’ve been studying evolution lately.

                        One of the things that I always thought was so dumb about aliens is “why do they look like us?” But I’ve came across a biologist named Conway Morris who is a specialist in convergent evolution. He is changing the way other biologists understand evolution. He points out that convergent evolution suggests that traits develop with similar morphologies.

                        Crab morphologies develop over and over. Sight nearly always evolves as two camera eyes in wildly divergent creatures and environments. Evolution is operating under constraints that produce the same morphologies and characteristics, regardless of lineage.

                        For a land creature, maybe intelligence evolves into a big-headed bipedal creature with arms and hands…Same as two eyes are the way evolution always produces sight…So spaceship building aliens should look like us?

                        The reason this matters with bioluminescent owls is that it supports what Silcock is saying. If a fish can develop bioluminescence to hunt in the dark, then so could a night hunting bird. There doesn’t need to be a genetic lineage, or lots of other bioluminescent birds. Nature evolves these capabilities in similar ways, regardless of the lineage.

                        The plot thickens….

                        So I’ve been trying to read everything I can find about bioluminescent owls.

                        And guess who else is taking about them?

                        The cryptozoology guys.

                        Because it turns out there is one other flying creature that is alleged to have bioluminescent capabilities.

                        Pterodactyls!

                        Apparently pterosaurs have been reported all over the world (especially New Guinea.) And they are alleged to be nocturnal. And they are alleged to have bioluminescent capability.

                        There’s one guy who has a website who has put together a map of pterosaur sightings in the USA.

                        And guess where the highest density of sightings is?

                        Oklahoma.

                        Comment


                          #13
                          The next time you go , I’d be willing to go with you so you won’t get disoriented and skeerd sumpin is going to get you
                          Last edited by Bucknaked; 06-10-2023, 07:52 AM.

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Sock puppet

                            Comment


                              #15
                              It's La Lechuza!

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