Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-10502460-20180606231912/@comment-10502460-20180610081242

DrBobSmith wrote: HopelessNightOwl wrote: BTW in case I didn't make it clear enough in the draft (which I'm starting to suspect I didn't), this is supposed to be a giant bird. As in like a thirty-foot wingspan, giant avian cryptid. Not just a big eagle. I think I'll add some more text to make that aspect more clear.

HopelessNightOwl, A bird with a 30 foot or nine meter wingspan strains suspension of disbelief. Something that big would show up on radar. How did a bird with a wingspan as big as a fighter jet stay hidden from modern civilization for so long?

It is my understanding that most of the world's radar including most of the radar in the United States is either weather radar or air traffic control radar. It's dubious if weather doppler in the 1990s would pick up even a bird of such large size, especially if that bird did not fly over a thousand feet (weather radar can pick up formations of birds at high altitude, but that's usually during migrations). And air traffic control radar is designed only to trigger and pick up response signals from IFF transponders on planes, it isn't actually scanning for the whole plane's profile the way military radar does.

Also, the idea is that the bird is a recently escaped military experiment, not something that's been living in the wild since before European colonization.