Kurt's property sat about twelve miles north of Lexington: a big open field, a pond, woods along the edge and a creek nearby. Canada geese loved it. On the afternoon of December 20, 2023, close to a hundred of them were resting in the field next to the house when, all at once, every one of them started honking and lifted off in a panic.
He stepped out onto his back deck to see what had spooked them. What he saw first was a figure in what looked like an all-black outfit walking out into the field, and he assumed it was a neighbour. Then he realised it was a bird.
It had its back to him, so he never saw its face. It was jet black and built like an enormous, hunched vulture, with the 'shoulders' of its folded wings sitting higher than its head. He guessed it stood five feet tall or more. While he stood there torn between running for his phone and not daring to look away, it took a short run, opened its wings and was in the air after two great beats. The tips of its wings brushed the grass. The sound, he says, was a slow 'whomp', exactly like the rotor of a neighbour's small helicopter winding down after he cut the engine.
The wings were deep, broad and squared off, with fingered tip feathers he thinks were as long as his arm, and he is six foot four. It climbed and cleared the trees at the edge of the property by only a few feet before he lost sight of it. Afterwards he walked out and paced off the spot where he remembered the wingtips touching the ground: about sixteen or seventeen feet.
His wife and neighbours suggested he'd simply seen one of the five or six black vultures that roosted on the property. He saw those birds every day, he says, and this was three or four times their size. A black vulture stands about two feet tall with a five-foot wingspan. He had also seen an Andean condor up close at a wildlife rehabilitation centre in Peru, and this was much bigger. He points out that he was a plane spotter in the Air Force Auxiliary as a teenager and knows aircraft wingspans by heart. Watching it lift off, he says, was like seeing a Piper Cub take off from his field.
He doesn't think it was anything supernatural. It looked and moved like a real bird of flesh and blood, just impossibly large. He has wondered whether it was a vulture with some kind of gigantism. He regrets not getting a photo, and later sent researcher Kevin Guhl pictures of the exact view from his deck: in his memory, the open wings reached beyond the two trees on either side of where it stood.