Down the rabbit hole
Thunderbird · Tombstone, Arizona · 1900
2 documents · 2 independent accounts
2 documents tell this story. They trace back to 2 independent accounts.
The route
- One encounter the reported sighting this case is about
- 2 documents that tell it, as we collected them
- 2 independent accounts behind those documents
Copies are not confirmations: thirty papers printing one story is still one account.
Each shape is one document; open it to go to where we found it. The same graph as a list is below.
Why these records are connected
- Why these documents are one case. The case matcher joined them because:
- A Possible Source for the Thunderbird Photo? & The lost thunderbird photo 1: A wild west tall story, folkt…: their quoted passages are nearly identical; they describe the same details; same place; same year
Every document, as a list
- Account 1 1 document
- Earliest found The lost thunderbird photo 1: A wild west tall story, folktales and a lumberjack, and a collection of large dead birds. Reddit post · Jun 15, 2022
- Account 2 (Separate account) 1 document
- Earliest found A Possible Source for the Thunderbird Photo? Reddit post · Apr 13, 2024
How to read this
- Time runs left to right by publication date. Very long empty stretches are cut short (the axis shows how many years were skipped); undated documents sit in their own column.
- One row per independent account. A reprint, re-upload or cross-post carries the same text, so it stays in its account's row and never counts as a second witness.
- Earliest found (ringed) is the earliest document we hold for that account. It is not proof of the first telling: an earlier one may exist that we haven't collected.
- Arrows run from a document to a source it names. A dashed shape is a source a document cites that we haven't found yet; its link searches a public archive for it, and a hit there is a lead, not a confirmation.
About the numbers
- Only documents we've collected are counted; retellings elsewhere on the web aren't counted yet.
- Documents are matched by shared text and by the sources they name, by plain rules with no model in the loop. A match can be wrong; tell us.
- Our case matcher counts 1 independent account here: some of these accounts quote the same words, so they may be one telling.
Where next
- Back to the case
its summary, sources and discussion - Back to the map
opened on this case - Thunderbird · Glacier National Park, Montana · 1934
Another trail, same creature: 4 documents · 1 independent account - Bigfoot · Calcutta, Ohio · 1980
The next-deepest trail: 2 documents · 2 independent accounts
Every rabbit hole → · How we tell copies from independent accounts