THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD AND THE DEAD PTERODACTYL
KARL SHUKER investigates a mystery involving a seminal album and a thunderbird photo
One of the most tantalising fortean mysteries is that of the missing thunderbird photograph – an elusive early picture supposedly snapped during the mid-1800s and depicting either a very large dead bird or a very large dead modern-day pterodactyl pinned with wings outstretched onto a barn with American Civil War soldiers posing in front of it, yet which despite having been reputedly seen by numerous people since then in various books or magazines cannot be traced anywhere. But what if this photo had appeared not in any publication but on the cover of a record album instead? This was the novel, hitherto-unconsidered prospect that I recently investigated, as exclusively revealed here.
It all began on 14 October 2020 when I received a message posted by Facebook follower Ari Sarkar on my FB ‘fan’ page that included the following fascinating statement: “The Workingman’s Dead Sessions album by the Grateful Dead has the band posing with a dead pterodactyl. They are dressed in Civil-War era uniforms and the photo is suitably aged. It’s completely bizarre!”
Wow! It was some hours before I logged onto FB and saw Ari’s message, and although I replied straight away with a request for more information, no response came back. Despite not being a Dead Head (i.e. a dedicated Grateful Dead fan), I was familiar with their famous Workingman’s Dead album, released in June 1970, and I knew that its cover simply contained a photograph of the band’s members wearing factory attire and gathered outside a building in a San Francisco street, with any pterodactyl conspicuous only by its absence, as duly confirmed when I checked it online.
I also accessed what must surely be the most detailed online history behind the creation of that album cover photograph (written and posted by Bob Egan on his PopSpots website), but again, no pterodactyl was mentioned (although I did discover that an early, pre-finalised version of the photo actually contained a giant star-nosed mole, but this unexpected feature was deleted before the final photo was produced).
Nor could I find anywhere online any Grateful Dead album cover that depicted a dead pterodactyl, or any mention of a ‘Workingman’s Dead Sessions’ album.
True, an official release of some of the Workingman’s Dead sessions came out in July 2020 to celebrate the album’s 50th anniversary – but this is an online-only release, subtitled “The Angel’s Share”, and has no photo on its ‘cover’ at all. As far as I could determine, therefore, if the enigmatic pterodactyl-portrayed Grateful Dead Sessions album did exist, it was evidently not an official album, and might instead be an unofficial bootleg. Pursuing that possibility, however, I swiftly discovered that it was not included on a list of Grateful Dead bootleg albums on the website Bootlegpedia, nor on an even more comprehensive bootleg listing on Discogs. So perhaps it was of exceedingly limited availability – or could it even be just a non-existent spoof? That is, merely a hoax album cover photograph created and posted online by someone as a joke.
On 15 October, I received a reply from Ari, who sent me a scan of its front cover, so that at last I could see it for myself. Amusingly, the picture used for it proved to be none other than the famous PTP (Pterosaur Photo) Civil War pterodactylian thunderbird photo (and
therefore did not feature the Grateful Dead band members at all). This image had been created specifically by a VFX company hired by the production design teamat the American TV show FreakyLinks (produced by Haxan Films) to appear (as indeed it did) in the show’s fourth episode, entitled ‘Coelacanth This!’ and first screened on 27 October 2000. The PTP photo should not be (but very often is) confused with an earlier, visually inferior Civil War pterodactylian thunderbird photo, featuring different actors as the Civil War soldiers plus a different pterodactyl, in the form of a physical model. This latter photo had also been created for FreakyLinks, but was used by them solely for advance publicity purposes, being included in their FreakyLinks website (which had been launched two years prior to the show’s actual screening in order to promote it), but not actually appearing in the show itself. The pterodactyl model from that publicity photo is now housed at Loren Coleman’s cryptozoology museum in Maine, USA.
The reason why two different Civil War pterodactyl photos associated with FreakyLinks exist is that the advancepublicity photo was created first, but seemingly there was subsequently a problem in obtaining talent releases for the actors featured in this photo, which would be needed if it were indeed to be shown in the episode. Also, the show’s production designer apparently didn’t think that the advance-publicity pterodactyl was very impressive. So Haxan hired the visual-effects company E=MC2 Digital to create a second, better Civil War pterodactyl photo (which would then be shown in the episode), and signed up new actors to appear in it, yielding the PTP photo (the pterodactyl in it reputedly being a digitally-added image this time, rather than a physical model). So, to reiterate the key fact here: it was the PTP photo that was used in the actual episode, not the publicity photo. Brian Dunning revealed all of this and more concerning the two different photos
An early version of the photo actually contained a giant star-nosed mole
in a fascinating Skeptoid podcast of 9 January 2018.
On 17 October, I received another reply from Ari, stating: “I downloaded the album about 10 years ago from a (now defunct) bootleg site on blogspot. There was no other artwork apart from this cover and not even a back cover.” So now we know – it was indeed a bootleg, and conceivably available in download format only. This would explain its absence from listings of physical bootleg albums.
The curious case of the Grateful Dead and the Dead Pterodactyl is duly solved, inasmuch as it certainly has nothing to do with the original missing thunderbird photograph from the 1800s after all. Conversely, if the missing thunderbird photo genuinely exists, it remains just as tenaciously elusive as ever.
My sincere thanks to Ari Arkar for kindly bringing all this to my attention.
Ari Sarkar, pers. comm., 14+15+17 Oct 2020; http://paleo.cc/paluxy/livptero. htm#Ptp-photo; http://bootlegpedia.com/ en/artist/Grateful-Dead 2019; https:// skeptoid.com/episodes/4605 9 Jan 2018; www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxtDX3ntroQ uploaded 1 Feb 2015; www.popspotsnyc. com/workingmans_dead/ (n.d.); www. discogs.com/label/263704-Not-On-LabelThe-Grateful-Dead (n.d.). For a detailed look at the genesis of Workingman’s Dead in a series of podcasts, visit: www.dead. net/deadcast.