Jurassic Park, Alaska?

The Anchorage Daily News reported last week that residents of Togiak and Manokotak, in southwest Alaska, saw a flying creature with a wingspan of 14 feet that looked like something out of the movie Jurassic Park.

“At first I thought it was one of those old-time Otter planes,” the paper quoted Moses Coupchiak, 43, a heavy-equipment operator from Togiak, as saying. “Instead of continuing toward me, it banked to the left, and that’s when I noticed it wasn’t a plane.”

But scientists are skeptical about the sighting.

“I’m certainly not aware of anything with a 14-foot wingspan that’s been alive for the last 100,000 years,” raptor specialist Phil Schemf told the newspaper.

Rob Macdonald of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in the article, however, that there had been several sightings in the past year and a half of a Steller’s eagle, a fish-eating bird that can weigh 20 pounds (10 kg) and have a wingspan of eight feet.