Calif. — A man in Sacramento County on Friday said he saw an unidentified winged creature.

74-year-old D.R. told Cryptozoology News he was driving on State Route 16 near Rancho Murieta when the incident took place the night of July 15.

“It was around 11:45 p.m.,” said the piano technician. “I was driving home from a performance in Fiddletown, near Plymouth,” he added.

The Californian claims that he was driving at around 65 mph when the “huge bird” showed up.

“It swooped down from my left and leveled off in front of my vehicle, and flew along in front of me about 20 to 30 feet in front of me. I instinctively hit the brakes when this object appeared in front of our car,” he explained. He didn’t specify who the other person in the vehicle was.

The man described the creature as a 30-feet-wide black bird with “features similar to those of a hawk”.

“The wingspan covered the width of the two-lane highway. Its wings seemed to undulate because of it’s huge size.”

The animal, he said, “continued to fly at around 10 feet off the highway and then lifted off to the right and out of sight”.

“I am not sure how to accurately describe it.”

The sighting reportedly took about “5 to 7 seconds”.

Thunderbird, also known as Roc, is the nomenclature used by Native Americans to refer to bird-like creatures with reptile features that are believed to be related to the extinct pterosaurs.

In July 2015, two people in Nevada reported seeing a creature that reminded them of a pterosaur, a flying reptile believed to have gone extinct about 65 million years ago.

Two weeks later, a minister and her daughter claimed to have seen an unidentified flying creature that looked like it was “straight out of Jurassic Park”.

In 1890, Arizona newspaper The Tombstone Epitaph wrote about two ranchers killing a “winged monster” similar to an “alligator” in the desert between the Whetsone and Huachuca mountains.

In April 2016, two people in Georgia said they had seen a large bird they could not positively identify.

In February 2017, a 55-year-old from Maryland claimed that he and two other people had witnessed a bird he believed to be Thunderbird.