Felipe Rodriguez says he thought he was hallucinating when an eagle snatched his sister’s little dog from her yard, flapped its massive wings and disappeared over the trees.

Did he really just see that?

He had. Zoey the 8-pound bichon frise was gone, taken by a hungry raptor Tuesday not 50 feet from his sister’s house on the banks of the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia. “It seemed like something from the ‘Wizard of Oz,”‘ he said Wednesday. “I’m a city boy. This doesn’t happen in my world.”

Even more astonishing: Zoey survived.

Zoey’s ordeal began as she was playing in her fenced yard in Bowmanstown, watched by Rodriguez, who was visiting from Chicago and enjoying his time in the country.

But suddenly, the eagle’s screech riveted his attention.

“The bird was holding onto the dog. There was flapping of wings and then it was gone,” Rodriguez said. After a fruitless drive around the neighborhood looking for the 7-year-old bichon, he assumed Zoey was gone for good.

His sister and her family were devastated. “I did nothing but cry all day,” Monica Newhard said.

Newhard said it’s not unusual to see eagles, given her home’s proximity to the river. But it never occured to Newhard that any of her four dogs could be in danger.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t Zoey’s time. A neighbor later spotted Zoey curled up and shivering on a back road. Christina Hartman scooped up the whimpering pooch, wrapped her in a blanket and took her home, nursing her back to health with two bowls of chicken-and-rice soup. Aside from the trauma, Zoey had a couple of patches of fur missing and a limp.

Thanks to a Facebook post on the snatching, Zoey and her owners were soon reunited.

It’s not clear how far the eagle might have carried the dog, but the family said they can’t believe Zoey survived.

“She is not really herself, but she is getting lots of love,” Newhard texted the AP on Wednesday. “She doesn’t want to go out. … I really can’t blame her.”