Living-pterosaur expert Jonathan Whitcomb was interviewed for “The Conspiracy Show” on May 5, 2012, to be broadcast later this year in Canada. Richard Syrett questioned him on reports of pterosaurs or dragons in history and about his expedition in 2004.
I also mentioned the possibility that some of the Marfa Lights in Texas are the bioluminescence of nocturnal flying creatures that may be related to the ropen of Papua New Guinea. I mentioned how the light splittings and rejoinings may be large flying creatures hunting the Big Brown Bat at night.
Syrett also asked me about my creationist beliefs. I mentioned my differing view of the first part of Genesis: I don’t think it refers to the creation of the universe. Regarding the meaning of living pterosaurs, I referred to the Flood of Noah, that it demonstrates how God protecting the basic types of life, protecting life from extinction.
The questions included the subject of how modern pterosaurs have remained hidden from general knowledge for so long and how they have survived until the present.
From the book Searching for Ropens, second edition:
As the ship plowed through the temperate night, I began talking with those around me. They were curious why an American was going to Umboi Island. When I told them I was looking for a creature called ropen, they became interested. Some had heard about the creatures, and Gibson Kuvurio, from Pilio Island (off the southern coast of West New Britain), told me of the legend of wawanar, the dragon that flies around at night: It “owns the land and the sea.” Many gathered around us as I related what I knew about the ropen and shared my belief that the creature glows at night to catch fish.
On occasion, an eyewitness will use the following to report or to use a search engine: “I saw a giant bat.” Susan Wooten, years ago, mentioned a huge bat-like flying creature, when she first reported to me her sighting. In fact, she said, “It looked as big as any car . . . NO feathers, not like a huge crane or egret, but like a humongous bat.” But her sketch of the creature shows us something more like a long-tailed pterosaur:
When Wooten first reported to me her sighting in South Carolina, I took note that she included, “NO feathers.”
In San Antonio, Texas, around 1986, two eyewitnesses were shocked at the flying creature they encountered one night. “We noticed something flying around across the road . . . flying just above the phone lines. It would go one direction, turn, and swoop back. The shape was wrong for any large bird of the area, and the size was much too large to be any bat I have ever seen . . .
Dracula-Like Flying Creature
In Brownsville, Texas, around 1996, another eyewitness, a twelve-year-old girl, encountered something terrifying one morning, in back of her house (from the third edition of the nonfiction book Live Pterosaurs in America):
Next door, in the neighbor’s backyard, was what she first thought was a tall man; but he was about as tall as the house, too tall. He was “draped in a long black coat or cape,” facing away from her. “Dracula” came to mind as [the girl] tried to understand what she was looking at. The “man” turned, and revealed a face that terrified the child: It was non-human.
Slowing the creature . . . unwrapped its bat-like wings, dark leathery wings. The girl had never seen anything remotely like them. Her mind still raced for an explanation, something that would make sense of what see was watching. A large bird, maybe? No, it was nothing like that: too big, and without feathers. The girl was frozen in fear . . . With big black eyes, it stared at her, and began to walk towards her. . . . “Pterodactyl” came into her mind, although it seemed a crazy idea. . . .
Also reported in that book, Peter Beach, a biology professor, encountered glowing flying creatures at a river in the northwestern United States:
I think the Rhamphorhynchoids, if that is what they were, were feeding on the nighthawks [nocturnal birds] as the nighthawks were feeding on the flying insects. Bats were also common, but they were fast, made sharp turns, and were relatively small.”
The Hodgkinson sighting alone, perhaps the most important pterosaur sighting in history, repudiates the “giant bat” misidentification explanation. Note the following points, taken from my scientific paper “Reports of Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific,” . . .
Almost all of the researchers who have studied these accounts for years believe that these creatures are live pterosaurs. Most of the eyewitness accounts include a description of a long tail; some include a structure they have seen at the end of the tail: like a Rhamphorhynchoid tail flange.
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Spaulding Family Heritage (genealogy booklet)
Edward took his family from “James Citie,” probably because of the hostility of the Indians. They came to Massachusetts . . .
With BMP now two years old, let’s look at some of the most popular posts, beginning with the oldest and most visited, “New View on the Fiery Flying Serpent.” Please let me know if you have any suggestions not mentioned here:
#1 New View of the Fiery Flying Serpent
This addresses problems with the traditional interpretation. Some Bible experts have suggested that the animals were not themselves like fire and not actually flying, but that they were literal snakes. That traditional approach almost strikes out on the spot, for only one of three critical points are taken literally. This post suggests the creatures themselves were like fire (bioluminescent), were actually flying (Rhamphonrhynchoid pterosaurs), but that they were not literal snakes.
#2 Strange Flying Creatures and Bulverism
Explains the meaning of “bulverism” and how it relates to discussions (or lack of true discussions) on pterosaur extinction. A particular paleontologist is mentioned. A little is mentioned about the 1856 European “pterodactyl” of the famous railway tunnel (a newspaper hoax).
The third most visited post includes information on two sightings in Washington state. In addition, it mentions the possibility that some nocturnal pterosaurs catch and eats bats at night. It also mentions a few native names for the large flying creatures of the night in Papua New Guinea.
#4 Christopher Schorerum Dragon Sighting in 1619
At first I was surprised to see this post was so popular: 9% of all visits to the many posts are to this one. Perhaps it is the word “dragon.” That word does attract some attention from some web surfers.
The sighting of this glowing “dragon” was in Switzerland, near Mount Pilatus, in 1619, and the eyewitnesses gave some details, although few of them are quoted on this post. This old sighting is compared with that of Jacob Kepas. When he was a boy, he saw the glowing seklobali one night, as it flew over his village in Papua New Guinea.
#5 Live Pterosaurs: We Aren’t in Kansas Anymore?
One of my favorite titles for a post. The two sightings mentioned were northwest of Witchita and near Garden City.
. . . driving to town from the family farm between Rush Center and Larned, Kansas. I could not believe my eyes as I immediately thought of a prehistoric bird when I saw it. It must have had a wing-span of 16-20 feet.
. . . deep in the mainland interior of Papua New Guinea, Paul Nation . . . and Jacob Kepas . . . observed the indavas . . . The nocturnal flying creatures appeared to be like the ropen . . . glowing at night with apparent intrinsic bioluminescence. Paul recorded two of the lights . . . and the [video] footage was later analyzed by a physicist [Clifford Paiva], confirming that the lights were not from any car headlights, flashlights, meteors, airplanes, camp fires, or paste-on hoax.
#7 Marfa Lights to Monstrous Heights
About a Houston Chronicle newspaper article about my ideas about the mysterious ghost lights of southwest Texas, the Marfa Lights. A staff writer for that large daily newspaper took a dismissive attitude regarding my ideas.
#8 Model Pterodactyl Shot Down
The title is symbolic, of course. Model “pterodactyls” often totally fail to explain significant pterosaur sightings. Perhaps the most obvious is Hodgkinson’s sighting in 1944, in a remote jungle clearing: impossible to have been an airplane model. (But that example is not one of those listed on this post.)
#9 “Objective Ministries” Site if a Hoax
There seems to be no professor named “Richard Paley.” Even “Fellowship University” is nonexistent. Although parts of at least some of the pages refer to real persons and at least one real expedition . . . “Objective Ministries” is a huge joke . . .
#10 Eskin Kuhn Sighting and Creationist “Claims” — There was no Hoax
This refutes a careless little blog post by a critic-skeptic who assumed that the U. S. Marine Eskin Kuhn had played a hoax. That U. S. Marine then got in touch with that critic-skeptic and there was an apology . . . not from the U. S. Marine. (But that part of the story is missing from this post.)
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Missionary Jim Blume asks an old man about a grave robbery by the ropen (from a video recorded in Papua New Guinea, in the 1990′s).
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Third edition of the non-fiction cryptozoology book Live Pterosaurs in America. Purchase your own copy and learn of these amazing encounters, through the more-credible sighting reports, those found to be more-likely actual living “pterodactyls.” Your purchase shall also help support future investigations, perhaps even quicken the official scientific discovery of these wonderful flying creatures. This book is in nonfiction-cryptozoology genre.
Four years ago friends and family members were shocked at the passing of young Scott Norman (1964-2008), the devoted Christian and devoted cryptozoologist. He had been to Africa on an expedition that failed to prove the existence of a living dinosaur, but Scott’s investigation on another continent, in 2007 at an undisclosed location, resulted in a dramatic sighting of a pterosaur. He was highly respected in the cryptozoology community, so his account of the encounter made an impact. He left this life as a successful cryptozoologist.
The Scott Norman “Pterosaur” Sighting: His Own Words
(Small portions of the article by Chad Arment)
Our contact in the area has seen these type of lights and we have also seen them now too. I don’t now how to explain them, but they really do look like falling stars, but the difference is that they go in many different directions, even up and down . . .
Part of the reason I’ve been skeptical is that our contact had a video of an animal that was supposed to be a pterosaur and Garth, David, and some others believed it to be, to me it was just a bird and I had some other people look . . . and they thought it was a bird also . . .
Both Garth and David were tired and went to sleep and I stayed up till 4AM. Here’s the kicker, the skeptic between 1:30-2:30AM, probably closer to 2AM, has a sighting! On the property is a house and a shed, we had chairs and equipment set outside of the shed facing a pasture. I was sitting in a chair, sideways towards the shed looking up at the starry skies, when this animal came gliding just over the shed and into the field and then I lost it. I did not tell them about the sighting until later that morning, I had to sleep on and think about what I saw.
The animal I saw had an 8-10 foot wing span, the wings were bat-like in shape, the inside had that wavy type of look. The body was about 5-6 feet in length, the neck about 1-2 feet in length, the head was about four feet in length, and the head was key for me: it has a crest that was about 2 feet in length, fit that of a pteranodon, don’t know how else to describe it.
I give Scott high credibility in this night sighting, for he began his watch that night with honest skepticism. He suspected that his associates, may have been over-zealous in hoping that the nocturnal flyers in that area were pterosaurs. In addition, after his sighting he kept quiet until he had thought carefully about what he had observed. After quiet reflection, he revealed details.
Scott estimated the head was about four feet long. This reminds me of the large head of the “pterodactyl” observed by Duane Hodgkinson, in New Guinea in 1944. I do not imply that the Finschhafen “pterodactyl” is of the same species of Scott Norman’s pterosaur, but the large head plainly suggests that neither flying creature was a bird or a bat.
Finschhafen “Pterodactyl” (from the scientific paper “Reports of Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific” by Jonathan Whitcomb, published in the Creation Research Society Quarterly)
The creature ran to their left, taking six to ten steps to get airborne and ascended at an angle of about 30 degrees (similar to an airplane taking off). It then disappeared over the dense brush but soon returned and flew over the clearing, presenting a “perfect side view” of its features before again flying out of view. The wings never stopped flapping, at one to two seconds per flap, while it flew.
Hodgkinson recounted . . . details. The girth of the body at the chest was about 2 ft . . . He estimated the legs to be 3–4 ft . . . long. The top of the back was 5–6 ft . . . above the ground just before takeoff. . . . he estimated it [the tail] was “at least” 10–15 ft (3–4.6 m) long. He compared the wingspan to a Piper Tri-Pacer airplane (~29 ft or 9 m). The length of the head, not counting the appendage, was about 3–4 ft (1–1.2 m), similar to the length of the neck. An appendage protruding from the head, above the neck, was about half that length, and both the head and appendage were parallel to the neck . . . During fl ight, the feet were tucked up to the body. Hodgkinson was unsure of other features. The color was dark but not black. He took no notice of any feathers or hair, and he remembered nothing about the eyes.
Over the years, I sometimes come across the words of a skeptic who asks why, if pterosaurs are still living, we do not see them regularly. I now ask why we ever see them in daylight, for most of them, if not all, seem to be nocturnal. For some sightings, how simple the answer!
Dramatic sighting reports of pterosaurs flying in daylight sometimes give us clues about why flight was in the light of day. The flying creatures were disturbed from sleep and took off into the air as a bird or bat will do when awakened or spooked by potential danger.
Duane Hodgkinson reported that a wild pig ran through the jungle clearing, just before he and his army buddy saw the huge flying creature (that he called “pterodactyl” and that I call “ropen” or “Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur”) ran to get airborne. It was west of Finschhafen, New Guinea, in 1944. The noise of the pig surely frightened that ropen, waking it up, just as the two soldiers were startled by that pig. That sighting was in the middle of the day, but ropens are known to be nocturnal, even glowing with bright bioluminescence, apparently. (See “Expeditions of 2004“)
Brian Hennessy reported that a prehistoric-looking creature flew overhead one day in 1971, as he was in a truck on a mountain road on Bougainville Island, New Guinea. I imagine a truck on a mountain road on a tropical island in 1971, and I can almost hear the noise of the engine. That is probably what woke up that nocturnal ropen on Bougainville Island. (New Guinea is now Papua New Guinea.)
A teenaged girl was gazing out over a cliff with her father, on a summer day in Arkansas, in 1977, as she kicked rocks over the edge. Guess what came flying off that cliff, only about twenty feet below the feet of that teenaged girl. What would wake up a flying creature that was sleeping in daylight on a cliff?
Pterosaur Sighting in Arkansas
A critical point, missed by critics, is the physical closeness to the flying creature, even when the encounter was years ago. In this case, the two eyewitnesses were only about twenty feet away from the “teradactyl,” when they first saw it flying away from them, in western Arkansas.
Running pigs, noisy trucks, falling rocks—those are not the only distractions that can wake up a nocturnal creature. One lady saw a long-tailed flying creature—obvious pterosaur—fly in front of her car, while she was driving on a country road in Georgia, in 2008, the day after a tropical storm had passed through. If you live in a cave subject to flooding, a tropical storm can ruin your day, in fact people have been known to lose sleep when their houses are being flooded; it could happen to nocturnal creatures that are evicted in daylight.
Fifteen miles of her commute is on a two-lane 55-mph road through woods alternating with pastures . . . The southeastern United States had just been hit by Fay [a serious storm] . . . when PS drove to work on August 27, 2008. . . . an animal suddenly flew from the right, just over the front of her car. Although alone, she yelled, “What the — what — what is that?” . . . Overall, the animal was tan, similar to the light brown of the local deer . . .
We need to keep this Georgia sighting in perspective, however. About two weeks after her first sighting, the lady in Georgia had a second sighting, a smaller flying creature of the same species, in the same general area of countryside and also in the light of morning, flying over the same road. That does not prove the earlier storm was irrelevant, but it may suggest a more complex behavior, perhaps of a mated pair trying to find a suitable place to sleep in daylight.
Mountains and forest in Georgia, U.S.A.:
Have you noticed your two blind spots while driving? Unless you ride a motorcycle or drive a car with no windshield or constantly rock your head forward and back, those blind spots (side-supports for the windshield) follow you everywhere. I’m usually careful pulling forward from a stop sign at a particular intersection near my house, for a car is almost always parked on my right. The other day, I pulled forward, fortunately with usual care, and noticed a car, slowly coming from my right, almost obscured by my right blind spot. The other driver acknowledged my second stop and passed safely in front of me. We were never close to having a collision, but it brought those blind spots into my view.
The point? Professors who teach the universal extinction of all species of pterosaurs—those professors never ride motorcycles . . . something like that. But everybody has blind spots, of course, not just paleontologists; the danger is in living as if we had none.
Over the past eight years, I have encountered critics who assume that my associates and I have a serious bias: a religious blind spot caused by our need to support our beliefs through the idea that pterosaurs are modern rather than extinct. Those critics fail to realize that Garth Guessman, David Woetzel, Paul Nation, and I have differences in religious beliefs: Aside from being Bible-believing Christians, we probably have at least somewhat different interpretations of some parts of Genesis.
But those critics are seriously mistaken about our need for living pterosaurs. We would have been quite happy in our faith in Jesus Christ even were all species of pterosaurs to be extinct. Humans are known to be the major cause of extinctions in recent centuries and humans were probably the cause for many extinctions in the more distant past. Turning over the coin, a serious bias is not restricted to those holding a less-popular opinion. What about those critics?
Over the past eight years, I have interviewed eyewitnesses from various countries, of various religious beliefs, with various educational backgrounds, under various cultural influences. As far as I know, I have communicated with more apparent-pterosaur eyewitnesses than any other cryptozoologist in the world. What do the eyewitnesses have in common? Each one has seen a winged creature whose description suggests a living pterosaur more than it suggests any bird or bat. Human experience deserves our attention, even if that common experience from around the world contradicts an assumption popular with one or more of the world’s cultures. Critics appear to have failed to read far enough to notice that critical detail.
Western culture has a blind spot (at least one) that blocks communication with eyewitnesses of pterosaurs. We need to listen to eyewitnesses, and we need to move our head forward a few inches to see past the blind spot . . . something like that.
In the introduction to the third edition of my book Live Pterosaurs in America, I wrote:
. . . please consider the feelings of those who have revealed to us their encounters with what seem to be live pterosaurs, for some of them have suffered more than discomfort. I intend to comfort those innocent victims who have been ridiculed or ostracized because of a cultural weakness, for each has seen something unaccepted by their society.
On page 95 I wrote:
Now compare those reactions to those of natives in Papua New Guinea. My experience interviewing natives and reviewing interviews done by other explorers—that suggests it’s easier to catch a giant ropen in a fishing net than to find a native eyewitness who disbelieves personal experience because of what American professors assume. Eyewitnesses in a culture that dogmatically teaches pterosaur extinction—they sometimes have problems dealing with an experience that they feel should not have been experienced; native eyewitnesses in New Guinea have no problem.
On page 96 I wrote:
What has a beak and a long tail, and flies with no feathers? . . . Some would reply, “Living or extinct?” But why not just answer that question? Of course it is a Rhamphorhynchoid (long-tailed) pterosaur, called by many non-scientists “pterodactyl,” a layman’s term for any reptilian-like “prehistoric” featherless flying creature. The point? What’s wrong with simply accepting an eyewitness report of a long-tailed featherless flying creature? Why believe that all pterosaur species must be extinct? Without the idea of universal Rhamphorhynchoid extinction, we conclude that the eyewitness saw a pterosaur. Non-extinction, as an alternative, now appears.
I’m responding to a forum thread that attacks not any particular sighting report or analysis of any sighting: It attacks me. I will not attack the critics in retaliation but feel it better to answer a few of their comments.
