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Pterodactyl Expert

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. The original forum thread title was “Jonathan Whitcomb: Pterodactyl Expert.” (I did not participate on that cryptozoology.com forum discussion.)

#1 From “ape man”

Do you know what Johnathon Whitcomb’s solitary expert qualifications are? The expert qualifications listed in his book and on every creationist website? Here you go:

Jonathan D. Whitcomb, certified court videographer

#1 Reply

My lack of qualifications in paleontology is irrelevant in cryptozoology. I do not examine fossils of pterodactyls, I examine eyewitness testimony. Many other interviewers (police officers, FBI agents, military specialists) may be better qualified to interview eyewitnesses of apparent living pterosaurs, but none of them seem to have become involved in this special field of cryptozoology. One qualification I have acquired is the ability to get in touch with the eyewitnesses and to communicate with them in a way that they do not feel threatened. I doubt if my critics, those who accuse me of lies, would make those eyewitnesses feel as comfortable.

#2 from “ape man”

“His invented monster is different than any known pterosaur”

#2 Reply

What “invented monster” is “ape man” referring to? My overall conclusion, after more than eight years of research, is that there are a number of species of pterosaurs living in various parts of the world, with various differences in appearance. What do the important sightings have in common? Descriptions of the flying creatures (often called “pterodactyls”) suggest a modern pterosaur far more than they suggest any misidentification or hallucination or hoax.

Religion is the Issue

The critics who attack me are upset because of my writings on the Biblical relationship with modern pterosaurs. Just a quote or two will make this clear:

“He is really nothing more than a flag bearing creationist leading a charge against evolution on the back of a flying reptile. His quest makes Don Quixote look like a paradigm of sanity.”

This strikes me as interesting (I have no bruises from those remarks), for over 90% of my writings (up to early 2012, at least) make no mention of the religious aspects of the existence of modern living pterosaurs. For those eyewitness accounts that I have found more credible, I write more often. On occasion I write about misidentifications, for example, what sightings are very likely Frigate Birds. I invite those who want to know the truth to read my books and blog posts and peer-reviewed scientific paper (“Reports of Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific”), before assuming that I must be afflicted with the worst possible case of insanity.

“Pterodactyl Expert” on Modern Pterosaur

. . . Whitcomb is nothing like a paleontologist. He probably could not tell the species of a fossil of one if he dug it up himself. He is a cryptozoologist who interviews eyewitnesses of what many call “pterodactyls,” which is simply the name many non-paleontologists use for “pterosaur.” He searches for the eyewitnesses who think that they have seen modern pterosaurs, and he tries to figure out if they misidentified a bird or a bat or if they saw what they think that they did.

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Skepticism or Skip Decision

Why believe in a living pterosaur? Why disbelieve an eyewitness of a living pterosaur? Some who first learn about these investigations assume they are using scientific skepticism when they skip the decision to investigate for themselves. Of course, not everybody can delve into every report that appears to have the eery glow of the paranormal. But skipping the decision to look deeper is not scientific, even when the word “science” is used in repeating a century-plus old indoctrination of a whole society.

Not Everybody Embraces Living Pterosaurs

This species of critic is not satisfied at destroying an idea; they appear anxious to destroy the reputation of anyone who disagrees with them. More than once this kind of critic, on this online forum, has accused me of dishonesty for using something other than my real name, and this when those same critics use fantastic online names that must be made-up. Once, on the same forum of commentators with obviously made-up online names, I was accused of deception for using my real initials instead of my real full name. Really!

From the third edition of the nonfiction book Live Pterosaurs in America

“Since the two ropen expeditions of 2004, in Papua New Guinea, more Americans have learned of the living-pterosaur investigations and the many resulting eyewitness interviews. Many web pages have sprung up, many of them by explorers themselves. But despite other web pages, by scornful critics who never went anywhere and never interviewed anyone, those two expeditions, and those that preceded and followed them, are causing an awakening, opening human minds in the birth of a new perspective: Universal pterosaur extinction has been an assumption; some pterosaur species are still living.”

Why “Stupid?” What “Lies?”

Referring to creationists, in the first sentence Konkus uses the word “idiocy,” and in the second sentence, “idiot.” Starting off like that brings up the concept of bulverism. Also in the second sentence, Konkus gives a straw man argument, rather than quoting any creationist.

cover of nonfiction cryptozoology book "Live Pterosaurs in America"

Third edition of Live Pterosaurs in America (nonfiction/cryptozoology)

From an Amazon review of the second edition of this book:

This is an updated review of the book and I am changing my rating to 5 stars. This book has been on my shelf for almost a year now. I pick it up every now and then and a part of me becomes more impressed by the book every time. . . .  I highly recommend this. You may find yourself almost believing in it, although that is not even the authors intent! Whitcomb painstakingly reviews every account for credibility and reason. This man is not a crank. He tries to weed out would be hoaxes and miss-identification. This is not a guy looking to create evidence to confirm his own beliefs. On top of this, I have great respect for a guy who follows his dreams so passionately. He has traveled to Papua New Guinea to search for the creature there and this book is somewhat of a sequel if you will. After Whitcomb traveled to New Guinea, he started to collect more stories from North America concerning the pterosaur like creature . . .

Whitcomb is a pterosaur expert in the cryptozoological sense, interviewing eyewitnesses of flying creatures whose descriptions make them obvious candidates for a modern-pterosaur interpretation.

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Sixty-Five Million

Two different pages on Wikipedia mention “sixty-five million.” Let’s examine both “sixty-five million copies” of a book and “sixty-five million years” since the “extinction” of pterosaurs. I believe that both ideas are mistakes.

The Alchemist, a short novel by Paulo Coelho, was acclaimed, at least before January 18, 2012, on Wikipedia and elsewhere, as having sold sixty-five million copies. I had just finished reading the book and noticed the back cover of the paperback  (English edition printed a few years ago); it conflicted with what I had read on Wikipedia. I looked deeper and, sure enough, found that my suspicion was well founded, for Coelho’s own web page reveals that twenty-one million copies had been sold worldwide. I believe that the back cover of the paperback I had read was correct, that the “sixty-five million” was the total number of sales of all Coelho’s novels (not just this one short novel) up until that paperback printing of the English version of The Alchemist (a few years ago). I believe that by the beginning of 2012, about a hundred million copies had been sold of all his many books, including The Alchemist. Still, twenty-one million is a lot less than sixty-five million, and the subject of the Wikipedia page was that particular novel, not all the novels by that author. The subject now involves mistakes on Wikipedia.

On rare occasions I edit Wikipedia pages, and on January 17, 2012, I edited The Alchemist page, to correct that mistake. So why think of it? To most ordinary persons, who will never sell any millions of anything or be famous for anything, twenty-one million seems practically the same as sixty-five million. The problem lies in casual thinking: Too many of us rely on others to think for us, and we do so too often, too much, and in matters too important. I don’t expect many persons to spend half a year on mathematical calculations to test Darwin’s idea that natural selection causes small simple organisms to evolve into large complex ones (I did so with my Evolutionary Boundary), but I expect more persons to be more open-minded to the possibility that the minority may sometimes be correct and the majority may sometimes be incorrect; even the majority of biology professors may be mistaken regarding a common assumption.

I googled “sixty-five million Alchemist” (not in quotes) and saw the influence of Wikipedia. The third entry, by an online bookseller, quoted Wikipedia’s mistake (quoting Wikipedia’s paragraph as it stood before I corrected the error). The fourth entry found by Google quoted Publishers Weekly: “Sixty-five million readers can’t be wrong. The Alchemist, Eleven Minutes, and Coelho’s other books will easily carry fans . . .” At least Publishers Weekly does not look at Wikipedia when a number is critical. The fifth entry mentions twenty-one million copies of The Alchemist that were sold worldwide. The seventh entry, another bookseller page for The Alchemist, says, “It has sold more than sixty-five million copies.” (It appears that booksellers might rely too much on Wikipedia.) A brief glimpse at the second-page results from the Google search seems to confirm that Wikipedia’s influence is great, even when a number is far from correct.

Sixty-Five Million Years Without Pterosaurs?

Pterosaur extinction has been taken for granted, for generations, in Western countries like the United States. So why doubt extinction? Countless eyewitnesses, from around the world, have testified and continue to testify that this featherless flying creature still lives. Not every species of pterosaur became extinct long ago. Countless repetitions of something like “they all became extinct by 65 million years ago” (referring to dinosaurs and pterosaurs) does not prove even one species became extinct; it does not even accumulate evidence for that dogma. But increasing numbers of eyewitnesses of living pterosaurs—they accumulate evidence for life and discredit the universal-extinction doctrine.

Fiery Flying Serpent

An oblique response can lead to unintentional injury to reasoning. If a human who was bitten by a snake felt like the wound was burning, why label the snake with that sensation? It seems to me much more likely that “fiery” refers to something like fire in the animal, for that is what is being labeled: It is the animal.

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Fiction book by Paulo Coelho - "The Alchemist"

Available on Amazon.com — The Alchemist (by Paulo Cuelho)

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non-fiction book cover - Live Pterosaurs in America - third edition - with sketches

The best selling nonfiction cryptozoology book on modern living pterosaurs: Live Pterosaurs in America (third edition), available on Amazon.com (usually at a discounted price on Amazon)

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Hoax Potential – Pterosaur Wingspan

Wingpan estimates from eyewitnesses of apparent pterosaurs

No hoax or combination of hoaxes played any significant part in ninety-eight eyewitness accounts of apparent pterosaurs. Those reports came from decades of records, taken mostly from my own interviews and accounts given to me directly from eyewitnesses. A minority of those ninety-eight were taken from nonfiction books (like cryptozoology books), newspaper accounts, and online reports. One key to eliminating any hoax possibility comes from fifty-seven of those reports, the ones in which an eyewitness gave an estimate of the wingspan.

In the above graph, the verticle indicates the number of sightings within a particular range of wingspans. The letters indicate those wingspan estimates, for example: b=3.25-6.25 ft. (ten sightings) and f=15.25-18.25 ft. (six sightings). Actually, this graph seems to exaggerate the three-foot-to-six-foot range, for twenty-six eyewitness estimates were from 6.25 to 18.25 feet (c, d, e, f). In another graph (below), wingspans are divided in every two feet, showing a less pronounced peak on the left:

Another graph of wingspan estimates, at every two feet

In the second graph, the higher elevations around “e” and “f” (8.25 feet to 12.25 feet) demonstrate the honesty of the great majority of these eyewitnesses, for hoaxers would not have inadvertantly caused the high instances of estimates that are too large or too small, according to common ideas about pterosaurs. (And it defies reason to imagine hoaxers, over several decades and from various parts of the world, giving lies about wingspan estimates based on their foresight that some future investigator would analyze the overall estimates in this way.)

If some hoaxers gave “estimates” based on standard beliefs about long-tailed pterosaurs, and some hoaxers gave “estimates” based on standard beliefs about giant pterosaurs, the graph would have shown two peaks, with a deep valley in the top graph around “d,” (“e” and “f” in the lower graph), far different from the actual data collected. The fifty-seven wingspan estimates coorelate very well, however, with the following:

A number of species of modern pterosaurs live in various parts of the world, with smaller ones outnumbering larger ones and the giant ones being rare. Eyewitnesses who estimate wingspans are generally making those estimates with random errors, for many of the sightings involve flying creatures previously unknown to those eyewitnesses, making it difficult to judge distance and size.

Wingspan Estimates Eliminate Hoax

To put it in a nutshell, the fifty-seven wingspan estimates show a fairly smooth curve downwards toward the giant wingspans, and it is far too shallow a curve to have come from hoaxers who would have tried to fool people into thinking that the hoaxers had seen long-tailed pterosaurs. The reason for that is that those Rhamphorhynchoids are commonly believed to have been smaller pterosaurs with wingspans generally less than seven feet. The statistics show something far different.

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Singapore Pterosaur

In September of 2010, I received an email from a man who lives in Singapore. Around 1958-1960, when he was a small boy, he watched two flying creatures (that he now believes were pterosaurs) as they flew and ate some orange fruit from some tall palm trees.

I was wandering some distance from the village; I was staying in Alexandra Road area, and was out on an adventure hunt one hot afternoon in a forested area when I came across a pair of them flying together [as they circled the palm trees] . . . at that time I thought nothing more of them as I was of the notion that such bird-like creatures were the order of the day – at such a young age, at that time, I never knew they were thought to be extinct.

Question: Where was your sighting (country and state or area of country)?

I apologise that, in my eagerness to share my experience in your website, I had inadvertently missed out in reporting the place (country) that I live in, i.e. the place of my sighting.

I live in Singapore, an island at the tip of the Malay Peninsula (South East Asia). There are many much bigger islands south of my country, and they form the Indonesian Archipelago. In one of the islands there, I believe it was Sumatra, there was a recent sighting of a similar kind, a couple of years ago . . .

In those days, we lived in a small village which was near a densely wooded area. Of course with the general development of Singapore to a metropolitan state it is today, the creatures, if they had propagated, would have ventured further south to the wilder regions to avoid civilisation (to ensure their survival). . . .

Pterosaur Near Singapore (same sighting as above)

I have seen a pair of them way back in the early 60′s when I was a small boy . . . circling some tall palm trees (those with small orange coloured fruits) and then helping themselves to the fruits. They were making cries which sounded like squawking . . . They were large . . .

Pterosaur Near Indonesia

In June of 2008, two very experienced pilots were at the controls of a light twin-engined plane, flying over the sea southeast of Bali, Indonesia. While the copilot was looking at a chart, the pilot noticed what he assumed was another plane, heading in the opposite direction, threatening a direct collision. The pilot put the plane into a dive, but the other “flyer” also dove, forcing the pilot to veer away, with a bank to the left. . . . Both men [pilot and copilot] were sure, at that time, that it was a creature and not another plane that had nearly hit them, for in passing them it made one slow flap of its wings.

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Live Pterosaurs in America bookLive Pterosaurs in America

Buy the second edition of this non-fiction book, available on Amazon and elsewhere.

Live “pterodactyls?” [AKA Pterosaurs] In the United States? Many scientists have long assumed all pterosaurs died millions of years ago. Now take a whirlwind tour of many years of investigations in cryptozoology, and prepare for a shock: At least two pterosaur species have survived, uncommon, not so much rare as widely and thinly distributed.

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Apparent Pterosaur in Namibia, Africa

Two days ago, I received an email from a Belgian man who has lived in Africa, for at least forty years, working in public service. I’ll mostly let his email tell the account of his encounter with an apparent pterosaur in Namibia.

It was on a Saturday/Sunday morning just having finished breakfast, ~10:00, late April/early May 2011 – this is Southern African autumn! I was sitting in the garden . . . when I saw a large bird gliding, moving its wings very, very slowly, very much as we see raptors or eagles do when they circle in the air scanning the land for prey. I paid attention to the wings as it would allow for identification – but this bird did not have any feathers, at least not any spread primary feathers (as eagles often show). It looked more like a large bat. . . .

It showed a long, very long, slim neck (like of cranes or flamingos) . . . The overall colour of neck-cum-head-cum-beak was bright (whitish?). The colour of the body-and-wings was brownish, with a lighter patch of greenish-brown covering 3/4 of the underside of the wings. . . .

The wings span was about double the distance of beak-tip to end-of-tail. I cannot remember details of the tail, but thought that two legs and a strange looking longer tail or appendix were visible, parallel to one another. . . .

At the time of observation the sun was at 30-40° height and the bird was at 3-o’clock to 5-o’clock position relative to the sun. Flight direction was SE to NW. From my (seated) position the bird passed at 15-30° from the vertical (that is why I could not make out details of any beak(bill) or head). Sky was blue with hardly any cloud. Estimated altitude of bird above ground (based on comparison to small planes taking-off from or landing at the small airport of Windhoek) was about 200+ metres.

The eyewitness estimated the wingspan, but I’m not yet sure what he means by “wingspan,” for he mentioned the planes flying overhead as having wingspans of “5-7 metres.” That seems too small a wing-tip-towing-tip for even the smallest private planes, so I assume he meant the length of one wing. At any rate, he estimated the flying creature had a wingspan about half of that of the airplanes he sees flying overhead; it was a large flying creature.

 

Manta Rays and Stingrays do not fly over jungle canopies

Hodgkinson and his army buddy, in 1944, were nowhere near the seashore, when they stopped in a small jungle clearing well inland from Finschhafen, New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea). The giant creature took off from the ground, soon flying over the trees. No Manta ray was involved.

Kongamato of Africa

. . . living along certain rivers, and very dangerous, often attacking small boats, and anybody who disturbed the creature. They are typically described as either red or black in color, with a wingspan of 4 to 7 feet.