Modern Pterosaur Verified in Cuba

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At least within the realm of cryptozoology, the 1971 sighting by Eskin Kuhn, of two long-tailed pterosaurs, has been recently supported by another sighting around 1965, by Patty Carson of California. Both sightings were at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (“Gitmo”), which is maintained by the United States. Much has been written about the Kuhn sighting, so I’ll now concentrate mostly on the earlier sighting. (I learned about the 1965 sighting a few days ago.)

Patty was only about six years old when she and her younger brother were walking home on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. I’ll let Patty’s words tell much of this account.

We lived at the end of the road, last house, by the radio tower. We were walking from the boat yards toward home, but still closer to the boat yards, to where it was sandy underfoot, sparse scrub vegetation around four feet tall . . . There were some stagnant pools here and there, a few inches deep . . . We were walking through that scrub area, and suddenly it sat up, as if it had been eating something or resting. The head and upper part of its body, about a third of the wings at the joint (tips still held down) showed.

[It was] about thirty feet away. All of us froze for about five seconds, then it leaned to its left and took off with a fwap fwap fwap sound, in a big hurry, more of a scramble . . .

Patty did tell me, in a phone conversation, that the creature looked at them with apparent intelligence, as if trying to decide whether or not to attack them. The teeth were small but clearly visible, as the creature’s mouth was not quite closed. About those teeth, Patty said that there were “a LOT of them.”

The two children had no inclination to see what was at the place where the creature had been sitting; they ran home and told the grownups that they had seen a dinosaur that had flown away. They “started to tell me it was a pelican or frigate bird. NO WAY! It was as tall as a man when it stood up on it haunches.”

In our phone conversation, Patty explained to me that she was a very intelligent child and that the encounter was ingrained in her memory. She told me that the wings were like bat wings, in a way, but not at all transparent. She is sure of the structure at the end of the tail (what I call a “vane” or “flange”) and estimates the “diamond” was about five inches long and about three inches wide.

Eskin Kuhn Sighting — There was no Hoax

Read the whole blog entry (it’s short) and you’ll find not a milligram of evidence for any hoax. It seems to be just another case of a critic ridiculing a concept because it is supported by persons who have the label “creationist.”

I have interviewed Eskin Kuhn (early 2010) by surprising him with a phone call; he had no time to prepare how to respond. The first thing he said to me was something like, “It was a long time ago.” He confirmed that the desciption he gave of the two apparent pterosaurs was an honest report of what he had seen; in early 2010 he had nothing to add, subtract, or change. I was moved by the high credibility of this man . . .

Two Pterosaur Sightings in Cuba

Very recently another eyewitness, a lady living in California, has come forward, supporting the U.S. Marine’s testimony with her own sighting report. Patty Carson observed a single pterosaur, about six years before the sighting by Kuhn, but was disbelieved for decades and unaware that anyone else, other than the ones with her at the Guantanamo Bay installation in around 1965, had seen anything similar.

Marfa Lights and Science

Consider those eyewitness accounts in which apparent pterosaurs appear to glow at night. Some of those sightings are in North America, and those flying creatures may be related to the ones observed in Cuba.

When a group of intelligent predators has a successful hunt, they may, on the next day (or the next night for nocturnal predators) repeat what was recently successful, assuming the hunting conditions are similar. Applying this to the hypothesis mentioned so often recently (a group of scientifically-unclassified nocturnal flying predators, having bioluminescent capability, hunting, on some nights, around southwest Texas), we would expect to find a few consecutive nights with ML activity and maybe even with a similar start time for the appearances. This has been found and published by James Bunnell, although he has not yet admitted the plausibility of my hypothesis, at least not to my knowledge.

Sightings of long-tailed pterosaurs in Cuba need to be taken in the context of many sightings of pterosaur-like flying creatures in North America.

6 Replies to “Modern Pterosaur Verified in Cuba”

  1. Well, not necessarily verification per se, but a very good step towards it, in my mind this sets it within the confines of a reasonable statement to say that what they saw was a valid animal, a pterosaur? well you and I could agree on that, but unfortunately a scientist demands physical evidence for such a claim (even if testimony points towards this conclusion) so, verification probably isn’t the best term for this, though it is very, very interesting nonetheless.

  2. Reply to Lincoln Shoemaker

    I think you made a good point with “not necessarily verification per se, but a very good step towards it,” for many readers might think of the word “verified” in the scientific sense. But for many who follow news in cryptozoology circles, Patty Carson’s testimony verifies the validity of Eskin Kuhn’s sighting, for they describe a very similar animal in the same part of Cuba: Guantanamo Bay.

    I have written one scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal (“Reports of Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific” – in the Creation Research Society Quarterly, Volume 45, Number 3), and I am sure I would have been advised not to use “verified” in the way I used it in this post title, if a similar situation had arisen; advisors for scientific journals are often very picky about word choice. But I think of this blog as more cryptozoological than scientific.

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