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 . . .