Last night I got a phone call from Les Kouke, who now lives in Colorado Springs. He had sent me an email, a few years ago, but I’m glad for the phone call. Next to a face-to-face interview, the combination of email and phone conversation is the best way for an eyewitness to report a sighting to a cryptozoologist.
Mr. Kouke was living on the isand of Oahu, Hawaii, when he was twelve years old. It was around 1970 when he saw the creature flying about a hundred feet high, at mid-morning. He was alone during the thirty seconds or so of the sighting, but other eyewitnesses in other areas of Hawaii have also reported apparent pterosaurs flying overhead, and significant recent sightings have been with multiple eyewitnesses.
Mokoli’i Islet, Oahu, Hawaii
Sighting in Maunawili Valley, Oahu
Mr. Kouke told me, in our phone conversation, “[I was] not believing what I was seeing” when he first saw the flying creature. He estimated the wingspan at 24-30 feet. At first he wondered if it might be a man-made object, but the gliding changed into slow flapping, after it had lost some altitude. That wing flapping frequency was about two seconds, and he made it clear to me that he means one second upward wing movement and one second downward wing movement.
The apparent pterosaur was a light brown or tan color, with a “horn” on the back of its head. He could not recall anything about a long tail or absence of a long tail, probably because he had been concentrating on other features during the sighting. He told me the surface of the creature had a canvass-like appearance and no feathers. He noticed about four ribs on each wing, from leading edge to trailing edge. I believe Mr. Kouke encountered a living pterosaur.
He visited Duane Hodgkinson three or four years ago, and they compared their sightings.
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I have encountered several sighting reports from Hawaii this year [2012] . . . But the encounter described in a post of the s8intcom blog now deserves attention and comparison with other sightings in Hawaii. Two soldiers were looking up at the night sky, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, for a strange creature was flying through some scattered thin clouds. . . . wingspan of about twenty feet. This was late in 1999, in what the soldiers called the “Kahuku range,” on the northeast side of Oahu. . . .
Huge Pterosaur Flying Over Oahu
The number of reported sightings of modern pterosaurs in the Hawaiian Islands demands that we examine the reports and evaluate the possibility. Certainly nobody who thinks about it carefully will proclaim that if large pterosaurs lived in modern times none of them would be able to fly across an ocean. Butterflies have been reported to have been blown over some stretches of ocean . . .
Multiple Eyewitnesses of Pterosaurs
Between 3-4 foot wing span, sharp, long beak, featherless wings more like a bat than a bird, almost transparent, a fleshy, brownish pinkish grey color, and legs that laid straight back and fairly long, and (I knew what it was because of this!) a long featherless tail with what them described as Diamond on it’s tip . . .
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