William Gibbon’s nonfiction cryptozoology book Missionaries and Monsters has a chapter on “Winged Wonders” (with reference to the Biblical “fiery flying serpent”). Before getting into details about living pterosaurs, here is part of the publisher’s information:
Bill [Gibbons] collects reports of mystery animals from missionaries and others, with chapters on lake monsters, sea serpents, unknown apes, and the possibility of living dinosaurs. Some of these cryptids look like species from the fossil record, while others (like the “Nepal Dragon” sighted in 1980) don’t resemble known species at all.
I recommend this book for its many eyewitness accounts of cryptids from around the world, some of which suggest living dinosaurs and pterosaurs. I’d rate the book “4.5 stars out of 5.0″ and hope to some day research some of the reports in the “Winged Wonders” chapter (those I have not yet researched), and I encourage other cryptozoologists to investigate reports of living pterosaurs in the southwest Pacific.
That said, certain details about the flying creatures called “ropen” and “Duah” I do not recommend be repeated without reference to more recent living-pterosaur investigations in Papua New Guinea, from expeditions more recent than those on which Gibbons has relied.
Before getting into details, from pages 76-78, on which I disagree, let it be known that I agree that different varieties of modern pterosaurs live in Papua New Guinea. And varieties of basic types of classified organisms (the non-cryptids) commonly include different sizes: elephant seals out-weigh harbor seals; anacondas out-length gopher snakes; Goliath beetles out-bug boll weevils. Strange as it sounds to Westerners ignorant of living-pterosaur investigations in Papua New Guinea, I believe (as do at least some of my associates) that different species of pterosaurs, of different sizes, fly over jungles of the southwest Pacific, including more than one species in Papua New Guinea.
Hundreds of isolated villages and hundreds of village languages are scattered across Papua New Guinea. Gibbons seems to have relied on reports from Carl Baugh, perhaps without adequately considering the reports from more recent explorers (Paul Nation, David Woetzel, Garth Guessman, and me). Regardless, general references to words in native languages of Papua New Guinea need to be taken in context with this diversity of languages, and “ropen” and “duwas” (regarding pterosaur-like flying creatures) come from different languages.
“Duah,” to the best of my knowledge, is not a flying-creature word in any village-language in Papua New Guinea (although in Tok Pisin it means “door”). “Duah” probably comes from some American who assumed that “duwas” was a plural for the giant flying creature known in various parts of the country. So when Gibbons refers to the “Duah” and the ropen, it seems that the comparison should actually be between the duwas and the ropen.
But another problem flies up here: The word “ropen,” when used for a featherless flying creature that is not a bat, is the word used in various villages on Umboi Island, where there is probably no other word for any similar creature; likewise, if a researcher were to interview natives in villages where “duwas” refers to a featherless flying creature larger than fuit bats, those natives probably would have no other word for any similar creature. In other words, the difference between a duwas and a ropen is probably only the difference between the spellings of “duwas” and “ropen,” and those different words tell us nothing about size-differences of flying cryptids in Papua New Guinea.
So rejoice in the good news of some apparent diversity in pterosaurs in the southwest Pacific. The bad news? We are still mostly ignorant of many biological details, notwithstanding random references to flying creatures (of various reported-sizes) connected to various words in various languages. How much we have to learn about these amazing non-extinct flying creatures of Papua New Guinea!
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Bored with life, or know someone who is? Thrill to these encounters with flying creatures that some outdated American cultural traditions teaches us are long extinct. They are not extinct but very much alive.
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Sightings of pterosuars in Ohio include the Antwerp case that was covered in a newspaper story a few months ago:
“He described it like a pterosaur, according to a recently-published book, ‘Live Pterosaurs in America.’” The creature was reported “chasing sparrows as it flew over the Route 49 bridge near Antwerp, Ohio.” The author found credibility in the testimony. . . . Few major newspapers have published eyewitnesses accounts of apparent living-pterosaurs, at least in recent years. As reported in the Antwerp Bee-Argus, they “have been thought by many scientists to have gone extinct many millions of years ago,” that is, the pterosaurs, not yet major newspapers. [quotations from the Ohio newspaper article about the sightings of a living pterosaur]
Of course, this seems to have little relationship to the title of this blog: The Bible and Living Pterosaurs. One eyewitness in Ohio, however, was a minister; the sighting was in 2005:
[in Mount Vernon, Ohio] “I was coming to preach at a church out in the country. . . . I [noticed] a creature in the sky. . . . It appeared to have no feathers . . . [the tail was] longer than most bird tails . . . with a diamond-shaped point at the end.” [from Pterosaurs in the Bible]
The Antwerp, Ohio, sightings are covered in detail in the nonfiction cryptozoology book Live Pterosaurs in America. But sightings of apparent living pterosaurs in the United States are hardly confined to Ohio; other sightings have been reported in California, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, New York, Maine, Michigan, Kansas, and other states.
“An object regarded with awe as being the embodiment or habitation of a potent spirit or as having magical potency”—that definition of “fetish” almost applies to the philosopohy of strict Naturalism, including the idea of Natural Selection. But the object of that pseudo-religious worship is not a physical object but an idea, including the dogma that all life came into existence without any help from God. Where is the magic? It’s in the belief that small simple life, through “survival of the fittest,” evolved into large complex humans.
Pterosaurs living (though mostly hidden) in modern times—that should cause reevaluation of the foundation of Darwin’s philosophy, for Darwin himself would have thrown out his idea of unlimited common ancestry if he had known what we now know. Over a century after his death, our knowledge of life, including the complexity of even the simplest organisms, surpasses even the wildest imaginations of nineteen-century biologists. But the higher qualities of modern human accomplishment exceed any reasonable naturalistic explanation within the limits of Darwin’s philosophy.
Objective reasoning, for the devout atheist, results in severe problems, including the problem of explaining the higher qualities inherent in modern humans. We have built space vehicles to travel to the moon; humans have walked on the moon. Can anyone justify believing that particles in a puddle of mud would accidentally bump into each other in a way that would eventually create beings that would fly to the moon? How could such beings be completely unlike any gods? (Remember what it says in the New Testament about humans: “Have I not said ‘ye are gods?’”) The higher qualities of modern human intelligence cannot be ignored, for something god-like resides within us.
And what about modern humans preserving endangered species? How similar is that to God preserving species on the Ark of Noah! One problem for atheism is how to acknowledge the noblest human behaviors and still disbelieve that those qualities may exist in a personage more advanced than modern humans. The devout atheist cannot dispute the existence of the head of NASA, just because he has not shaken hands with that person; why dispute the existence of a higher authority?
But how can so many Westerners remain ignorant of the existence of God? They have been blinded by “survival of the fittest.” Where does the truth lie? The general concept of Natural Selection is hardly disputable. The fallacy is in believing it accounts for the existence of humans. Why? Simple organisms survive better than complex ones, therefore more complex ones would have become extinct, replaced by the simpler forms, according to the definition of Natural Selection.
Looking at it from a broad perspective, a planet with its early history including tiny simple microorganisms, over billions of years, would result in a world devoid of any life, for the non-living substances of the planet (sand, water, and rock) survive much better than any form of life. Larger, more-compex organisms would never have competed well with the simpler ones, and so would never have even begun to be established.
Natural Selection, in a universe without any God, does more than make human life impossible: Over billions of years, on a planet that started with some form of life, all life would have become extinct. Because he never looked deeply enough into the ramifications of his philosophy, Darwin never realized that our wonderful planet of life could not exist without the enormous protective efforts of someone with super-human intelligence and power: God
Acknowledgement of extant pterosaurs does not refute general ideas about biological evolution, those limited changes that are obvious. But Darwin himself acknowledged the challenge of ”living fossils” to the credibility of his ideas, and we would be wise to encourage a reevaluation of the philosophical foundations of those ideas, in particular how “survival of the fittest” cannot account for the life we now find on this earth.
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Live Pterosaurs in America, by Jonathan David Whitcomb, is a nonfiction in the true genre of cryptozoology. But the Christian beliefs of the living-pterosaur investigators are not hidden, acknowledged in the appendix, let readers believe as they will.
Please support living-pterosaur investigations by purchasing this book about amazing eyewitness accounts of pterosaurs in many parts of the United States over many years. See Live Pterosaurs in America. (Second edition of this cryptozoology book to be available by about late November, 2010)
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