Evidence for Extant Pterosaurs

By the modern-pterosaur expert Jonathan D. Whitcomb Before mid-January of 2017, I had assumed that the primary type of evidence for the reality of non- extinct species of pterosaurs was in eyewitness testimony, and that it was almost the only evidence. Then the image of an apparent Pteranodon, in the photograph that I now call “Ptp,” struck me harder than it ever did before. It began when Tom Payne contacted me; he has a degree in computer science: “I'm 67 years old and remember this photo from when I was young. . . . I can tell you that technology wasn't available to modify a photo like this before about 1980. First off, you couldn't get the image into the computer. Photos didn't become digitized until much later. I've always been convinced that this is an authentic photo. It may not be during the Civil War, however. Maybe a little later. . . .”

Evidence for Extant Pterosaurs, continued I (Jonathan Whitcomb) then contacted the scientist Clifford Paiva, a physicist who first started to examine this photo many years earlier. He confirmed, through his scientific testing, that details in this photograph are consistent with it being a genuine image that contains a modern pterosaur. It was not just in the preciely correct anatomical details of the apparent Pteranodon. Paiva examined the shadow under the boot of the soldier who stands in front of the animal; it’s the boot that’s on the beak. The shadow is consistent with other shadows on and under the animal. In other words, the scientist found evidence that there was no pasting of a Civil War soldier’s image onto any separate image of an apparent pterosaur. Man and animal were photographed together. I’m also a scientist, with a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal of science (“Reports of Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific”). On January 14, 2017, Paiva and I consulted together, by phone, about this photograph and agreed that it is authentic. Within a few weeks, I realized we had another way to test the criticisms of skeptics, who said that Photoshop was involved with those images of apparent Civil War soldiers. I magnified the images of the belt buckles on those men, measuring the widths of the buckles. I realized that the camera had to have been some distance away from the animal, if this was a real photograph of men standing next to a large dead animal. The man standing in front would then be slightly closer to the camera, compared with the distance between the camera and the other men. His belt buckle would then be expected to appear slightly larger than the other buckles, if this was an authentic photograph. I found that his buckle is indeed slightly wider, 11 pixels wide. The average width of the other four buckles is only 9 pixels (one man is turned too much away from the camera to use his buckle). In addition, I measured shirt buttons and got a similar result: The three buttons behind the animal each have a width of 3 pixels, but the button in front of the animal has a width of 4 pixels. One problem that has hindered public recognition of the Ptp photograph is that a hoax-photo was made in imitation of it: a reenactment with actors dressed like Civil War soldiers were photographed to promote a Freakylinks TV show in the early 21st century. Those actors posed themselves near a fake animal, with much of the scene and stances made to resemble the original photograph. This caused one skeptic to publish a small image of Ptp on his web page, with a nearby text entry that obviously was intended to refer to that photograph. The text, however, mentioned, “the photo has since been exposed as a hoax--a promotional stunt for a Fox television series.” Notice the problem: Freakylinks was on the Fox Network. The skeptic appears to have been totally ignorant that two photos are involved. He badly blundered in leading people away from the truth about the original photo, the one that two scientists have now declared to be an authentic photograph.

Do Live Pterosaurs Disprove Evolution? "I sometimes encounter a criticism such as this: ‘A living pterosaur would not disprove evolution. It would just be another example of an ancient species that survived.’ That appears simple and airtight, appearently proving me and my associates to be fools to think that an extant pterosaur would relate to the conflict between ‘religion and science.’ One problem with that reasoning is with the word ‘evolution.’ That word some people assume to precisely refer to gradual shifting of biological forms; few people know that the word itself is a shape-shifter." See "Do Live Pterosaurs Disprove Evolution."

The American World War II veteran Duane Hodgkinson is here interviewed, in this Youtube video, telling us of his amazing encounter with a giant "pterodactyl" in 1944 in New Guinea.

In this blog post, “Validing a Civil War Pterosaur Photograph,” the careless remarks of three skeptics are answered in detail.

From title page of the nonfiction pterosaur book Live Pterosaurs in America (3rd edition): 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 . . . How are sightings in the United States related to those in the southwest Pacific? How do some apparent nocturnal pterosaurs pertain to bats . . . ? How could modern living pterosaurs have escaped scientific notice? . . . These mysteries have slept . . . until now.

Ropen Lights Videotaped in 2006 "Late in 2006, I interviewed Paul Nation in his home in Granbury, Texas, just days after he had returned from Papua New Guinea. I videotaped the interview and made a digital copy of the video footage of the two indava lights. A copy was later given to the physicist Cliff Paiva, who analyzed the lights and found them to be anything but ordinary: Not meteors, airplanes, car headlights, lanterns, or campfires. And a hoax it was not."

Evidence for Extant Pterosaurs

By the modern-pterosaur expert Jonathan D. Whitcomb Before mid-January of 2017, I had assumed that the primary type of evidence for the reality of non-extinct species of pterosaurs was in eyewitness testimony, and that it was almost the only evidence. Then the image of an apparent Pteranodon, in the photograph that I now call “Ptp,” struck me harder than it ever did before. It began when Tom Payne contacted me; he has a degree in computer science: “I'm 67 years old and remember this photo from when I was young. . . . I can tell you that technology wasn't available to modify a photo like this before about 1980. First off, you couldn't get the image into the computer. Photos didn't become digitized until much later. I've always been convinced that this is an authentic photo. It may not be during the Civil War, however. Maybe a little later. . . .”

Evidence for Extant Pterosaurs, continued I (Jonathan Whitcomb) then contacted the scientist Clifford Paiva, a physicist who first started to examine this photo many years earlier. He confirmed, through his scientific testing, that details in this photograph are consistent with it being a genuine image that contains a modern pterosaur. It was not just in the preciely correct anatomical details of the apparent Pteranodon. Paiva examined the shadow under the boot of the soldier who stands in front of the animal; it’s the boot that’s on the beak. The shadow is consistent with other shadows on and under the animal. In other words, the scientist found evidence that there was no pasting of a Civil War soldier’s image onto any separate image of an apparent pterosaur. Man and animal were photographed together. I’m also a scientist, with a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal of science (“Reports of Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific”). On January 14, 2017, Paiva and I consulted together, by phone, about this photograph and agreed that it is authentic. Within a few weeks, I realized we had another way to test the criticisms of skeptics, who said that Photoshop was involved with those images of apparent Civil War soldiers. I magnified the images of the belt buckles on those men, measuring the widths of the buckles. I realized that the camera had to have been some distance away from the animal, if this was a real photograph of men standing next to a large dead animal. The man standing in front would then be slightly closer to the camera, compared with the distance between the camera and the other men. His belt buckle would then be expected to appear slightly larger than the other buckles, if this was an authentic photograph. I found that his buckle is indeed slightly wider, 11 pixels wide. The average width of the other four buckles is only 9 pixels (one man is turned too much away from the camera to use his buckle). In addition, I measured shirt buttons and got a similar result: The three buttons behind the animal each have a width of 3 pixels, but the button in front of the animal has a width of 4 pixels. One problem that has hindered public recognition of the Ptp photograph is that a hoax- photo was made in imitation of it: a reenactment with actors dressed like Civil War soldiers were photographed to promote a Freakylinks TV show in the early 21st century. Those actors posed themselves near a fake animal, with much of the scene and stances made to resemble the original photograph. This caused one skeptic to publish a small image of Ptp on his web page, with a nearby text entry that obviously was intended to refer to that photograph. The text, however, mentioned, “the photo has since been exposed as a hoax-- a promotional stunt for a Fox television series.” Notice the problem: Freakylinks was on the Fox Network. The skeptic appears to have been totally ignorant that two photos are involved. He badly blundered in leading people away from the truth about the original photo, the one that two scientists have now declared to be an authentic photograph.

The American World War II veteran Duane Hodgkinson is here interviewed, in this Youtube video, telling us of his amazing encounter with a giant living "pterodactyl" in 1944 in New Guinea.

In this blog post, “Validing a Civil War Pterosaur Photograph,” the careless remarks of three skeptics are answered in detail.

From title page of the nonfiction pterosaur book Live Pterosaurs in America (3rd ed): 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 them- selves. But despite other web pages, by scornful critics who never went anywhere and never inter- viewed 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 . . . How are sightings in the United States related to those in the southwest Pacific? How do some apparent nocturnal pterosaurs pertain to bats . . . ? How could modern living pterosaurs have escaped scientific notice? . . . These mysteries have slept . . . until now.

Evidence for Extant

Pterosaurs

By the modern-pterosaur expert Jonathan D. Whitcomb Before mid-January of 2017, I had assumed that the primary type of evidence for the reality of non-extinct species of pterosaurs was in eyewitness testimony, and that it was almost the only evidence. Then the image of an apparent Pteranodon, in the photograph that I now call “Ptp,” struck me harder than it ever did before. It began when Tom Payne contacted me; he has a degree in computer science: “I'm 67 years old and remember this photo from when I was young. . . . I can tell you that technology wasn't available to modify a photo like this before about 1980. First off, you couldn't get the image into the computer. Photos didn't become digitized until much later. I've always been convinced that this is an authentic photo. It may not be during the Civil War, however. Maybe a little later. . . .”

The American World War II veteran Duane Hodgkinson is here interviewed, in this Youtube video, telling us of his amazing encounter with a giant "pterodactyl" in 1944 in New Guinea.

In this blog post, “Validing a Civil War Pterosaur Photograph,” the careless remarks of three skeptics are answered in detail.

From title page of the nonfiction pterosaur book Live Pterosaurs in America (3rd edition): 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 . . . How are sightings in the United States related to those in the southwest Pacific? How do some apparent nocturnal pterosaurs pertain to bats . . . ? How could modern living pterosaurs have escaped scientific notice? . . . These mysteries have slept . . . until now.