New Youtube Video: “Pterodactyl” Sighting in California

By the ropen expert Jonathan Whitcomb

This has a different format than the other videos that I uploaded to my Youtube channel Protect Animal Life, although it’s a common style on Youtube. I sit on my living room couch and talk to the camera. Many Youtubers make similar recordings of themselves, although not usually while they’re sitting on a couch.

The video is titled “A confession about a pterodactyl” and gives my account of an ironic twist in my life: from a severe skeptic to a firm believer in modern pterosaurs.

Watch this mini-documentary here:

A transformation in thinking about modern pterosaurs

Although it’s not covered in this video, one thing I’ve learned about living pterosaurs is that sightings are not nearly as rare as people would suppose. Sometimes an eyewitness will remain quiet about seeing a live “pterodactyl” until he or she learns that a friend or member of the family has also seen such a flying creature.

In this video, I get into a sighting in Altadena, California, in about the year 1969. A teenaged girl told my sister, who was also a high school student at the time, about her encounter with a gigantic “pterodactyl.” That deserves looking into.

How many persons did my sister know in 1969? How many of those potentially hundreds of persons would have trusted my sister enough to tell her about seeing a live “pterodactyl?” Definitely a lot less than a thousand. Where does that lead?

The following is overly simplistic, I know, but consider this: With about 300 million persons in the United States, if my  sister’s experience is typical then more than 300,000 persons in the USA, at least once in each of their lives, must have had a good sighting of a living pterosaur.

That one example, my sister and her friend, is hardly an adequate sampling, of course, but I have had hundreds of eyewitness sighting reports sent to me by Americans who have seen these flying creatures, and some of them know someone else who has had a similar encounter. That means we actually have a huge number of eyewitnesses in the USA.

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Youtube playlist Pterodactyl Sightings in California

Here are the videos (as of Aug 31, 2019):

• “Giant Pterodactyl in California”
• “Pterodactyl Sightings in Los Angeles”
• “A confession about a pterodactyl”

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New Youtube channel on pterosaurs

Five months ago today, I uploaded my first video to the Youtube channel Protect Animal Life. Let’s now look at where this video channel stands as of August 29, 2019.

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Music video: living pterosaurs in California

A few days ago (early in May of 2019), I uploaded a video to the Youtube channel Protect Animal Life. [One of the sightings in this video was in Altadena, California, in the late 1960’s, close to Pasadena; another sighting was in Irvine, California]

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Living-Pterosaur Videos on the Youtube Channel “Protect Animal Life”

I call my young channel “PAL” and here list its seventeen public videos [as of July 31, 2019; there are now more] that are mainly about living pterosaurs . . .

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Modern Pterosaurs in a Scientific Paper

“Reports of Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific” gives you a better look at the ropen of Papua New Guinea. This scientific paper, peer-reviewed in a journal of science years ago, is briefly featured in this video . . .

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