Flying Fox Misidentifications? No!

How often, during the past twenty years, has somebody suggested that Flying Fox fruit bats are the cause of live-pterosaur sighting reports! But many details shoot down that fruit-bat idea, and one detail is a long tail.

Both the Australian Brian Hennessy and the American Duane Hodgkinson describe a long tail on the large flying creatures that they observed in New Guinea (the country is now independent and is called "Papua New Guinea). Hodgkinson said that the tail on the "pterodactyl" that he saw was "at least" 10-15 feet long; Hennessy described the tail on the "prehistoric" flying creature as long. Both eyewitnesses seem to have observed the same type of creature, possibly the same species.

I have interviewed both eyewitnesses, giving both of them survey forms to choose the sketches that best correlate with the creatures that they had seen. The composite sketches of the head show striking similarities, completely different from any flying fox fruit bat, completely pterosaur-like, with a thin pointed head crest.

Why then have critics suggested the flying fox for sightings of living pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea? It seems that those critics may be completely ignorant of the details in critical eyewitness sighting reports.

See New Guinea Ropen

See also Marfa Lights

Worldwide Sightings of Live Pterosaurs

Woetzel's Ropen Sighting in Papua New Guinea

David Woetzel led the second ropen expedition on Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, late in 2004, accompanied by fellow-American cryptozoologist Garth Guessman. One night . . . Woetzel saw a strange light flying towards the mountains near Lake Pung. Consider this excerpt from my interview with him in 2005:“My sighting was so quick that it was impossible to get a video  . . . [The flying light was] almost golden and shimmering around the edges. . . . There was no [meteor tail] and it was flying horizontal from Mt. Barik toward Mt. Tolo [Lake Pung area] . . . The size, color and speed made it immediately stand out as unlike any other thing I’ve ever seen in the sky.”

Near Collision Over Indonesia

The pilot of a small plane reported a large flying creature . . . about 150 miles southeast of Bali, Indonesia, at 6500 feet. Immediately after the near collision, both the pilot and co-pilot said, "pterodactyl!" They are both former navy pilots . . . without any sign of a hoax and without any sign of a predisposition to promote the concept of living pterosaurs. They do not seem inclined to either disparage or promote our investigations. . . . the size of the creature (at first the pilot thought it was another plane) and altitude seem inconsistent with common birds or bats in the southwest Pacific. It could have been a ropen.

See also: Pterodactyl Flies Over Military Ship (It may have been around Indonesia.)

Live Pterosaurs in the Western United States

(Eyewitness was 16 years old)
"I saw two ropens together sitting on a fence. I was riding my bike home [in Washington State] . . . on a wood plank fence were two of the biggest bird-like creatures I could ever imagine! . . . I noticed . . . their heads, then I thought this can’t be! Could they be dinosaurs? . . . They were huge! . . . [Their] heads I would have to say it was maybe 4 ft long with the beak. . . . Their tails were . . . maybe 6 ft long . . . I told my mom and she saw them too . . . if I would have had someone other [than] my mother to talk to about them we would have mentioned it. But my mother was worried no one would believe it. I can tell you I believe their wing span was about 20 ft tip to tip."

Pterosaurs in Georgia and South Carolina

I live in a small town in northeast Georgia . . . On August 27, [2008] I woke up very early in the morning . . . I had driven less than ten miles . . . and suddenly an animal flew out from my right . . . it flew directly in front of my car . . . the shape of the tail . . .  was very long with a shape on the end. . . . head that was curved, like a hammer; the head had a crest on the top that was solid, not feathery at all . . . [from the book Live Pterosaurs in America]

[South Carolina sighting] It was huge, as big as a plane . . . a huge pterodactyl looking creature, flying very high in the sky. The strangest thing about the sighting was how slow the wings were flapping and how high it was flying.

Two Pterosaurs Observed in Cuba

As a member of the United States Marine Corps, [Eskin Kuhn] was stationed at Guantanamo, with the 2nd Battalion, 8th Regiment (reinforced), H&S Co., 106mm recoiless rifle platoon. . . . The  two creatures were very unlike any bird, for they had no feathers. They could have been strange bats except that the heads were completely wrong and they had long tails. Their flight, the flapping of their wings, was described as graceful.