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.

Pterodactyls in Texas

Why not? With mammals the size of houses diving deep under the surface of the oceans, with not-quite-so-large mammals having noses many feet long, with birds that can swim, with spiders that catch small birds, with so many wonderful forms of life on this earth, why not pterodactyls in Texas? After all, we believe in whales, elephants, penguins, bird spiders (big tarantulas), humans.

Getting specific, what some particular eyewitnesses have observed in Texas are not fossils, and the correct general name for the flying creature is "pterosaur," not "pterodactyl," but why could they not live in Texas? With plenty of space to hide in the day, nocturnal flying predators could roam the skies at night, rarely seen by humans, even if the creatures are not extremely rare. But some Texans have seen pterosaurs, and some of the descriptions cannot reasonably be much else except modern living pterosaurs.

Texas Pterosaur in Marion County

. . . he was only eight years old . . . He reported his sighting to me in 2009 (I interviewed him in January, 2010), and that throws light on the reliability of his experience. Why? Childish imaginings do not usually remain misunderstood after a person grows into adulthood; even what is vividly imagined will normally become revealed as imagination as a person matures. My communications with Mr. Tullock revealed no symptom of any abnormality related to potential hallucination or delusion, and I have had adequate experience with those with that kind of problem. I believe that Mr. Tullock observed a flying creature with features basically the same or similar to those that he described to me.

Marfa Lights of Texas

The flying light appeared to have “on and off states as well as occasional bursts to brightness.” He concluded that it had “the appearance of chemical combustion including at least two re-ignitions and step changes in brightness.”

All day, the men searched along the base of the Chinati Mountains . . . where the lights had been. They found no evidence that Indians had been anywhere in the area. No tracks, no doused campfires, no nothing. But the next night and the next after that, they again saw the strange lights. Cowboys kept seeing the lights night after night, week after week, and year after year.

Balls of light sitting in a chico bush, atop a small pile of rocks or on the foundation of a removed radio antenna spitting streamers and shifting color from yellow to purple and red, a few flashes of yellow streamers and the light blinks out. . . . One I really enjoyed watching moved straight up a cliff face and then rested on top of the mountain changing from bright yellow to a dim red then blinked a couple times and was gone.

Marfa Lights, New Insights

. . . one of the lights [was] many miles away . . . flying around in the same general area . . . This light lasted for well over an hour . . . during which time several other lights [closer] appeared to the left. The group of lights here behaved somewhat differently, seeming . . . to interact with each other . . .

Pterosaurs and Texas

What does Texas have to do with extant pterosaurs? A lot. Not only do eyewitnesses report apparent living pterosaurs in Texas, but two Texans are pioneers in this cryptozoological investigation. . . . Recent investigations suggest that some living pterosaurs eat bats and/or birds at night. Pterosaur extinction is for the birds.

Flying Dinosaurs (Actually Pterosaurs)

Those wonderful featherless flying creatures, sometimes called "flying dinosaurs," were actually not dinosaurs; they were pterosaurs. And, contrary to what has often been taught to Western students, not all species of flying dinosaurs (excuse, me: pterosaurs) are extinct.

Let's consider two examples, sighting reports of flying dino . . . pterosaurs.

Flying Creature in San Fernando Valley, California

" . . . flying creature in Sherman Oaks, California, suggests similarities to the ropen of Papua New Guinea. . . . at about 10:30 p.m., on September 21, 2009 . . . very large, winged creature that was gliding maybe 100 yards [above the two eyewitnesses] . . . the wingspan: ten to fifteen feet; the girlfriend estimated twenty feet. The wings appeared more like those of bats than birds, with a greater depth from leading-edge to trailing edge."

Living Pterosaur in Ohio

“A young man was reported to have seen something strange flying over the Maumee River in the summer of 2003.; he described it like a pterosaur, according to a recently-published book, Live Pterosaurs in America. It was reported to be chasing sparrows as it flew over the Route 49 bridge near Antwerp, Ohio.”

Living Pterosaurs, Not Extinct

By living-pterosaur researcher and author Jonathan David Whitcomb
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How many critics have assumed that eyewitnesses of living pterosaurs must be either mistaken or dishonest! How dogmatic the teachings of universal extinctions! How long we have been indoctrinated! Why have an open mind to someone who talks about seeing a living pterosaur? It is a human experience.

I have interviewed eyewitnesses from many countries, including the United States, England, the Netherlands, Sudan, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Australia. Many of them describe a large flying creature with a long tail; many descriptions include words like "featherless," "head crest," "diamond at the end of the tail," "huge." These people come from different cultures, different native languages, different religious beliefs; yet about 80% or more of the sightings, in any particular part of the world, include "long tail" with a description of a strange flying creature. Consider now that long tail; what does it mean?
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Sketch by eyewitness Eskin Kuhn (eastern Cuba, 1971)

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A few critics have ridiculed sighting reports as hoaxes because they have mixtures of descriptions that do not coorelate with any particular pterosaur fossil. Those critics, however, fail to take into account a number of important details. Many of the more-credible sightings (true eyewitnesses sometimes report directly to a cryptozoologist who specializes in living pterosaurs; I am one of those investigators) include the same unusual combinations: large size, long tail, head crest. Random hoaxes would not create such a consistant set of descriptions; and why should a modern pterosaur not have those characteristics? Those consistencies would not come from hoaxes; for example, in the United States, decades of movies and television have conditioned any potential hoaxer to think Pterodactyloid rather than Rhamphorhynchoid, but American eyewitnesses, like those in other countries often describe a long tail.

Misidentifications of a giant bat---that is another common criticism. But how do critics explain the long tail, often seen with a Rhamphorhynchoid flange at the end? And how do they explain the behavior of ropens at Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea? There the creature has been seen to hold itself upright on a tree trunk (not upside down like a bat), and to catch fish on the reefs, and to glow with bright bioluminescence. Some eyewitnesses of the ropen give a sure witness of a pointed head crest.

Generalized criticisms of eyewitnesses are also shot down. How can we say "crazy" when one of the eyewitnesses is a psychologist? How can we say "vision problems" when one of the eyewitnesses is a flight instructor (with many thousands of hours of flight experience)? How can we say "unscientific observers" when one of the eyewitnesses is a scientist?

Why assume that all the eyewitnesses must be wrong, as if human experience were secondary to the dogmatic proclamations of fossil experts? Living pterosaurs, not extinct pterosaurs---those are what eyewitnesses see.
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Jonathan Whitcomb with his wife, Gladys, in Murray, Utah, USA

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Cryptozoology book on living pterosaurs in the United States (non-fiction)

"Pterodactyl" Flies Over Military Ship

With a fellow cryptozoologist, some time ago, I interviewed a man who had been a sailor on the U.S.S. Jouett (guided missle cruiser), CG-29. He told us about the night when he was surprised by an excited shipmate who summoned him out of his bunk. Many sailors had just witnessed a giant "pterodactyl" that had flown directly over the ship. The sailor who went up top to see for himself was too late, for the creature had already flown out of sight. Nevertheless, he was impressed by the sincerity of those sailors who had seen it for themselves.

If anyone has information on this, please send me an email: info [at-sign] livepterosaur.com

Thank you.

Comparing a Paleontologist to a Fox

In the July 14, 2010, posting on the Live Pterosaur blog, the paleontologist is compared with a fox.

One Monsterquest episode involved an expedition to New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea. On the surface, it appeared to be a search for giant nocturnal flying creatures that some cryptozoologists believe are modern living pterosaurs (in reality, it was a dramatic production project to make an intertaining show; it was not a scientific investigation). Of all the potential explorers to take with them, Monsterquest chose a paleontologist. What’s wrong with that? It’s like inviting a fox to inspect an electric-fence security system for a chicken yard; you know that the fox will advise you to immediately stop wasting electricity on the worthless contraption. Likewise a paleontologist will be totally predictable, regardless of eyewitness evidence that a cryptid is a “living fossil.”