In Orange County, California, this encounter, around 1997, was more of a hearing than a sighting. This account should be read in full: Rancho Santa Margarita Cryptid. In brief, it includes:
“One night I was awakened . . . with the most . . . awful screeching and screaming that I have ever heard. . . . like . . . pigs being slaughtered. . . . I opened the window . . . the sound was accompanied [by] some thrashing around in some hedges or bushes in the backyard of my . . . neighbors [vacant] house . . . The unearthly screeching continued . . . like . . . [a] struggle to the death. . . . I went into the front yard . . . Chills shot up and down my spine. As I stood holding my breath, a heard a deep, soft, ‘hushing’ sound, like giant wings lifting something heavy into the air. This came from around the side of my house . . . I didn’t ‘see’ so much as ‘felt’ it. Whatever it was swept up and onto the chimney of the next-door-neighbors house. the night sky was incredibly dark so I could not really make out anything, but a large hulking ‘presence’ sat on that chimney. As I stared hard into the dark, trying to make out a shape or a movement, I realized whatever it was was staring right back at me. I left the yard quickly and went inside. . . . The next day I called around and finally got a hold of a wild animal control center in Orange County . . . they told me that it was most likely a great horned owl.”
In itself, this cannot prove that pterosaurs live in Southern California, of course. But it contributes to the accumulating cryptozoological evidence that those who contact me with their experiences are, in general, obviously not hoaxers. I have received similarly vague accounts, occasionally, from various parts of the world, including the U.S.A., Greece, Africa, and Australia. Hoaxers would not try to convince anyone of a pterosaur sighting with such vagueness. But if actual living pterosaurs have indeed been observed (at least on occasion, in various places in the world) then at least a few encounters would naturally include less-clear sightings, with sound-evidence more than visual. This puts one more nail in the coffin holding the hoax hypothesis.
A clearly seen apparent pterosaur, in 2007, in another area of California, suggests a giant Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur. That one was seen near the university at Irvine.
Read more about this encounter in the third edition of the cryptozoology book Live Pterosaurs in America.