Last March, I wrote a post on bulverism, not my first posting on that subject and not my last, but a problem keeps cropping up: unclear thinking among those who most vehemently criticize those who promote the concept of modern living pterosaurs.
I just noticed a blog post titled “Those damned ropens again,” by David Hone. (I’ll not link to it, but it can be found through Google.) It seems to me that the cryptozoology book author he refers to is me, and the book seems to an edition of Searching for Ropens. But it’s not the words he uses when referring to me, “rabid” . . . “ignorance and arrogance,” that makes my response necessary; it’s the misrepresentations about the sightings and how he avoids writing about any detail about any sighting.
Here are some mistakes:
- “The real drive comes from a US lawyer” [I have never been a lawyer; I was a forensic videographer for attorney firms]
- “alleged evidence for the existence of living pterosaurs in New Guinea which consists entirely of incredibly dubious semi-nocturnal sightings of flying creatures.” [The critical sightings are in clear daylight: Hodgkinson-1944, Hennessy-1971, Koro–about-1994, etc]
- “Judging stuff for size and speed while high in the sky is hard, at that is the most basic thing to do, let alone actually identify it accurately.” [Size and speed are not critical in judging the possibility of extant pterosaurs. The critical sightings cannot reasonably be any species of bird or bat; that is far more critical, for it opens up the possibility of living pterosaurs. Secondary, perhaps, are the characteristics of pterosaurs: feather-less with long tails, pterosaur head crest, tail with Rhamphorhynchoid vane at the end. Further down the list of important factors is the size of the flying creature, which is, as he states correctly, difficult to judge during flight.]
- “Finally, and very significantly there is the issue of expectation, for the tribesmen and the ropen hunters alike, they *expect* to see these animals because they *know* they exist . . .” [Apparently David Hone has not read my book carefully, even though he says that he has a copy. The critical sightings, like Hodgkinson’s, Hennessy’s, and Koro’s, were without any expectation of seeing any strange flying creature. Critical eyewitnesses were shocked at seeing the unexpected.]
Hone’s post is dated April 29, 2010, but he seems to have no knowledge of recent posts and web pages. Many sightings that have recently been analyzed are daylight sightings, some of them at close range. Several eyewitnesses that I have personally interviewed have seen a long-tailed featherless creature in southeast Cuba, a flying creature that is sometimes seen to clearly have a long head crest and to clearly have a Rhamphorhynchoid tail vane. All of those sightings were in daylight, not “semi-nocturnal sightings” that he proclaims.
Hone writes long paragraphs about hypothetical sightings:
Let’s assume that the average person who sees some flying thing he can’t identify immediately is no wildlife expert, has not seen tons of local birds, bats and other fliers (let alone exotics), has not considered the difficulties of making rapid identifications . . .
That is just one sample of his hyper-generalizing. How much better to examine at least one of the critical eyewitness reports!
P.S.: Search Hone’s page in vain for references to one of the following names of critical eyewitnesses: Hodgkinson, Hennessy, Koro, Wooten, Kuhn, Carson. Nothing was found when I did a search for those names. Like some other critics, Hone imagines sightings, inventing one or more hypothetical sightings that he can tear down. This practice is one type of what is known as a “scarecrow argument.” Unscientific, to say the least.