Today, after receiving an email, I spoke on the phone with a truck driver who witnessed what seems to have been a ropen, in Oklahoma, just yesterday. Here is the first part of his email message:
I’m a truck driver and I was headed eastbound [on July 17, 2012] on I-40 about 30 to 40 miles west of Oklahoma city around 2:30 p.m. I was [on] the phone with my wife when I saw something I had never seen before flying southward in front of me . . .
The flying creature was only about the size of a crow and only about twenty feet above the ground: unlikely to be a Frigate bird lost in Oklahoma. When the man told me something that suggested the possibility of a very short neck, I thought of the Frigate-bird misidentification possibility, but the location and coloring (tan-leather) and flight pattern (full-flapping but very slow) made that sea-bird possibility appear remote: Oklahoma City is over 400 miles from the coast, and Frigate birds normally fly above oceans.
The truck driver also noticed something at the end of the tail, what he called a “blunt end.” He could not make out any detail, but acknowledged that it could have been what other eyewitnesses describe. In other words, he was sure that there was some kind of structure at the end of the tail.
He told me that he had found the sketch by the U.S. Marine [Eskin Kuhn] and that the wings on that image correlated well the wings of the creature that he had seen yesterday. Here is the 1971 sketch:
“Pterodactyls” in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas
About [1985] . . . in Woodward, Oklahoma, near a small river . . . a large animal took off into the air. At first I thought it was an eagle. Then I noticed it was a dinosaur. . . . I was afraid it would eat me. I stared at the back part of the head because it was exactly like the ones depicted in books.
. . . Frigate Birds . . . I’ve lost count of how many times I have responded to that video footage, explaining that it does not show any ropen but only a common ocean-going bird.
Let’s consider some photos of Frigate Birds.
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