I recently found a sighting report on FaceBook, actually an eyewitness account of two sightings in Florida. I here give an excerpt from “Animal Discoveries and Curiosities” by Karl Shuker:
. . . About two years ago, I heard a noise that I thought was my pool filter surging. . . . I was standing right at the open doorway of the porch ready to go down the three steps to the pool deck. It was a pretty bright night. The moon was pretty bright . . .
. . . as I looked up, something huge took off over my head and my porch. It’s wings made a loud whooping noise and as it went over I got a look at the underside of an enormous wing. The wing was grey in color and was like that of a bat not a bird. The wing had to be at least 5 feet long or more and this creature flew off over the porch out of site. . . . it was enormous, and unlike anything I have ever seen in Florida in my 35 years here. . . .
Well two nights ago [my husband] and I went out for a late night run to the 7/11 . . . As we rounded the corner I saw something about 15 feet up in a tree that was grey and huge . . . this thing flew over our car and it’s wings passed right in front of the windshield. It was exactly the same thing I had seen two years ago as far as the look of the wings. My husband saw it too this time. He said the same thing . . . that it looked like bat wings.
With a wingspan estimated to be ten feet or more, the flying creature was not likely a bat, even if a flying fox fruit bat had escaped from a zoo in Florida. That species, largest of bats, would not on two occasions give the impression of having a wingspan of 10+ feet, when encountered twice at close range.
Bat Wings on Pterosaurs?
On that FaceBook thread on “Animal Discoveries and Curiosities,” one of the comments was about a literal interpretation of the eyewitness description, that the flying creature observed had the same wing structure as bats. My experience with eyewitness reports leads me to a different conclusion, for most people have no concept of any different between the bone structure of bat wings and those of pterosaur wings.
We need to be specific here; avoid getting carried away in generalization. To illustrate, my wife runs a child care business and today a four-year-old boy answered the question, “How do you get to the zoo?” He answered truthfully: “Get on the freeway, then turn.”
Stop almost anybody on the street and ask, “Does a pterodactyl have bat-like wings or bird-like wings?” If the person does not looked shocked and back away from you, the answer will be, “bat-like.” If you happen to encounter a paleontologist on the street . . . well, that’s different. Most people have no need to know the skeletal differences between wings of bats and pterosaurs.
The point? When an eyewitness says “bat-like wings,” it means there were no feathers, and the sightings about two years ago, and about two days ago, were probably from encounters with the American ropen. And that animal, I have no doubt, is a living pterosaur.
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Pterosaur Sightings in Florida and Georgia and South Carolina
“In 1995 I was living in Pensacola Fl. . . . I was in the driveway at 5 am. I saw this huge bird with bat wings, at least a 20 ft wing span, flying towards me, I just turned and ran screaming into the house.”
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. . . an estimated wingspan of 8-12 feet and a tail as long as its torso with a large bulb or lump at the tail very diamond shaped, no feathers and all colored the same whitish-grey color with a pointed beak. . . .
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Revised and greatly expanded: Searching for Ropens and Finding God
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