Many Live Pterosaurs or Coincidences?

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While writing the third edition of my biggest (and I believe best) book, Searching for Ropens and Finding God, I came to better realize how many pterosaur encounters we may have in this big world of ours. On page 217 I wrote:

Do I make too much of coincidences regarding the husband and wife in Texas? Consider another couple who had separate sightings, in different places and in different years. They work in a different field of paranormal research, not cryptozoology. I first interviewed the wife, an eyewitness of a featherless long-tailed flying creature, with the encounter just hours before she contacted me. I became convinced that she had seen a ropen. I later interviewed the husband, who told me about his own sighting, a strange flying creature that could have been similar. It was years before his wife’s encounter and a few miles away. [Western USA]

I have noticed this kind of connection many times. When somebody reports a pterosaur sighting to me, that eyewitness may know somebody else (or may have heard of somebody else) who had a similar sighting. Over the course of ten years, this continues to come up, in one variation or another.

I myself have not yet seen an apparent pterosaur (as of early July, 2014, at least), yet this applies to me as well. When I was a teenager, my sister had a friend who reported to her that a giant “pterodactyl” had flown up from a neighborhood where her family lived in Altadena, California. The flying creature was as big as a bus. I would not have believed that if I had heard it in the 1960’s, when the three of us were teenagers, but how my life has changed! How does this relate to those who are connected by more than just a pterosaur sighting? I have written and published more books and web pages on live pterosaurs than anybody else on the planet, over the past ten years, as best as I can tell. If pterosaur sightings were very rare encounters between those flying creatures and humans, we would not expect an investigator like me to have a sister whose close friend saw a giant “pterodactyl” flying in our own community, just miles from where I lived in Pasadena, California.

Now consider what I wrote on page 218 of the book:

. . . two pairs of eyewitnesses in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California saw possible ropens but in separate encounters in separate cities. One of the two who saw the flying creature in Sherman Oaks contacted me to report it, but he also talked to one of his coworkers. Well, that coworker had his own sighting of a similar flying creature at night, but it was in Sun Valley, a different city in Los Angeles County . . .

Ropens are nocturnal but not rare. Sightings of those creatures are not rare. An American who reports observing a live pterodactyl—that person is rare. When somebody does speak out, however, it encourages other eyewitnesses to admit that they’d seen those creatures themselves. When two eyewitnesses are close friends or family members and one of them talks, the other takes courage and also talks. That’s why it can appear that we have strange coincidences, only a few dozen publicized sightings per year but with a few eyewitnesses knowing other eyewitnesses from different sightings.

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nonfiction book by Jonathan Whitcomb: "Searching for Ropens and Finding God" - third edition

“The Bible of Modern Pterosaurs:” Searching for Ropens and Finding God

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Flying Creature Sightings in Georgia

[Eyewitness reported:] I can only guess to be 15-20′ wing spans and the motion of their wings as they flew was very slow. The head was long and ended in a point; wings ended in a point and appeared to be featherless . . .

Flying Creature of the Night

[If you are an eyewitness] If you live in the United States, you have the same problem as countless other eyewitnesses of living pterosaurs. Do you call the police? The newspaper? Animal control? A nearby university? A brief reflection makes it obvious: None of those will do.

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