I’m sure I’ve read this book at least once, in my youth long ago. On the Track of Unknown Animals, by Bernard Heuvelmans, is now considered a classic in cryptozoology, originally in French but often encountered in its 1958 or 1959 English edition with its 120 sketches, a well-crafted assortment of strange creatures and a few monsters. Yesterday I found a library copy and took notes on sightings of apparent pterosaurs. This classic now deserves quoting, again.

Chapter twenty-one, “Kongamato, the Last Flying Dragon,” begins by quoting Charles Kingsley (The Water-Babies): “People call them pterodactyls; but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.” On page 485 the author digs into the meat of a live pterosaur in Africa.

In 1923 Frank H. Melland published an account of his travels entitled In Witchbound Africa . . . [It included] rather vague rumours about a much-feared animal called “kongamato,” said to live in the Jiundu swamps in the north-west corner of No. Rhodesia near the frontier of the Bengian Congo and Angola. . . . The natives told him that it was a bird, but not exactly a bird, more like a lizard with wings of skin like a bat’s . . . the beast’s wingspan was between four and seven feet . . . it had no feathers at all . . . [with skin] bare and smooth, and its beak was full of teeth. . . . he showed the natives pictures . . . They immediately [pointed out] the Pterodactyl, excitedly muttering “kongamato!”

Amazon gives two prices for this out-of-print cryptozoology book, On the Track of Unknown Animals: $135.00 and $339.66, revealing its collectible status.

Kongamato or Pterodactyl of Africa

The kongamato is sometimes compared with the ropen of Papua New Guinea or the long-tailed pterosaur seen in Eastern Cuba in the mid-20th century. This kind of cryptid has been reported in many parts of the world, including North America, Australia, Europe, and Africa.

Kongamato Crossing the Atlantic?

One species of crane flies over the Himalayan Mountains regularly, sometimes at an altitude of 30,000 feet. Large nocturnal pterosaurs, under the right wind conditions, could cross the Atlantic, from Africa. As more sighting reports come in from Africa and North America, we need to look at the possibility that some of the flying creatures on different sides of the Atlantic may be closely related or even the same species.

Books About Live Pterosaurs in North America

It seems we now have three nonfiction books about extant pterosaurs in North America . . . These paperback books are Big Bird (by Ken Gerhard), Live Pterosaurs in America (by Jonathan Whitcomb, third edition), and Bird From Hell (by Gerald McIsaac, second edition).

Books on extant pterosaurs are not so rare as they were when On the Track of Unknown Animals was first published.

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Get the details lacking on the online blog posts and web pages. Buy Live Pterosaurs in America, third edition, by the nonfiction author who interviews eyewitnesses from around the world, the live-pterosaur expert Jonathan David Whitcomb. Get the facts, eyewitness accounts from many U.S. states: California, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Virginia, Kansas, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Missouri, Kansas, New York, and other states.

From a review of the second edition of this cryptozoology book, on Amazon, by “stevie” (the third edition is slightly expanded, even better than the second edition):

“This is an updated review of the book and I am changing my rating to 5 stars. This book has been on my shelf for almost a year now. I pick it up every now and then and a part of me becomes more impressed by the book every time. . . .

“Whitcomb painstakingly reviews every account for credibility and reason. This man is not a crank. He tries to weed out would be hoaxes and miss-identification. This is not a guy looking to create evidence to confirm his own beliefs. On top of this, I have great respect for a guy who follows his dreams so passionately. He has traveled to Papua New Guinea to search for the creature there and this book is somewhat of a sequel . . .

“I do believe the author tried hard to deliver these stories and was very good at it. This is well written and very hard to put down.”

First let’s consider a pterosaur sighting in Africa and compare it with one in Australia. The extremes are distance from observer to flying creature: 10 feet away and 17,000 feet away. Neither of these encounters are found in the third edition of Live Pterosaurs in America or the second edition of Searching for Ropens (my nonfiction cryptozoology books of sightings of apparent pterosaurs). I plan to include them in an e-book, to be published soon.

Pterosaur in Sudan, Africa

“Walking from one mud-brick hut to another, early one night in 1988 (in Sudan, Africa), the boy noticed something on the roof of a nearby hut. Lit up by the patio light, perched on the edge of the roof, the creature appeared to be four-to-five feet tall . . . and leathery (no feathers). A “long bone looking thing” stuck out the back of its head, and its long tail somehow resembled that of a lion.”

That “kongamato-pterodactyl” web page fails to mention, however, that the creature hopped from one mud-brick hut to another RIGHT OVER THE BOY’S HEAD. The distance between the feet of the creature and the head of the boy must have been about ten feet, if that much. After the boy had grown into a man, he gained access to a computer (not everybody in Sudan has a computer) and sent me an email, with details about his encounter. I found his report highly credible, both in his honesty and in the high probability that it was a pterosaur.

Pterosaur, perhaps, in Victoria, Australia

I say “perhaps” because the flying creature, observed in about 1998, was so far away from the eyewitness. I say “pterosaur” because the sighting is consistent with other sightings in Australia, encounters that were much closer to the eyewitnesses, and because the creature appeared to be about the size of a “Cesna” but was slowing flapping its wings. After receiving a long email from the Australian man, I came to believe that he had seen what he suspected he had.

What I saw was what I first thought was a pelican flying about 3000 feet high but realised pelicans at that height did not look as large as this. I was standing outside about nine o’clock one night. It was full moon and very bright with a cloud bank to the south east extending to and over the Ranges. Mt. Dandenong is about 2000 feet high and the clouds were much higher than this.

I glanced to the south and something caught my attention. It was something flying that appeared to be at the height of light planes that fly around here as Moorabbin Airport is not far away. This thing was at least as large as a light plane, say a Cesna.  It was about 5 klms away and was lazily flapping it’s wings, flying to the east in at that point a clear sky. It appeared to be lit up by the moonlight and shining as if it had no feathers. . . . I could see it quite clearly. I had it under observation for about 5 mins whence it disappeared into the cloud bank.

Extremes in Delayed Reactions

From the third edition of Live Pterosaurs in America, a lady gives us a positive perspective on her two 2008 encounters in Georgia.

Fifteen miles of her commute [in northeast Georgia] is on a two-lane 55-mph road through woods alternating with pastures; This part of Highway 82 has few houses and almost no stop signs. . . . She had woken up early and could not get back to sleep, so she left her house [to drive to work] at 6:45 a.m. . . . She had driven less than ten miles, just leaving an area of pasture, entering an area of thick woods, around a mild downhill curve, with high banks and brush on each side of the road, when an animal suddenly flew from the right, just over the front of her car. Although alone, she yelled, “What the — what — what is that?” She was stunned.

She had another encounter two weeks later, at a different part of the same stretch of highway. But the point is how she looked back on her experiences with apparent living pterosaurs:

The lady used to dread her daily commute to work; that has changed. She told me, “The world is now totally different. I feel blessed that God has allowed me to see this creature that should not be here, and yet is, this strange dragon-like thing that lives somewhere in the woods in this redneck little town.”

Her experiences differ greatly from those of seven boys who encountered the giant ropen at Lake Pung:

On the remote island of Umboi, in Papua New Guinea, seven boys climbed up to Lake Pung, just north of their village. Within a few minutes they saw the giant creature fly over the water. The boys ran home in terror and the memory of that fear lasted for years. In 2004, Jonathan Whitcomb explored part of Umboi Island. He interviewed Gideon Koro, who confirmed their encounter, calling the creature by its local name: “ropen;” two other young men verified Gideon’s account.

Of course the circumstances between these cases differs considerably. Gideon and his friends were exposed to a creature that was notorious, on Umboi Island, for eating human flesh (at least taking dead human bodies from graves). The lady in Georgia was protected in her car, with no knowledge of any potential danger from any strange flying creature. With all that said, I suspect the flying creatures seen by these eyewitnesses (in Sudan, southern Australia, southeastern USA, and Umboi Island) are related, even if they represent different species.

With the right winds, butterflies can sometimes get across the Atlantic Ocean, at least from North America to Ireland. So could a kongamato get across the Atlantic from Africa? I like to think of it from another perspective: Could a species of large pterosaur be prevented from crossing the Atlantic if countless of the flying creatures flew off the west coast of Africa for countless centuries? What could prevent their eventual migration?

One species of crane flies over the Himalayan Mountains regularly, sometimes at an altitude of 30,000 feet. Large nocturnal pterosaurs, under the right wind conditions, could cross the Atlantic, from Africa. As more sighting reports come in from Africa and North America, we need to look at the possibility that some of the flying creatures on different sides of the Atlantic may be closely related or even the same species.

Pterosaurs in Cuba

. . . I had been in Cuba for perhaps four months and the SeaBees were engaged in constructing new barracks for us . . . It was a beautiful, clear summer day . . . I was looking in the direction of the ocean . . . I am an artist with sharp eye for detail and was determined to drink in the visage before me for future recording on paper. I saw two pterosaurs flying together at low altitude, perhaps 100 feet, very close in range from where I was standing, so that I had a perfectly clear view . . . The vertebrae of their backs was noticeable, mostly between the shoulders. I would estimate their wingspan to be roughly ten feet.

Pterosaur Extinction Indoctrination

Standard Western paleontology is based upon assumptions about extinction. When a dinosaur fossil or a pterosaur fossil is discovered in a stratum, that layer of rock may be subject to reevaluation: given a different date based upon the popular ideas about when that species lived and when it became extinct.

But what if a species of pterosaur never became extinct? What would that do to paleontology, in particular with dating a stratum by the existence of a fossil of that species being found in that stratum?

Gitmo Pterosaur

The sketch shown above was drawn by the U. S. Marine Eskin Kuhn, who witnessed two of the long-tailed featherless flying creatures (obvious pterosaurs) flying at “close range” at the Guantanamo Bay military installation in Cuba, in 1971.

I recently received an email from a man in Windhoek, Namibia (southwestern Africa). A few weeks ago, just after breakfast, at about 10:00 a.m., while sitting in his garden, he saw what he first thought was a large gliding bird. He later thought it more like a “prehistoric animal.”

[It was] moving its wings very, very slowly, very much as we see raptors or eagles do when they circle in the air scanning the land for prey. I paid attention to the wings as it would allow for identification – but this bird did not have any feathers, at least not any spread primary feathers (as eagles often show).

It looked more like a large bat with distinctly brightly coloured (yellow-brown, orange?) protrusions, where birds have carpal joints (like some ‘spur-winged birds’). It showed a long, very long, slim neck (like of cranes or flamingos), with a thickening in the middle . . . ending into a long beak (like storks). At the joint of the neck to the wing (or body) there was a type of thickening or collar (like the fluffy doughnut collar of a ‘white backed vulture’).

The overall colour . . . was bright (whitish?). The colour of the body-and-wings was brownish, with a lighter patch of greenish-brown covering 3/4 of the underside of the wings (form of patch like can be seen on the underside of the wings of a ‘bat hawk’). . . . I cannot remember details of the tail, but thought that two legs and a strange looking longer tail or appendix were visible, parallel to one another.

. . . Estimated altitude of bird above ground (based on comparison to small planes taking-off from or landing at the small airport of Windhoek) was about 200+ metres. For the wingspan I would venture to say (based on comparison with again overflying aeroplanes’ wingspan . . . that it was half of that of a small plane’s wing span . . .

I am a Belgian national, retired from a 40 years career with the Namibian public service in the field of [a specific technical field. Identity is being protected for this eyewitness].

Flying Snake in Southwest Namibia

In 1942, a flying-snake like animal swooped down from a cave in the vicinity of a farm near Kirris West sixty miles east of Keetmanshoop, in southwest Namibia. The flying snake, or whatever it was, frightened Michael Esterhuise, a farmhand, severely, and left a trace on the ground and a burning smell. It was investigated by Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer of Coelacanth fame. It shot into the air again and made a sound like “wind blowing through a pipe”

Kongamato and Ropen Compared

The boy froze as the creature stretched its wings and hopped toward another roof, passing a few feet over the boy’s head. He dropped the metal tray of dishes that he had been carrying and the creature flew away. The eyewitness was sure about the head crest and the long tail. [Pterosaur sighting in Sudan, Africa]

Pterosaur Extinction (or nonextinction)

According to Jonathan Whitcomb, the many eyewitnesses of the ropen and the indava do not come from any hoax; they are genuine eyewitness sightings.

Are all fictional stories based upon people or animals that never existed? Let’s be careful not to rush to conclusions about dragons, for fantasies, though fictional, are often based upon some truth. The old story of Little Red Riding Hood is fictional, but grandmothers and wolves are both real.

Monster in Super 8 film

This film could have been much better had it been longer with strange things prepared for, or had it given less emphasis on preparing us to love those kids and more emphasis on preparing us for the weirdness of that monster.