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Why do Pterodactyls Attack People?

YouTube thumbnail for a modern-pterodactyl video

By Jonathan D. Whitcomb

On December 2, 2023, I uploaded to YouTube a video that now looks like it could become viral or at least attain the rank of “mini-viral”. If you’d like to watch it while remaining on this blog, click below and you’ll remain on this post:

Without the late Brent Sawin interviewing Frank Sicilia, we would not have this important video footage of this eyewitness and his testimony. Thank you to all who made possible this disclosure to the world.

Three cousins were fishing at night in Pennsylvania when they were attacked by a huge flying creature. Frank estimated the wingspan: between twenty and twenty-two feet.

It hovered for a short while before diving down toward them, and those dives numbered at least twelve to fifteen times. One of the fishermen left, and the other two, including Frank, remained with their fishing lines and kept whacking the legs and lower body of the flying creature each time it came down.

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Preschool Girl Attacked in Oklahoma

The eyewitness contacted me and related the terrifying details: When she was a small child, in daylight as she was walking to her house in rural Oklahoma, a huge hairy flying creature, with teeth in its mouth, dived down towards her. Fortunately, she ducked down to the ground just in time and escaped.

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Pterodactyl Sightings in the U.S.A.

It was the summer of 1977 and I was 17 at the time. I was fishing at a gravel pit in Heyworth, IL and the dawn had just [broken]. . . . As I stood there a creature glided down from my right to just above water level directly in front of me, no more than 50′ from where I was. . . .

I realized this was no ordinary bird but appeared more like a featherless reptile.

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Ropen Danger to Children – Big Flying Creature

Is it possible that a ropen with a wingspan of about 16-18 feet could have carried away a two-year-old boy in southern Arizona, in 1945? About 24 hours after his disappearance, he was found alive, sleeping in a dug-out hole in the ground 15 miles from where he went missing.

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Pterodactyls ALIVE in the USA!

Apparent modern living pterosaurs, a.k.a. “pterodactyls” or “dinosaur birds”, have been seen in North America for centuries, including sightings in the United States of America. The following are the locations covered . . .

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New Pterodactyl Sighting Reports

These two encounters are described here in this video on the “Protect Animal Life” channel. First was a terrifying pterodactyl sighting in Washington state, with Mom and Dad suddenly realizing that their whole family could be in danger. Second was an encounter in Topeka, Kansas, and the wingspan was as wide as the street.

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Missing Persons in USA – Attack from a Ropen?

The following Youtube video covers three possible “pterodactyl” attacks against children, during the past 80 years, in the United States.

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Loss Aversion and Living Pterosaurs

I now write about a cognitive bias, loss aversion, that appears to have had a major influence over a critic of my research. Since I am diving into a potential weakness in this man’s thinking, I do not mention his name.

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Flying Dinosaur in Canada – I saw a Pterodactyl

. . . here is one such account of an encounter with such a flying creature (in part): “I saw something similar to a pterosaur in Maple Ridge, British Columbia Canada. It was approximately 1 a.m., in the summer of either 2013 or 2014. . . . What appeared to be a pterosaur flew past, it was high up in the sky, and I just spotted the GIANT wings”.

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Missing Persons in USA – Attack from a Ropen?

Jonathan Whitcomb with sketch of a pterosaur

By Jonathan David Whitcomb

The following Youtube video covers three possible “pterodactyl” attacks against children, during the past 80 years, in the United States. (Click the image below to watch the video while remaining on this blog post.) The states involved were Arizona, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Ropen Danger to Children – Big Flying Creature (Youtube site)

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Western Oklahoma

The following are some of the words of the eyewitness (Sara) from Oklahoma. The encounter was a few miles south of Cordell. (edited slightly for English)

In 1977, in sw Oklahoma, . . . I was 4 years old. My older siblings just left off on the bus for school. I was heading to the house from the chicken house [at] about 8 a.m. when a large flying creature tried to grab me. The wings where slick like a bat. The body (about the size of a Volkswagen bug) was covered in hair. . . . It had a beak with teeth and I turned . . . and screamed. It missed me and it squawked a mean squawk. I kept looking up as I ran in the house.

Sara also reported to me that the huge flying creature had teeth in its beak, and she knew, even at only four years old, that it was not normal for a bird to have teeth.

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Eastern Texas

Now for the words of a grandmother in Texas, a few years ago:

My grandchild was outside playing just before dark at twilight. This grey reddish, giant looking bird, with no feathers, tried to take him. I grabbed him and ran inside the house. My grandchild didn’t see the danger. He kept on playing inside. It’s been three years since that [happened]. I never mentioned it [until someone asked me if I had seen this kind of flying creature]. I thought, no one would believe it . . .

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Another Oklahoma Pterosaur Sighting

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 . . .

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New Mexico and Texas

I live in central N.M.. Fourteen years ago, in [Socorro], N.M., me and a close friend, who now has a masters in biology, were hiking during the midday sun at [a] box canyon . . . and saw a large flying animal. . . . It had a 20-30 foot wingspan . . .

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Missing Persons & Pterodactyl Sightings – Ropen?

This Youtube video, on the channel “Protect Animal Life”, features Frank Sicilia, who was attacked by an apparent “pterodactyl” while he was fishing on the bank of the Delaware River.

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Missing persons and pterodactyls

From I can tell so far, from reading his book, most persons in these cases are never found, alive or dead. When a person or a body is found, it is often miles away and where that person or body should not have been found. It’s often at a much higher elevation, even on or near a mountain peak or ridge or it’s a body at the base of a cliff.

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Pterodactyl Attacks in British Columbia

This horse was not killed by a bear, a wolf, or a cougar. . . . None of these animals carries part of their dinner to the top of nearby trees, and they certainly have no reason to break branches on those trees.

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Modern pterodactyl danger

Almost never will a modern ropen or pterodactyl attack a person, yet those less-common times when someone is attacked—those deserve attention.

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Declaration on Living Pterosaurs

Most of the following are from direct eyewitness testimony sent by email to the cryptozoologist Jonathan Whitcomb, who now lives in Murray, Utah. Some of the reports, however, involve more direct communication with the persons encountering the flying creatures: face-to-face interviews and phone conversations.

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An Individual Ropen is Identified and Named – Precise Location Unknown

Desert mountains in Nevada

By Jonathan Whitcomb, executive director of Animal Discovery

How do I know that a ropen with a thirty-foot wingspan, now hunting house cats and killing chickens in Nevada, is the same animal seen in Draper, Utah, a few years ago? The one in Utah was about that size, or a bit smaller, and was there hunting house cats and killing chickens. Yet one clue pins this individual ropen to chicken murders in southern Salt Lake County : The predator does not eat chickens but stomps them into the ground. We call this pterodactyl the “Draper Ropen” (“DR”).

See the Youtube video “Whitcomb Interviewed

desert mountains in Nevada 01

Remote desert in Nevada

The flying creature seen in 2018 in Draper may have been a bit smaller, according to the rough estimate, than 30 feet in wingspan, but it may have grown during the past three years. The present wingspan estimate of 30 feet is close because of how DR was encountered on October 2, 2021, by the man whose head came to within four feet of one of its wings that night.

As of October 13, 2021, Jonathan Whitcomb does not know for certain whether or not this particular animal is clearly dangerous to humans. He advises great caution should it appear reasonably possible for any person to observe it from less than five hundred yards away.

reservoir in a remote area of Nevada

A reservoir in a remote area of Nevada

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Testimony of the Eyewitness in Nevada

“Approximately 9:20 pm Saturday, 02 October, 2021 [in a rural area of Nevada] I experienced something unusual . . . [While on my computer] in the garage, I heard something very heavy land on the tin roof near its edge. . . .”

“. . . the roof rafters creaked, then I heard claws scratch the roof (similar to big claws just resting on the tin roof). But, much heavier and bigger claws and much much louder than any domestic house cat or bobcat claws both in the area, and MUCH louder than a vulture, turkey, peacock, goose, owl, eagle or hawk . . .”

“I turned off the lights. And, quietly, and very carefully I opened the door and went outside. . . . The garage’s roofline measures 26 ft wide. This creature’s wingspan spread wider by about 2 feet on each side and its wingtip flapped within about 4 feet of my head as I opened the door. . . .”

“My best description is its wing appeared nearly light/tan/ brown/sandy on the topside, but more the color of the night sky underneath. As it flapped for takeoff, I saw the underside first, then the topside of the wingtip. I got a very clear and close view of the wingtip and the animal’s silhouette (and I felt the strong wind its wing produced on an otherwise calm night without any wind at that moment). . . .”

“The wingtip didn’t look like feathers, but it looked very much like a gigantic bat’s wing. From almost immediately underneath (at the closest point during its takeoff), it had a long narrow tail longer than its head to base of tail length.   . . . It looked amazing and gigantic so close.”

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Missing Children and Pterodactyl Sightings

I suggest that to understand the potential danger that a few of these flying creatures may pose to children, we need to know something about modern “pterodactyls”, including the long-tailed ropen.

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Live Pterodactyl

A Youtube playlist highly recommended for those who are new to Youtube videos about sightings of modern pterosaurs like the ropen

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Attacks From a Ropen in New Mexico?

I’ve recently been reading the nonfiction Missing 411 – Western United States & Canada, by the former lawman David Paulides. On page 200, the author points out that all six of those missing persons listed in New Mexico disappeared in the Santa Fe National Forest. Why did none of them go missing in any other national forest of New Mexico?

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An Apparent Living Pterodactyl Reported in Utah

The nonfiction author Jonathan Whitcomb, of Murray, Utah, in 2017 and 2018, interviewed four eyewitnesses of an apparent “pterodactyl” in central Utah. He now declares that those reports from Draper, Salt Lake County, help distinguish Utah in a map showing where similar sightings have been reported across the United States.

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Ropen (Pterosaur) in Draper, Utah

This morning I interviewed, face-to-face, an eyewitness of an apparent living pterosaur that flew over his backyard in Draper, Utah, on Sunday, November 4, 2018. He seemed perfectly credible to me, and I also talked with his wife and found nothing wrong with her deportment.

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Pterodactyl Sightings and Evolution

Patty Carson's sketch of a ropen with caption: "Yes, Virginia, there is a ropen"

By Jonathan Whitcomb

My associates and I, over the past two decades or so, have been criticized in various ways, one of them in a strawman argument something like this: “They try to disprove evolution by trying to convince people that pterodactyls are alive.” The main problem with that criticism is that it’s not usually quoting any of us but declaring what our intentions are, and critics oversimply reality.

Evolution and Neo-Darwinism

First, I recommend my Youtube video “Pterodactyl Sightings and Evolution – Part 2″ on my channel Protect Animal Life. There I explain a bit about the fallacy of lumping various concepts of biological evolution together and assuming it all means the same thing. Let’s get into that a bit deeper.

The word “star has various meanings and we rarely have any problem with that. But what about the word “evolution”? That’s a different matter.

In my Youtube video dated September 9, 2021, I mentioned how shooting stars are not literal stars; no problem. Yet we in Western societies are often bombarded with the word “evolution” when it refers to different things. The video presents four types of biological evolution:

  1. Loss of a useful organ
  2. Tiny change that helps in survival
  3. Major change in outward appearance
  4. Upward Evolution

An important point in the above is this: Nothing in the first three concepts gives any credibility to the fourth concept. In addition, the first three have been observed and relatively few persons dispute the details in those three concepts, but the fourth has major problems and is based upon many persons who imagine what has happened in the distant past.

Danger to Children

The reality of modern pterosaurs like the ropen—that is not just a subject for theoretical debates about evolution in the distant past but is extremely important to some cases of missing children, including possible attacks against persons in North America.

One lady has reported that she was attacked, when a preschooler, by a huge flying creature in western Oklahoma. The animal, which was covered in hair, flew down towards the girl but she ducked down to the ground and escaped, soon getting into the safety of her house. The child saw that the creature was very strange, for it had teeth in its beak. She knew that birds do not have teeth.

How can we protect children and adults from that kind of attack? We must learn the truth about these flying creatures and help others to know about the reality of ropens and similar apparent modern pterosaurs. Although it seems that only a tiny minority of modern “pterodactyls” every attack any human, that limited number of animals can be dangerous, at least on occasion.

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The Ropen and Evolution

A common criticism thrown at me and my associates relates to the age of the earth and evolution. Our critics will sometimes ridicule the idea that non-extinct pterosaurs “disprove” evolution or prove that the world is 6,000 years old. What they fail to mention, however, is that they construct a sentence or two, in their own words, as if it were our words or our precise purposes.

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Missing Children

I suggest that to understand the potential danger that a few of these flying creatures may pose to children, we need to know something about modern “pterodactyls”, including the long-tailed ropen.

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Living Pterosaurs

This is a well-established blog on non-extinct “pterodactyls” in our modern world, flying creatures sometimes called “dinosaur birds” or “dragons”.

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The Quest for Discovering Modern Pterosaurs

The nonfiction book by Jonathan David Whitcomb: Searching for Ropens and Finding God (fourth edition)

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Living Pterosaurs or Dragons

This may be the oldest living-pterosaur site on the internet

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Modern-Pterodactyl News (2021)

The main news for now relates to the formation of a nonprofit organization that will specialize in research into reports of non-extinct modern pterosaurs, including the long-tailed featherless ropen [Animal Discovery].

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