The above images were analyzed by the missile defense physicist Cliff Paiva, of BSM Research Associates. Paiva seems to have no doubt that these two glowing objects are closely related, even if they are large bioluminescent flying creatures not yet classified in Western science. One video was recorded in Florida; the other,  in Mexico. And these are only two sightings.

Yakima Lights

Many flashes were parallel to the river. . . . there were many fish . . . Prime hunting grounds for fish-eating birds. Only these things fish at night with bioluminescence. At first I thought I was just seeing shooting stars, but they were all parallel to the river and close to the horizon. Next I noticed that when the cloud cover came in, I could still see the flashes. They were under the cloud cover.

Sightings of large glowing flying creatures—those have also been reported, in modern times, in widely diverse areas: Papua New Guinea, Los Angeles County, California; the Caribbean Sea; and in England.

Cheesman Lights and Marfa Lights

On the surface, it might seem better to tie the Cheesman lights to the ropen light of Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, for all those lights, as individual lights, seem to last for only about five or six seconds or so, and individual CE-III Marfa Lights may last much longer. But the indava lights (seen just a couple of mountain ranges or so south of where Cheesman was) sometimes do glow longer than a few seconds.

I have noticed many Youtube videos that require attention: various flying lights, mostly without the vidoegrapher or uploader being aware of the possibility of bioluminescent flying creatures.

*****************************************************************

Cryptozoology Book

Regain your faith in the human potential for courage by reading of eyewitnesses who bravely tell their experiences and cryptozoologists who explore sighting areas and interview those who have seen live pterosaurs. How did this escape the notice of American scientists? If you walk away from this book, how will you know?

Lake Pung, Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, where the ropen ("demon flyer" or not) sometimes flies

The book Mysterious Creatures, A Guide to Cryptozoology, by George M. Eberhart, includes this entry under the “Ropen” title: “An Austronesian word said to mean ‘demon flyer.’” That may be partially correct but easily misleading. Most of the sources for Eberhart’s Ropen entry are the writings of Karl Shuker in Fortean Times articles, dated in the years 2000, 2001, and 2002. Without reading those articles I will not speculate on them. But my associates and I who have explored in Papua New Guinea more recently and have interviewed many natives—we may have had opportunities more extensive than Shuker’s, or at least have had the potential for new insights.

Austronesian is a language family, not a language; individual languages of this family are found on many islands, including many in Papua New Guinea. Among the hundreds of languages spoken in Papua New Guinea, Kovai (spoken in some villages of Umboi Island) is Papuan, according to Wikipedia; it is not Austronesian. But the word “ropen,” for a large flying cryptid that sometimes glows as it flies at night—that word comes from those villages that speak Kovai.

The second Umboi Island expedition of 2004 (a few weeks after mine) turned up an interesting perspective on the word “ropen.” Jacob Kepas, the native interpreter for the American cryptozoologists David Woetzel and Garth Guessman, knew the word but was puzzled. Why go to such trouble flying on a small plane to Umboi Island to search for a bird? In his village near Wau (mainland Papua New Guinea), “ropen” is the word used for a common bird. The large nocturnal flying creature that glows—that frightening creature they call “seklo-bali.”

So in those two small areas of Papua New Guinea (villages of Umboi Island including Opai and Gomlongon, and at least one village near Wau on the mainland) the meaning of the word “ropen” differs greatly. An examination of the expedition reports from American cryptozoologists who have searched for living pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea in the 1990′s and early twenty-first century—that reveals that the Western-world usage of ”ropen” comes from the Kovai-speaking islanders of Opai and Gomlongon.

A casual observation of the “Demon Flyer” episode of MonsterQuest on television is a world apart from reading Shuker’s article or Eberhart’s book or one of my books. Monsterquest episodes are mini-adventure-shows, not scientific documentaries, so we are not surprised at a few technical innacuracies; but innaccuracies are hardly confined to television adventure shows. Search with the phrase (in quotes) “demon flyer” and one of the first-page results from Google can take you to a page with the following:

Just off the eastern coast of Papua New Guinea . . . are the small islands of Rambunzo and Umboi. These two islands are said to be the home of the Ropen, which when translated from the indigenous dialect literally means, Demon Flyer.

Let us examine that declaration.

First, a brief Google search makes me suspect that the island of ”Rambunzo,” by that spelling, does not exist in Papua New Guinea; perhaps it is a misspelling, for the first few pages of Google searching refer to cryptozoology sites and Wikipedia has nothing by that spelling. But if this is a misspelling of “Rambutyo,” ( near Manus Island) we need to consider what at least some of the people of the northern islands of Papua New Guinea call the large nocturnal flying creature : “kor.” My contact person in that part of PNG is clear about that word for what Umboi Islanders (to the south) call “ropen.” “Kor” is their word, which I suspect is used by the people of Rambutyo. In addition, I don’t recall ever writing anything about “Rambunzo,” in any of my web pages from 2003 to late-2011, in spite of what one web site declares about my involvement with that word.

Second, Rambutyo (as the correct spelling for the nonexistent ”Rambunzo”), which is actually northeast of the mainland, is smaller than Umboi, but many people would not call Umboi, at 900 square kilometers, ”small.” In addition, many islands, of various sizes, are east and northeast of the mainland; why single out those two? The large nocturnal flying creatures, called by various names in various languages, can be seen (although mostly at night by their bioluminescence) around and over many islands of Papua New Guinea, not just over or near Rambutyo and Umboi.

Third, there is no “indigenous dialect” for these two islands. In fact, I was told by Delilah Kau (or “Kow”), wife of the government-and-local-village leader Mark Kau, that several nearby villages around Gomlongon have different “languages.” She probably referred to what we would call different dialects of Kovai, but other villages of Umboi, not so close to Gomlongon, really do have different languages. Even if islanders of Rambutyo all spoke the same language, it would be very unlikely to be the same dialect (even if the same language) as any on Umboi Island.

That brings up the idea that “ropen” comes from two native words. A brief reflection makes that appear unlikely, for how could such a short word come from two words that mean “demon” and “flyer?” No, it is much more likely that the original meaning of the word was something like ”flyer.”

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 apologies to Shakespeare:

To be extinct, or not to be extinct, that is the question:
Whether it’s no bull or in the mind, pterosaur eyewitnesses suffer
The slings and arrows from outraged paleontologists

From a recent press release:

Extinct or not extinct, that is the question about pterosaurs

How rarely do we read anything about dinosaurs or pterosaurs without reference to extinction millions of years ago! But a controversial idea promoted by the American cryptozoologist Jonathan Whitcomb has caught the attention of the Houston Chronicle, a Smithsonian magazine blog, and a well-known paleontologist in England. Not everybody embraces living pterosaurs.

Indeed, from my eight years of investigating reports of living pterosaurs, I know that not everybody embraces living pterosuars.

“It Would Have Been Seen” if BigFoot Existed

Looking straight at their reasoning reveals the problem: “People who say they saw X could not have really seen X because if X existed then somebody would have seen X.”

Perhaps what some skeptics mean is more like this: “If X existed, newspapers would have it in their headlines before now” (with “X” representing any cryptid, including a living pterosaur). Well, this may be news to some skeptics, but if I recall correctly, as I was taking a plane from Papua New Guinea to Australia, after finishing my expedition in 2004, I was reading a newspaper that had a front page headline directing readers to an article about my findings and experiences (and my interpreter’s) from interviewing eyewitnesses of the ropen of Umboi Island. That newspaper was (and probably still is) one of the two largest in Papua New Guinea.

If critics are only interested in American newspapers that have headline stories that are favorable to the possibility of a living pterosaur, then read on:

Sightings in Antwerp, Ohio

The Antwerp Bee-Argus newspaper (Aug 5, 2009 issue) gave an account of two sightings over the Maumee River, Ohio: 2002 and 2003, both in the daylight heat of summer. (More detailed information is in my book Live Pterosaurs in America . . .

That newspaper article, I remember clearly, had a front-page headline about a modern-pterosaur sighting (with the article starting on the front page, as well). In addition, it was positive, not negative, about the possibility of a living pterosaur in Ohio.