Mount Sual (Umboi Island), where the ropen light sometimes flies

For years, I have advocated multiple species of pterosaurs living in various parts of the world. Even for glowing lights in Papua New Guinea, multiple species may be involved, even when only two mountain ranges separate them. But for now, let’s consider why one species seems to be responsible for flying lights in two areas of that tropical country.

Let’s compare the words of four witnesses: three natives on Umboi Island and one British biologist on the mainland of New Guinea. Each describes flying lights: on two sides of Umboi and on the mainland to the west of Umboi.

Evelyn Cheeseman

The British biologist and explorer Lucy Evelyn Cheesman was the first woman ever hired as a curator at the Regent’s Park Zoo, in London. She traveled in the south Pacific prior to World War II, discovering a number of new species of small creatures and writing several books. But the discovery she made near Mondo, on the mainland of New Guinea, would support cryptozoological investigations many decades later.

In her book The Two Roads of Papua (1935 – London: Jarrolds), she described the flying lights:

While at Mondo I witnessed a most curious phenomenon which I could not understand; nor could I later hit upon any satisfactory explanation for it.

[One night] I spent much in time leaning over the veranda, and gazing across at the . . . jumbled hills against a purple sky. When suddenly I saw a flash of light somewhere below the horizon. It was rather a slow flash, and might have been made with an electric torch [flashlight] by someone with a finger on the switch to prolong it perhaps four seconds. . . . in a moment it came again, and this time I counted; yes about four or five seconds . . . flashes continued at intervals.

Many lights appeared like the first one, and they were strung out in a horizontal line for quite a distance, just below the top of a mountain ridge. The natives would not answer Cheesman’s questions about them so she relied on her own powers of reasoning.

But after careful observations and careful pondering, she gave up trying to explain the phenomenon. It could not have been from many natives with flashlights: The flying lights were slightly above the tree canopy, and even if natives had access to many flashlights, why would they use them in that fashion, on a long horizontal line? She became convinced that the lights were not from any human origin. But what were they?

Lucy Evelyn Cheesman, biologist

First 2004 Ropen Expedition

When I explored part of Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, in 2004, I had no knowledge of Cheesman’s observations seven decades earlier. I was following up on the findings of other cryptozoologists, including Paul Nation (who had instructed me in how to conduct my expedition). I interviewed native eyewitnesses of the flying light and eyewitnesses of a large flying creature they call “ropen.” Natives think of them as the same thing, and my findings verified that idea.

I interviewed David Moke, a village leader, who told me about his encounter with a bright light that appeared over his head while he was fishing one night, months earlier, over a reef off the southern coast of Umboi Island. The brilliant light lasted about “five seconds.”

About a week later, I talked with another native. William Gima told me about the bright light that lit up Aupwel Village, a few weeks earlier, on the northern side of Umboi. That light lasted about “five seconds.”

Second 2004 Ropen Expedition

A few weeks after I completed my expedition, two other American cryptozoologists were exploring Umboi: Garth Guessman and David Woetzel. Many of their interviews were with islanders I had not met, in villages I had not visited.

The school teacher of Arot Village, Gibson Kuvurio, told the Americans about the ropen light:

When ropen flies, its body glows maybe around five or six seconds, but the light never glows beyond this time.

Coincidence or Bioluminescence?

Many observations of flying lights that last 4-6 seconds—those are not likely by coincidence, especially when some areas of Papua New Guinea have reports of large nocturnal flying creatures that glow as they fly. This phenomenon deserves serious scientific study, not just by cryptozoologists but by biologists.

Indava and Ropen of Umboi Island

Evelyn Cheesman appeared to have no thought about pterosaurs when she observed the strange glowing objects that flew near the top of a mountain ridge.

________________________________________________________________

Live Pterosaurs in America — third edition of nonfiction cryptozoology book

From the chapter “Marfa Lights of Texas”

His account of the strange lights of Marfa [Texas] got me thinking. Some accounts, not quite like James’s observations, involve “dancing” behavior. But if the lights are made by ropen-like animals, why would they move like that? Of course ropens in Texas might be hunting bats, but how could dancing help them catch bats? Insects! Of course lights attract insects. After two ropens have glowed in one area long enough to concentrate insects, they separate for awhile to allow the bats to feel safe in catching those insects. Soon the ropens return to catch the bats.

Sometimes an eyewitness will say “giant bat.” We need not assume the flying creature was literally a bat. In Western cultures, the idea of universal pterosaur extinction is so deeply ingrained that eyewitnesses find it difficult to use that word, for it makes them feel unbelievable. “Pterodactyl” is the same. The description details make the distinction between bat and pterosaur, in the critical sightings.

Let’s consider large bats and compare them with modern living pterosaurs.

The bones in the wings of the above bat eliminate a pterosaur interpretation. They radiate from the finger-claw on the leading edge of the wing. The apparent lack of a tail eliminates a bat interpretation for most of the clear daylight sightings that have been reported to me. Bats do not have long tails, whether or not they are “giant bats” (Flying Foxes) or other species.

The illustration above shows more detail in this anatomy of the bat. But eyewitnesses might never get such a clear view of a flying creature that refuses to pause for an examination, so let’s look at photos.

Even when a mother Flying Fox carries a baby during flight, nothing will look like a long tail: not the two feet, not the baby, not anything. The idea that this fruit bat has caused sighting reports of “pterodactyls” in Papua New Guinea now appears ludicrous. I don’t recall even one sighting report that turned out to have been this kind of misidentification.

Why do some skeptics continue to cry “flying fox misidentification” when actual ropen sightings are of long-tailed flying creatures? Part of their problem is this: They continuously fail to consider actual sighting reports. They prefer to mention their imagined typical sighting, not real sightings. Some would call that approach a “straw man argument.”

Let’s examine some of the details from Duane Hodgkinson’s report.

Could he have seen a giant fruit bat and consciously or unconsciously have exaggerated its size and features? This conjecture quickly breaks down, for too many major differences jump out at us.

No exaggeration of any structure on a Flying Fox could make a tail “at least” ten or fifteen feet long, as reported by Hodgkinson. And even if he had seen a giant bat, with a wingspan of six feet, and thought it was twelve feet, this is still much smaller than the wingspan of a Piper Tri-Pacer airplane (about 29 feet).

In addition, the legs of the “pterodactyl,” that he observed running through that jungle clearing in 1944, he estimated to be three to four feet long. On the other hand, the length of the legs of even the largest Flying Fox fruit bat cannot be measured in feet, barely even in inches. And nobody who sees even the largest fruit bat would say that its neck was about three or four feet long; that bat neck appears almost nonexistent.

Giant Bat

If you have seen something flying at night, not like a bird but too big to be a bat, please contact Jonathan Whitcomb to report details about your sighting.

“Dinosaur Bird”

The pterosaur is known by several names in the United States: “dinosaur bird,” “flying dinosaur,” and perhaps the most popular “pterodactyl.”

Jacob Kepas, a Baptist minister and a native of Papua New Guinea, may be the most experienced ropen seeker in his country. But when he was a boy, the glowing creature that he saw fly over his village was not known by his people as “ropen” but as “seklobali.” It would not be the only time in his life that he would see a giant nocturnal flying creature in Papua New Guinea: a pterosaur candidate.

Late in 2006, the American Baptist missionary James Blume, an airplane pilot, took Kepas and American Paul Nation deep into the mountainous interior of the mainland. There, near the village of Tawa, Blume left the two explorers as he flew back. Kepas and Nation talked with the villagers and learned that the local name for the large glowing creature of the night was “indava.”

I have often written about the two indava lights Paul Nation videotaped near the top of a ridge above Tawa Village. Not so often have I written about the daylight sighting of an indava that Jacob Kepas and a local villager observed. It helps verify what local villagers say about the creature.

Paul Nation did not accompany the other two men on this particular daylight hike, but he loaned them his camcorder to. Unfortunately Kepas and the local guide could not get close enough to the sleeping creature that they observed. It appeared to be sleeping on a cliff opposite to the hill that they had climbed. They tried to get a video recording of it but failed, perhaps because of their lack of experience with the camcorder; but it was also just too far away. They reported to Nation that the creature was very large.

During this 2006 expedition, Nation learned from one local villager of another daylight sighting. The man had seen an indava near a river and described the creature in terms of the size of an airplane (Tawa Village is near a small air strip). Nation also learned that indavas sometimes carried away village pigs or children, at some time in the past, but they no longer do so, for the villagers have learned to make noise to scare away the creatures.

Investigators now believe that both the lights videotaped by Nation and the creature observed by Kepas were modern living pterosaurs.

The American cryptozoologist Garth Guessman (lower-left) interviews native Jacob Kepas, with interpretation help from Mary Blume (wife of Jim Blume). This interview was in 2004, just before the Woetzel-Guessman-Kepas expedition on Umboi Island. Kepas tells of his sighting when he was a boy.

###

Lakewood – child care cost

Long Beach child care

How often an American eyewitness has expressed anxiety over what was observed! What’s wrong with a living pterosaur? Think about it: nothing in the creature itself. But our Western culture indoctinates us from childhood, constantly emphasizing extinctions millions of years ago.

I have started organizing the Pterosaur Eyewitness Group Support (PEGS) to encourage open communication between those who have observed apparent “pterodactyls” and those who have only read about or heard about the encounters. Posts on that blog may also include responses to skeptics or critics. For now, let’s consider a few eyewitnesses who have given us their names.

Gideon Koro I interviewed on Umboi Island, Papua New Guinea, in 2004. He had almost no time to prepare for that interview because my guides and I surprised his village by showing up unannounced. His demeanor impressed me; he showed no sign of fabricating any part of his account.

His videotaped interview is available on Youtube. One point missing from that video relates to Gideon’s description of the mouth of the ropen: “like a crocodile” (mouth). A few minutes after he had volunteered the word “crocodile,” I drew two sketches in the dirt. Without giving him any clue what I was doing, I gave him an opportunity to choose a crocodile head instead of a pterosaur head: He chose the pterosaur. The only difference was in the eye socket (crocodilians have elevated eyes so that they can see above water when they are mostly submerged). If he had been telling me a lie about observing a large flying creature, he would not likely have passed up the crocodile head after he had described a crocodile mouth. But he chose the non-crocodilian eye immediately. He was extremely credible.

Eskin Kuhn at Guantanamo Bay, 1971

I surprised Eskin Kuhn with a phone call in February of 2010. He answered my questions with high credibility, giving no hint of any hoax involvement. His sketch of the two “pterodactyls” of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, remains an important piece of cryptozoological evidence for modern living pterosaurs. His sighting was in clear daylight in 1971, when he was stationed at Gitmo as a U. S. Marine.

Kuhn saw two pterosaurs in Cuba, in 1971

Eskin Kuhn’s sketch was drawn just minutes after his 1971 sighting, when it was fresh in his mind. A few years earlier, other eyewitnesses had seen strange flying creatures at Gitmo: Patty Carson and her brother.

Brian Hennessy is now a psychologist, usually working in China. In 1971, he was on Bougainville Island, New Guinea, when he observed, one day, a strange flying creature that had not sign of any feathers. The long tail gave him the impression of a “primitive” creature, and the head crest suggested to me a pterosaur like the one observed by Duane Hodgkinson, years earlier, many miles to the west. My email interview with Hennessy impressed me with his credibility.

###

Smithsonian Attacks Ropen “Myth”

Switek gives no evidence . . . only mentioning the religious nature of Woetzel’s beliefs, as if that were enough to dismiss his ideas about living pterosaurs. . . . Switek has never thought about Isaac Newton’s relationship to this, for Newton had religious beliefs similar . . .

.

From the third edition of the nonfiction book Live Pterosaurs in America:

“With big black eyes, it stared at her, and began to walk towards her. Now the idea of ‘large bird’ was gone, leaving in its place fear of the unknown. Distracted by some noise, fortunately, the creature turned away from the girl, revealing to her another perspective of its head. ‘Pterodactyl’ came into her mind, although it seemed a crazy idea.”