Strange Lights | Live Pterosaur

November 5, 2014January 10, 2017

Second Pterosaur Expedition of 2004

Woetzel and a native and Guessman, on Umboi Island

Ten years ago David Woetzel and Garth Guessman climbed mountains and interviewed natives on Umboi Island (AKA Siasi) in Papua New Guinea. I pray that their expedition will not be forgotten, for how dramatic were their discoveries, notwithstanding the ropen of Umboi appearing unwilling to cooperate except through one or two brief glowing episodes. I have no doubt that the flying creature seen by native eyewitnesses is a Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur. I submit a few quotations from the fourth edition of my nonfiction Searching for Ropens and Finding God.

From page 93

Guessman and Woetzel left California October 17, arriving in the city of Lae on October 19, Papua New Guinea time, where they met missionary Jim Blume and his wife, Mary. Here, Guessman interviewed both Jim Blume and Pastor Jacob Kepas. Blume had founded fifty-two Baptist Churches in Papua New Guinea, and under his leadership Kepas had founded nine.

Both Blume and Kepas would reveal what they had seen but there’s more: Blume had previously spoken with about seventy eyewitnesses of what we call ropens, and Kepas would soon become deeply involved by going with the two Americans to Umboi Island as their interpreter . . .

From page 94

Rather than take a ship, as I had, those three flew to Umboi Island in a small plane, searching the landscape as they passed over the center of the island. Because the pilot had no interest in zigzagging, they flew directly to the northern coast which they followed to the air strip at Lab Lab.

Here the three ropen investigators met Peter Ake, magistrate of Mararamu Village, and the four men took a banana boat along the northeast coast. Kepas interprets between English and Tok Pisin, but Peter also interprets between English and the local dialect of Kovai.

From page 95

Stopping to refuel at Kampalap, they learned that villagers occasionally see the ropen as it leaves a cave, most recently three weeks earlier. The local man said, “Taim em kam aut . . . save . . . taim em go bek, em no gat.” They know when it leaves the cave but not when it returns. The creature flies to a promontory north of the village, landing and waiting on a tree top before flying out to the reef.

Interpreting the man’s Tok Pisin, Peter explained the belief that the ropen waits to see if it is being watched before it flies to the reef to feed. What it eats, the man was unsure. He was also unsure of the size, admitting that it’s only a light that they see, but his hand gestures showed his belief: The ropen is bigger than a man.

About a week later, Woetzel had his own sighting of the flying ropen light. After the expedition, Woetzel answered my questions about the encounter.

From page 98

“My sighting was so quick that it was impossible to get a video—maybe two seconds. The light was very different from what Garth and Pastor Jacob saw. I suspect theirs was a meteor. I also saw some meteors while on night watch. They were whitish in color and had a tail.

“But this thing was different. It went about as fast as a meteor, but it was very different in coloration . . . almost golden and shimmering around the edges. . . . There was no tail and it was flying horizontally from Mt. Barik toward Mt. Tolo.”

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Rhamphorhynchoid in South Carolina

“It looked as big as any car, and had NO feathers, not like a huge crane or egret. . . . it swooped down over the highway and back up gracefully over the pines.”

What is a Ropen?

Before you dismiss the concept of a modern pterosaur (in particular, of a long-tailed featherless Rhamphorhynchoid), consider the many eyewitness testimonies of those flying creatures.

Nicknamed “the Bible of modern pterosaurs,” this nonfiction ropen book is a large-paperback of 360 pages

August 16, 2014April 14, 2015

Bioluminescent Pterosaurs in Southeast Washington State

Tree near some of the sighting places (flying lights), Yakima River, Washington state

On Wednesday, August 6, 2014, Peter Beach, Milt Marcy, and I drove together from Portland, Oregon, to the Yakima River in southeast Washington state. Before getting into interview details, I discourage anyone from searching for living pterosaurs in this area by the Yakima River. The flying creatures are nocturnal, not usually seen there in daylight, and Peter told me that men have been shooting off their guns at night along this part of the river. I myself saw spent shell casings on the ground while I was interviewing Peter and Milt. In addition, a local farmer is against any out-of-towners roaming around there and is not shy about phoning the local police to report strangers. In addition, this is on a busy country road on the way to a nuclear generating plant. The location details I reveal are for documentation and research, not for encouraging any expedition.

I emphasize that sightings of apparent living pterosaurs are throughout the states of Washington and Oregon, and it now appears that other areas will be better and safer for future expeditions in those two states. For research (not future expeditions) I reveal the approximate location of sightings by Peter Beach, Milt Marcy, and others: 46°, 20′, 56″ North; 119°, 27′, 59″ West. This is off U.S. Reservation Road (highway 225), near the Tri Cities Shooting Association target range.

I had no idea, when my wife and I went on a vacation to the Portland area, just before arranging for a one-day drive into Washington with Peter and Milt, that the daylight sighting of a pterosaur in a tree (on the Yakima River), years ago, related so closely to the night sighting of a flying light (on a later date) by Peter: Leaping lizards, it was the same tree!

Professor Peter Beach tells Whitcomb how the bright light quickly flew up from the tree

From the book Live Pterosaurs in America (3rd edition), the words of Peter Beach:

We were unable to get a picture but we saw many . . . flashing lights. I would have assumed that [they] were fireflies but we [don’t] have them in Washington. One of the flashes took off from a big tree overhanging the river and made a kind of flashing coma turn. 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.

Car Crash From Pterosaur Sighting

Late one night in 2007, a young man in Wenatchee, Washington, drove his car into a light pole because he was distracted by a “pterodactyl.” That was about 83 miles from the reported sighting area on the Yakima River.

Two Pterosaurs in Southwest Washington

In the farmlands south of Chehalis, Washington, many years ago, a 15-year-old boy encountered two apparent pterosaurs. This is about 60 miles north of Portland, Oregon, and about 160 miles from the Yakima River location, as the ropen flies. From the third edition of Live Pterosaurs in America:

I saw two ropens together sitting on a fence. I was riding my bike home from a friend’s house around 5 pm in . . . I lived in the country with my parents on a . . . ranch. [About] 1/2 mile from home, riding down an old country road . . . I heard a strange noise [a kind of] screech. . . . on a wood plank fence were two of the biggest bird-like creatures I could ever imagine! I almost crashed my bike! They were about 50 ft from me; the first thing I noticed was their heads, then I thought this can’t be! Could they be dinosaurs?

Washington State Pterosaurs

We have seen and heard a strange nocturnal, bat-like creature . . . huge, light grey, skin with no fur, feathers or scales. It silently swoops down at you with giant bat wings. . . . We keep our chickens and goats, small dogs and cats safely housed at night, however . . .

Yakima River, near sighting area in Washington (photo by Whitcomb, Aug 6, 2014)

September 6, 2013December 25, 2013

Marfa Lights and Sightings of Living Pterosaurs

Green mountain in the area of Marfa in southwest Texas

The following is taken from an email sent by Jonathan Whitcomb to one of the supporters of the living-pterosaur investigations.

You have given me much to think about and I have much to say. For now, I’d like to go into Marfa Lights research by James Bunnell and also sightings of nocturnal pterosaurs and limitations on what we can learn from them.

Yes, Bunnell assumed that CE-II and CE-III types of Marfa Lights are caused by non-living things, when he wrote the first edition of Hunting Marfa Lights. (He might some day write an expanded second edition.) But the data that led him to define those two types were from observations and comparisons between sightings. I see little chance of any major problem in his creating those two definitions: stationary blinking lights and moving ones.

Other aspects of his research, in contrast, have surely been influenced by his basic assumption about non-living causes. For example, he dismissed at least two sightings in which lights seemed to have chased automobiles; I believe he would have accepted those sightings as valid encounters with flying lights that actually followed cars, if he did not follow that non-living axiom.

Mountain near Marfa, Texas

Now let’s turn to sightings of apparent pterosaurs.

I believe that you have found some valid points regarding patterns. The path you would probably be taking, however, would be a much longer road than you have expected; it’s probably more complex than you have considered.

The sighting reports I have accumulated over the past ten years clearly demonstrate the credibility of the live-pterosaur concept. But they have much less value in predicting where future sightings will occur or where any pterosaur may be nesting, if that is the word. Here is why:

Sighting locations are scattered around the world. My specialty is in world-wide sightings of apparent pterosaurs. If I had the funds and could have spent the past nine years searching on Umboi Island, with no family ties in the USA, I would probably have significant photographic and video evidence, by now, of a living Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaur on Umboi. As it is, I have written several books, over a thousand web pages and blog posts, and a scientific paper. Because of that, I have received many eyewitness reports; but the scattering, across much of the planet, is significant.

Only a small fraction of the human sightings of living pterosaurs is reported directly to any cryptozoologist or paranormal investigator, and those sightings are only a small sampling of all the places and times of flight for those creatures. We have too little data.

Let’s get as specific as we can. Even if each pterosaur could be seen at least once a year, for 20 seconds, what would we have? If all those sightings were reported we would have only have 1/10,000th of a percent of the flying times of those creatures.

All we know from any particular sighting is that for an extremely tiny part of the creature’s life, it was at a particular place at a particular time. Perhaps it has a secret hiding location 300 feet away and always lives around there. Perhaps it sleeps one mile away and flies around that neighborhood during that time of year. Perhaps it is passing through from an original nesting area 3,000 miles away and will never return.

But there’s another problem with trying to predict seasonal habits. Most modern pterosaurs are nocturnal. The daylight sightings teach us the most about their appearance, but they can be misleading if we try to stretch the information beyond reason. Consider the following:

A pterosaur was seen by three eyewitnesses early in a morning that must have been cold, for it was in winter in northern Minnesota. How can we come to any reasonable conclusion about seasonal appearances when this could have been a displaced individual, desperately trying to survive in a season and place in which it usually does not live? Did it sleep through the migration alarm clock or was it forced to come out of hibernation early?

Another pterosaur was seen in milder weather but it was right after a major storm had passed through the Winder, Georgia, area. Was it always living there, flying around only at night but disturbed enough to fly in the daylight after being displaced from its nest? A different individual of the same species was seen only days later, also in morning daylight, but in a slightly different location; but how can that tell us anything about seasonal migrations or seasonal behaviors? Maybe this is a displaced pair that is searching far afield for a place to raise young.

The point is this: The best sightings are almost always in daylight, but those probably have the least value in revealing where and when the nocturnal creatures normally fly. And where do they usually sleep in daylight?

Of course we have exceptions, like with the persons who were throwing rocks over the top of a cliff just before a large pterosaur flew out from somewhere below them: There may have been a nest in a cave. That sighting in Arkansas was decades ago, however, and that cliff is probably now part of private property where new condominiums thrive, at least it appears to be so from recent satellite images.

In other words, most sightings probably relate to how the creatures DO NOT normally behave. That’s the rub.

Getting back to Marfa Lights, data from Bunnell can tell us much, but without more eyewitnesses in this part of Texas, reports of apparent pterosaurs, what can be really helpful? Without those pterosaur flyovers that are seen by humans, it could take decades of detailed observations for even a few persons to come to any certain and accurate conclusion about CE-II’s and CE-III’s.

I don’t mean to imply that your reasoning is generally faulty, not at all. In fact, the solution to these problems you yourself just gave me:

“You’ve opened a door for people who have seen these creatures to share their experiences. By opening up they encourage others to open up, which opens the door for all of us to accept the reality . . . That, in turn, loosens – ever so gradually – the death grip of this stifling dogma cloaked in the august robes of ‘science.’ . . .”

Thank you very much for your support. Your words of encouragement help keep the investigation vigorous.

Jonathan Whitcomb

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Searching for Ropens and Finding God – fourth edition, published October 31, 2014; nonfiction about modern pterosaurs – More than twice as many pages as the competing cryptozoology book Live Pterosaurs in America (third edition), this newer book has a 100-page chapter on sightings in the United States of America. Don’t miss these extraordinary but true adventures, with encounters reported from around the world.

Category: Strange Lights

Second Pterosaur Expedition of 2004

Bioluminescent Pterosaurs in Southeast Washington State

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