In the third edition of my nonfiction cryptozoology book Live Pterosaurs in America, I gave several pages to the two sightings near Winder, Georgia. When that edition of the book was published, however, the eyewitness was anonymous, and I had no knowledge of her subsequent sightings in that area. In addition, she had not yet given me permission to publish any of her sketches. Those things have changed.

Copyright 2008 Sandra Paradise (sketch drawn by the eyewitness)

First two Sightings (from third edition of Live Pterosaurs in America)

She told me a bit about Winder and about her commute, which is about twenty-five miles through a partially forested area.

[Sandra Paradise] drove to work on August 27, 2008. She had woken up early and could not get back to sleep, so she left her house at 6:45 a.m., with the sky still overcast from the last remnants of the storm. I believe this weather disturbance may relate to her daylight encounter with an animal I believe to be nocturnal.

. . . 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 looked up at a “very long” tail that had a strange shape at the end.

“Dive-bombing my car,” is how she described the flight path, as it crossed the highway in front of and slightly above her. “Curved, like a hammer,” is how she described the head, which had a crest that she thought was “solid, not feathery at all.”

“The thing made perfect sense as it flew;” other eyewitness have also been struck by the gracefulness of flight [of modern pterosaurs].

[She] looked at the online page her friend had recommended and searched through online photos of herons and other birds . . . Negative. Everything about the bird photos was wrong, including the color and shape. Her friend later asked about planes; she pointed out that the creature flew under the tree tops.

Two weeks later, the lady had her second sighting: a flying creature similar to the first one only bigger. It was a little later in the morning: obviously not two identical tricks of sunlight striking a bird. Her sightings reminded me of the South Carolina sighting, by Susan Wooten, years earlier.

Hammerhead Ropen in Georgia

“. . . you don’t have to go to New Guinea. Far as I can tell, you can sit on a hill outside the town where I live in the mornings and see them. One sighting was at 7 in the morning, and one was at 9 am. Both days were overcast . . .”

More Sightings in Georgia

From an email I received from Sandra Paradise early in May, 2012

. . . it was around october of the same  year [2008]. I was driving the same road, had just passed the point of my  second sighting. looking ahead and up a hill I saw a flock of crows  cross the road, from right to left, followed by –yep, you guessed  it. The pterosaur was in perfect silouhette, wings outstretched,  distinctive head in full view, pad on the tail. . . .

. . . about a year and a half ago, maybe a little more, I saw what I  believe to be the same animal from directly below, traveling fast,  with a distinctive, quick, 1,2,3 rest (with wings outstretched)  1,2,3, rest wingbeat. Birds don’t do that. The tail is what riveted me, you could see the shape on the end; instead of rippling along, this time it stuck straight out. . . .

With both the third and fourth sightings (above), she tried to drive after the creature, but with no luck. Having a camera on hand does not guarantee that a driver can get a good photograph while driving. Neither will parking near the sighting location cause the creature to fly back to you.

Recent newspaper headlines about living “pterodactyls” . . . well, those are more rare than modern pterosaurs, at least for most of us who read the news in major or minor cities in the United States. Perhaps editors have over-reacted to the nineteenth-century newspaper hoaxes and mid-twentieth-century big-bird stories by avoiding the subject of modern pterosaurs. Modern news professionals do need to protect their reputations, I suppose.

It may enlighten us to review two of those old hoaxes in newspapers, before we review recent newspaper coverage of eyewitness reports, for some of those tall tales, contributing to nineteenth-century subscriptions, may have had a long-term influence. Getting news-media attention to recent pterosaur sightings is as difficult as pulling teeth out of a hungry ropen.

Man-Bat Civilization on the Moon (New York Sun newspaper hoax of 1835)

Understand that Sir John Herschel was an eminent British astronomer of the early nineteenth century and that he did indeed make successful observations with his telescope in South Africa. He just failed, in 1835, to observe bat-winged humanoids on the moon.

The excitement began on the other side of the Atlantic, when readers picked up their copies of the August 25th New York Sun:

“We have just learnt from an eminent publisher in this city that Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope, has made some astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description, by means of an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.

The August 28th edition of the newspaper included:

. . . We counted three parties of these creatures, of twelve, nine and fifteen in each, walking erect towards a small wood… Certainly they were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified… About half of the first party had passed beyond our canvas; but of all the others we had perfectly distinct and deliberate view. They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs from the top of the shoulders to the calves of their legs.”

The circulation of the New York Sun reached over 15,000, perhaps close to 20,000, before the newspaper admitted the hoax, later in 1835. Most newspapers in the United States have strictly avoided hoaxes in recent decades.

The 1856 Hoax of the ”Pterodactyl” From Stone

The British newspaper The Illustrated London News carried this story—less fantastic, more pterosauric—in its February 9, 1856, issue, although I have not yet seen the original.

Pterodactyl Hoax in The Illustrated London News

The French railway-tunnel pterodactyl of 1856 is finally getting its obituary, albeit The Illustrated London News has no such obituary. Not that France is a fairy-tale country or that railway tunnels are figments of the imagination or that all nineteenth-century newspaper articles are always filled with lies; but a pterosaur that survives for ages embedded in rock and then survives . . . [coming] out of that rock . . . well, that pterosaur is fictional.

More Recent Pterosaur Coverage in Newspapers

Sightings in Antwerp, Ohio (Antwerp Bee-Argus weekly newspaper)

. . . 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 . . .)

Pterodactyl in Washington State

Witnesses told police he had been driving down Wenatchee Avenue and drifted into the wrong lane, against oncoming traffic. When police asked him what caused the accident, he apparently replied with a single word: “pterodactyl.”

The news was carried by two newspapers in Washington state, on December 31, 2007, and on January 1, 2008.

Purchase your own copy of Live Pterosaurs in America (third edition) and get the full account of the amazing eyewitness encounters with “pterodactyls.”

###

How much $ for childcare in Lakewood?

Many eyewitnesses have called the flying creatures “pterodactyls,” although the correct name for the large non-bat featherless flyer is “pterosaur.” Let’s examine some of what has been reported on sightings in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Texarkana, Arkansa, Sighting, About 1982

I received an email from this eyewitness many years ago.

We saw the creature for approximately 20 seconds. We did not see any signs of feathers just sharp edged wings, the sharp pointed beak, and the sharp pointed crest on its head. We did not see any tail. I have looked at my dinosuar book and the picture of the pteranodon looked like what we saw.

Woodward, Oklahoma, Pterosaur Sighting

From page 33 of my book Live Pterosaurs in America (third edition):

About [1985] . . . in Woodward, Oklahoma, near a small river, at about noon, a fourteen-year-old became terrified at the sight of a pterosaur-like creature.

“I was walking to the small river where I usually caught carp fish. . . . a large animal took off into the air. At first I thought it was an eagle. Then I noticed it was a dinosaur. . . . I was afraid it would eat me. I stared at the back part of the head because it was exactly like the ones depicted in books. . . . had a long neck and wide wings just like in the movies or in books. It had no feathers and it was flying around and looking downwards into the fields.

“I was really afraid. . . . I never told anyone about this until now. People think you’re crazy when you tell them about something like this. The creature [looked] like it was dark brown. I was really close to it.”

“Pterodactyl” in Southern States

. . . a huge, featherless bird in Arkansas . . .  We were sitting on big rocks at a cliff about 300 foot above the river when it flew out just under us and we watched it all the way down toward the river till it passed the tree lines. It was an awesome experience, indeed.

Pterosaur in South Carolina

 “Susan Wooten was driving east on Highway 20 . . . on a clear mid-afternoon in the fall of about 1989 . . . [She] saw something flying from her left, then passing in front of her . . . ‘It swooped down over the highway and back up gracefully over the pines,’ . . . ‘It looked as big as any car . . . NO feathers, not like a huge crane or egret, but like a humongous bat.’”

Sightings have been reported in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, in addition to surrounding states.

In 2010, I received a report from a lady in North Carolina:

I was driving home from dropping a friend off at school.  When I was almost home (passed the Food Lion on Commerce Rd, going towards Country Club Rd in Jacksonville, [North Carolina]), I saw something HUGE above me in the sky.  It looked like a pale greenish white and smooth-skinned. It didn’t appear to have any feathers, and it had the tail with the diamond shape on the end.  I couldn’t believe my eyes, and I knew no one else really would.  It was probably . . . 100 ft away.  I just looked up the Rhamphorhynchus and it was definitely similar to what I saw.  It was headed towards Highway 17 and coming from Jacksonville Mall area (flying made the route different since it could fly passed all the things we had to drive around).

South Carolina Pterosaur

It was huge, as big as a plane, and looked very similar to the sketch created by Susan Wooten on your website. . . . I saw a huge pterodactyl looking creature, flying very high in the sky. The strangest thing about the sighting was how slow the wings were flapping and how high it was flying. . . . I remember shouting “that was a pterodactyl!”, but everyone else [around me] that saw it, seemed to shrug it off in disbelief.

Pterosaurs in Georgia

. . . my 16 year old son and I both saw [something that] resembled a small pterodactyl. Very large wingspan, but the odd thing was it had no discernible feathers. My son saw it better than I as I was driving, albeit slowly. He said it was a leathery-looking skin. Pointed head, diamond shape at the end of the tail. It appeared to me that its legs were kind of pointed backward.

Sighting in Jupiter, Florida

Late in 2008, I received an email from an eyewitness in Florida:

“Maybe about six years ago I was sitting outside my house with a buddy of mine talking (it was about 2 or 3 in the morning) and all of a sudden something caught both of our attention, above our heads. It was a flying creature that flew over our heads towards my backyard (behind us over the roof of the house) it was a biege brownish color, pointed wing tips, no feathers pointed beak and what made me think pterasoar was that long pointed thing protruding from the back of its head . . .. I live in Florida so I’ve seen my share of cranes and what not, but this WAS NOT a bird. . . .”

 

Susan Wooten’s amateur sketch of the “huge” pterosaur that she observed in South Carolina (it flew over a highway and into a wooded area)

###

California child care