By the independent investigative journalist Jonathan Whitcomb
This morning I uploaded what I think is the best-yet video on my Youtube channel Protect Animal Life : “Living Pterosaurs — Part 1” (more similar videos will be coming). In this one, I appear for the camera, proving I am a real person and not just some vague anonymous voice on the internet.
Here are the ropen-hunting explorers shown:
Paul Nation
Jonathan Whitcomb
David Woetzel
Garth Guessman
Luke Paina
I call this video a brief introduction to living-pterosaur investigations, yet it’s longer than the great majority of videos I had previously uploaded to this channel: almost seven minutes long. I put it into the playlist “Pterodactyls in the Tropics.”
It begins with a brief overview of what was accomplished in the late-20th-century expeditions on Umboi Island. It then covers a bit of what we did in the two expeditions of 2004, including my interviews of Gideon, Wesley, Mesa, and Michael: Three clear daylight sightings and one ropen-light sighting at night. Excerpts of the interviews are shown.
Watch this video above: “Living Pterosaurs – Part 1”
One video clip included is hard to find elsewhere: My face-to-the-camera account in 2005, just months after my expedition, brief as it may be.
. . . this paranormal music video is an entertaining way of informing viewers of a sighting of an apparent living pterosaur in Sudan, Africa, and comparing it to an encounter in Cuba . . .
Almost immediately after hearing about her passing (Patty Carson), I began creating a Youtube video on her sighting at Guantanamo Bay. It took more than two weeks of work to complete “The Girl who saw a Flying Dinosaur.”
I have direct eyewitness reports, of apparent living pterosaurs, from five continents, accumulated over the past 15 years, and the great majority of them are credible accounts of long-tailed pterosaurs . . . some kind of large Rhamphorhynchoid.
This is about new mini-documentaries I’ve recently uploaded to Youtube on my channel Protect Animal Life. Although many of the sighting reports of apparent modern pterosaurs suggest the nocturnal long-tailed ropen, none of the short videos, at least as of June 1, 2019, has the word ‘ropen’ in the title.
By the modern-pterosaur author Jonathan D. Whitcomb
On June 26, 2017, my wife and I met with several eyewitnesses in a neighborhood of Draper, Utah, (in the southern part of the Salt Lake Valley) a few miles west of the Wasatch Mountains. Each of the four persons we talked with lived within about 300 yards of each other and a little south of the Swire Coca Cola complex, which is in northwestern Draper. These four wish to be anonymous, at least for now.
The flying creature involved, which may be more than one animal, appears to be an American Hammerhead Ropen. Some of the words that came to the minds of eyewitnesses, after the sightings in this neighborhood, were these:
dragon
hammer (shape of the head with a crest)
big bird
Bioluminescence appears to be involved, as in many ropen sightings worldwide. The June 21st sighting seems to be not an isolated encounter but part of a general flight pattern in Western Draper. Consider some of what each of these four persons told me and my wife.
Eyewitness-A
Between 35 and 55 years old, she is the mother of two children who also have had some kind of encounter with the flying creature at some time within the past few months, either seeing or hearing it. I gave her a copy of my recent nonfiction cryptozoology book, Modern Pterosaurs (about the Civil War photograph of an apparent Pteranodon that was living in the 19th century).
At about 11:00 p.m. on June 21, 2017, she saw the strange thing fly over her house. She was baffled, unable to come up with a sensible-sounding explanation. It reminded her of what her children had seen with her in movies: not something that is supposed to be still alive.
She might have dismissed it as some kind of drone aircraft, except that it was flapping its wings. She was struck by the lack of feathers and lack of hair on the tan-colored creature, which flew about 50 feet above the ground, over her backyard. She later searched online and found what looked very much like her “big bird.”
Kuhn saw two pterosaurs in Cuba, in 1971
The above sketch was seen by Eyewitness-A, after her sighting. It’s very much like what she had seen.
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Eyewitness-B
This twelve-year-old boy was on his back in his backyard in western Draper, Utah, on a warm night in mid-June of 2017, when the huge creature flew overhead. He later learned that his uncle, who lives nearby, had also seen the same animal flying over that same neighborhood, earlier in the year.
The boy told me (Jonathan Whitcomb) that the flying creature had a head that reminded him of a hammer. After he drew a sketch, I realized he was referring, at least in part, to the angle of the head crest. This led me to conclude that he had seen an American Hammerhead Ropen, similar to what was seen by Patty Carson in Cuba in 1965 and probably by Eskin Kuhn (also in Cuba) in 1971.
Eyewitness-C
This man lives in the same neighborhood as the first two eyewitnesses mentioned above (A and B). It flew over his backyard three times in one night, early in 2017, appearing to be searching for something. I believe it was hunting, for many family pets are kept in backyards in this neighborhood.
He described a glowing outline of the animal, suggesting to me that the flying creature was bioluminescent. It was flying too high to have been lit up from ground lighting.
Hearing a Screech
I talked with a teenage girl who also lives in this neighborhood. She heard what she believes were the sounds of a cat being attacked in the large yard next to her backyard. But the cat cry was quickly cut short as the girl heard a terrifying screech, a sound she compared with the screech of a velociraptor from a movie. She was sure that the sound was not from a raccoon. She also compared it with a girl screaming very loudly.
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Copyright 2017 Jonathan Whitcomb (“Big Bird in Draper, Utah”)
I am glad to find this website that shows others have seen something similar to what we saw– we thought we saw a pterodactyl on the Big Island of Hawaii!
One skeptic, writing a very long online article, mentions what I have written about related words in some of the many village languages in Papua New Guinea. He says that “ropen” means bird in one language but fruit bat in another. He then writes, “Well, there you have it,” as if it supports his declaration that a significant number of sightings of apparent pterosaurs in that area of the world could be from misidentified birds or bats. But he misses the point . . .
. . . he [the critic] seems to have fallen into a severe combination of bias issues including both confirmation bias and belief perseverance, regarding his ideas about the old photo that is now known as “Ptp.”
Before giving a brief history of our investigations of this old photograph, I present a recent discovery related to the source of what we now call “Ptp,” what some people would call the “Civil War” Pteranodon photo.
In January of 2017, the physicist Cliff Paiva and I agreed that the old photograph now called Ptp has a genuine image of a modern pterosaur. Since January, we have found additional evidence for its authenticity, which is what should be expected for something that is genuine rather than a hoax.
Within the past few weeks, I’ve received two reports of apparent pterosaurs in Mexico, one in the north and one around Mexico City. Both reports were in Spanish. Here’s part of the report from northern Mexico. I wonder if it relates to the Marfa Lights.
Chihuahua, Mexico, Sighting (Spanish)
. . . el motivo de este mensaje es para informar de un avistamiento de un animal . . . lo que he investigando es un ropen o un pterodactido, los hechos ocurrieron hace aproximadamente 10 años, en una presa cerca de mi ciudad, la cual se encuentra en el estado de chihuahua en Mexico . . . . . . ese día nos encontrábamos en ella porque fuimos a pasar el día pescando pero por la descompostura de la lancha mi familia nos dejo en la orilla de la presa a mi primo Daniel y a un señor amigo de mi papa, en ese tiempo yo tenia 15 años y mi primo 14, pasaron las horas y oscureció . . . . . . de pronto escuchamos un fuerte aleteo a lo lejos, lo cual en su momento pensamos que fue el viento . . . cuando de pronto frente a nosotros aproximadamente a 500 metros de distancia sobre el agua, una luz verde fosforescente comenzó a destellar . . . El animal tenia forma de dinosaurio, sin plumas y volaba de una manera extraña, no como un ave, la impression que tuvimos los 3 fue muy grande . . . el animal de pronto dejo de brillar.
Rough English Translation (sighting in Chihuahua)
. . . the reason for this message is to report a sighting of an animal . . . [I wonder if] what I have investigated is a ropen or pterodactyl. It happened about 10 years old at a dam near my city, which is in the state of Chihuahua in Mexico . . . That day we were in it [in or near the water behind the dam] because we went out for the day fishing. But the breakdown of the boat [left] my family . . . on the shore of the dam. My cousin Daniel and a gentleman friend [of?] my father (at that time I was fifteen and my cousin fourteen) spent the hours [in the dark]. . . . suddenly heard a loud flapping in the distance, which, at the time, we [thought] was the wind . . . when suddenly in front of us, about 500 meters away on the water, a phosphorescent green light began to flash . . . The animal was shaped like a dinosaur and featherless, flying in a strange way, not like a bird. The three of us had the impression that it was very large . . . the animal suddenly stopped shining.
A live pterosaur is hardly restricted to the USA. Large flying creatures fly wherever they choose, regardless of political boundaries. With reports of living pterosaurs in Americans states like California, Arizona, Texas, and Arkansas, it is no wonder that people in Mexico also report those same strange featherless “birds.”
“An ancient Mayan relief sculpture of a peculiar bird with reptilian characteristics has been discovered in Totonacapan, in northeastern section of Veracruz, Mexico. José Diaz-Bolio, a Mexican archaeologist-journalist responsible for the discovery, says there is evidence that the serpent-bird sculpture, located in the ruins of Tajín, is not merely the product of Mayan flights of fancy, but a realistic representation of an animal that lived during the period of the ancient Mayans – 1,000 to 5,000 years ago. . . .”
. . . about one and a half miles away, a huge black bird-like creature came from the more mountainous region to my left, and flew toward the ocean . . . wingspan about equal to the length of the taller palm trees, I thought about 30 to 40 feet. The wings moved very slowly, almost touching on the downward swing . . .
Reports of apparent living pterosaurs also come from Mexico and the Cuba. In fact, one sighting was of two glowing flying pterodactyls seen by two women from a cruise ship in the Caribbean.
Flying in the face of the Wikipedia deletion of “ropen” last month, an apparent bioluminescent pterosaur flew into the eyepiece view of the telescope of Michael Slack of southeastern New Mexico. Apparently, self-appointed Wikipedia editors and judges failed to exterminate the ropen itself. It was flying along quite well, and glowing, on the night of September 1, 2014, just days after the “ropen” page on Wikipedia was removed, supposedly because of a lack of input from supporters of traditional points of view. That has not deterred actual ropens.
The moon had already gone behind the trees, by the middle of that night a week ago Monday, so Mr. Slack and his buddy searched the sky for the Andromeda Nebula. This required using a low-magnification eyepiece, fortunately, to locate that galaxy, allowing the amateur astronomer to see the flying creature sweep through the field of view.
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Area of the sky where the creature was seen in New Mexico
I asked the eyewitness, “Did you notice a tail?” He replied:
I thought I noticed “something” trailing not far behind this ‘thing’ although my friend says he did not notice anything. Was there something that attached the trailing ‘thing’ to the main body? No. In my estimation there was about 10′ [feet] between the main body and the little something that trailed it. So to say that I noticed a tail…no sir I can not, in so far as I did not see anything that connected the little glowing “bit” that trailed and followed the main body.
That seems to me to have been a sighting of a bioluminescent glowing ropen, with the end of the tail glowing but the main length of the tail not visible in the dark of night. When there is no glow at all, people often do not see, at night, any tail.
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Sketch by eyewitness Michael Slack: the view through the telescope
Others have reported sightings of huge pterosaurs in New Mexico. From the nonfiction cryptozoology book Live Pterosaurs in America (third edition), we read:
“Hello, my name is [RA] and 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 something blocked the sun for a moment. We both looked up to see what did that and saw a large flying animal. It had a 20-30 foot wingspan and was about the same length long. It had a long tail with [a] seeming spike at the end. Its head was very pterodactyl shape with a fluted back pointy head. It glided at about 700 feet in a westward direction. . . .”
En 2004, viajé de los Estados Unidos a Papúa Nueva Guinea. Encontré a un intérprete en la ciudad de Lae. Mí y mi intérprete viajó, por buque, a la Isla de Umboi. Más tarde, encontramos muchos nativos que habían visto el ropen.
I interviewed him in front of the villagers who knew him. After I asked him the length of the tail of the ropen, he looked away as if to imagine the tail on the ground. He looked back and forth at the ground for a few moments and then he looked back at me and answered emphatically, “sefan meetuh” (seven meters). He was surely doing this to get a feel for both what the tail would have looked like if it were stretched out on the ground, and to then to estimate the length.
Duane Hodgkinson was interviewed, in 2005, near Livingston, Montana. He described the huge “pterodactyl” that he saw fly up from a jungle clearing in New Guinea, in clear daylight. He and his army buddy watched it fly off above the trees, but it soon returned, flying above that clearing but in the opposite direction.
